Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [322]
Walk down to NBC with Nancy. She tells me Eric has arrived on this morning’s Concorde. I find I now wince involuntarily whenever I hear that name (Concorde, not Eric).
My major problem of the afternoon is that the much improved and carefully honed monologue, in which I refer casually to a lack of proper socks (when everything else is perfect) and gradually build it into an obsession, just isn’t working. It raises hardly a laugh (except from Bill Murray – my greatest fan!) and I return to the dressing room in a state of some despondency. How I could do with the security of the cat routine now!
After the meal break, and as the audience are beginning to file in for the dress rehearsal, I tell Lome that I feel that a possible salvation for the monologue would be to lose the cards and do it ad-lib. Lome agrees and I wait for the start of the dress rehearsal with added adrenaline output – knowing that I have to make up four or five minutes of spiel.
The monologue founders at dress rehearsal. I stumble on painfully. The whole of the rest of the show seems to sag too.
Various suggestions for cut-down monologues. Lome says it may be best to be straight, sincere, say we have a fantastically full show and get off after 30 seconds. But someone – I think it may be director Davy Wilson, with his solid, dependable good humour – decides me to go with it.
11.30 – again the wait backstage, the very successful Carter cold opening, then the music builds and Don Pardo’s classic American announcer’s voice builds with stomach wrenching speed up to the climax – ‘Michael Palin!’ And out I come. And I know I’ll survive. They’re listening and I sense they’re not embarrassed. In fact it begins to get a few laughs, I enjoy playing it, and it comes to an end with applause I’m very happy with. Not a great monologue – for it was always a slight idea – but I feel immeasurably happier throughout the show because it had worked – I had saved it.
The show, predictably perhaps, really takes off. Sketches, cut only within the last half-hour, work better than ever, performances are all tweaked up, the live magic works and even during the show, but certainly by the end, word gets around that it’s a good one.
It’s a nice, silly time of one’s life, this hour or so after hosting a successful show. For a while you’re King of the Castle.
The air of unreality continues at the after-show party at i Fifth Avenue, when half-way through our meal a waiter arrives, announces a telephone call for me and leads me off through the kitchens to the back of the restaurant where stand huge, evil-looking basins full of clogged washing-up. I’m told that one of the washing-up staff has always wanted to meet me, and was shown the man, who rather sheepishly turns round and breaks into a grin. It’s Alan Bennett, a friend of the restaurant owner, hands in the sink. He immediately goes into profuse self-deprecation, saying what a fool he’s felt waiting for me for an hour!
Eventually he comes to the table and I ask if he’s going back to London for the press showing of the last of his Frears/London Weekend plays. Alan doesn’t think he is. He likes New York. Stephen wants him to write a play about it, but he just enjoys being here and can’t put his mind to work.
Monday, January 29th, New York
Lunch, organised by PBS, with TV critic Marvin Kitman, an eager, talkative, spongy-faced character, who’s full of bounce and one feels is used to sharp, quick one-liners, which I can never supply very well. But we had a good talk. He noticed a difference between my two shows. In the first one my own contribution resulted, he felt, in two pieces which broke new ground for the show – one was the cats down the trousers, and the other was the escape from the box during The Seagull.
This time, he felt, the show was within itself and lacked a unique edge. Which I had to agree with. I should have registered my feelings more strongly to Lome perhaps, but I did want to play a character – or at least do something original enough to top the cats.
Kitman told me of George Carlin, American comic,