Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [278]
Wednesday, April 5th, New York
The phone wakens me at ten past eight. ‘Where’s Eric Idle?’ enquires a girlish voice – and it’s some while before I can assure her that I don’t know. ‘Did I wake you?’ the voice turns on me provocatively. ‘Yes …’ ‘Well, I hope you can go back to sleep, because I never can after I wake up …’ I put the phone down. Aw hell, four hours.
Over to the restaurant somewhat heavily named ‘Sea-Food of the Aegean’, where we are dining with Bob Osterberg and Ray Brodie – our lawyers in the Python versus ABC case. Osterberg is straight, Ray Brodie the gushing enthusiast. Very good to see them and pay back some of our thanks.
Then half an hour of still pictures for continuity on the show and at 3.15 ready for the read-through. This takes place in the Green Room on the ninth floor (this is to become one of the landmarks of the building over the next few days). Bowls of salad, coffee and beers are provided and the room is crammed with twenty or thirty people.
My feelings after the read-through were that I was reading an awful lot of narrator/link man parts and would have preferred to have done more characters.
The writers sensed and appreciated this and went off to rewrite, whilst myself, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray1 – grim-faced and unshaven – and Garrett Morris – the neat, chirpy black member of the cast – began first rehearsal for our Chilites dance routine. Sometimes I find it hard to figure out quite how Lome’s mind works. He loves the Chilites’ song ‘Have You Seen Her’ – a hit of eight years ago – and wants to see it on the show. However, since that time two of the Chilites have been imprisoned and one is dead. Lome still has the lead singer – Eugene Record – and hopes that the rest of us, in Afro wigs, will be able to recreate the Chilites behind him. I’m sceptical, dear diary.
Decline Lome’s invitation to dine with Paul at Wally’s and am just heading east to the Essex House when Laraine1 and a group of the writers ask me to eat with them. Well, I am hungry, and it’s good to take any opportunity to get to know them better, so I find myself up on W91st at Marvin Gardens – huge but cheap plate of turkey salad and a couple of bottles of wine with Laraine, Bill Murray, Al Franken,2 Brian Doyle-Murray3 and others.
In the cab on the way back Al F says how easy people are finding it with me – which I take as a compliment – and fall into bed, tired but grateful, just after one.
Thursday, April 6th, New York
To NBC and Studio 8H, for the first day of’blocking’ the sketches.
I have to do a series of visual promos between four o’clock and five o’clock, which go smoothly and in their small way give the studio crew confidence in me. We work on with blocking, rehearsing our Chilites number, which is fast becoming my bête noire of the week – it’s musically quite complicated.
That night I eat with Lome at Charly O’s. He’s inquisitive, but not prying. We talk about marriages, kids, relationships. His marriage (to one of the present writers) lasted ten years. He thinks kids would have saved it. He’s a Canadian, won his spurs with CBC, trained for the law, but never practised, wrote for the ‘Laugh-In’, etc. He’s a very effective, rather stylish leader of men and, though his own ego is clearly a thing of pleasure to him, he does give as well as take. I like him more and more.
It’s at two in the morning that myself, Lome, writers Al Franken and Tom Davis, stumble eventually onto what is to become the shape of the opening monologue