"America -- land of the free and the armed and the crazy"

by Ken

When I came across this December 1980 entry in Michael Palin's newly published Diaries 1980-1988: Halfway to Hollywood and realized I had to share it, for a moment I was disappointed that we'd missed the anniversary by just a week-and-a-bit. Then I was relieved; it's not an occasion I would want to feel as if we were "celebrating."

As the entry begins, Michael is on the railway platform near his home in northwest London, waiting for a train that will eventually take him to Southwold on the Suffolk coast, where his mother lives. He runs into a schoolmate of his 11-year-old son Tom, who delivers news that alters his world.

Tuesday, December 9th, Southwold

At Gospel Oak station by a quarter to nine to combine a visit to Southwold with my first opportunity to thoroughly revise the Time Bandits for publication at Easter. [Michael had co-written the Time Bandits screenplay with the director, fellow Python Terry Gilliam, and also appeared in the film, which had been shot but was then still in postproduction.]

It's a dull and nondescript morning -- the shabby, greying clouds have warmed the place up a bit, but that's all. I reach the station in good time. Holly Jones is waiting for her train to school, having just missed the one in front with all her friends on. It's she who tells me that over in New York John Lennon has been shot dead.

A plunge into unreality, or at least into the area of where comprehension slips and the world seems an orderless swirl of disconnected, arbitrary events. How does such a thing happen? How do I, on this grubby station platform in north-west London, begin to comprehend the killing of one of the Beatles? The Rolling Stones were always on the knife-edge of life and death and sudden tragedy was part of their lives, but the Beatles seemed the mortal immortals, the legend that would live and grow old with us. But now, this ordinary December morning, I learn from a schoolgirl that one of my heroes has been shot dead.

My feelings are of indefinable but deeply-felt anger at America. This is, after all, the sort of random slaying of a charismatic, much-loved figure in which America has specialised in the last two decades.

Once I get to Southwold I ring George.* And leave a message, because he's not answering.

I work through for a five-hour stretch and we have a drink together by the fire and watch tributes to John Lennon, clumsily put together by newsroom staff who know a good story better than they know good music. And Paul McCartney just says 'It's a drag' and, creditably I think, refuses to emote for the cameras.

What a black day for music. The killer was apparently a fan. The dark side of Beatlemania. The curse that stalks all modern heroes, but is almost unchecked in America -- land of the free and the armed and the crazy.

*George Harrison was a passionate Monty Python fan, and from the group's inception had been eager to find ways to work with them. Unlike your average show-biz phony, he followed through, devoting both time and money to Python-related projects, eventually serving as an executive producer on a number of movies by Pythons jointly and separately. Michael P developed a cordial relationship with him, and paints an affectionate portrait in the first volume of his diaries, Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years.




FAN-WORSHIP POSTSCRIPT

By odd chance, a week-and-change later Michael -- in agony with a foot problem that seems to become more painful after each treatment -- hobbles with his wife (who "has looked in her books and is bandying words like 'toxaemia' around") to an opening-night showing of Woody Allen's Stardust Memories, which is steeped in its creator's discomfort with his too-admiring fans.

The cinema is full and I like the film very much indeed. But I can see that my appreciation of some of the scenes depicting horrific excesses of fan worship comes from having experienced this sort of thing and viewed from the other side, this could be seen as Allen kicking his fans in the teeth.

Though my foot still throbs angrily, I feel the worst is over. I have been cured by a Woody Allen movie!

#