15

THE BOLLYWOOD HOLE

In September 1980, Monty Python ran for four nights at the legendary Hollywood Bowl, where we played to eight thousand screaming fans a night, a wild and crazy crowd best summed up by my line in the Bruces sketch:

“It’s a typical Hollywood audience. All the kids are on drugs and all the adults are on roller skates.”

Drugs were everywhere. Not just grass. Cocaine was abundant. You couldn’t go to a record company meeting without some executive saying, “Let me take care of your nose.” Hollywood made several movies at that time which can only be understood in the context of cocaine. In 1979, searching for a venue for Python to play in LA, I was shown several possibilities by a young, hip, tightly jeaned executive from a major live-event company. We went into the Pantages Theater on Hollywood Boulevard in the middle of a performance of The King and I. Yul Brynner was onstage. We walked through the auditorium and the young man talked normally to me, as if there were not two thousand patrons sitting in the dark spellbound. I marveled no one seemed to notice. Then we went to the Ford theater, an outdoor venue, where the Village People were onstage and the scent of amyl nitrate filled the air. Finally, we ended up for dinner at Carlos ’n Charlie’s on Sunset across from the Chateau Marmont. A slight drizzle had begun, and as the executive pulled into the valet parking in his little silver Mercedes, he was rear-ended by the next arriving customer.

“All the kids are on drugs and the adults are on roller skates.”

“Shit. I got to take care of this. Will you hold on to this for me?” he said, shoving a package into my hands.

“Sure,” I said, and walked inside.

What was in the package he was so keen to get rid of before the police came? Did I know at that moment? The thought certainly occurred to me as I entered the restaurant. I decided it would be better to know, so I headed for the bathroom and opened the packet. I had never seen so much cocaine. I was looking at about fifteen years. Steeling myself, I calmly went and sat down at the table and ordered a strong martini. Soon he returned. I shoved the package onto his knees under the table.

“Thanks,” he said.

We did not go with that company. We went with Denis O’Brien, who had figured out how to get a cheap Python movie out of us if we filmed our live performance at the Hollywood Bowl. We shot the show on a new 1,000-line Japanese video system, which we could easily convert into a movie, and our old BBCTV friend Terry Hughes, from The Two Ronnies, came in to direct.

The Hollywood Bowl was great fun, possibly the most fun we ever had together. We were spoiled rotten. George Harrison was there, Marty Feldman was there, Carrie Fisher was there, and Harry Nilsson was always there with Timothy Leary. Steve Martin, currently dating Bernadette Peters, threw us a party at his house, where Michael Palin was slightly embarrassed by a topless girl leaping into the Jacuzzi. I think he made some excuse about having to go off and read The Daily Telegraph. Terry Jones made no such excuse but plunged right in. To the water anyway. Though with Terry you never knew. He would always give a girl a decent chance.

Marty Scorsese threw us a party at our hotel, where he was working on Raging Bull, impressing me beyond belief by holding three separate conversations at once. Graham, who had rented a house in Brentwood, threw a party for his parents. It became star-studded and raucous and all of the Stones trooped in. There were slightly disapproving glances from elderly English people, and sharply at ten Graham’s parents suggested to the Stones that it was getting late and time for them to leave. They all took the hint and cleared off.

“No problem, love,” said Keith. It was probably still breakfast time for them.

After the show John Cleese and I stayed on to help Terry Hughes edit and adapt our two-hour, two-act live show into a ninety-minute film for Handmade Films. It was going to get a theatrical release.

Tania and I lived quietly in a bucolic canyon. One day Denis O’Brien came over. He had been eyeing me suspiciously, concerned about what I might have been saying to George about his many offshore companies and the mysterious, nameless people who ran them. I had indeed expressed some of these concerns to George. They were troubling. Now O’Brien told me I was fired from Monty Python. I laughed in his face.

“Denis, my dear, I think you will find you may cease to represent my financial interests, but you can’t fire me from Monty Python. That’s definitely not up to you. What will you do, sack a Beatle next?”

He was obviously very concerned that I was on to him and would reveal to George how shady he actually turned out to be. I think George must have asked him some questions and mentioned my name for O’Brien to have responded so abruptly. I had to go, and quickly. It would be many years before George finally learned the extent to which he had been bamboozled by his manager, and by then it cost him about thirty million dollars.

“Somebody should have warned me,” he said. “Oh, that’s right, you did.”

By then, George hated Denis so much that he wrote and recorded a song called “Lyin’ O’Brien.” A few months after the Bowl, the rest of the Pythons decided that they too had had enough of him, and we all assembled for a conference at the Chewton Glen Hotel to decide how to tell him he was fired.