Around
the States in Eighty Days
Being an irregular and erratic account by the
Greedy Bastard himself as he sets out to traverse America on
a comedy tour.
Day
Thirty Nine. St. Louis, Mo.
Friday,
November 7, 2003 - Touhill Performing Arts Center.
The
Westin Hotel has Heavenly beds. They are truly heavenly too.
Unfortunately it also has a poltergeist which raps smartly
above my heavenly bed at 2.30 in the morning waking me. When
I complained about this unfortunate noise yesterday to the
"Executive Bellman" the engineer tracked it to an
upstairs fan which he turned off. Now it's on again and banging
away happily this morning. Perhaps it is an Executive Poltergeist.
This is a very smart, new hotel, downtown in the ancient parking
district of St.Louis. There seems to be nothing here but a
baseball ground. The hotel has been rebuilt from old brick
warehouses and is all blond wood and Swedish furniture. Very
nice too. Its only problem is that to get to the Executive
suites you have to cross a bridge and they are chary about
posting directions to this glass and steel appendage, so that
I wander minotaur-like through a maze of Executive corridors
before giving up and starting over. The nice lady at the desk
guides me to my destination and gives me a local paper for
the movie times. I am startled to find myself on the cover
as Nigel Spasm. I note from the interview inside that I have
now progressed from Comedy Legend to Comedy God. I think the
cycle goes Cult - Legend - God - Has been. Anyway at the moment
I'm an Executive Comedy God.
Deification doesn't seem to have improved my looks. Or my
mood. I think I must have that sunlight deficiency syndrome,
since my spirits sink in the cold grey of the day. That's
really why I left the UK. I need the sun or I'm back in the
Ophny at Wolverhampton. This afternoon I fail to appear on
a heavily promoted live radio interview in Edmonton thanks
to an Executive PR error, which failed to notice we have changed
time zones. They seem a little pissed in Edmonton. To cheer
myself up I go out to the movies with Peter. John is there
too but absolutely refuses to join us in seeing Kill Bill.
He is quite right, and we don't last the distance. Quentin
seems to need some kind of intervention. Remember plot? Remember
character? Enough of the violence of pornography. You're a
sick puppy Quent and smart and clever enough to pull out of
it. Write a fucking story for God sake. It's like watching
Charlie's Angels set in a blood bank. Seeing the lovely Uma
Thurman reminds me inevitably of the six months we spent together
on Baron Munchausen in Rome and Spain in 1987/8. This
Terry Gilliam movie dragged on for six months and provided
many extraordinary memories, all of which are better in hindsight.
I love Terry but this was a multi lingual mishmash, dogged
by confusion and miscommunication at every stage, culminating
in a shoot in Spain where Spanish assistant directors and
extras tried to work with English actors and an Italian crew.
It was worse than the Crusades! How he finished it at all
is a mystery.
Terry cast Uma to play Venus, rising naked from a clam shell.
She was a very young, extremely beautiful seventeen year old
and everyone adored her. She was also smart as a whip and
very intelligent. She had divorced her parents legally at
the age of fifteen and gone off to live in New York where
she began modeling. Her father was a famous Buddhist lecturer
and my pal Timothy Leary was her Godfather. I took to her
at once. Little Sarah Poley was about eleven then and has
since turned into Uma. We were an odd bunch, Jack Purvis,
the little guy from Time Bandits, big Winston the overweight
bouncer from South London, the engaging and brilliant actor
John Neville, constantly wondering what he had done to deserve
this, Charles McKuen who wrote it, and me, freshly bald. When
he persuaded me to shave my head Gilliam swore he would shave
his too, but reneged on the deal…the bastard. It was
an odd experience to be suddenly in Italy and bald and I liked
the menacing power it gave me. People stepped off the pavement
to avoid me. In those days only lunatics and skin heads shaved
their heads. My wife when she saw me at the airport burst
into tears. She nearly jumped out of her skin when I came
into the bathroom.
We were very quickly in Executive hell, since the picture
had only a third of the budget it required and soon the producer
Thomas Schuly wasn't even talking to Gilliam and retired to
his suite where he entertained interviewers by showing them
his gun and his fully equipped boxing gym. He would pose with
his boxing gloves on for photographers while the film snowballed
into the red. Filming itself, with its daily grind of three
hours make up and at least nine hours waiting around, was
a form of daily torture, mitigated only by our presence in
Rome, which is a truly wonderful city to live in. Every morning
on the way to Cinecitta I would watch the sun rising over
the Coliseum. Now that's a commute.
Tania and I had found quarters in the Palazzo Ruspoli, a sixteenth
century palace at the junction of the Corso and the Condotti.
At the weekends we would take wads of per diem to spend on
Quinzi e Gabrielli's fresh seafood or visit new friends Franco
Amurri and Susan Sarandon at the seaside. Old friends came
by too, and we were able to get away for a couple of weekends
in my turbo Citroen, with Marsha and Robin Williams on what
we called The Big Jobbie Tour (named after a memorable monologue
of Billy Connolly's about a "floater," the turd
that never sinks.) We drove hilariously down the Appian Way
to Naples and Sorrento, visiting Pompeii en route. You can
only imagine what it's like to visit Pompeii with Robin pretending
to be an Italian Tour Guide! "Theesa poor people a not
able to leeva the toilet, frozen heer, taking a poop for eternity…"
We took a boat across to the island of Capri, where I relived
the chairlift experience that had moved me at 14 to write
a purple passage of prose about what I did in my school holidays.
It was as glorious as ever to float silently, feet dangling
over the grapes and back yards of the houses, gazing across
the magnificent Bay of Naples to the smoking mountain of Vesuvius.
We saw the phosphorescent waters of the celebrated Blue Grotto
where Tiberius held his orgies. We went for a carriage ride
pulled by a scrawny mule and we laughed and laughed and laughed.
Later, after Robin was suckered into joining the movie to
replace the suddenly unavailable and very canny Sean Connery,
we drove up to Florence where Robin and I shopped like gay
men, swishing through the stores screeching about how fabulous
we looked in these shoes. "They're keepers duckie."
We visited Gore Vidal and Howard in their Roman apartment
where we sloshed martinis and went off for a very drunken
dinner. Olivia Harrison came out with George to celebrate
his 45th Birthday, and we made a big cake saying Revived
Forty-five, a reference to his Thirty-three and a Third.
(Long gone is the world of 78's, 45's and 33 and 1/3rd's.)
There was intense speculation about who would succeed in dating
Uma, and she sailed serenely through it all, effortlessly
resisting the drunken lurches of the rather wonderful Oliver
Reed. There was a famous old Italian actress called Valentina
Cortese, who constantly made Uma's life hell. Valentina's
idea of acting, no matter what the scene or how it had been
rehearsed, was on the word action to bump Uma out of the way
and then head straight for center screen. It was like a football
play. No matter who was between her and her goal she would
always end up in the middle waving her arms around dramatically.
For the rest of us it was amusing. For Uma it was a nightmare.
Robin got revenge for all of us. Fully aware of her tricks,
he would step firmly on the hem of her robe to prevent her
moving then squash fruit into her mouth to prevent her protesting.
He earned all our applause.
So here we are then in St.Louis with its big MacDonald's arch.
Tonight is our 25th show! After that we pile into the buses
and head North for Buffalo. Foul weather is on its way. Oh
to be young and in Roma again!
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