10 The Divorce Fairy, Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

THE DIVORCE FAIRY

By Christmas 1975 the divorce fairy was hovering. My marriage was breaking up, and no wonder. Lyn was a lovely woman and a good mother and she certainly deserved better. Not surprisingly, my faithlessness was rewarded by hers and she left me and my two-year-old son in London to spend Christmas in France. I did learn that infidelity is not a good basis for a marriage. Best to disappoint one woman at a time. Sad, but with my lovely blond son for company, I got an unexpected boost. On a snowy Christmas Eve, two men delivered an enormous thing wrapped in brown paper from a lorry. We ripped the paper off to find a fully stacked jukebox filled with all George’s favorite records. A note said, Every home should have one, Happy Christmas, love George and Olivia.

That Christmas, Carey and I danced away. He could only just reach the buttons. He could punch 123, which was “Money” by Pink Floyd, but his favorite was “Bohemian Rhapsody.” He adored that song. When I finally moved out of our house in St. John’s Wood to a cold flat in Pimlico, Lyn did an amazing thing. She promised me she would never come between me and my son. I always thought that was really mature, and I have always been grateful to her for that. Now I was miserable and alone, and serve me right. I had been an asshole. Men come in three sizes: small, medium, and extremely fucked up. I know men aren’t entirely alone in this. A female friend told me she was looking for a boyfriend.

“What sort of man are you looking for?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, “he must be breathing and have a penis.”

My postmarital depression began to lift in January 1976 when I was offered three TV commercials in Australia for a “Nudge” chocolate bar. From cold-winter London, I was flown first-class to Sydney, where it was summer, with sun, sea, sand, cricket, and that extraordinary harbor with its bridge, its exciting opera house, and, across the bay, artist Martin Sharp’s beckoning mad clown head at Luna Park. I went to Bondi, where I ventured into the sea and experienced the first joys of Australian surf, which was like being popped into a washing machine and turned upside down underwater. I emerged eventually onto the beach with a mouth full of sand, and with as much dignity as I could muster. Pommies!

Before I left London, Richard Neville, one of the editors of OZ magazine, who was arrested and tried for a controversial schoolkids edition, had given me a pile of postcards introducing me to the most interesting people in Sydney. This pallid masturbating wreck standing in front of you is called Eric Idle. Please look after him.

I think on the first night, at a party, I met them all. Australians are amazingly kind people, and they invited me to everything, including a trip to the Blue Mountains, where I spent a weekend with “Little Nell” Campbell, long before Rocky Horror, the exquisite Gaël McKay and her boyfriend Stephen Maclean, and the English photographer Tim Street-Porter. We drank exotic cocktails and stayed at the Carrington, a delightful old hotel in Katoomba. In Melbourne, I shot my “Nudge” commercials next to the Melbourne Cricket Ground—where Australia was engaged in a titanic struggle with Clive Lloyd’s West Indies cricket team—and then returned to Sydney for some more relaxation.

Before I’d left for Australia, George sent me a gift. He had been giving me spiritual advice, such as “Leave your dick alone,” which was a bit rich coming from him.

“You’re going to Australia?” he said. “So you’ll be flying over India.”

“I guess so.”

“Well, I’ve got to send you something then.”

On the day of my departure a beautifully wrapped package with a peacock feather arrived with the instructions: “Not to be opened until over India.” Wow, I thought, spiritual guidance from George Harrison. Some ten hours into the flight I looked down and asked the air hostess, “Is that India?”

“Yes,” she said.

Right, I thought, time for that spiritual advice. So, I reverently opened the package and found inside a small box. I removed a little handwritten card from George.

It read: Shag a Sheila for me!

I took his advice.

On my return from Oz my actress friend Carinthia West, who had been in my Rutland Weekend Television series, offered me her basement flat in Praed Street and then kindly told all her female friends I was gay. One by one they crept downstairs to convert me. It turned out to be surprisingly easy.

We were now setting up for a second season of Rutland Weekend Television, though this time we had been relegated to Bristol, a two-hour drive down the M4. It is only very rarely when writing comedy that you actually make yourself laugh. It happened to me just once. I had dragged Neil Innes into the RWT project and his job was to provide one or two songs per week and send me rough demos of them. I would then fit them into sketches or link them, or come up with film ideas. One of the songs he sent me for the second season sounded so like the Beatles of the A Hard Day’s Night era that it came to me in a flash: we should do it as “the Rutles.” At the same time, I came up with the visual gag of a TV interviewer walking and talking to the camera, and the camera begins moving away from him, just slightly faster than he is walking, so that he has to hurry, then is forced to break into a run to keep up, and finally ends up galloping after the camera, which eventually leaves him behind. This image made me laugh. I just knew it would be funny.

Flash-forward to later in the year and we are filming somewhere in Shepherd’s Bush, in the mean little backstreets behind the BBC. We are set to shoot this gag. I am wearing a silly wig (as usual) to hide my shoulder-length hair. Our cameraman has done lots of documentaries and he knows exactly the way the gag should work. The first take works fine.

A few days later we are down in Shepperton Studios filming “I Must Be in Love,” the song Neil had sent me, only now we are dressed as Sixties Beatles and it has become a song from A Hard Day’s Rut. It’s England, it’s freezing, it’s intermittently raining, and we are making up sight gags in a field that is now a housing estate. The bit cut together like a dream, and it is one of my favorite pieces from the entire series. In this first iteration, I was playing George.

Meanwhile, I had bought a house in St. John’s Wood in North West London to be near my son, and I shared it with my friend Robbie Williams, who worked for Pink Floyd. (No, not him.) We put a sign on the door that said NO LUGGAGE to deter young ladies from moving in, a vastly overoptimistic hope, as Australian models flowed through and left their flimsy dresses drying over the Aga. It became quite a party house.

In April 1976, we performed Monty Python Live! for four weeks in New York at City Center, where we were a big hit with fabulous reviews. We were all getting along really well and the audiences flocked to see us. On the first few nights we would hang out around the stage door and sign autographs for fans, but after a couple of weeks the crush grew so great and the police so concerned that we had to jump into a limo and drive out in a hurry. Otherwise they would follow us to our hotel. It was an instructive lesson in the swiftness and power of fame. Of course, some people did follow us home, and our social lives bloomed.

This time the opening-night party was held at Grand Central Station and we were chased around by Leonard Bernstein, who looked dashing in a cape. We pointed him in Graham’s direction. Graham was being particularly naughty. He came to Mike and me and confessed he had slept with a lady. Mike and I said it was alright, we forgave him, but not to make a habit of it.

Oddly, we got the news that Monty Python had just become the top-rated TV show in Japan. They had changed the title. The literal translation was now The Gay Dragon Boys Show, and afterwards four men in business suits sat on chairs seriously discussing the sketches, including my favorite: “The Number One Deciding Guy Skit” (“The Twit of the Year”). Spike Milligan said that watching John Cleese dubbed into Japanese was the funniest thing he ever saw.

At the Python party, I also met Lorne Michaels, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, and Chevy Chase, who were just finishing their first season of Saturday Night Live. Lorne Michaels, a writer on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, had pitched the show to NBC as a cross between Monty Python and 60 Minutes. He even came to London and watched us rehearse and shoot one of our shows, although I don’t remember meeting him then. Wisely, NBC bought Saturday Night Live and it has been running ever since. One night after our show, Terry Gilliam and I went to visit them as they broadcast live from the NBC studios at 30 Rock. Lorne was very friendly and we stood on the stage floor at 8H, where we were surprised to see they had puppets. John and Dan were very scornful of the puppets and happy that at the end of the season they were leaving for London, where they became The Muppet Show.

A few days later I met Paul Simon in the queue for Bette Midler’s dressing room after the opening night of Clams on the Half Shell Revue. I was a huge fan, and we began chatting as we waited a long time for Elton John to emerge. He was inside giving Bette diamonds. When it was our turn she graciously showed us round what had been Debbie Reynolds’s dressing room. “And this is where Debbie pooped,” she said, showing us the toilet. Paul would eventually marry Debbie’s daughter, Carrie. I took him to see Billy Connolly at Carnegie Hall, where the Manhattan audience struggled to understand Billy’s broad Glaswegian accent, while the devoted Scots fans roared their approval of this man in black tights and banana-shaped Wellie boots.

That fall I would return to New York to host Saturday Night Live for the first time. It was the year of the American Bicentennial.

“What’s a Bicentennial?” asked Ronnie Wood.

“It means America is two hundred years old,” said an American proudly.

“Oh, the same age as my house,” said Ronnie.

Ronnie’s house, the Wick, a perfect oval eighteenth-century home, was a gorgeous Georgian mansion set high on a curve of the Thames near Richmond. I would set off with the delightful Ronnie to the Stones concerts at the Earls Court Arena, driving straight backstage in the limo into the encampment where you could eat, dine, play, wash, shower, powder your nose, and generally hang out till showtime. I’d watch the gig and then climb into the limo as everyone went back to Woody’s for refreshments and snooker. Several days passed in that haze. I love Ronnie. He had come and stayed with me in France when he was joining the Stones, and Mick had given him two tapes: one of all the Stones songs to learn; and the second, how to get laid in French. What a thoughtful bandmaster.

Amongst the many celebrities who flocked to the Python show in New York were Harry Nilsson and Ed Begley, and after I met them on the street we went for a drink at a bar on Sixth Avenue. I liked a drink in those days but Harry was a professional. Ed told me recently that after we’d had a few we all went up to Graham’s suite at the Navarro Hotel on Central Park South. He innocently knocked at the door and was startled to be greeted by Graham with a full plonking kiss on the mouth. He said he felt honored.

A few nights earlier George Harrison had come onstage for “The Lumberjack Song” dressed as a Mountie. He behaved perfectly, stayed in the chorus line, and no one would ever have known it was him.

George Harrison onstage with Monty Python at City Center.

Harry heard about this appearance by George, and there was nothing for it: he was going to come on and be a Mountie too. So they dressed him up and he entered on cue with the chorus of Mounties, but Harry’s performance was a little different from George’s. For a start, he was drunk, and he had no intention of remaining anonymously in any chorus line. He was a star and he wanted the audience to know it was him onstage. So he wore dark glasses and waved his arms around; leaving the chorus line, he lurched about the stage, gesticulating, swaying dangerously, and generally drawing attention away from the focus of the song, which was er, well, me as the Lumberjack. This caused a certain amount of frosty disapproval from John Cleese, who was less than fond of Graham’s alcoholic rock-and-roll friends but who had been delightfully enchanted by George and his sweet modesty. When the song ended there was a feeling of “thank God that’s over” as we all stepped back to let the curtain drop. All, that is, except for Harry. There was a huge wave of applause and cheers triggered by the end of the song, and Harry wasn’t going to miss a minute of this. So as we stepped back, he stepped forward. The curtain fell.

“Where’s Harry?” we asked, and then laughed as the curtain went back up and he was nowhere to be seen. Ignoring all instructions, he had stepped forward into the dark to acknowledge the cheers and fallen into the orchestra pit. So we all had a good laugh at his expense, and even when it was revealed that he had broken his wrist, some of the more cynical members of the comedy fraternity expressed less than halfhearted murmurs of sympathy, and considered comic karma to have triumphed.

Immediately after the run at City Center, I joined George and Olivia on holiday at the Rockefeller resort at Caneel Bay on St. John in the Virgin Isles.

George had just finished recording Thirty-Three and ⅓, the age we both had now reached, and we played happily on the beach as if we were still seven. It was a fabulous time.

One night we met a couple at dinner.

“What do you do?” said George.

“Import-export,” they said.

“Oh,” said George, “have you got any?”

They had.

Another afternoon, playing acoustic guitar in his room, we were interrupted by a banging at the door. A young lady was complaining that Norman Lear, the legendary American sitcom creator, was trying to write downstairs and our music was disturbing him.

“Oh, sorry, love,” said George politely, “we’ll stop.”

A few hours later a very shamefaced Norman Lear came to the door, utterly embarrassed that he had told a Beatle to stop playing guitar!

Back in England, George asked me to direct a couple of short promo films for his wonderful new record, though this was well before MTV, when music videos became common. I shot “Crackerbox Palace” and “True Love” in the house and gardens of Friar Park.

Son Carey helping direct “Crackerbox Palace.”

That fall, Lorne Michaels invited me to host the second show of the second season of Saturday Night Live on October 2, 1976, and in my opening monologue I did a very bad version of “Here Comes the Sun.” I also made a short film with Gary Weis, called Drag Racing, where Dan Aykroyd and I raced in full drag along a tiny landing strip in Flushing, Queens. Lorne asked me to play a clip from my current TV series. I showed him the Rutles gag and a parody of the Who’s Tommy called Pommy, about a deaf, dumb, and blind man stuck in a Ken Russell film and his struggle to get out of the cinema. Lorne selected the Rutles piece. On the live show the runaway camera gag got a huge laugh and there was a great audience reaction to the song and the sight of the Rutles. After the show, there was a surprisingly strong response, many fans writing in, sending letters to the Rutles and begging for more. I was gratified to hear this because, encouraged by George, I had been thinking that this could make a very nice documentary. On the phone, I mentioned to Lorne that I was thinking of doing this for BBC2.

“Don’t do that,” he said. “Do it for me through my deal with NBC. You’ll have a much bigger budget.”

If I came to the West Indies for Christmas, he added, we could talk about it and he would go back and pitch it to the network as a special.

It seemed like a no-brainer. A model was making unmistakable signs of moving in, buying HIS and HER pillows and showing disquieting signs of nesting. I wasn’t ready for a nest. It was time to move on. Lorne’s invitation couldn’t have been timelier. So, it was Barbados for me, tra-la-lee. Fortunately, my life was to change again unexpectedly and I finally began to grow up.