Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [154]
Tuesday, July 22nd
Terry and I worked together today on Fegg. It’s the third successive day I’ve spent on new material for the book [for the upcoming American edition].
Then up to Dr Chapman’s house at Southwood Lane, Highgate, for an interview with a Yugoslav journalist – for the Yugoslavs have apparently bought the Holy Grail film. A squat, rather scrubby-bearded man with a tape recorder was sitting on his own in what passes for Graham’s sitting room. I said hello, then heard a shout of ‘Get your trousers off, then’, in a bad Scottish accent, from the next room. McKenna, Bernard was there, surrounded by sheaves of paper, covered in his squiggles, looking harassed, while Dr Chapman sat in his usual writing attitude – glass of gin and tonic in one hand, legs stretched out, gazing into space.
Graham looked grey – as if he had spent the last five years un-dead. Which really was nearer the truth than it seemed. Graham, having lately fallen in with Ringo Starr – for whom he and Douglas have written a TV spectacular (American) – has also drifted into the Keith Moon/Harry Nilsson orbit.1 Now Moon is a genuine loony and drives Rolls Royces into swimming pools and leaves them there, but Nilsson, as I heard from Tim Curry, and heard again tonight from a slurred and shattered Chapman, is a man bent on self-destruction. Graham, sounding like a Sunday school child on an outing to Sodom, told me how Nilsson had had to be helped from GC’s house last night utterly and totally smashed. Graham had bruises today to show for it. Nilsson drinks neat gin – a bottle in one evening -pops every pill possible, but most of the time prefers cocaine. Graham was really shocked.
We talked for an hour or so to the very affable Yugoslav, who told us that there had been many anti-Python protests in Yugoslavia, but that the show had become a rallying point.
Sunday, July 27th
I began work just after 9.00, writing up a couple of new ideas. Terry, Alison and Sally arrived about 10.00 and, whilst Helen packed and Alison and Sally took William up to Parliament Hill and Thomas watched Thunderbirds, Terry and I sat in the increasingly uncomfortable heat of the work-room and slogged away at Fegg with a ferocious concentration.
The room became hotter – outside the temperature was over 80° – and we finally emerged, like the National Union of Railwaymen after an all-day attempt to avert a strike, sweaty, crumpled but happy, at 9.30 in the evening.
We opened a bottle of champagne and celebrated wearily amongst the piles of washing, clothing, toys, cameras and books destined for Italy. For myself, it couldn’t be better timing. To have worked literally to the last moment, and to be able to leave for a month in Europe, after such a mind-draining concentrated spell of work, gives me that warm, satisfied feeling of all the systems being totally and fully used.
After a three-week holiday in Italy with the Davidson family, it was time for yet another trip to New York, this one occasioned by publication of the Fegg book in the US.
Wednesday, September 3rd
All-out onslaught on letters, etc, before leaving for NY tomorrow. The American fan mail is sometimes quite extraordinary. Less restrained than the English. I received one quite steamy letter, full of declarations of love, meant for my eyes only, which ended with the note, ‘I hope you’re the one I mean’, and another from what must be one of the world’s least-known organisations – the Michael Palin Sub-Committee of the Python Fan Club of Apartment 4c, 825 West End Ave, NY.
Thursday, September 4th, New York
To New York again.