STEAMING DOWN THE HIGHWAY, BOB DYLAN’S LOVE ANDTHEFT CRANKED UP HIGH ON THE STEREO. LAST NIGHT WE PLAYED THE COUNT BASIE THEATRE AND WON. NOW WE ARE LEAVING NEW JERSEY, LAND OF SPRINGSTEEN. BYE-BYE, Bruce. Good disguise tonight, by the way. The fans never noticed. You were the woman in the twinset in the fourth row, weren’t you?
I am gobsmacked12 by the news that John Cleese is coming to Chicago to be photographed with me for Vanity Fair. This is totally unexpected and utterly surprising. If I were a betting man I would have given you 100:8 against. In fact, I can hardly believe it, but that is what they tell me. John is coming from Miami to Chicago simply for this photo, to celebrate twenty-five years since The Life of Brian, and then he has to go on to California. I think Graydon Carter must have something on him.
I met John forty years ago (dear God) at a Pembroke Smoking Concert. It was my first ever public appearance, and I was performing a sketch he’d written; this very lanky man came up after the show and was most encouraging. He’s always been encouraging. I remember once, on his expedition up the Nile, we roasted him one night, and when it was my turn to speak he muttered softly under his breath, “Be funny.” He himself was stand-out funny at Cambridge. You couldn’t look at anyone else onstage. His control, his timing, his deadpan made him easily the funniest man of his generation. He went off to the West End in a Cambridge revue called Cambridge Circus; it eventually wound up on Broadway, because of which I got to take over some of his bits at the Edinburgh Festival, where I wound up meeting Terry Jones and Michael Palin. When John returned to England, after an improbable appearance in Half a Sixpence on Broadway (honest) I wound up writing bits for his radio show I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again and then graduated to TV, where I contributed material to The Frost Report. He became a star overnight in this live TV show, appearing weekly in hilarious sketches he wrote with Graham Chapman. Terry Jones and Michael Palin also wrote for this show, as did the wonderfully eccentric and as yet undiscovered Marty Feldman. I then graduated to tiny roles in John’s next show, which debuted Marty and Graham Chapman (with Tim Brooke-Taylor): the very silly and eccentric At Last the 1948 Show, which was the real father of Monty Python. The mother was Do Not Adjust Your Set, a highly successful award-winning kids’ show featuring me, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Neil Innes, the Bonzo Dog Band, and Terry Gilliam. When Marty Feldman went off to star in Marty for the BBC, John was offered his own TV series by the BBC, which for some reason he was reluctant to accept. Instead he approached Michael to hook up with him. Michael said he was with Terry Jones and me, oh, and Terry Gilliam, too. We had all been offered our own grown-up show: an ambitious forty-five-minute slot on ITV, the commercial network, the only drawback being we had to wait almost a year for a studio to be free. This was the deciding factor. We decided to slip in Monty Python first! So, almost accidentally the two halves of Python slid together—on the one hand John Cleese and Graham Chapman, and on the other the Do Not Adjust Your Set crowd. We would work together on and off from 1969 until 1983, slipping into movies and records and books and stage tours as well as the original TV series. John would also come along and guest-star in my movie Splitting Heirs and reunite with us all at the Aspen Comedy Festival in 1998. And now it’s forty years later and we are to have our photos taken for Vanity Fair. Forty years ago. And me still in my thirties. It’s a funny old life if you don’t weaken.
The Williamsport Community Arts Center is a magnificent Moorish movie palace, beautifully restored and painted buttery leather, with red-and-blue glass Moroccan brass light fixtures and twisted columns guarding two great murals: one a lurid sunset over the hills of Spain seen between the colonnades of the Alhambra, and the other a full and misty moonrise. On the ceiling and over the exotic alcoves heraldic shields are emblazoned with colorful coats of arms. Moorish designs on the tiles and moldings complete this exquisite 1928 example of the power of the talkies. Now it is a tribute to the restorers’ art, America proudly conserving her past.
Tonight a few heads dropped when we heard our crowd was down. It happens. Each promoter does what he can, in his own way, to sell the show. He has very limited dollars. This one only had three weeks’ notice and consequently we are far from full. I gather the gang together in my dressing room before the show and warn them not to let it affect them.
“These people have paid,” I say. “We are going to give them an even better show than they could possibly expect. We haven’t lost a show yet, and I don’t intend to start here.”
The cast responds with enthusiasm. Yes. Right. Let’s go. Let’s get ’em.
We needn’t have worried. Most of the crowd fill the wide stalls, it’s the upper tiers that are thinly peopled, and we can’t see up there anyway. The audience is as noisy as ever, responding enthusiastically, laughing loudly, and singing along lustily. We don’t lose a show at all. They stand and cheer and demand encores. I’m proud of the chaps. An extra rum ration all around.