Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [143]
I was up at 6.00 and in the lobby of the Navarro at 6.30. Met John Goldstone and Eric I there and was driven in a huge, greedy limousine to the ABC A.M. America studios. We (the Pythons) were to co-host this nationally networked ABC TV morning show – and it runs for two hours.
At 7.00 the show began, hosted by a lady called Stephanie something or other, an attractive redhead, with a cool, head-of-school-like assurance, but she was playing along well with us. Eric kept holding up cards on which he’d scribbled things like ‘Norman Mailer – Ring Your Mother’. Once or twice before an item of serious news – e.g. the fall of Saigon – Stephanie would ask us to refrain from being too silly, but generally we were allowed a loose rein.
Eric and I did the first hour of the show, then Graham added to our number and TG and TJ joined at 8.30. Terry G made a rude drawing of a man with slobbering tongue and staring, lust-filled eyes and held it alongside Stephanie’s head as she signed off and, as the credits rolled, they actually exhorted us to wreck the studio.
No-one seemed to feel it was incongruous that we should be part of a programme which included the latest bulletins on the end of America’s longest war, or serious interviews about Reagan’s chances in 1976.
We ended up in the Plaza Hotel for breakfast, and drank orange juice and champagne out of the largest, widest glasses I’ve ever seen. Typical of America, always confusing quantity and quality – to the eternal detriment of the latter.
At 12.00 we rolled up outside a modestly fashionable ‘brownstone’ with a recently-restored front, on one of the streets somewhere in the East 60ths. This is the studio of Richard Avedon – by all accounts One of the World’s Leading Photographers and He has chosen to photograph no less than us. Python is to be immortalised in the pages of Vogue.
Avedon turns out to be a slight, wiry, dark-skinned, bespectacled man, who could be between 25 and 55. Full of vitality and easy charm.
We are dazed from our efforts in NY and our early appearance on ABC and he must have found us a lifeless lot as he made us coffee. But after ten or 15 minutes of uninspired ideas, he leapt on the suggestion, made by Graham and Terry J, that we should be photographed in the nude. The idea sounded no worse and a lot better than putting on silly costumes or funny faces, so it was resolved. We would keep our shoes and socks on, though, and I would wear my hat.
Avedon – remarkably spry for one who has, by his own account, just worked a 15-hour, non-stop session – took us into his studio, a simple, square room, white-walled, about twenty feet high. Apart from camera equipment, simple lights and photos of Marilyn Monroe and a huge blow-up of A’s photo of the Chicago Seven, the place was quite austere.
Soon the Python group were a little naked gaggle and Avedon was busy arranging us in a parody of the sort of beautiful person photo where all is revealed, but nothing is shown. So our little tadgers had to be carefully hidden behind the knee of the man in front, and so on, and every now and then Avedon would look through the viewfinder of his Rolleiflex and shout things like ‘Balls! … balls Graham, balls.’
After a few more exhortations like this, GC was heard to mutter, ‘Are you sure he’s the world-famous photographer?’
We dressed, muttering jokily amongst ourselves about how ashamed, how very ashamed, we were of what we had done. The elfin Avedon, busy as ever, talked to us as he scribbled some letter. I couldn’t help noticing that the one he was writing began ‘Dear Princess Margaret.’
As we walked out into the sunlit street, I felt slightly high and rather relieved, as though I’d been for an exotic medical check-up.
Took a few hours to myself this afternoon. I decided to take a trip out to the Statue of Liberty, as Tom had specially asked me to get some pictures of it. I travelled down by Subway, which is one of NY’s finest features – like its telephones. It’s noisy, dirty and literally every coach is covered in aerosol drawings – or just simply people’s names