I HAVE SLEPT UNDER THE STARS. I WAKE UP ALONGSIDE A BLACK WALL PAINTED WITH THE NAMES OF ROCK STARS. WE’RE IN MINNEAPOLIS, THAT’S GREEK FOR “SMALL APPLES.” [PLEASE DON’T LISTEN TO HIM.—ED.] WE’RE ON A MAIN STREET opposite the Target Center, and I am looking at the names of those who have played here: Cyndi Lauper, Billy Idol, Eurythmics (my pal Dave Stewart), and the Reverend Horton Heat (recently deceased). It reminds me I once had a fictional group called the Self-Righteous Brothers. I also liked a Rutles gag about Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young, Gifted, and Black. For a Python record I created a silly fictional group called Toad the Wet Sprocket, and one day I was driving along the freeway in California and heard the deejay say, “That was Toad the Wet Sprocket,” and I was so shocked I nearly drove off the road. They eventually sent me a platinum album by way of a thank-you.
I have been reading Otto Friedrich’s excellent book Before the Deluge, a history of Berlin before the Nazis. The book reminds me of my own visit to Berlin at the height of the cold war in 1963. It was summer and I was hitchhiking through Germany with a friend. We were sleeping out in fields and at building sites, and decided after visiting Nuremberg to head on up to Berlin by bus, where my pal Alan Sinfield had friends, and we could sleep in beds for a change. Nuremberg is the beautiful medieval city of Albrecht Dürer, now largely reconstructed after Allied bombing flattened it. It houses the infamous rally site where the Führer experienced his fatal ecstasies. This is a huge area, as big as six football fields, and we stood on the Leni Riefenstahl spot and spouted German nonsense and goose-stepped about in the traditional British way.
Rex Stardust, lead electric triangle with Toad the Wet Sprocket, has had to have an elbow removed following their recent successful worldwide tour of Finland. Flamboyant ambidextrous Rex apparently fell off the back of a motorcycle.
“Fell off the back of a motorcyclist, most likely,” quipped ace drummer Jumbo McCluney upon hearing of the accident. Plans are already afoot for a major tour of Iceland.
Berlin in those days was an island surrounded by the Russian satellite Communist country of East Germany. To get to it by road you had to pass through various East German checkpoints and two suspicious-looking English boys were swiftly pulled off the bus by the far-from-gentle border Polizei and our rucksacks thoroughly searched. On the return journey, we got the same treatment, only this time all the pictures of the Wall (die Mauer) were confiscated. Wouldn’t want that news to leak out….
We hadn’t seen a newspaper in weeks and didn’t know it but there was a strong reason for the heightened tension. Our timing was impeccable. JohnF. Kennedy was about to visit Berlin. We entered a city feverish with excitement. We were staying in a nice, clean, German apartment with friendly people, in a typical wooded suburb, except suddenly and terrifyingly at the end of the street was the huge, electrified, barbed-wire Wall, with guard towers and a cleared killing field beyond. Shocking. I had no idea Berlin was such a wide open city, with parks and hills and lakes with sailboats. East Berlin, through Checkpoint Charlie, was by contrast bleak and depressing, with huge gray workers’ blocks. We passed the flattened site of Hitler’s bunker and listened to the compulsory “guide” spouting about the triumph of communism, but one glance at the architecture was enough. We were happy to get back through the Wall, images of John Le Carré in our heads.
West Berlin was en fête. Streamers and banners everywhere welcomed J.F.K. and the U.S.A. who had kept the city alive during the Berlin airlift. We were taken to see the parade. The streets were lined with thousands of people watching the cavalcade go by: it consisted of sixteen limos of Secret Service followed by seventeen limos of international press. But finally they appeared: Willy Brandt (the legendary mayor of Berlin) standing up in the back of an open vehicle and JFK himself next to him. The Germans went nuts. He passed right in front of us. I remember the shock of his hair and how surprised I was by his ruddy appearance. A florid-faced JFK flashed that radiant grin and waved at us and was gone in a scurry of Secret Service vehicles, leaving nothing behind but the memory of that big, broad smile. Like the Cheshire cat. We returned to the apartment to watch his famous speech on television, where he proclaimed, “Ich bin ein Berliner.” Which, as Eddie Izzard points out, means “I am a doughnut.”22
Tania and I were once walking down a deserted street in Chicago when a back door to the Roosevelt Hotel opened and President Reagan emerged with a couple of Secret Service agents. He looked startled to see only us, waved, and then was whisked away in a black car. There was no one else around. We pinched ourselves. Did that just happen?
Robin Williams was due to host a Clinton fund-raiser in L.A., but his movie director, Ivan Reitman, wouldn’t let him go. The president wanted him at his table, but his director would not release him! So Robin and Marsha asked Tania and me if we’d like to use their tickets. We weren’t doing anything that evening so we thought, well, why not? Having faced the traffic snarl and passed through the security we entered the Harold Lloyd mansion, and when I say mansion I mean hotel. In England some towns are smaller than this.
We wandered around the cocktail party picking up a few friendly faces, who all asked us what the hell we were doing there, and finally we were called into another garden where a huge stage was erected before an outside auditorium. The audience was laid out in rows on the grass on those little golden event chairs that appear at weddings. We were walked toward the front. Great seats, we thought, no problem about hearing the Eagles from here. We kept being led farther and farther forward, until there we were on the second row being led into the center. Suddenly my wife gave a little gasp and clutched me. She was staring wide-eyed at the seats directly in front of ours. Two labels read THE PRESIDENT and MRS. CLINTON! People who had shelled out thousands of dollars stared at us in envy at our extraordinary position, wondering why the hell we were there, but we could only smile nicely and bask in the knowledge that sometimes life (like God) moves in a mysterious way.
Next to us were two dinky little gold seats marked SECRET SERVICE in huge letters.
“Not much of a secret,” I said to Harvey Weinstein, who was looking at me with new respect, wondering what he’d missed. But we were interrupted by “Hail to the Chief,” and everyone rose and applauded as the First Couple came in and sat down right in front of us! My wife and I felt like Cinderella for a night. We had to pinch ourselves we were really there, decked out in fancy clothes, sitting for two hours within arm’s reach of Hillary and William Jefferson Clinton. I could have reached out and touched both of them. But I didn’t; the muscles of the men next to me were powerfully intimidating. It was an extraordinary thing for a nonvoting, tax-paying, part-time ex-transvestite English comic to be sitting behind the most powerful man in the world, watching him hug Hillary while the Eagles played, seeing him laugh at Tom Hanks, and watching him wipe away a tear as Barbra Streisand sang with thirty young kids.
Sometimes, as Barry Cryer observed, life is very well written.