Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [181]
Bomb-scare talk with the cab driver. So far no deaths or dangerous explosions since Stagg’s death, but the cabman tells me that Warren Street Underground has been cleared and that there’s a road block at Notting Hill Gate. Pick up Robert and on to Odin’s – which has been boarded up outside like a wartime restaurant. There is a man standing outside who checks your name on the reservation list and only one small rectangle of glass on the door has been left uncovered. I suppose the more expensive the restaurant the heavier the bomb-proofing – there was nothing at all over the extensive glass frontage of the Italian caff on the corner opposite.
Home about 12.15, feeling a bit swivel-headed – and remembering that we drank a whole bottle of champagne as well. What swells we’ve become in the thirteen years we’ve known each other. The potential was always there, I suppose – but the money never was!
Thursday, February 17th
Afternoon visit to a showbiz, sorry, the showbiz throat specialist. Jill F had suggested I go and see him before taking any voice projection lessons, just to check that there was no damage to my vocal cords, etc, since previous screamings.
His surgery is in Wimpole Street, where illness and privilege combine to create a pleasantly elegant part of the world. The ceilings were high, the hallway opened out into a sort of circular covered atrium with heavily impressive, brass-handled doors leading off on all sides – like a dream where you have to choose between six identical doors. They apologised for their heating having gone off.
Mr Musgrove was at his desk in the far corner of a huge room. I noticed a leather armchair, but that’s about all. He wore a reflector plate on his head, talked beautifully and, from where I was sitting, he could have been Kenneth More playing the role. He sat me down on a swivel chair beside a table full of instruments, which looked like a still life from a book of Edwardian medical studies.
Holding my tongue and nearly bringing me to the point of vomiting, he investigated my vocal cords, occasionally sterilising his mirror in a small gas flame.
But he was efficient, convincing and reassuring. No sinus problems and, he was glad to say, my vocal cords were in good shape – no trace of damage. Prescribed some nose drops for me to take only if things got really bad. He told me he’d treated Julie Andrews every day for six months when she was shooting Sound of Music. ‘Oh, yes … we got her through,’ he said. Suddenly I felt my problem was really quite insignificant – which I’m sure is the best way I should feel about it. I paid him £10 thankfully.
Thursday, February 19th
Down to Wimpole Street (for the second time in a week) for a medical examination for insurance for the City Center Show. After having my throat, eyes, balls, back, thighs, glands and penis examined (in a way which made me feel more like a racehorse being checked for doping), I took myself off to South Kensington to Willy Rushton’s apartment in Old Brompton Road. It looks out over one of the busiest, most cosmopolitan, open-all-night stretches of London, just by South Ken tube. WR describes it as rather like a ‘cold Tangier’.
Ian Davidson, Terry J, Willy and myself are performing’Custard Pie’1 at a charity show at the Old Vic on Sunday night in memory of an actor called James Mellor, whom, it transpired as we sat around the table at Willy’s, none of us actually knew. Willy R does rather a lot of these good causes (shows for Angola, Chile, refugees, etc) and we fantasised on the idea of professional charity performers having a ‘Chile show’ that ‘might run’ and ‘a week on Namibia in June’, etc, etc.
Willy knocked back two and a half pints very swiftly and, about 9.00, we made our separate ways, to meet again at the Old Vic on Sunday. ‘I’m never quite sure where the Old Vic is,’ says Willy, in his famous crusty-colonel voice, which, as far as I can gather, is his actual