Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [343]
We sat after dinner in the long, dark room, and Denis turned the lights so low that at one point (his wife) Inge thought Helen had gone to bed, although she was in fact sitting in a chair opposite.
We went up to our brass four-poster bed soon after ten. Rachel’s rubber lilo kept deflating and we had to improvise a bed for her. Eventually, and slowly, I drifted off to sleep, surrounded by a cacophony of nocturnal seagulls and buoys making a variety of doom-laden, bell-tolling rings out on the Sound.
Saturday, August 11th, White Caps, Fisher’s Island
After breakfast, Denis and I adjourn to the long room, sinking into their comfortable sofas and looking out towards the not-too-distant Connecticut shore and the bevy of fishing boats come to snatch bluefish from the rich waters off the headland. Denis and I talk about his taking over my financial affairs – everything will be looked after from holidays to contracts, all of which will be personally negotiated by Denis himself. He wants to give us ‘flexibility’ – that is to take all possible measures to ensure that we control as closely as possible the commercial exploitation of all our work.
After a good talk, Denis suggests that he and I go over to see John Calley, who lives mid-way down the island.
John Calley, friend to the talented (viz Kubrick, Lome Michaels), genial face full of neatly-cropped beard and big, black-rimmed spectacles, is wearing a colourful, light wool topcoat over a Superman T-shirt and green striped slacks with shoes and no socks.
He takes us through endless sitting rooms and libraries until we settle on a room to sit in – the size of the coach house where eight of us are living at Sag Harbor! It turns out that he is only on Fisher’s Island for a month of the year. Denis confirms that the summer population may be 3,000, but in winter it shrinks to 300 all-year residents.
Denis goes to phone the airline, leaving me with Calley. Decide to go in at the deep end and ask him if he will look at the three new Ripping Yarn films I’ve brought over and advise on whether they may be combined as a theatrical movie in the US.
As soon as we start talking ‘business’, I find myself talking easily and constructively to him, rather as I can with Lome. Calley does not react in any stereotyped Hollywood way – he muses, reflects and suggests, gently and amusingly, not playing the mogul. I felt contact being made on a sensible and sensitive level and I will be very interested to hear his reaction to the Yarns, which he promises to view next week.
From Calley’s we drive in the Black Bronco down the road (mostly unmade, with occasional strips of tarmac) back to White Caps. The weather is holding firm, but overcast – the flights are going. The Palins are lifted off Fisher’s Island in two planes – Helen, Willy and Rachel first, then myself and Tom a few minutes later.
A useful visit, but I’m glad to be back in the cosy, crowded warmth of Sag Harbor and the coach house. I still feel uncomfortable and a little uneasy in enormous houses. For me they are still like living in museums. It sets me to thinking about our little home and ‘living in the community’ – as Al puts it.
Enough philosophising. This short trip and the talks of August 10th/11th with Denis and Calley could alter all our circumstances within a year. We may just have to spend, throw away or give away an awful lot of money – being accepted on Fisher’s Island seems to mean that.
Sunday, August 12th, Sag Harbor
It sounds to be raining every time I wake in the night and there’s a strong wind too. All rather cosy inside our house.
Al comes in at ten – I’m just looking at the first Python poster of the Brian campaign, which appears this morning in the New York Times. Al looks worried and says a ‘North-Easter’ has set in and high wind and rain could persist all day. Temperatures must have dropped almost 30 degrees over the weekend and I roll on my sweater for the first time.
It’s the day, suddenly, amazingly, for a log fire. And where else but America would you buy