20

THIN WHITE DUKES

I have met many people in my life and, sadly, many of them were not famous. I agree it’s not their fault, though they might have tried harder. Anyway, I’m not writing about them because you don’t know who the hell they are, and I’m tired of little notes from my English or American editor saying, Who’s this? Surely, they’ve heard of the Queen…?

I believe it is wrong to be prejudiced against people just because they are not well-known. Fame can bring a sad misunderstanding about the nature of life. As George Harrison never failed to point out, “Even the famous have to die,” although I think in America they do suspect it gives you a pass on the death thing. Anyway, I have always tried not to hold fame against those who suffer from it. It’s really not their fault that just because they possess some talent in a popular performing art, people look up to them, worship them, stalk them, hunt them down, and kill them. “Fan,” after all, is short for “fanatic.” So I try very hard not to discriminate against the illustrious and eminent.

In any case, it is only after you have achieved fame that you realize that it is a piece of shit. As Bob Dylan observed, “It’s only really useful for getting tables in restaurants.” It can be very confusing when you see people smiling at you across a room and you panic, thinking, Have I met that person—or are they remembering me for something I did in a frock a long time ago? So you end up hopelessly nodding at strangers in airports, and saying “Nice to see you again” to the wife. “Nice to meet you” is always a minefield and to be avoided, unless you can remember with some certainty that you never actually have met a pope before.

America used to be about the pursuit of happiness, but they seem to have exchanged that for the pursuit of money, fame, and Twitter followers. Once you become a celebrity, in today’s culture, not only do people feel they have the right to bother you or shoot you, or demand you pose for “selfies,” and scribble your name on grubby bits of paper, but they get your identity wrong, confuse you with other people, tell you shows you weren’t in, and then ask you what your name is. I always tell them I’m Michael Palin and to go fuck themselves, so I can help ruin his reputation for niceness.

Whenever I checked in to a hotel in the Eighties, I would check in as Mick Jagger. It’s better to be mistaken for a better class of person, don’t you think? Nowadays I don’t do that. I need my sleep. And I bet so does Mick. For a while I was his Bunbury, when he would tell Jerry he was out all night with me. Yeah, right. Some of his friends believed it, and David Bailey wouldn’t have dinner with me because he and his model wife, Marie Helvin, thought I was leading Mick into trouble! As if. Eventually Tania cleared my good name, which was only right since I was home every night with her.

Perhaps the best way to ensure that people leave you alone is registering at hotels under the name of a novelist. Although I don’t recommend Salman Rushdie for security reasons. I recommend his books, and I was rather startled to find myself entering his latest, The Golden House. Yes me, personally. It’s a bit scary to be quietly reading a novel in bed and find yourself coming into the scene. I even sing “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” at the dinner party in the book. I have known Salman for some years, since we met at a Billy Connolly concert in Hammersmith, where his dates were four hefty guys from Special Branch, and we sat singing Beatles songs with Gerry Rafferty. You don’t have to believe me, but who could make this shit up?

Anyway, you can register away in hotels as Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, confident in the knowledge that people will leave you alone. I once tried registering as Meryl Streep, but then I felt guilty because she is so damn nice and smart. Notice how cleverly I introduced the fact that I know her. That’s name-dropping at its finest, as I said to Prince Charles only the other day. He wasn’t there, but I like to talk to myself and if I pretend he’s in the room it feels classier. I used to talk to myself in French so that people would think I was quoting Rimbaud. No. Not Sylvester Stallone. Nowadays I talk to myself in a Birmingham accent, like Jeff Lynne’s, because I like talking like that and if people overhear me they will assume I am rehearsing for some kind of Midlands sitcom with Lenny Henry, or an episode of Peaky Blinders. I’ve been pals with Jeff for a long time now, and we’ve played guitars and drank a lot of red wine. One night, quite late, we’d had a few and were playing away when Jeff said:

“Let’s form a group.”

“Okay,” I said.

“What should we call ourselves?”

“The Fuck You Two!”

So began a legendary duo that was dedicated to never writing, recording, or releasing anything at all, and was constantly on the brink of splitting up. The FU2 is still my favorite group. Even though I did once write “Toad the Wet Sprocket” in a sketch and nearly drove off the road when I heard them announced on the radio in California. They sent me a platinum record. I think “Blind Lemon Pie” was also borrowed, from The Rutles.

What has this to do with the price of cheese? I hear you ask. Well, it’s all by way of being a preamble to my meeting with David Bowie, and how we became friends in the Eighties. I wasn’t particularly a Bowie fan when we met, and early on he asked me to collaborate with him in making a Ziggy musical, handing me a tape of Diamond Dogs to listen to. I didn’t know how to respond so I said, “It’s very loud.” Luckily, he laughed. That was the great thing about David. He would simply explode into laughter. He was surprisingly normal and he loved comedians. He pursued comedians like he pursued musicians, like he pursued everything really, with a high seriousness. I met him for tea in Hollywood through our mutual friend Bobcat Goldthwait, the rowdy comedian and now brilliant director, in the Pink House we stayed in above Sunset.

We had almost met when we were on the road in the U.K. in 1973. His tour went up the east coast while Python’s went up the west, and both tours collided in Edinburgh, where we all stayed at the same hotel. There were carrot-haired weirdos at breakfast, but only Terry Gilliam was smart and hip enough to go to his show. I ran into David again in the Eighties when we were both guests of Lorne and Susan Michaels on St. Barts in the Caribbean. David and Coco Schwab, and his young son “Joe,” now Duncan Jones, the amazingly good movie director of Moon, Warcraft, and Mute, were staying with Lorne and a house party of friends. We immediately launched into North Country gay dresser chat, and spent two days improvising camp dialogue.

“Well,” I said, “you’re not going to wear that onstage, are you?”

“If looks could kill I’d have been a slab of herring.”

“Oo, get back in the knife box, you’re too sharp to live.”

David was very funny, and for days we bantered interminably in these panto voices until the rest of the group became thoroughly sick of it and begged us to stop.

Back home, David invited Tania and me to visit him and Coco at their Swiss villa in Vevey. One night they took us to dinner with Oona Chaplin. Here we learned the story of how after Charlie Chaplin died, and was buried locally, two Polish men had the idea of digging up and kidnapping his corpse. They called Oona and demanded two million dollars for the return of the body.

“Keep it!” said Oona brilliantly.

Two days later the body was returned. Not a brilliantly thought-out crime.

David and Mick and the cake. Far right, Tania’s mom, Algea, and niece Kris.

Because of our friendship, I wrote a short scene for David in Yellowbeard and he came down to join the party in Mexico. I even jumped into his jock strap once when he casually canceled his appearance as the Pied Piper in Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre, and she called me in tears to fill in for him. You have not seen disappointment till you have tried on a jock strap for a dresser who has designed it specially for David Bowie. So it was me who had two hundred rats crawling over him in Toronto, and not him. Not just any old rats either, but Hollywood rats, trained in LA and flown to Canada on a one-way ticket, a journey which for them ended up as snake fodder in the Toronto Zoo. A perfect metaphor for showbiz. One minute you’re in a movie, the next you’re being fed to the pythons…

Tania and I spent many good times with David. He and Mick both came to our wedding reception. They sweetly brought out the cake for a very nervous Tania to cut. There was a huge bouquet of flowers from Mike Nichols, and on his card to Tania he gave her excellent advice for her wedding night: “Act surprised.”

Tania and I went to Welwyn Garden City in 1983 to see David on his Serious Moonlight Tour, and to Cannes for the opening of Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, where the French medical students were on strike and had put plaster of Paris and bloodied bandages on every statue in town. We even went on two cruises with him, the first to the Windward Isles, where we were marooned on Mustique with Iggy Pop, as the rented yacht hadn’t made it across the Atlantic, and they stuck us for a week in Princess Margaret’s rather pretty Oliver Messel villa. Before dinner I made the mistake of asking for a rum punch and Mrs. Lane, Princess Margaret’s steely-eyed cook, said severely, “We. Don’t. Meddle. Wid. Rum.”

Oops. Bet she didn’t say that to PM, as everybody on the island called the Queen’s sister. She would put religious tracts under our pillows with red warnings about the devil. I kept a sharp eye out but I never saw him. At least under the pillow. One day there was a terrific shrieking from a terrified cook. A bird had gotten into Mrs. Lane’s kitchen and she was freaking out. I went in and calmly opened a window and it flew out. She never bullied me again. I think she thought I had saved her from the devil.

Finally, the boat arrived and we left the island on a wonderful yacht. One night we hoaxed the crew by telling them it was going to be Drag Night. With Bowie and Idle on board they decided they had better make a real effort, and so at cocktail time a fully glammed-up staff emerged on deck, dressed to the nines, with the captain leading the way in a blond wig, twinset, and pearls. When we emerged, dressed normally, they realized they had been had. Being British, they were still game to go ashore with us for dinner in their frocks and wigs.

Drag night. With David, Iggy Pop, and a conned crew member.

Another time, we cruised the Italian coast with the beautiful Iman, and David took us to Campo di Thermi, where he had done his first gig. He spoke movingly about his dad and how proud he had been of him. David was himself a proud parent, bringing up Joe, of whom I am a strangely useless godfather, and I was always happy that he had a daughter with Iman.

I could never get him to be friends with George Harrison, though. I would say to George, “He’s wonderful and brilliant and funny,” but then George would become very much a Beatle, “Oh Bowie,” he would say contemptuously, to rhyme with “Bowwow.” I even got David as far as Henley once, but George would not admit him. Stubborn buggers, Beatles.

In 1987, Tania and I were on holiday in the South of France with Robin Williams and family, and David invited us to come for lunch to see his new yacht. Steve Martin and Michael Caine were nearby filming Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and we all turned up at the quayside to find a simply enormous boat, with David waving from the top deck. We all stared at this huge vessel in stunned amazement.

“Fuck me, Eric,” said Michael Caine. “We’re in the wrong business.”

David was always extremely generous, and in early 1991 he lent me his wonderful house on Mustique to write a movie. Tania and I spent an idyllic six weeks in this lovely Balinese home of many waters that he had built high on a hillside, overlooking a beautiful bay, with our tiny new daughter, Lily, floating around in the pool. I’d had the idea for the film when a friend told me he had been found as a baby in a telephone booth in Sloane Square. This seemed so very Oscar Wilde (a handbag??) and it reminded me of some friends of ours who had too good a time at a party and left, forgetting their baby was asleep in a bedroom with the coats. Of course, when they got home they remembered and panicked and raced back, but what if the baby had been gone? I liked the idea of a wealthy, hippie, Sixties upper-class couple forgetting their heir in a restaurant. Searching desperately, they were given the wrong baby (Rick Moranis), who grew up to become the Duke of Bournemouth, while the rightful heir (me) grew up with an Indian family in Southgate. Universal liked my script and I came back to England with eight million to spend, but it was January and it was three weeks before I could find anybody to work.

That Easter, John Cleese invited us to join his expedition to Egypt. It was tough, I can tell you, on a luxury boat with a Jacuzzi on the top deck, floating gently up the Nile, with no one for company but John, Peter Cook, William Goldman, Stephen Fry, and forty other assorted friends. John and Alyce Faye very generously paid for the entire trip and even arranged for the British Museum to give us a private tour before we left London, and for the Cairo Museum to open early so we could gaze undisturbed at the sarcophagus of Tutankhamun. (He didn’t look a bit like Steve Martin.) The boat itself had air-conditioned bedrooms, each with a private bathroom and a little balcony, where I could sit and play guitar. Tania won the Easter Parade with a hat composed of the many medicaments she had taken with her to avoid almost every known form of tropical disease. People were very grateful for that hat. Peter Cook was in great form and would usually skip the day tours of the temples and pyramids so he could be hilarious in the evenings. He was, but the temples and burial sites were unbelievable, some of them so recently excavated they looked as if the painters had just left. I crossed the Nile at dawn on a tiny boat to fly in a hot-air balloon, as the sun rose over the Valley of Kings. Each day, at teatime, Stephen Fry would read us a chapter of Billy Bunter on the Nile, a popular Fifties kids’ book, as we glided past villagers in colorful robes winnowing, straight out of illustrated scenes from a children’s Bible. Oh, it was rough let me tell you, but I had to get serious and return to London to begin work on Heirs and Graces, whose title Universal had changed to Splitting Heirs.

John Cleese gave a very fine nuanced performance.

We shot the movie in the glorious summer of 1992 at Longleat, the magnificent palatial home of the Marquess of Bath. Barbara Hershey played the Sixties hippie, and John Cleese a shady lawyer, seen on the this page, giving one of the most emotionally charged performances of his career.

Catherine Zeta-Jones, in her first movie, played the love interest. Catherine was adorable, and Rick made special canvas backs for our chairs: ERIC ZETA IDLE, RICK ZETA MORANIS, BARBARA ZETA HERSHEY. The film went very well and I got to do a nude scene with Catherine, though sadly it was I who was nude.

Halfway through the shooting, Tania and I flew to Florence for the marriage of David Bowie and Iman. David had asked me to make a speech at his wedding, and Tania kept asking him for me just how low I should be. Tell him to make it as low as he wants, David would reply. I, of course, went too far as usual, and I blush to think of it now, but it went down very well with the guests, who included Ono, Eno, and Bono.

“Mawwige, is what bwings us together today.”

The studio was very happy with Splitting Heirs, and it was chosen by the French to be the British representative at the Cannes Film Festival. “Chosen by the French” I emphasize, because some of the British press got their knickers in a twist. What was this comedy doing representing Britain? Well, getting laughs for one, since it played very well at the screening, but at the press conference I was publicly attacked by Baz Bamigboye and Alexander Walker. The rest of the world’s press looked on amazed as the British tried to eat their own. How dare I? Who did I think I was? I have no idea what Baz was up to, but I reckon Alexander Walker was still seething because we had pilloried him in Monty Python as a pretentious fart with silly hair, even building a special wig which grew taller as Graham spoke. I was very happy when later Ken Russell took a stick to Walker on Film Night.

Back home, the tabloids were hounding Catherine Zeta-Jones over a boyfriend issue, and at the last minute she pulled out of attending the festival. I don’t blame her, but it meant I had to take the long walk up the famous Palais staircase all on my own. I think it was the loneliest I have ever felt. I decided there and then, Right, that’s it, fuck it, I’m leaving. If that’s how you behave when someone brings eight million back to spend in the country, I shall take my flops to America, where they don’t even mind if you are successful. The unexpected press response to my movie in the U.K. caused Universal to have cold feet about the American release, and they pulled back on the spending. I think a lot of the attacks on me were because they discovered I was fifty, and therefore by their reckoning too old for the lead. I had outed myself by writing a cheeky letter to the Prime Minister.

The Rt.Hon. John Major M.P.

10 Downing Street

London SW1A.1AA

12th January 1993

Dear Mr. Major,

On the 29th March you and I will both be fifty.

Has it ever occurred to you that, but for a twist of fate, I should be Prime Minister and you could have been the Man in the Nudge Nudge sketch from Monty Python?

I do hope you don’t feel too disappointed.

Happy birthday anyway.

Eric Idle

He wrote me an amusing reply about how his cricketing friends always said the first fifty was the hardest, and invited me to 10 Downing Street, but sadly the newspapers found out and had a go at me for being too old. It was enough for me. Tania and I decided to bring up our daughter, Lily, in California. I felt I couldn’t survive another fifteen winters in St. John’s Wood, and the idea of driving her to school in California seemed far more appealing. It was.