Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [276]
I was taken round, with Nancy and the others, to Charley O’s, where a sumptuous cold buffet had been laid on for all concerned with the show. The producer’s son was a frightful pest. He buzzed around the table constantly making alternately fawning and facetious Pythonic references. ‘I mean, wow – oh, I get to shake the hand of Michael Palin, the Michael Palin …’ And so on and so on and so on. Ed Goodgold, who I was talking with, finally lost patience with the boy. He called him over.
‘Hey,’ says Ed, ‘are you Jewish?’
‘Half,’ returns the gawky acolyte quickly.
‘Well, it’s your worse half.’
Monday, April 3rd, New York
At five over to NBC – in the RCA building at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. One of the old-fashioned skyscrapers, soaring sixty or seventy storeys above the skating rink in the Plaza, with the flags billowing all around it.
The décor of the foyer is New Deal Inspirational.’Wisdom and Knowledge Shall be the Stability of Thy Times’ is picked out in bold relief above the doors, whilst inside murals – in oils and what looks like gold stucco – mix airliners with naked maidens.
A bewildering variety of lifts, from which I was eventually spilled out at the seventeenth floor.
Magnificent views – the Empire State Building dominating to the southeast and, to the north-east, the twin gothic spires of St Patrick’s cathedral on Fifth Avenue, guarded by sweeping skyscraper blocks on all sides. A classic New York panorama.
Lorne Michaels was not in his office when I arrived. I got to know the room a little first. It was small and individually furnished – not at all like the usual American executive office, more like a rather trendy Oxford don’s room. Along one wall were framed mementoes of Saturday Night Live – the show Lome created and has guided through three years and eighty-seven shows. Pictures of the cast meeting President Ford, numerous jokily inscribed photos from Chevy Chase,1 letters from the White House, Emmy awards. On the facing wall, two wood-framed cabinets full of video cassettes of the shows labelled according to their host – ‘Steve Martin’, ‘Anthony Perkins’, ‘Lily Tomlin’, ‘Richard Pryor’, ‘Eric Idle’, ‘OJ Simpson’, ‘Kris Kristofferson’, ‘Paul Simon’, ‘Art Garfunkel’ and so on.
Lome ambled in. Small, unremarkably dressed, with a bright, intelligent face and disproportionately large head. An attractive, easy confidence as he shook hands. A lack of calculated effusiveness, but no lack of warmth in the welcome. I knew I was going to get along with him and felt suitably relieved.
I felt like a new boy at school with Nancy Lewis chaperoning me, and the sensation increased as Lome took me around the offices and then down to Studio 8H, the legendary RCA studio where Toscanini recorded. Showing me the studio was a shrewd move, which I appreciated later, for from Thursday lunchtime until one o’clock Sunday morning it was home – the hub, centre and focus of the colossal outpouring of nervous energy that creates Saturday Night Live.
There are about fifteen writers who assemble in Lome’s office, five or six of them women. All, bar one – a venerable, white-haired father-figure1 – look younger than me. Mainly scruffy. A rather earnest, college boy look about them.
The meeting is a curiously stilted affair. Lome presides gently, analyses the ideas that come up and shows encouragement for the good and half-good, and firm but diplomatic discouragement for the bad. But no-one sounds energetic. No ideas are put forward with great conviction. It’s as though this first meeting is part of a formula which has to be gone through – the real ideas will form tomorrow.
Lorne invites me to a party to be thrown at the fashionable disco, Studio 54, by Truman Capote and Andy Warhol.
Outside huge arc lamps are directed at the entrance to the club. A crowd, probably hired by Warhol and Capote along with the lamps, clusters around the entrance