Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [194]
I try a contact of Dr Lustgarten’s. He’s also away, but a Dr Ryan rings me back. Dr Ryan has not got the expected message of hope – all he can suggest is that I buy ‘Afrin’ nasal decongestant and try and squirt it on my vocal cords. This doesn’t sound like the miracle cure I’ve heard so much about, but I’ll give it a try.
Out around midday. It’s a warm, sunny Sunday morning. Walk along Second Avenue to try and find a pharmacy with the miracle ’Afrin’.
Police everywhere. A buzzing feeling of something being about to happen takes my mind off my own predicament. Turns out there’s to be an enormous ‘Free Soviet Jewry’ march on the United Nations, only about half a mile away from our house. Find ‘Afrin’; head home as the police take up their positions in serried ranks along Second Avenue.
Absolutely no effect. Depression and gloom close in again. Buy a huge copy of the New York Times; and decide to sit out in Turtle Bay Gardens in the sun with a beer and hope that rest will somehow save the remnants of the voice.
It’s 2.00 and time to go to the theatre. Once there, I decide to try everything and see. Funnily enough, Gumby is the easiest. The grunting can be easily brought up from the depths of the stomach in the proper way – it’s things like upper-register incredulity and emphasis in’Travel Agent Sketch’, for instance, which prove most difficult.
At half-time in the first show Dr Briggs arrives. Smooth, receding hair neatly brushed back with a precision only doctors seem to achieve. He has his daughter with him and seems more anxious to get my autograph than to treat the voice. He whizzes me upstairs, whilst they hold the curtain, and gives me a Cortisone jab in the arm and sprays my throat with Novocaine. The spray is re-applied midway in the second half. My voice is now a rather sinister manufactured thing, like Frankenstein’s monster. At the end of the first show I’m supposed to rest it, but instead there’s a birthday party organised for me by Loretta and Laura, two fans who’ve been outside for every single show. They’ve made me a cake, given me a present of two T-shirts and other presents for the kids and even bought me a bottle of Great Western New York State Champagne. Everyone sings ‘Happy Birthday’ to me in a hoarse whisper.
Clearly Dr Briggs’ much-vaunted Cortisone treatment hasn’t worked by the second house, despite his confidence – ‘I got Robert Eddison on to play Lear and his voice was far worse.’ I suppose there are better people than Dr Briggs, but I was paying the penalty of losing my voice in New York on a Sunday. No-one was there. Before the 7.30 show another doctor, this time with halitosis, appeared, and, before he looked down my throat, asked me who was going to pay him the $40. Then he treated me utterly ineffectually and went away.
Neil, meanwhile, kept offering me large swigs of scotch as ‘the only cure’. He was right. I drank enough not to care, and managed to survive the last show. As the audience knew my voice had gone, they were very sympathetic and we made some capital out of it. But there is still something terrifying about going on stage in front of 2,000 people and not knowing if you will be able to speak.
Monday, May 3rd, New York
A record-signing had been laid on at Sam Goody’s Store from 12.00—2.00. A limousine with all the others in was supposed to pick us up at 12.00. It didn’t arrive. It was getting rather cold suddenly and we were all in summer gear, feeling like Indians in Aberdeen, pathetically trying to ring Nancy. No luck.
At 12.10 we set off for the record-signing – and then realise we don’t know where the store is, so we stop and ask a pretzel seller. All at once we’re there. Through the traffic, on the opposite side of the road, a queue half