Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [294]
My last memory of the children is of Tom, Willy, Rachel (in Helen’s arms), Holly, Catherine, Louise and Helen Guedalla forming a tableau in the back window of the Cadillac. It felt like an archetypal image of the native son off to the big city to find fame and fortune. Except he wouldn’t have left in a Cadillac.
We went on to Eric’s, and I realised that these vast cars are designed to make the occupants look important, rather than to take on goods and chattels. So, despite being twice as long as any other non-goods vehicle on the road, we still had to go through a minor comedy routine with the cases.
Graham had by this time taken his hat off, and looked less jaunty. Through growing clouds of pipe smoke he told me, a little apologetically, that he’d only bought the suit because he was going to take a tax year out of the country (and this was the first day).
Eric has equally positively decided to move out of London, though only as far as the outer commuter countryside – Oxfordshire, possibly – ‘to be near George [Harrison] and near London’. He talks of the country wistfully now, as if drawn to it as the next inevitable step in his development.
I had nothing to equal such hefty decisions.
Graham and I talked of Keith Moon, who was to have been in the movie and flying out soon to join us, but who died some time on Thursday night, after a party. Graham, whose abstention from alcohol has increased his appeal a hundred percent – he now sounds like, as well as looks like a very wise old owl – told me that Keith was trying to cut down his Rabelaisian appetite for booze, and had some pills called Heminevrin to help out, but these should be taken under carefully controlled conditions and never with alcohol – for they act to increase the strength of anything you do drink.
So Keith had just gone too far and, although his whole life was lived constantly up to the limits, this time, like an adventurous schoolboy on a frozen pond, he’d stepped a little too far out. What a waste. But GC reckons both Peter Cook and Ringo’s are also in trouble with booze.
A long taxi drive from Tunis to Monastir as night fell. Impressions of aridity, emptiness, scrubland stretching away on either side of the road. A camel train tottering, or rather swaying, in that peculiarly restful camel motion, along a dried up river bed.
The villages we pass through are reminiscent of Ireland or Cyprus – not neat and tidy Best Kept Village candidates as in France, Germany or Britain, but collections of houses built as basically as possible to provide shelter for men, women, children and their animals. No time or money for grass verges or floral clocks here.
To the Hotel Méridien by eight. It’s large, new and comfortable – as different from those villages as England is from the moon. An international standard of comfort and atmosphere, protecting the Overdeveloped from the Underdeveloped.
The bed is comfortable and the room has no fewer than three balconies with views out over the sea – which sounds near. Unpack and drift off to sleep about two o’clock. Almost my last memory is of Rachel sitting in my bed this morning and asking ‘Where are you going today, Daddy?’
‘Africa, darling.’
Monday, September 11 th, Hotel Méridien, Monastir, Tunisia
Looking through the script, it strikes me, not for the first time, that the schedule is very full indeed. A long and ambitious film to be squeezed into the eight-week shoot we have planned. Can’t help but feel that some scenes will be trimmed or cut altogether.
Lunch on the terrace of the Sidi Mansour Hotel, where TJ, TG and most of the crew are staying. Terry J was struck down by some metabolic demon in the night and is still in a very delicate state. The art director, Roger Christian, is in bed with sunstroke, and Doctor Chapman, with his napkin draped over his head as an improvised sunshield, has already been called upon