BOOK OF THE DAY: STEPHEN DIXONreviews Halfway to Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988By Michael Palin Weidenfeld Nicolson 621pp, £20
THE EARLY 1980s found Michael Palin pondering on the meaning of Monty Python life. “To the Hollywood Bowl,” he wrote. “Much standing around and a photo session distinguished by a marked lack of enthusiasm among the Pythons. How old will we have to be to finally stop putting our heads through chairs, eating each other’s legs and rolling our eyes? Saw an obviously-posed picture of the Three Stooges going through the same ordeal the other day – and they looked about 70.”
What Palin did, as these charming and vastly-entertaining diary entries record, was branch out with growing confidence as a writer and comedy film actor, often in projects with no Python associations. But, of course, the best ones did: Time Bandits, Braziland A Fish Called Wanda.
The team continued to work together from time to time on stage and in one last film, Monty Python’s the Meaning of Life, and there was still a closeness, friendship and fierce, impenetrable loyalty: “No patterns can be imposed on the group from outside. Or at least they can, but they never stick; they crack up, and the internal resolutions of Python are the only ones that last.”
Each member is deftly sketched: manic Terry Gilliam, lofty and irascible John Cleese, laid-back Eric Idle, confused Graham Chapman and, especially, Terry Jones, Palin’s oldest and most beloved friend and co-writer, the man he turned to for solace when his sister Angela took her own life in 1987 after years of mental illness.
There are comical little portraits, too, of those he met or worked with along the way. A growling, drink-sodden Trevor Howard. A milder but still drunk Jack Lemmon. A waspish Peter Cook. Ben Kingsley, pompous and odd. An affable but sometimes acutely critical George Harrison, ex-Beatle and boss of Handmade Films. Kevin Kline, a co-star in Wanda, told him about being on the set of Cry Freedom with Richard Attenborough in Africa: “Kevin K, quite unmaliciously, recounts tales of Sir Dickie calling African extras ‘Darling’ to their obvious bewilderment.”
Lack of malice characterises Palin, too. He’s quite obviously an agreeable and sincere fellow, who wears his fame lightly and chats away to movie technicians and drivers just as easily as he does to Robert De Niro or Mel Brooks. Above all, he is a highly-disciplined professional, though grounded in family life and happiest in the company of his wife and children.
If you didn’t know his work – and surely most do – you’d hardly guess from these diffident jottings that he possessed one of the keenest comic minds of his generation.
The story that made me smile most – and I smiled a lot reading these diaries – concerns Alan Bennett, who wrote the film A Private Function, one of Palin's first solo vehicles. There had been difficulty finding a men's urinal in Yorkshire large enough for a key scene in which the Palin character is confronted by a mafia of local businessmen.
“Then one morning at Betty’s Tea Rooms in Ilkley, Alan B appeared, full of excitement. ‘We’ve found a toilet,’ he enthused, ‘near Paddington Station, and it’ll take ten!’ Only as heads turned and the noise level dropped did we realise what this must have sounded like to the middle-aged, respectable and largely female clientele at Betty’s.”
Stephen Dixon is an artist and journalist