23

PYTHON REUNION?

In the States, I found that Monty Python was really popular. Everyone knew The Holy Grail. It seemed to be a college rite of passage. Now, I helped 7th Level turn it into a CD-ROM game. They had been very successful adapting our TV series into Monty Python’s Complete Waste of Time, an interactive CD, and now I got to rethink Grail. I loved this new high-tech world. I had sniffed contemptuously at Timothy Leary in the Eighties, when he said one day everyone would have a laptop computer.

“Why would I want that?” I said in my snobbish ignorance. “I have a pencil.”

Now, not only did I have a computer, but I visited Microsoft in Redmond, and ESPN, and several other companies, looking for a home for a Python website. In the end, 7th Level generously offered to bankroll it, and in July 1996 I founded PythOnline on the newly burgeoning Internet, where even spam was named after one of our skits. Running PythOnline was a quotidian task that eventually became promethean. My ambition had been to create an amusing site to which the Pythons could contribute and where I could vent my occasional spleen and unfold my propensity for satire, but as the Python contributions soon dried up and I was left to deal with it solo, the task became increasingly frustrating. Each day there would be an ever-growing mountain of Python questions, and when I attempted to answer them, the fans would argue with me.

“You’re not Eric Idle,” they would say.

“Yes, I am,” I would reply.

“No, you’re not,” they would insist.

“Then fuck off,” I would add.

“Oh. You are him.”

It was an early form of Twitter. How to drive yourself crackers. I found I had given myself a highly unpaid job, a monster that daily demanded new food. But the popularity of PythOnline made me think that Python was not dead yet, and I came up with an idea for a final Python movie called The Last Crusade, where a bunch of grumpy old knights, loosely based on ourselves, are rounded up reluctantly to go off on a crusade, taking King Arthur’s ashes to Jerusalem. They didn’t want to do it.

“I can’t, I’m too old.”

“The thing is my mother is coming.”

“This is my year off to read a book.”

Promised beautiful women and cash, they are lured to Venice, where they are screwed by the Italians.

Everyone seemed to like the idea of playing older versions of their younger characters, and I went for lunch and a walk on the beach in Santa Barbara with John Cleese, who sounded quite positive about the notion, and so we arranged for a Python Conference at Cliveden, a neoclassical manor hotel on the River Thames in England. Once the Astors’ old family home, in 1963 it had been the setting for the Profumo scandal. Involving sex, call girls, government ministers, and Russian spies, this helped bring about the collapse of the Tory government.

The meeting began rather disastrously when John announced at the outset that he was not interested in making another Python movie. Terry Gilliam, who had just flown overnight from California, where he was prepping a film with Johnny Depp, asked rather acidly if he couldn’t have said that before he flew all the way from LA. John then said he was very tired and went off for a nap, so the rest of us began working on the idea anyway. It was just like the old days of Do Not Adjust Your Set, and we were going quite well when John returned and said he wanted to have a business meeting instead. We had a hilarious dinner, and afterwards the four of us (minus John) had an uproarious game of snooker on the very same billiard table where Christine Keeler had contributed to the Tories’ downfall. She hadn’t been playing snooker, but the balls were definitely Conservative.

Next morning, we discussed doing a live show and, as we had all been getting along very well, we decided to accept an invitation to attend the Aspen Comedy Festival. A few months later, in April 1998, we assembled in the thin Colorado air and filmed a Q&A session in front of an invited audience at the Wheeler Auditorium for an HBO Special. On John’s recommendation, I went to see Eddie Izzard perform and loved him so much that I went back the next night. He was truly funny and unique, and I asked him as a gag to come onstage with us at the beginning of our show. When Robert Klein introduced the Pythons to a cheering audience, Eddie came on as well and took one of the chairs.

“How did you all get together?” was Robert Klein’s first question.

“Well,” piped up Eddie, “we were all in the RAF and we first met in a railway carriage in 1943 and…”

But we interrupted him.

Michael and Eddie in Aspen. Executive transvestites.

“Fuck off, Izzard,” we said, and threw him off the stage. He went off reluctantly through the middle of the audience shouting bits of old Python sketches.

We had one other gag set up. We brought Graham’s ashes out onstage with us, in an urn, and placed them reverently on a low table, with a picture of Graham. We answered a few mild questions, and John was in the middle of a long reply, when Terry Gilliam crossed his legs and “accidentally” knocked the urn off the table, scattering ashes all over the stage. The audience laughed in total shock. We got up and did our best to clean up the mess, shoveling the ashes under the carpet, sweeping them into a tiny dustpan, and even bringing on a vacuum cleaner. The laugh went on for four minutes and grew even bigger as they realized they had been duped. It was certainly the longest laugh we ever got. And of course, we finished the show singing “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”

The joyous response of the audience seeing us together inspired some of the group to suggest we do a reunion show, and at a business meeting the next morning this proposal became more concrete. Mike and Terry were for it, John seemed keen, and even Terry Gilliam didn’t seem to mind, though he was mainly there to hang out with Hunter S. Thompson, whose Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas he had just filmed. It seemed the Pythons were really keen on doing some kind of a stage show, and I was designated to explore the options. Believing them to be serious, I set off to find the finance. I came back with a solid offer of ten million dollars from Alan Tivoli, who had been our promoter for Monty Python Live at City Centre. Python was to play six nights in Las Vegas, culminating in a live TV performance on New Year’s Eve. Not a bad idea and a very decent offer. We were talking dates, venues, and deals. There was a long Python conference call while I was on holiday in Venice. Everyone was in. Then, a month or two later when I returned to LA, Michael suddenly reneged. He had said yes, of course, but what he had meant, apparently, was no. He had always had anxieties about doing a live show, though he had not shared these anxieties, and he had apparently been very reluctant all along. Of course, it would have been nicer if he had said so earlier. I had spent a lot of time taking meetings and dealing with businesspeople, and now that the offer was concrete he pulled out. But life is too short to fight with friends, and I find at my age I can barely remember to hold a grudge, so although I confess I was a little pissed with Mike for wasting my time, of course I forgave him. It’s impossible to dislike him for long. He is after all a National Treasure, although, in his case, perhaps a bit of a Hidden Treasure.

The fallout from Aspen liberated me. Finally, with Python definitely not going on the road, I was now free to play my own songs. I had been working constantly on music with John Du Prez, and we performed a concert at LA’s J. Paul Getty Center in 1999 with backup singers and a band, which became a record, Eric Idle Sings Monty Python. The following year this turned into a full-blown two-month, twenty-city tour of the U.S. called Eric Idle Exploits Monty Python.

With my longtime pal and partner, John Du Prez.

On the road with John Du Prez and twenty-one other people—what was I thinking? Certainly not money. William Morris made more than I did, but in hindsight this was a smart move. I enjoyed playing to live audiences across America. It was a nice change from developing movies that never got made. I loved making people laugh, and I really liked singing my songs. Wherever we went, the audiences sang along to “Bright Side.” At Carnegie Hall I stood onstage in full drag as Dolly Taylor, singing “Sit on My Face.”

“Follow that, Brahms,” I said as I looked at his portrait in my dressing room.

In the 1997 James Brooks movie As Good as It Gets, Jack Nicholson sang “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” to a dog.

“Thanks for ruining our film, Eric,” he said to me.

“Thanks for ruining my song, Jack,” I said back.

We had met Jack through our friend Anjelica Huston, and hung out quite a bit with him while Stanley Kubrick was busy driving him and Shelley Duvall mad filming The Shining in London (see Rule One for actors).

Hans Zimmer, who scored Jim Brooks’s movie, asked Art Garfunkel to sing “Bright Side” over the closing credits, and Artie was kind enough to come onstage and sing it for me both nights at Carnegie Hall. A year later Monty Python was inducted into the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame, and John Du Prez and I went along with our touring company to accept the trophy. There were wonderful nostalgic clips of us at the Bowl twenty years earlier, and then Robin Williams came on like a blast from a blowgun and torched the audience with a high-octane tribute.

Originally Terry Gilliam was going to join me onstage to accept the award and then we were going to sing “Sit on My Face,” but the Bowl nixed that naughty song, saying it was inappropriate for a gala, and so, sadly, Terry Gilliam pulled out. He has very high moral standards when it comes to low moral songs, so that moment of particular public tastelessness would have to wait.

Meanwhile I took the trophy from Robin and said:

It’s wonderful to be back at the Bollywood Hole after all these years.

I am proud to be here on behalf of Monty Python to accept this honor.

I bring messages and thanks from the others. Terry Gilliam sadly can’t be with us tonight as they won’t let him show his ass, which has been very favorably compared with Spielberg’s ass.

Graham Chapman can’t be with us tonight, as sadly he is still dead. And John Cleese is finishing a movie.

He has to get it back to Blockbuster by tomorrow.

So that just leaves me here tonight.

And so, I’d like to thank me, without whom I too wouldn’t be here this evening.

I’d like to thank everyone at the Bowl for honoring us in this way.

I’d like to thank Robin for friendship above and beyond the call of comedy.

But above all I’d like to thank America and you Americans for accepting Monty Python’s essentially British silliness so warmly, so wholeheartedly, and so surprisingly.

Because, you see, I never wanted to do this for a living.

I always wanted to be a…lumberjack…

—and on marched a chorus of Mounties to sing the inevitable with John Mauceri and the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra. Of course, as we exited we naughtily sang “Sit on My Face”…

After Monty Python they honored Stevie Wonder, introduced with a spot-on impersonation by Smokey Robinson. At the end, there was an incredible curtain call, where I appeared holding hands with Stevie Wonder and Smokey Robinson. I can die now, I thought as the crowd went wild and two of my heroes held my hands and we bowed onstage at the Hollywood Bowl.

Little did I know I would return within a year for a less happy occasion.