I was friends with Mike Nichols for fifteen years before Bill Haber asked me who I wanted to direct Spamalot. Bill had come to tea with Tania and me at our home in the Hollywood Hills. He had just bought the play for Broadway in twenty minutes after I gave him a script and played him a couple of songs, and he was on his way out the front gate when he asked that vital question.
Without a second’s hesitation I replied, “Oh, Mike.”
“Mike Nichols?”
“Absolutely. He’s a pal. I’ve known him fifteen years.”
“Well, he’s a friend of mine, too,” said Bill, “but he takes ages to respond.”
“So send him the script and the demo of the songs; he really likes our songs.”
“Well, I will,” said Bill, “but don’t hold your breath.”
Three days later the phone rang. It was Mike.
“Yes, yes, yes” was all he said.
In all those fifteen years of friendship, in many far-flung places around the world, Mike and I never argued or disagreed or had any kind of falling-out. It was always laughter, theater, dinner, and comedy. Once in Saint-Paul de Vence, passing an art gallery with me, Mike spotted a skinny sculpture on display behind the glass. He popped his head in and said, “How much is that Dalí in the window?”
It reduced me to hysterics.
Even when we were on vacation with him in Barbados our holiday snaps were by Avedon. Of course. They were best pals. Mike was first class all the way. So when we began working on Spamalot we were the best of chums, but working together is totally different from being on holiday, and as it happened we disagreed on many things. Of course. Disputes over details are an important part of the process and I have deliberately left these moments in, because they show that it is possible to disagree with someone and still continue happily working together. During the Monty Python writing sessions we would argue vociferously about everything, about every tiny detail, about what kind of a chair it should be, about what sort of bird should be dead, and especially about where we should go to film. Disagreement is healthy and normal. It’s comedy. It’s that serious!
I began writing Spamalot at the beginning of 2001. In the mid-nineties I had been working on a CD-ROM game of Monty Python and the Holy Grail for 7th Level. Having written and produced a musical for BBC Radio Four in the eighties, John Du Prez and I had been looking for a good subject for a stage musical when I suddenly realized it was right under our feet. Of course, the Holy Grail! I realized that if the Python film could spawn a game, it might also adapt into a musical. It already had three great songs, there are no horses onstage, and the quest for the Holy Grail itself is Wagnerian in scope. Not the Ring cycle exactly, more the Rinse cycle.
John and I had just returned from the Greedy Bastard Tour, a fifteen-thousand-mile, three-month comedy tour across North America in a rock and roll bus. I had blogged our progress daily from the road, and so now, leaving home again, I must have continued with my habit of jotting down my thoughts first thing in the morning. I had completely forgotten I’d kept this diary until last year, when we were moving from our old home in the Hollywood Hills to something smaller with no stairs. I call this process Downsize Abbey, and it’s amazing the things that turn up. Just how much crap can two people accommodate? I went to boarding school, but it might as well have been hoarding school for the amount of rubbish we had collected. We had two lockups filled with everything from old Monty Python scripts to hundreds of Beanie Babies that one day, apparently, we were going to sell for a small fortune. Yeah, right. And who needs twenty-seven guitars? Me, apparently. I still only have two hands. Or four thousand books? I realized I didn’t have time to read them again, so off they went to a bookshop in Covina. Let some other people read ’em.
Even weirder things turned up as we began to catalogue what was useful and what was just shite. One of the most unexpected was this Spamalot diary. A friend read it and said they enjoyed it, then my wife read it and cried, and then another friend said they’d loved it and, well, thank you, friends, this is all your fault. It tells the story of a most unlikely theatrical hit, from the first read-through in New York to the first previews in Chicago until, finally, a Broadway opening. It lays the blame for success squarely on Bill Haber; Mike Nichols; Casey Nicholaw; and of course my musical partner, John Du Prez. It was a roller coaster of a ride, and I am grateful to many people, but this book is dedicated to Mike Nichols. It was the best working relationship I have ever experienced as a writer. He was the kindest and the funniest and the most encouraging person I have ever met, and I loved him dearly. And of course to beloved Casey, the quiet genius.
It took a long time for all the various parties to agree and by the time this diary opens in the spring of 2004 Bill Haber has bought the rights, the Pythons have consented to take one third of the artistic royalties for the underlying rights (a new Broadway record; the norm is 25 percent), Mike Nichols is on board to direct, he has discovered the uniquely talented Casey Nicholaw for our choreographer, we are seven drafts and twenty songs in, and I am flying to New York for the first read of what we hope will be our Broadway cast when we begin scheduled rehearsals in the fall.
It was the best of times….
Eric Idle
California
December 2023