Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [233]
Don and the executives of Cinema-5 (who suddenly materialise from the foyer) are overjoyed and read and re-read the paper like men who’ve just won the Pools. So it is a good picture after all, they seem to be saying.
Saturday, April 16th, New York
To breakfast with Terry. Bought New York Post, which slams the film most violently. ‘Jabberwocky: Read Meaningless’ is the headline – and the reviewer hates the film as violently as Canby likes it. His only non-violent comment is that I was ‘amusing but misused’, the rest is hatred.
Terry G, I’m glad to say, laughs, and indeed the intensity of the man’s dislike would make grand reading next to Canby’s panegyric. If they’re both talking about the same film, it would make me curious to see it!
Back to my room for an interview with college kids from Princeton for a syndicated radio programme called Focus on Youth. A grim, two-hour ordeal by pretension.
After a quick shopping spree in FAO Schwarz (a magic set for Willy, a bowling game for Tom and a wooden scooter and painted bricks for Rachel), and a hasty snack at the Plaza, we are just in time for the end of the first Saturday performance at the cinema.
Not a bad crowd, but they certainly don’t fill the place. A one-legged man approached me as I was about to cross Fifth Avenue. ‘Hi Mike,’ he shouts, ‘How’s this for a silly walk!’
Sunday, April 17th
Arrive at Heathrow at a quarter to eleven at night.
Make for the taxis and home at last. No taxis – just another long queue. Resign myself to a late arrival home and decide to take the airport bus. But this only goes to Victoria, and can’t leave until it’s absolutely full. We are forced to wait for nearly half an hour.
The bus rattles down to Victoria. It’s all rather embarrassing and disheartening to realise that for most of the passengers (American tourists) this is their first impression of England. Even more disheartening is to be dumped at the Victoria terminal, which has no facilities and, today, no taxis.
Wander up Buckingham Palace Road with the handle of my FAO Schwarz bag now cutting into my fingers. At last find a cab, but he refuses to take me to Hampstead, saying it’s too far away.
Almost going spare, I suddenly glimpse an N90 bus with the magic words ‘Camden Town’ on its destination board, stopped at some traffic lights. I race towards it, and leap on with the same feelings of gratitude and relief that someone lost in the desert would show towards a water hole.
But the conductor, a crusty, near-retirement veteran, was clearly not going to have weary travellers thankfully boarding his bus at half past midnight.
‘Where are you going?’ he demands.
‘I’ll go anywhere you’re going,’ I reply, still full of happy relief and not yet aware that the man has no sense of humour. This doesn’t go down at all well.
‘You tell me where you’re going and I’ll tell you where I’m going,’ he snaps.
We settle on Camden Town.
The bus trundles on through Pimlico. My breath is coming back and I’m beginning to recover from the last two hours, when an unfriendly voice cuts through my grateful reverie.
‘You’ll have to move that, you know.’
It’s the conductor indicating my FAO Schwarz bag, once the pride of Fifth Avenue, now the target for abuse on the N90. ‘Yes, alright … I will move it, but just for a moment let me get my breath back.’
This perfectly reasonable request makes his face twitch and his eyes dart angrily from side to side, but what finally makes this kind and long-suffering man explode is when I ask him to ‘Cool down’. He moves quickly into a fury, tapping his badge and screaming that this is his bus and no-one is going to ask him to cool down.
Well, I reckon if it’s this bad at this stage of the journey, by the time we reach Camden Town one of us will have died of a heart attack, so I pick my cases up and get off.
Once I’m off the bus and waiting for the lights to change, he