21

RUN AWAY!

As a young teenager riding on top of the 148, a double-decker Midland Red bus from Studley to Birmingham, I would pass through a suburb improbably called Hollywood. How could I possibly imagine fifty years later I would end up living in Hollywood, California, in a rambling old 1920s Spanish house? We moved to LA in 1994. Tania and I had been discussing it for some time. She had spent seventeen years in England; only fair if we spent the next seventeen years in the States. We had frequently wintered there, staying in a huge old pink house above Sunset with Garth and Euva, lovely friends who rented out three or four suites to itinerant actors like Albert Finney and Greta Scacchi. The house and the pool were filled with beautiful models, like Janice Dickinson and Lauren Hutton. There was music, ping-pong, dancing, art, food, and excellent conversation. We had stayed there with the infant Lily, but now we would need to find somewhere to live. We would escape the Schadenfreudian nightmare of the U.K. and do a runner. It was almost as if I regretted not running away from boarding school all those years ago. Thaweesee (Wee), our adorable Thai nanny, who made the most exquisite food, would come with us. It wasn’t exactly Ellis Island, but I still had to wait downtown with immigration lawyers for green cards and driver’s licenses. The only difference? Celebrity. You get spoiled rotten. Finally, a good use for fame. Since I have a pathological fear of filling out forms, waiting in lines, and all officialdom, it was a great relief to be discreetly marched round the back and asked for autographs.

It wasn’t until I moved to America that I truly discovered I was funny. Suddenly I was making Steve Martin and Robin Williams laugh. Chevy Chase told people he wished he were really funny like me. Garry Shandling said he adored the Rutles. It’s appreciation by your peers that counts, and being in a group can make you feel insecure. My own TV show after Python, Rutland Weekend Television, had no live audience and so I never knew if it was funny or not. Several people went out of their way to assure me it wasn’t. My play Pass the Butler was hammered by some of the West End critics, though it ran for six months to gales of laughter. My solo film, Splitting Heirs, now also suffered critical abuse. In England, my future was behind me. It was time to leave.

I went to California initially to make a speech for John Cleese at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where he was presented with the Screen Actors Guild’s second annual Jack Oakie Award. The first was to Walther Matthau. There wasn’t a third.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.

Actually, I am here rather in error. The transatlantic phone line was very bad, it was Christmas, my mother was visiting so I was shit-faced, and I could vaguely hear someone inviting me to a Jackie Oakie evening, and what I heard was “a karaoke evening”: so naturally I was very excited.

Imagine my disappointment when I find it is instead some kind of salute to John Cleese, a man who has consistently ruined my life by being funnier, better known, and better paid than me.

A man who hurt me deeply by giving the role I would have been perfect for in A Fish Called Wanda to Jamie Lee Curtis.

A man alongside whom I have spent several days being crucified, perhaps the worst job you can get in show business, with the exception of working for Jeffrey Katzenberg.

Well, I have known John now for thirty-one years, which is perhaps the longest of anyone here. So, while it is an excellent opportunity to make some cheap cracks about him and reveal some tasteless and extraordinary bits of gossip about him that I have picked up over the years, I think I can embarrass him far more successfully by being sincere.

John is quite simply, and it pains me to say this, the best.

Perhaps even more irritatingly, he has turned himself into not just a nice person but a morally fine, caring, thinking, teaching, incredibly generous, wise, and loving human being.

And now he’s dead.

Oh, I’m sorry, that’s something I was writing for later.

John responded with a very funny speech complaining how nobody ever mentioned his fucking humility, a line Mike Nichols found so hilarious he told John he was going to steal it.

Shortly after this tribute, Tania, Lily, and I were in Encino when the Northridge earthquake hit, on January 17 at four thirty in the morning. We were just four and a half miles from its epicenter in Reseda, in the San Fernando Valley. It had a 6.7 magnitude and lasted for an interminable twenty seconds.

I was awoken by Nikolai, the dog, just after four in the morning, and took him outside, but he just stood there looking confused, so I went back in with him. No sooner had I climbed into bed than the earthquake struck. It was like the sound of an express train coming through the bedroom. I held on to Tania while the bed bounced, until the whole house finished shaking and we could run and check on Lily. It seemed like an eternity and we found her underneath a clown picture, which had fallen off the wall but fortunately missed her. Downstairs the house was a mess, but Wee and I turned off the gas, swept up the broken glass, and we all went back to bed. The house continued rocking and swaying with aftershocks all night long. Even the dog jumped into our bed after a particularly big tremor. We were on Balboa Avenue, which at one point that night was both flooded and on fire. The wail of car alarms echoed round the valley. It was eerie.

The house belonged to our friend Dave Stewart (of Eurythmics) and, fortunately for us, he was seriously paranoid about earthquakes, and had built it to three times code, so while it bounced a lot, it withstood the initial earthquake and the three weeks of aftershocks. The power was back on by noon the next day and we sat in the Jacuzzi and discussed what to do. Nobody was very keen on returning to an English January. The general consensus was that since that was “the big one,” we might as well stay. Eventually I took some geological maps and discovered where granite and limestone intersected and bought a house there. I would start again.