Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [354]
Soon after arriving I’m taken in to talk to a roomful of about fifty boys and girls. They’re all so young – most of them younger than my eldest son – and only a very few put their hand up when I ask who’s heard of Ripping Yarns. But it makes for an easy, jolly, relaxed talk. They’re fascinated by how we nailed the boys to the wall in ‘Tomkinson’. ‘First we select three really naughty boys,’ I began, and they all titter.
Saturday, October 13th, Gordonstoun School
Dozed until 8.15, when Mrs M left a cup of tea and orange juice outside my room.
Thumbed through a book on Gordonstoun School as I sipped tea. Influence of Plato’s Republic on Kurt Hahn’s original philosophy of the school – preserved in the houses, where housemasters are Guardians and heads of house Helpers. But what stuck most in my mind was the reason why one of the Gordon family built the fine stone dovecote in the grounds mid-way through the nineteenth century. It turns out that there is a highly improbable Scottish saying ‘A new doe’cot means a death i’ the family’. He hated his wife, and built four of them.
Aberdeen by 11.30. Checked car in, walked through drizzle around grey granite squares. A man nearly scared me to death with a bellow of greeting – ‘You’re my hero!’ Neither of us had pencil and paper for autograph, so I gave him my Municipal Arts Society of New York membership card.
Thursday, October 18th
Speak to both Jack and Liz Cooper, who are as concerned as I am by our mutual friend Levinson’s precipitate leap into wedlock. Jack wrote him quite bluntly advising that they think a lot more carefully – and just live together. What a fine reversal of the traditional social and moral position – advising someone not to marry but to live together. But, as Jack says, ‘We’re in this together.’
As I’m sitting trying to look at a rather good TV play by Stephen Lowe, there is a knock on the door and a man from the flats behind our house comes round to see if his escaped owl has taken refuge in our garden. We can’t find it, and he’s rather in despair because it’s one of a breeding pair. Nice to meet an owl enthusiast.
Tuesday, October 23rd
T Gilliam is round to borrow a bicycle pump. We end up talking for an hour. Last night TG saw Denis, freshly returned from LA, but found him strangely low. None of the deals he’d gone to the States to make had been made – the main reason being a 30–35% dive in Brian business on the very weekend Denis arrived in the US. So Warner’s were not falling over themselves to sign on any of Denis’ dotted lines. He’s chatting up Paramount now.
I gather we are now banned in South Carolina – the first state to prohibit Brian – thanks to the activities of that great fighter for human rights, Governor Strom Thurmond. Someone told me of a news item about a cinema in Oklahoma being sued for showing the movie.
So the backlash has finally hit and Denis is now trimming his estimates about the gross. No longer are we on the upward spiral towards 40 million and beyond; he now seems to be happy to settle for a total of 24 or 25 mill, across the US, which would leave a distributor’s gross of 15 mill. Still way above anything the Grail did, but nevertheless bigotry, prejudice and intolerance – or pure and untarnished ideals – have at last shown there is a limit to Brian’s heady progress. The Promised Land of the dollar millionaires is way beyond us after all. Actually both TG and I breathed a sigh of relief.
Wednesday, October 24th
ITV returns, the weather changes, grows colder and wetter. The Ripping Yarns, which have been so well received and have seemed to highlight the sunny, gentle, equable days of early October, end tonight.
The news of Brian seems to set the heady, warm, jacuzzi-lounging, golf course running days in the sun at Fisher’s Island firmly in perspective. Then Python and Brian were unbeatable, set to be the biggest, and Denis was making plans accordingly. Now the brakes are on.
Even Shepperton suddenly faces an end to the volume of activity which has kept the place full for eighteen