Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [164]
We drank a couple of whisky sours at the bar and, as so often happens to John, we’re joined at the bar by a rather boring man, an architect, who was just off, as he put it, to ‘Saudi’. Five years ago, if a man had said he was going to Saudi Arabia, you’d probably think he’d been in trouble with the police. Now it’s where the money is – and the resourceful Brits are engaged tooth and nail in the process of bringing back the money we’re paying for the Arabs’ oil.
We go up to the restaurant and, despite his having just completed a very funny, widely praised series on the awful way people can be treated in hotels and restaurants, John and I are shown to the smallest table in the room, at which John has great difficulty in actually sitting. We share a bottle of Puligny Montrachet and tuck into smoked trout and eggs Benedict, looking out over Berkeley Square.
John is still not living with Connie and sounds sad about it … my God, he’s the third person I’ve had lunch with in five days who’s separated in the last year. Otherwise a good chat – both John and I feel that everyone is better off for having less involvement with Python.
He was strongly defensive when I suggested that there was a certain resentment that he had never been present on any of the film publicity trips. ‘I thought people liked going,’ was John’s response.
There was not much feeling of latent group responsibility in much of what he said – but we nattered on quite absorbed until nearly four o’clock. I then went down to the King’s Road, and bought clothes and some very fine Victorian ceramic tiles for our new sitting room shelf.
Dark nights shopping in the King’s Road made me long to be warm and indoors, so I dropped in at Nigel’s studio to see him and Judy. All was quiet. Nigel says the art market in England is in a deplorable state. They sit sometimes for days with no-one coming round – Nigel seems to manage to make ends meet by sales in New York. American money does have its uses.
Sunday, November 16th
A wild, black November day. Rain, strong winds and grey and gloomy light. Nancy L rings in the morning. She’s in London for a week.
Nancy is with Arthur Cantor, the genial Jewish impresario who is to put on our show in NY next April. He is a very unobtrusive sort of hustler and has plenty of other things to talk about besides when, where and how much? He is very pleased with himself this evening as, in a collection of 1,000 books which he bought for £550 from the estate of another impresario, ‘Binkie’ Beaumont, he has discovered some little masterpieces. He showed me two postcards, hand-written by George Bernard Shaw, which he had found tucked into a book. In one of the cards – to a producer or director of Caesar and Cleopatra – he tells the recipient not to worry unduly about the casting of Cleopatra, as the play is Caesar’s anyway.
Tuesday, November 18th
In the evening I go with Nancy to the Bruce Springsteen concert at Hammersmith Odeon. This is the first show outside the US for a 26-year-old New Jersey boy who has been hailed as the new Dylan, Lennon, Van Morrison and so on. The trouble is that the enormous reputation has been chiefly created by CBS Records and there is a certain scepticism around as to the legendariness of Springsteen. So, was this the New Messiah? Was this to be one of those concerts which fathers tell their sons about in years to come?
Of course the concert didn’t start until 45 minutes after the advertised time – and we kept having wretched announcements about it being your last chance to buy cigarettes and smokes before the concert began. The air inside the Odeon was so foul and heavy that this was hardly doing anyone a favour.
Nor did Springsteen start too well. A solo with piano. His croaky, straining voice sounding as though he’d