AFTER BREAKFAST I GO FOR A RIDE ROUND ST. LOUIS, UNDERNEATH THE IMPROBABLE GLEAMING ARCH, WHICH LOOKS A LITTLE LIKE SOMETHING SADDAM MIGHT HAVE BUILT IN BAGHDAD. THE TAXI DRIVER TELLS ME JOKES IN AN impenetrable accent. I can’t even tell when they are over such is his accent. He is half Hungarian, half Italian, about sixty, and boasts he has a twenty-three-year-old girlfriend. He doesn’t pause for breath. He keeps twisting around to see me and hammer home his humor. Not reassuring when he’s driving.
“I hate Hungarians,” he says, “we are so bloody depressing. And I work too hard. One week I work eight days!”
He finally dropped me at Union Station. It’s an odd mall, new and quite pleasant, but the shops are weird. There are endless funny shirt shops and fast-food places. A new Hyatt hotel uses the old station hall as a lobby. This comes as a total surprise. It’s like walking into Bavaria. From a typical American mall I’m suddenly in a vast, barrel-shaped room with an arched ceiling in art nouveau green and gold, stained glass, and statuesque goddesses holding torches aloft. It’s magnificent and glorious and reminds me of the stately dining halls of European stations. I expect large ladies in Bavarian hats with arms like hams holding huge steins of beer to step in at any moment. And where’s the little German band? It reminds me of the time I was in Munich with Terry Jones scouting for the second Monty Python German show sometime in the early seventies. It was Mardi Gras, and we were taken to the Knockebacker Bier Festival. It was freezing weather in February, and we were invited to visit a vast vaulted Bier Keller so large there was a German band at either end of the hall. To celebrate Carnival they brew a special, thick black beer that is so potent even the Bavarians stop serving it at ten thirty: otherwise they begin killing one another. People are very rowdy, drinking away at long refectory tables, and in one corner there are real Nazis. I kid you not. They are saluting and singing marching songs. As two English boys it feels like we just escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp and are trying to work our way home. Low-profile is clearly the order of the day. The main band has a feature where if you pay enough marks they will let you conduct. It’s late in the evening, the beer has done its work, and I look around for Terry. I am startled and not a little disturbed to see him walk out onto the stage. He has paid his ten marks and is intent on conducting the German band, whose conductor, I notice, has no hand, but a kind of metal claw in which he clasps the baton. Terry has a quiet little dangerous smile on his face and conducts nicely for a while, bowing politely to the crowd and nodding. Then he begins to strip. Oh no! He starts doing a striptease, wiggling his bottom and slipping off his jacket provocatively. The audience begins to notice what is going on and turns its attention to this strange man performing a striptease onstage. The band, unsure what to do, plays on. Terry bumps and grinds like a pro, popping the buttons of his shirt like a stripper, then removes his shirt and twirls it around his head, flinging it into the wings. Next he turns to his trousers. He starts lowering his zipper to shouts of encouragement. He pops open his belt, flirting with the crowd. He is just about to drop his pants when the clawed conductor decides enough is enough, races onto the stage, rugby tackles him, and drags him off into the wings to cheers and vast applause. It was the funniest and the bravest and the maddest thing I have ever seen anyone do. I felt quite relieved to get out of there alive.
It rivals Graham’s mad moment, when he was sent to pick up a Sun TV award for Monty Python. It was presented to him by the Home Secretary Reginald Maudling, a high official in the government of Britain. Graham took the award, popped it into his mouth, went down on all fours, and exited the stage through the audience barking like a dog. You don’t see that at the Oscars.
Further down the mall in St. Louis there is a Beatle souvenir shop, though sadly they have no Rutles stuff. I made some Rutle merchandise for Can’t Buy Me Lunch, but I gave it all to George, who adored all Rutle memorabilia. I think the most successful present I ever gave him was a Rutle guitar, which Danny Ferrington made for me. It was shaped like a limo and featured the Rutles looking out of the windows. George was thrilled with it. As well as customizing several ukuleles for George (one in fake leopard skin), Danny also made George’s final guitar to his precise instructions. He wanted an Australian guitar. It was a beauty, a work of art, custom built with the sound hole a perfect map of Australia, the bridge was the Sydney Harbor Bridge, and the headstock the Sydney Opera House. On the back and front and sides there were aboriginal designs in mother-of-pearl, with further illustrations of rare birds and animals on the neck. I had it (for safekeeping) for about a year after George died and am still kicking myself for giving it back.
George once gave me the most spectacular present. It was Christmas 1975 and my marriage was breaking up, and I was very sad, and it was snowing, and my little two-year-old son and I were alone on Christmas Eve. There was a ring at the door, and we stood on the stoop, bewildered, as two men unloaded a heavy, bulky object from the back of a large truck and carried it inside. Carey and I looked at each other, puzzled. What on earth was it? It was wrapped in corrugated brown paper and tied up with string, so we set about ripping the covering off. To our amazement and utter delight it was a jukebox filled with rock-and-roll classics! There was a note on it that said “Every home should have one, Happy Christmas, love George and Liv.” Well, we plugged that thing in, and it glowed and throbbed and pulsated with sound, and we danced madly to it all that Christmas. What a great gift.