13

THE BRITISH EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

Strange things kept happening to me in the Seventies. At some point Python had become not so much hot as cool. Because of that, I met a lot of very interesting people. I didn’t seek them out. They found me. What am I supposed to say?

“Fuck off, Keith Richards, I am not coming upstairs with you to sing till dawn in Rome”?

“No, Mick Jagger, I will not come with you to the Monte Carlo Grand Prix”?

“Bugger off, Bowie, who wants to join you on a yacht in the Caribbean”?

Heroes had become friends. Once you’re in the circus you’re all in the circus, and of course it turns out that they are real people too, and have a sense of humor, which we had effectively tickled. Celebrity fans became even more noticeable after I became friends with George Harrison. A Beatle and a Python is a fairly unbeatable combination. I mean, look at the following picture.

It’s my kitchen door in St. John’s Wood. Through this same door, George had brought Eric Clapton to meet me. Eric kindly gave me a rock fossil. I hope I refrained from making the obvious joke. We all then went to the Hammersmith Odeon to watch Bob Marley, where we sat on the stage, next to the singers. Does wow hack it? They were smoking the most enormous spliffs backstage, so I think the concert started two years late.

“And the winner is…”

But what is this picture telling us except that Harrison Ford is obviously completely happy, and even the young, sweet, and slightly insecure Mark Hamill is having a good time? I am coming through the door with a beard and a Silver Disc award for a Python album—but which, and when, and why? I found the photograph ping-ponging around the Internet. Somebody sends it to me on Twitter every three months or so. It was taken by the legendary rock-and-roll photographer Lynn Goldsmith, who was staying with the cast’s costar Carrie Fisher in our house off Abbey Road. But what the hell is going on? Champagne has already been poured and the evening promises to get rowdy. Rarely did such promises go unfulfilled. The most memorable was an impromptu party that featured the return of the Boukha. In fact, not only did it help make one scene in a movie, now it helped mar one scene in another.

I had brought back a bottle of this lethal brew from Tunisia for a rainy day, and this particular day it was pissing down. I’d met the delightful Carrie Fisher in New York while doing Saturday Night Live. She was utterly adorable, smart as a whip, funny and beautiful, and all the guys were crazy about her. She gave me a ride up Fifth Avenue in her little silver Mercedes, flipped on the stereo, and began improvising scenes from Noël Coward. She rented our house in St. John’s Wood while she was filming The Empire Strikes Back, and one day I found both her and Harrison Ford very despondent. They were filming at Elstree, which is not the end of the world, but you can see it from there. Shooting long days on a special effects movie can be tedious for an actor, as I found out for myself on The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, where I chewed my own foot off. (I got better.) This day they were so down that I said, “You need my special remedy,” and I brought out the Boukha rocket fuel, which I had used to sing my vocal to “Bright Side” in the hotel room in Monastir.

“This will definitely cheer you up,” I said.

It did. A party broke out and, if you can believe this, all of the Rolling Stones turned up. I of course pretended to the Star Wars folk that this was no big deal and happened all the time, but it began an epic night which ended only at 6:00 a.m. when the cars came to pick up the actors for work and the Stones sloped off to hang upside down in their caves. When I saw The Empire Strikes Back, I was so proud. The scene they shot that morning bears the scars of the evening. Carrie lurches out of a spaceship to meet Billy Dee Williams and says, “Hi!” Harrison is still clearly drunk. I remain inordinately proud of the scene I spoiled and hope that one day George Lucas will forgive me.

My time in the early Seventies was often pure rock and roll. Sitting with Ronnie Wood in his Malibu Colony rental, we would be suddenly swept up by Neil Young and taken for a ride in his enormous customized tour bus with its exquisite hand-carved wooden interior. There were glimpses of the California governor, Jerry Brown, quietly dating Linda Ronstadt. What a strange world it was—Ronnie Wood naughty and always beaming, Keith laconic, Mick whirling like a dervish. Mick was always very funny about me and would send me up in an impeccable Northern accent by saying, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, a man who has spent the last few years entertaining the British public in a short wig and a funny mustache.”

The party went on everywhere; one minute we were at Studio 54 in New York, the next on Dodi Fayed’s yacht in Monte Carlo. Mick had driven me, Tania, and Jerry to the Monaco Grand Prix from Bill Wyman’s house in St. Paul de Vence, where we were all staying. It was only an hour or two before the race, and I wondered where on earth he was going to park.

“Parking!” he said contemptuously. “Don’t worry about that.”

We drove right to the heart of the race by the Monte Carlo Casino. Police were everywhere.

“Ready, everyone,” said Mick. “One, two, three” and we simply got out of the car.

“Good job it’s rented,” said Mick with a naughty smile, as the Monégasque police towed away his car. Parking indeed.

He was instantly grabbed by Régine the New York Nightclub Queen, and within seconds we were sipping champagne at the Moët et Chandon top table at the Hôtel de Paris, while French executives looked at us, puzzled.

The Grand Prix was deafening, the cars racing through the canyons below, shifting gears noisily. We leaned over them on balconies.

“Who’s winning?” Andy Warhol asked me, and I was very proud of my reply:

“The red car, Andy.”

At the Cannes Film Festival that followed, we had a loud and pissy lunch at the Hotel du Cap with George and Olivia and Ringo. The terrace was packed with celebrities.

“Look,” someone said, “there’s David Begelman.” Begelman was a top studio executive who had been an agent and was currently in the middle of a big scandal for forging his client Cliff Robertson’s signature on his paychecks.

I approached his table with a pen.

“Excuse me, Mr. Begelman,” I said. “Big fan. May I have Cliff Robertson’s autograph?”

On this trip with George and Olivia, we followed their friend Barry Sheene, the British motorbike champion, down to the French Grand Prix at the Paul Ricard Circuit, where he duly won the 750cc motorcycle race going impossibly fast and low around corners.

“I saw you guys,” he said, “and I wanted to wave but I didn’t have time to take my hand off the accelerator.”

He saw us? In the crowd. Jesus.

You met all sorts at George’s. I met a strange Peter Sellers, who kept disappearing upstairs with a Swedish model. I think amyl nitrate was the cause of his dangerous complexion, and he would soon die for four minutes in LA, though mercifully he was brought back to life, at least for the time being. Terry Southern, a Texan writer who wrote The Magic Christian, Candy, and Easy Rider, was a friend of Mick’s, and he always carried around a shoebox of little vials and random loose pills that he would casually offer.

“I don’t think so, thanks, Terry,” said Mick as we stood in a light snowfall somewhere in Greenwich Village.

“What are they?” asked Tania.

“I don’t know. Take one,” Terry said.

“No thanks,” she said wisely.

We went to smart opening-night parties, Dolly Parton’s first performance in New York at the Bottom Line on May 14, 1977, and lots of Saturday Night Live parties. I hosted the show four times in the Seventies and marveled that they could write anything, so fucked up did they get. Python always wrote office hours. The idea that you would try to write comedy while under the influence of anything was anathema to us. On Tuesday nights on SNL, they would write all night, the offices reeking with the scent of marijuana. The host was expected to stay up and hang with them as they got more stupefied and less and less inspired. Rewrites were unheard of. They went straight from pitch to set design. I loved the cast, particularly Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner, though they were all sweet and friendly. Belushi was very protective of Tania and gave me warnings not to leave her. As if.

I hosted the classic SNL show where Belushi did dueling Joe Cockers, and that was some party afterwards. I remember writing Good night Joe on his arm with a Sharpie as he lay peacefully passed out on the floor of a New York apartment. The last time I hosted SNL, on October 10, 1979, Bob Dylan was the musical guest, and he was going through his Christian phase with a brilliant album, Slow Train Coming, but he seemed very paranoid. He’d get off the elevator at the Essex House hotel on our floor, and then stay with me while he asked Tania to go up one flight of stairs and make sure there was no one outside his door. There never was. I tried a joke.

“We can arrange for someone if you like…”

But nothing.

He was highly aware of all that went on around him. John Candy and I were once guest appearing in the “Wilbury Twist” promo video, and I was placed by the director behind Bob Dylan. It’s normal in these circumstances, when filming, to lean slightly left or right to find the camera. I leaned right; Dylan leaned right. I leaned left; he leaned left. He was preternaturally aware of where I was behind him and determined to stay in front. He seemed to have extrasensory vision. I was impressed and gave up. Hey, it was their video.

One other guest on my last SNL show was the strangely weird and wonderful Andy Kaufman. I had met him a couple of times and went to see his show in New York, where I had very much enjoyed him. During the intermission, he went offstage and left his mike on and you could hear him throughout the interval trying to persuade this poor girl backstage to give him a blow job. I loved his Mighty Mouse bit, and no one ever did a better or more unexpected Elvis. On SNL, he arrived with Bob Zmuda, and this was the first time he did his notorious wrestling-women act on TV. They brought on an entire wrestling ring and Zmuda was the referee. Andy baited the women in the audience, boasting he could beat any woman there, saying horrible sexist things about their role and place in society: “God, man, woman, dog…” Not surprisingly, he had several angry women takers from the audience keen to wrestle with him. I was on set, racing to change costumes for my next sketch, when I saw one woman Andy was heading toward. He was going to choose her. I ran forward to the stage manager.

“Joe,” I said, “you can’t let him take her.”

“Why not?”

“She’s pregnant.”

My mother in me, the outraged health visitor, had intervened. I’m glad to say they stopped her. We took my mother to see Andy Kaufman when we met her in San Francisco. She was on a world cruise. It was her third time. She said to me: “I wish there was somewhere else to go.” She had already been to Egypt, where, she said, “I saw the tomb of Carmen Tutu.” My favorite of hers was when she said, “I don’t want to come and stay if it’s not inconvenient.” But apart from world-class malapropisms, she could be good fun, and we met her off the boat and took her to see Rodney Dangerfield, who had Andy opening for him. Unfortunately, Andy sent on his alter ego, Tony Clifton, which was a character he played, an appallingly lush and offensive lounge singer. That night he was particularly vile, and incensed the audience, and then refused to leave the stage. I seriously thought there was going to be a riot. I have never experienced such anger from an audience. They yelled and screamed abuse, and he would only taunt them further. Poor Rodney Dangerfield. When they finally dragged Tony Clifton off, he came on to a cold and angry audience. I went backstage to say hello afterwards and he was shaken and furious. “Never again,” he said.

I’m sort of with him on that. My kind of insult comedian was Don Rickles, and he and I played separate heads of a two-headed dragon in an animated film called Quest for Camelot. We improvised happily for days in a recording studio and they used not one single word. The movie tanked.

The strange things kept happening. Pink Floyd record producer Bob Ezrin invited Tania and me to visit him in a studio in Provence the very evening Roger Waters was recording his lead vocal for “Another Brick in the Wall.” Just him. Just us. Timing.

We don’t need no education…

Well, actually you clearly do, or you’d say “any education.”

We hung out a bit with Roger in France. I thought his idea for the Wall tour, where they literally built a wall between the performers and the audience, was one of the most brilliant theatrical ideas of all time. I still do, even though Trump has tried to steal it.

More strange things: I stood in an elevator at Madison Square Garden after the Ali vs. Quarry world heavyweight fight, face-to-face with Henry Kissinger. Next to me stood his burly security guard. Behind Kissinger stood Ronnie Wood, putting his tongue out and making silly faces all the way down, trying to make me giggle. Kissinger’s security guard hadn’t a clue what to do. Had anyone threatened his charge physically his reaction would have been swift and lethal, but he wasn’t trained to deal with a Rolling Stone mocking his client behind his back. We both stood side by side, desperately trying not to grin, pretending it wasn’t happening.

More strange things. Why was it me standing on a table at Tramp at four in the morning with Harry Nilsson, George, and Ringo, bawling out “Volare” at the top of our lungs, trying to drown out the next table of loudly singing Italian waiters? Someone had to do it, I guess. People seem amazed these days that we all knew each other, but we were all part of the same generation of postwar kids who grew up with the rationing and shortages of the Fifties and conquered the world in every field in the Sixties—writing, art, poetry, painting, photography, couture, rock, and in our case comedy. It was an amazing Renaissance, as this brave new world was created out of the ashes and bomb sites of a world war that had just slaughtered sixty million.

The strangest thing of all was that Elvis turned out to be a big Python fan. That was mind-blowing. He had meant so much to me, and had saved our lives in the Ophny. I now learned he took his guys to private screenings of The Holy Grail late at night in Memphis. Not only that, but he had all the tapes of our TV show on his plane. That Elvis should love something I did was the world turned upside down. I knew Elvis had a sense of humor. His Vegas recording of “Are You Lonesome Tonight” where he cracks up after he changes a line to “Do you gaze at your bald head and wish you had hair” went to number one in the U.K. It’s not so much the line as the lack of response from the Vegas audience that makes him unable to continue singing the song. He laughs helplessly throughout. It’s still on my jukebox.

What finally blew my mind, and I had trouble believing it, was when I met the delightful Linda Thompson and she told me that Elvis would make her sit up in bed at night and do Python Pepperpot voices with him. They would screech loudly in middle-aged English female voices:

“Oo, hello, Mrs. Thing!”

“Hello, Mrs. Entity. How are you then?”

“I need a new brain.”

“Well, why don’t you get a new Curry’s brain then.”

He didn’t. I refused to believe it. I made her tell me three times before she finally convinced me, and then only because she knew the phrase “Curry’s brain.” No American would know that reference. It still amazes me.

“If Elvis had been alive today he would be your stalker. He loved you guys so much. He particularly loved the ‘Nudge Nudge’ sketch. He called everybody ‘Squire’ from it. There were only three TV channels, ABC, NBC, and CBS, and when they went off the air late-night he would make me sit up in bed and do Python sketches with him.”

I still can’t really believe that Elvis, the one who saved our lives at school, was such a fan.