Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [189]
Terry and I have an evening appointment with the singular Mr Cordon, our publisher. He meets us in the lobby of the Yale Club, on Park and Vanderbilt. Classical columns, and old group photographs. We are both given ties to wear and copies of Dr Fegg’s Nasty Book of Knowledge — our first sight of the completed new American version of Fegg. Both of us are very pleased with the look of it. Steve is full of disparaging banter. It’s cost them far more than they’ll ever get back, he says. The recent batch of alterations finally broke the chances of economic success and anyway the book is stuck at the printers in Wisconsin because of stroppy truckers.’Goddamn truckers rule this goddamn country,’ he grunts sourly, then breaks into a broad grin and introduces us eagerly to a man called Marvin Goldwater, who is president of ‘Beards of America’ and cousin of Barry, the Vietnam Hawk himself.
Saturday, April 10th, New York
Beginning, slowly, to relax into New York pattern of life.
A lunch in our garden in the sun with Neil and Yvonne, Miles and Luke1 and Al Levinson – looking tanned (from Jamaica), curly-haired and broad-shouldered. As he quotes someone in one of his poems as saying on first meeting him:’I cannot imagine you indoors’. Al brought, apart from jokes and good company, a bit of New York intellectual class and a bottle of scotch for the house.
At 2.00 the others (bar Eric) begin to arrive and we have a very good three hour rehearsal upstairs at 242. Al remarked on how well we mixed and how there was no apparent leader.
Nancy arrived and she and I went round to Stephen Sondheim’s house, next door but one. SS’s housekeeper, Louis, apparently organises cleaners, etc, for 242. The Sondheim house is decorated in a more modern and much more opulent style than 242 – yet with carefully restrained taste. Full of remarkable surprises, too. One room full of antique nineteenth and twentieth century games – early skittle alleys, very old pinball machines.
Louis – Spanish, I should think, small, chunky, camp, with a ready smile and friendly open manner. Very excited to meet a Python. He shows me a copy of New Yorker for the week, which contains a long article by Hertzberg about the court case in December. A long and very accurate article with quotes from Gilliam and myself – ‘Michael Palin, charming and boyish’!
On the way downstairs I meet the distinguished Mr Sondheim. He shakes hands briefly, distractedly, as he flits from one room into another with a grand piano in it.
Tuesday, April 13th, New York
Lunch at Ina’s office, where a Python business meeting has been called to discuss offers of a TV special to be made of the show. Terry J is, as usual, the chief originator of doubt about the project. He wants a Roger Graef-style film of the stage show, whereas Ina thinks we can only sell a TV special of the show, to be made after the end of the run at the Ed Sullivan Theater. TJ and TG against, John keen to earn the extra £3,000 we’re promised for doing it. I urge that we examine more carefully what is involved in moving the show to another theatre and preparing it for TV. It’s all being sold to us as a two day extension – I think we’ll be here an extra week!
Really I couldn’t care less. Here we are all being encouraged to be very greedy and complicate our lives further, when we have a theatre opening down the road in a day and a half and we haven’t even been on the stage.
Two incidents at the end of this unsatisfactory meeting. John, who has been lying on the floor to ‘relax his shoulders’, gets up and, as he does so, dislodges a huge picture on the wall, which crashes down on his foot, eliciting Fawlty-like shrieks of pain and explosive anger. I think he really did shake his fist at it. Then we find he actually has sliced a bit of flesh off his heel and he is sat down and a doctor called. It’s his ‘Silly Walks’ foot too.
Wednesday, April 14th, New York
One of those totally gruelling days that only happen in the theatre and, if they didn’t have to happen, the theatre would invent them.
Breakfast of fresh orange