THAT’S A LOVELY LINE, ISN’T IT? IT’S LIKE A LINE FROM A HARD DAY’S NIGHT. IT TOTALLY CAPTURES HIS SENSE OF FUN AND REALITY. I MISS him every day. From the stage, I encourage people nightly to go and see The Concert for George, which is just out in limited release. It is a wonderful memorial concert performed by his friends Eric Clapton, Paul McCartney, Ringo, Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty, Joe Baker, and his son, Dahni. It is marred only by an appearance by the old Monty Python boys, who come onstage at the Royal Albert Hall and sing “Sit on My Face.” Then they show their ancient asses…. So avert your eyes. It is a ten-Kleenex movie, so be prepared for tears. They play only George’s music and you won’t believe just how many great songs he wrote.
I was on a remote island with him when a man came up and said “George Harrison, oh my God, what are you doing here?” And he said, “Well, everyone’s got to be somewhere.”
We once planned to tease John Cleese by letting him discover accidentally that the rest of us Pythons were secretly getting together to rehearse his memorial. Cruel, yes, but funny, isn’t it? We could be quite cruel with one another. John once hid in Michael’s hotel room while he prepared for bed. He stayed silently watching him for twenty minutes, with his head poked over the back of a chair. Only after half an hour did Michael finally notice him, and then nearly leaped out of his skin. We used to play a game while filming that if we were on a life raft in an extreme survival situation in what order would we eat one another? Graham was often the first suggestion, because of being such a lazy old bastard, but he always got a bye, as he was a doctor and would be helpful in cutting up a body. Also, he was a bit of a chef so we felt he might usefully curry bits of us. Invariably the second choice was John, since he was so large he would feed us for days without having to kill anyone else for a while. No wonder John would get so grumpy with us. In Canada, on our stage tour, he would often dine alone at the same restaurant, sitting at a separate table for one. You’ve got to admire that sort of eccentricity, haven’t you? The only other person I ever saw dining alone quite so comfortably was Harold Pinter. Once, when all we Pythons were having a big, loud lunch, he sat alone at the next table. No book, no pretense at reading a newspaper; Pinter just stared at us through his big glasses as though we were some kind of recorded entertainment.
George once said to me, “If we’d known we were going to be the Beatles we’d have tried harder.”
I wake up parked outside the Samurai Japanese Restaurant, just a block from Yale. Breezy coeds go by in search of falafels. I decide to try this dining alone thing, and over lunch I begin a series of epigrammatic Zen pensées in the Japanese manner. I’m thinking a cross between La Rochefoucault, Lord Chesterfield, and Abba:
The further one travels, the less one gets anywhere.
If you don’t get on the bus, then you’ll miss it.
Life is like a journey. We don’t know where we’re going to, we don’t know where we’re coming from and we won’t know if we arrive.9
[Not much like a fucking journey then, is it?—Ed.]
I think publishers will lap this up. I must get on to my greedy bastard agent and see if he can’t whistle up a couple of million advance. [Dream on.—Ed.] I continue to apothegmize over the cold raw fish:
It doesn’t matter how nice you are. Nobody says they love Shakespeare because he was a nice man, do they? They don’t say, “We love Mozart, what a nice guy.” Nobody said Beethoven was such a nice man. Beethoven was a total shit!
You don’t hear them say that on classical radio, do you? You don’t hear the announcers say, “And now here’s the Fifth Symphony by that total shit Beethoven.”
Women have emotions; men have sport.
Home was not built in a day.
There is no time like the pleasant.
Great stuff, eh? All it needs is some snappy title like: The Four Disagreements or The Five Stages of Unbeing or Six of One and Half a Dozen of the Other or maybe The Seven Things You Learn When You’re Dead. Over lunch I notice I seem to have discovered the Cleese joy of dining happily alone and its benefit: Nobody disagrees with you. Afterward I bump into Jen and we walk around Yale. Some of the buildings are very old. One ancient brownstone proudly boasts the date 2003.
The audience for our show was loud and smart, though frankly cheap. The previous night our merch flew off the table; these tight bastards, though we gave them the very same good time, kept their wallets in their pockets. The extremely amusing Rutland Isles calendars, which have been handwritten and magnificently printed and make the perfect gift for people you never quite liked, remain in unwanted piles. The programs, so witty and filled with gems and such good value at only ten bucks, lie idle.
After the show, barreling down the Massachusetts Turnpike at three in the morning I realize we have now officially become a rock-and-roll tour. We are on rock-and-roll hours. John and I stand with smoking breath in the cold air at a truck stop, gazing at the moon, talking about the show. Everyone is happy with the way it’s going. We just need to tighten a few cues. We’ll work on it today at sound check.
The bus swallows up the miles as we head into Boston. I ride shotgun, up front with ’Lish, our bus driver. At 3:00 A.M. the streets of Chinatown are jumping. The bars have turned out, and the clubs are doing heavy business; lines of young people buzz like wasps around a diner. The lobby of our hotel looks like the end of the world: young couples are crashed out everywhere on the floor, waiting for transport. The girls look spectacular in semiformal dresses; the guys, yobbish and a bit drunk. I have anxious thoughts about my daughter in a few years. Hopefully Showbiz Alzheimer’s will have set in by then.
I go to bed at four after watching Dave Chappelle be very rude and funny on HBO. I am woken suddenly by a horribly cheerful voice. It’s an automatic alarm call. There is no real person on the line to abuse back. Carefully I dial the desk.
“Can you find out who set the alarm call?” I say in my most reasonable voice.
“Yes, sir.”
“I want them eviscerated,” I say.
“You want them killed?”
“No, I want them disemboweled, their entrails unwound, their livers extruded, their testicles removed, and their remaining bits burned and chopped into Boston Harbor.”
“Right away, sir.”
Politeness is best.