9

HERE COMES THE SON

The birth of my son in 1973 was the most emotional experience of my life so far. We called him Carey after Carey Harrison, my friend from Cambridge with whom I’d first traveled to France, and as I drove away from the hospital, the Joni Mitchell song came on the radio:

Come on, Carey, get out your cane…

I burst into tears.

It wasn’t a normal birth. For a start, I was holding the lights. A gynecologist was filming. Our son was born on camera. Because Lyn was an actress, her obstetrician had asked to film the birth and Lyn had gamely agreed. We had done some preliminary shots as her pregnancy advanced, where I played the rather unrewarding role of Husband. Now the hospital room was a damn movie set. What were we thinking? In the end we threw them out.

A year later, in April 1974, with a one-year-old Carey, Lyn was back on the boards. Drury Lane was a sellout, and we extended the run from two to four weeks due to popular demand. Once again, the great and the good, the young and the lovely, the rock and the roll flocked to our show. We couldn’t extend any longer, as we were due in Scotland for the soggy filming of The Holy Grail. Just before we left, the Department of the Environment for Scotland unexpectedly denied us permission to film in any of their castles, calling the film’s script “incompatible with the dignity of the fabric of the buildings.” Here, where thousands of Scotsmen had slit each other’s throats, we were not to talk about the curtains. It was a disaster. The Terrys had scouted and prepped several castles and now we were left with just two in private hands: Doune Castle, which suddenly starred in the movie as we shot it from every possible angle, and Castle Stalker. What had started as an underprepared and underfunded movie soon turned into full-blown chaos.

The poor Terrys. We had given them both the job of directing, which was smart for us and hell for them. In the end, one of them would edit by day while the other would change everything by night. Our producer was soon disliked by both directors. His qualifications for the job seemed to be that he had once shared rooms with Terry Gilliam. John detested him and even Michael was rude about him in his diary. Later he would sue us for money from Spamalot. Of course. We had broken the Mike Nichols golden rule of production: “No assholes.” Fortunately, Michael White had supplied John Goldstone, a young, brilliant, bearded Mancunian, to look after his interests and he was our producer for every Python movie from then on.

Filming Grail was uncomfortable, to say the least.

Soggy.

We began shooting in Scotland near Glencoe in May, and it was cold and damp and miserable. One of our two cameras broke on the very first shot, while Graham clung to a ledge shaking with nerves. We thought he was supposed to be a mountaineer. We didn’t know he was an alcoholic. The shaking was not nerves but DTs, and someone quickly snuck him up a bottle of gin. Both Graham and John refused to run across the rope bridge that spans “the Gorge of Eternal Peril.” To be fair, the Bridge of Death was terrifying. It was erected across a deep gorge by Everest mountaineer Hamish MacInnes and his local mountain rescue crew. I for one certainly would never have crossed it, but fortunately my character Robin was killed before I had to. Since we were all wearing woolen armor, jogging across the wet heather pretending to ride horses, you could tell what time of day it was by how far up your legs the damp had climbed. At the end of each day we had to change out of our soggy tights, so by the time we got to the hotel we shared with the crew, all the hot water was gone. John and I soon had enough of this and found a nearby hotel, a Hydro with plenty of hot water, and amazingly, just as we moved in, twenty-four beautiful young damsels arrived for their scenes as the maidens bathing in Castle Anthrax. We didn’t tell the others…

Grail wasn’t fun. Terry J. directed the comedy scenes and made sure the jokes were on-screen, while Terry G. shot the art scenes like the Dragon Boat and the more mystical shots of castles, which made it look like a real movie. Since both Terrys played multiple roles in the film, it must have been exhausting for them. We were completely unsympathetic and would complain endlessly and badger them to get on with it. Terry Gilliam came in for a lot of this abuse because when we’d done a perfect take he would call for one more.

“What was wrong with that?” John would inquire testily.

“Not enough smoke,” he would reply, to John’s disgruntlement.

The smoke became quite an issue and eventually Graham would quantify it from 1 Gilliam, which was light mist, to 10 Gilliams, which was smoke so thick no one could see the actors. Of course, it’s his genius art direction that gives the film its unexpectedly fine cinematic quality, just as it was Terry Jones’s comic brilliance that ensured we shot several really funny scenes in one take. That meant no one could interfere with our timing by inserting close-ups or pauses or reaction shots. The Guards scene is the best example. It’s all up there on the screen, one long shot. You can see all three of us clearly, including our legs (feet are funny!), and we played it in real time like a scene from the theater.

“Not to leave the room till you or anybody else…”

“Not anybody else…”

The timing of Graham’s hiccups is just wonderful. This was the scene we had the most trouble with in Spamalot, and often cut it altogether.

At its first public screening, in a cinema in West London, Monty Python and the Holy Grail was a total disaster. It tanked big-time. This is where the Python writers committee really came into its own. We commandeered a room and set to work discussing where it went wrong. The two exhausted Terrys, who had been cutting different versions, could only listen and be grateful for the help. Neil Innes’s medieval soundtrack was the first thing to go. It wasn’t bad in itself but it killed the comedy stone dead. When it was replaced by cliché music from a film library, the comedy began to come alive. It didn’t need sackbuts and tabors, it needed swashbuckling Hollywood movie music. Now it was parody, you knew where you were. We made cuts and changes in the text, too, added voice-overs to clarify the story, and did some small reshoots, like a claw turning over The Book of the Film (a prop I oddly came across last February at the Pasadena Antiquarian Book Fair; they wanted fifty thousand dollars for it! I didn’t buy it, but I did sign it and verify it as the genuine article). It took thirteen test screenings of The Holy Grail, dragging the scenes to where the audience laughed, before we were satisfied. It was worth it.

The Holy Grail opened to a perfect storm in New York in April 1975. Ron Devillier at Dallas PBS had bought a very cheap show the BBC were practically giving away, and when he put Flying Circus on late-night on Sundays he was rewarded by amazing figures. Other PBS stations followed suit, and soon New York began to play it too. We were a cult hit. When we opened The Holy Grail at Cinema 2 in New York, Don Rugoff advertised it by paying a knight to go up and down Fifth Avenue pretending to ride a horse, followed by a squire clopping coconuts. In a newspaper ad he promised free coconuts to the first thousand people to attend the opening screening, at 11:00 a.m. We were woken at 9:00 and told to get over to the cinema pronto, as there were lines round the block. It was something like Beatlemania. For safety reasons the NYPD were insisting they put on an earlier screening. We arrived to huge cheers and were then trapped in the cinema all day, emerging at the end of each showing to sign coconuts. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried signing a coconut, and why would you, but it’s not easy. Plus the crowd was so big they had to send out for more coconuts. To keep us company in the long gaps between emerging audiences, two of our investors, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, very kindly came by and hung out with us. We’d never met them before and they were modest and sweet and, of course, the fans couldn’t believe they were there. I’m happy to think they still get money from Spamalot.

Signing coconuts at the New York opening of Holy Grail.

The next morning, we cohosted AM America live on TV and then were taken off to be photographed by Richard Avedon for Vogue magazine. In the limo, we discussed what we might do.

“Well we certainly won’t be naked,” said someone.

That did it.

Of course, we had to be naked. It was a classic Python photo, and we spent a very silly session with the enchanting Avedon, with us all completely in the buff, a photo marred only by the absence of John. When I later reproduced the photo in Themontypythonscrapbook, I got Basil Pao to insert a photo of John on set in Tunisia in just his Y-fronts.

In the magazine article Leo Lerman, the veteran Vogue writer, said we were like slightly cracked angels. On our way out of the studio we glanced down at Avedon’s typewriter, where he had just started a letter.

Dear Princess Margaret, it began.

We couldn’t have been happier, leaving in a squeal of giggles, off to the Bronx Zoo to christen a python “Monty.” I avoided the beast like the plague.

The opening party was held at Relaxation Plus, a massage parlor in the basement of the Commodore Hotel on Fifth Avenue. No, I don’t know why. Each of the rooms had a different theme. Naval flags, for example. There was a large central Jacuzzi into which a naked Terry Jones was soon inviting guests. He’s friendly that way. I was chased round a massage table by a very tall actress from Li’l Abner called Julie Newmar, who seemed determined on something, but I managed to escape intact. Andy Warhol was there. Jeff Beck was there. Dick Cavett was there. It was odd. We were a thing.

That May we screened The Holy Grail out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival. We had thoughtfully taken along Jeannette Charles, a Queen Elizabeth look-alike, to change the name of a street from the Rue Python to the Rue Monty Python.

At our screening that evening, soon after the movie began, local firemen in brass helmets raced in and evacuated the cinema. The audience thought this was part of the joke and stood happily in the street while the pompiers searched the auditorium. It was a hoax, but the audience laughed even harder at the movie when they went back in.

With the “Queen” (Jeanette Charles) at Cannes.

I now had my own TV series on BBC2. Rutland Weekend Television began taping in January 1975, and our first six shows aired from May through June. I bought the title from John for a pound. Rutland was the smallest county in England, over a thousand years old, and the new Conservative government had just ruled it out of business, stating it was now part of Leicestershire. If you really want to fuck with the English, then history is a good place to start. Rutland was outraged. As soon as the Leicestershire council took down their signs, they would replace them with their own new ones. I liked the idea of having a tiny television station that broadcast from a place that had just been unmade. Sure, it broadcast only once a week, but it had plays like Three Men on a Goat, its own rock band with an “all-dead” singer, light entertainment shows, and sports: “International Wife-Swapping from Redcar.” It was a good model for TV satire and I had a lot of fun writing and creating sketches for it. RWT was shot on a shoestring in a tiny studio next to the weather studio on the fourth floor at the BBC Televison Centre. Even the shoestring was borrowed. I had a great cast of funny people, and Neil Innes contributed songs, which he would send to me and I would turn into sketches or movie ideas. Not many people saw it. Because it had no live audience, I was never very sure whether it was funny or not, and some people kindly went out of their way to point out that it wasn’t. That summer we were all working separately, John on Fawlty Towers, Michael and Terry J. on Tomkinson’s Schooldays, and me on Rutland. Still, we had a movie to open.

Sometime in August 1975, Terry Gilliam and I flew out to LA to do promo for the opening of The Holy Grail in Westwood. It was stinking hot and we were driven everywhere in a little old beater with no air-conditioning. The movie had yet to open in LA. Our TV show wasn’t yet on PBS in California. We were so unknown that Gilliam and I joined the line for the first screening of The Holy Grail outside a cinema in Brentwood, listening to the fans chattering away about Python. They were fanatics, but only from our albums.

One afternoon I was invited to a house in Laurel Canyon for a swim. When I arrived, it turned out I was the only guest; the young lady who had invited me was wearing a tiny bikini and proposing we relax and take mescaline. The afternoon was filled with exotic promise, when I got an urgent phone call from Terry Gilliam.

“Eric, can you come and get me?”

“What?”

“Just come and get me please.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m in the back of Book Soup on Sunset.”

“What’s up?”

“Just please…come and get me.”

He sounded desperate. I did the British thing. I apologized to the young lady and assured her I would be right back, but I must leave immediately on an errand of mercy. Racing down to Book Soup, I found Terry cowering in the back of the store. He seemed to have lost it.

“It’s all out there. Everything. Hollywood. Movies. It’s all out there.”

I understood all was not well in the Gilliam cranium. I know Terry suffers from dark moods. It goes with his genius. I think that having grown up in the San Fernando Valley, and maybe dreaming one day of directing, he was now back, having directed his first movie, and it had all become too much for him. I think all the Pythons are nuts in some way, and together we make one completely insane person. I took him to tea and he soon calmed up. My afternoon was in any case ruined…

That evening my life changed anyway, for at the screening of The Holy Grail at the old Directors Guild on Sunset, I met George Harrison. I had heard that George wanted to meet me, but I was somewhat shy of meeting him. People said he was an enormous fan of Python and a big fan of me personally because I had written a sketch for Flying Circus about an actor being busted by the police. The policeman had thoughtfully brought a package of his own. When the actor opened the brown paper bag, he found sandwiches.

“Sandwiches?” says the policeman. “Blimey, whatever did I give the wife?”

Cut to a stoned wife. “I don’t know, baby, but it was better than sandwiches!”

This was the only line cut by the BBC from the first series. George had assumed, probably rightly, that the sketch was based on his own drug bust in Esher, where the police had brought their own cannabis, and was anxious to meet me. I was shy and tried to avoid him, but he snuck up on me in the back of the theater as the credits began to roll. I hadn’t yet learned he was unstoppable. We began a conversation that would last about twenty-four hours. Who could resist his opening line?

“We can’t talk here. Let’s go and have a reefer in the projection booth.”

No telling what the startled projectionist felt as a Beatle came in with one of the actors from the movie he had just projected and lit up a joint. He managed eventually to get us to leave, and we went off for dinner with Terry Gilliam and Olivia Harrison.

Lunch at first sight. The night Gilliam and I met George and Olivia.

After dinner George insisted I go with him to A&M Studios, where he introduced me to Joni Mitchell. Joni fucking Mitchell, for Christ’s sake. Saxophonist Tom Scott was at work on some overdubs of George’s latest album, Extra Texture, and we listened to some of the tracks and then went back to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where we talked and talked and talked for the rest of the night. What was it like to be a Python? What was it like to be a Beatle? What was John like? What was your John like? A thousand questions.

“Did you really smoke a reefer in the Buckingham Palace toilets?”

“It might have been a cigarette, but it felt so naughty even doing that there, that it felt like we had smoked a joint,” he replied honestly.

Funny and serious and wise, he changed my life. We played together, partied together, argued together. He was irresistible. It was definitely love at first sight.

Back in England, my marriage was drawing to its sad conclusion, but shortly after I returned in early September 1975, George and Olivia invited me to visit Friar Park, their palatial home in Henley-on-Thames. I drove up for dinner with Lyn and little Carey in our VW. We came across a huge gate, with an exquisite gnomes’ cottage behind it, with twisted chimneys. It was incredible.

“This is beautiful,” I said, ringing the bell.

“Oh. This is just the gate cottage,” they replied, “the house is further up!”

Crackerbox Palace.

We drove up a long winding drive between huge dripping trees, through banks of rhododendrons, past manicured gardens, and there ahead of us under a magnificent cedar tree was the most amazing Victorian neo-Gothic mansion. It was bigger than my boarding school. Friar Park was built in 1889 by the eccentric lawyer Sir Frank Crisp. It is a dream of a palace, with William Morris tiles, polished wood interiors, a huge carved fireplace, and elaborate dining rooms, bedrooms, and drawing rooms. It features caves, grottoes, underground passages, and all kinds of formal gardens and lakes. Carved stone friars’ heads popped out of walls with philosophical quotes, many of which were already lyrics of George’s and some of which would soon become them.

Scan not a friend with microscopic glass

You know his faults now let the foibles pass

Life is one long enigma my friend

So read on, read on, the answer’s at the end.

On the grounds was a huge scale model of the Matterhorn covered in snow, scattered with edelweiss and alpine trees, under which ice caves led magically back into the house. Large signs instructed you to stay on the grass. Beyond the lawn with its Shiva fountain lay underlapping lakes and underwater caves, with a little electric boat to take you through twisting tunnels behind the waterfalls into a magnificent blue grotto, from which you emerged into a Japanese garden with an exquisite teahouse perched over a high waterfall. It is still the most unique and incredible house I have ever seen.

Following the disaster of what he called “the Dark Hoarse Tour,” George had retreated from the world into gardening. He was obsessive. But he did not neglect his music, for upstairs was a beautifully carved, fully equipped recording studio with every single Beatles guitar from every era hanging on the wall. After dinner, Lyn took Carey home and I stayed on for days, spending hours listening to the tracks he had racked up, playing guitars and eating Kumar’s curries, talking, sharing, laughing, emerging onto the lawn at dawn to play Frisbee. George made me welcome, cheered me up, and played his two jukeboxes like a professional, to instruct and delight. Of course he had some Monty Python, but they were heavy with Dylan.

I was swept up into a magical world, complete with his friends, for you had to meet everyone—the extraordinary Derek Taylor, local musician friends Andy Fairweather Low, Jon Lord and Deep Purple, Joe Brown, and Alvin Lee. It was like entering Wonderland, and always there was his running commentary, for I soon learned the Quiet One never stopped talking. He spoke about everything and everyone and was never shy to voice an opinion. The only thing we never agreed on was religion, but we agreed to disagree, for it was so much a part of his being, this ex-Catholic who had embraced Hinduism, sought enlightenment in Rishikesh, learned to play sitar, and single-handedly influenced the culture of the world by introducing Ravi Shankar and Indian art, music, and literature into Sixties Britain. All this from a guitarist in a rock group. Of course, they were the Beatles, but imagine all that influence stemming from the enthusiasm of a single Scouse and you get a glimpse of the determination of George.

Extra Texture was released in September 1975. He immediately put me to work recording radio ads for this new album, subtitled Ohnothimagen, and even had me add a couple of Pepperpot lines on his single “This Song,” which was a riposte to the lawsuit he was fighting with the aid of his manager Denis O’Brien. In exchange for my help, he agreed to star in my Rutland Weekend Television Christmas special, which aired on BBC2 on December 26, 1975, singing a song we had written together. George lurched on as a truculent and slightly unstable pirate and demanded to know where the pirate sketch was. As the sleazy compere, I insisted he was only there to sing “My Sweet Lord,” and there was no pirate sketch. But he was having none of that.

“No pirate sketch? Well, up you then,” and off he stormed.

Finally, at the end of the show, the set lit up saying GEORGE HARRISON SINGS and he came down the stairs dressed all in white playing the familiar opening chords of “My Sweet Lord” on his twelve-string. Just as he finished the intro, he beamed and suddenly switched into “The Pirate Song,” which we’d written together.

I’d like to be a Pirate

A Pirate’s life for me

All my friends are pirates

And sail the BB-sea!

I’ve got a jolly Roger

It’s black and white and vast

So get out of your skull and crossbones

And I’ll ram it up your mast!

“The Pirate Song,” Rutland Weekend Television.

It was a terrific gag and still one of my favorite moments. It is the only Harrison/Idle song, but certainly up there with the best of Lennon and McCartney. Olivia told me she thought it was the bravest thing George ever did. Afterwards we celebrated for hours, and—here is his amazing luck—on his way home to Henley at four in the morning his car ran out of gas, and he slid onto the forecourt of a country pub, whose landlord he cheerfully woke up to begin serving drinks.