Gilliamesque Read online

  Happily, working for Help! kept me too busy to rack up many hours of solitary reflection. Given that Harvey mostly operated from his home out in Mount Vernon, my job was mainly to oversee the day-to-day running of the magazine’s office with the head of production, Harry Chester. Essentially, I was Kurtzman’s representative on earth, and it was my job to deal with pretty much anything that came up. I also spent a lot of time in the city library, because we were always looking for engravings and paintings that we could put silly captions on. All the stuff Private Eye still does now – that started in Help!

  On the rare occasions when I actually had enough money to buy a drink, New York City’s strict laws ensured that I was usually asked for ID to prove I was over twenty-one. Such was my desperation to get served that I even resorted to a goatee. Alcohol hadn’t been a big thing for me when I was in college. I never liked the taste of beer and was good at resisting peer pressure by telling people who tried to bully me into getting drunk – ‘C’mon Terry, bolt it down’ – to go fuck themselves. But my sophisticated new metropolitan lifestyle required the occasional alcoholic beverage, and I was damned if I was going to be ‘carded’ every time I ordered one.

  I’d arrived in New York in the autumn without anything other than California clothes, and then winter hit. My blood had thinned down considerably since my Minnesotan childhood, and my excitement at how like Humphrey Bogart I was going to look in my first trench-coat quickly turned to chattering teeth as the icy wind whipped through the thin cotton. At one point I even got hold of a sun-lamp in a doomed bid to restore some California colour, and somehow managed to burn my closed eyelids. The logic of the situation was clear: the next time I used it, I kept my eyes open. Oh the pain! I woke up in the middle of the night totally blind, unable to prise open my eyelids. It was like someone had poured a beach into my eyes.

  It’s always been my default setting to think that the way I see the world is just normal, and all the other people are cooler, smarter and hipper than me. In New York in 1962–3, this was incontrovertibly true, and not just of Bob Dylan – who had Suze Rotolo to keep him warm as the two of them walked down a snowy Jones Street in Greenwich Village on the cover of his second album. Not only was I impressed by everyone, but I also knew I looked – and sounded – way too young to be in the responsible position of Assistant Editor, so I’d put on a deeper voice when I spoke to people on the phone, and then say, ‘I’ll send someone round’, before going to pick up the delivery myself . . . ‘You got a package for Mr Gilliam at Help! magazine?’

  On 28 August 1963, Help! sent me down (in full Zelig mode) to take photos of the cartoonist Paul Coker at the march on Washington, where Martin Luther King made his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. As far as the famous oration itself was concerned being there was a bit like that speech scene in LIFE OF BRIAN – ‘Speak up!’ – but there was a great atmosphere down on the mall. Look how cool everyone is in their suits and hats (luckily I’m behind the camera, so you can’t see how badly I’m letting the side down in fashion terms). It certainly was a very black sea that we wandered through on that day, but no one was anything other than positive towards us – Martin Luther King didn’t tend to bring out the anger in people. It was the same the night my friend Baltimore Scott took me up to the Harlem Apollo to see a stellar bill featuring Richard Pryor, Billy Eckstine and The Supremes – I was pretty much the only white face in that crowd (just as Scotty’s had been one of the few black faces at Occidental), in fact I was the lightest thing around to the extent that moths were fluttering around my face. It was certainly an amazing night out. There were parties there of three or four different generations – from grandmothers to small children – even though Richard Pryor wasn’t what you’d call a family entertainer, even then.

  This was one of my first nationally published cartoons (from an idea by Joel siegel). was a famously volatile heavyweight boxer – the Mike Tyson of his day, who became world champion in 1962 after knocking out a bewildered Floyd Patterson in just over two minutes.

  Every day was a new adventure. From the civil rights struggle to the beginnings of the feminist movement, it felt like the John Birch Society version of America was no longer having things all its own way. The old system was being ripped apart with the shape of its replacement very much up for grabs, and the offices of Help! were as good a place as any to feel the wind of change in your hair, as Harvey’s elite cadre of Mad veterans were now being joined by a new generation of young cartoonists such as Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton – creator of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and Fat Freddy’s Cat – many of whom had cut their teeth in Fang-style college humour magazines such as the University of Texas at Austin’s The Texas Ranger.

  Even at this early moment in his thespian odyssey – and channelling Groucho Marx as he undoubtedly was – woody Allen’s naturalistic acting style leapt off the page.

  University had become a place where you escaped the army to play around for four years, and Harvey Kurtzman gave a lot of these well-educated pot smokers who would later light the touch paper for the underground comics explosion (including me, although I was never much of a pot head) their first national outlet. He was such a conservative guy in real life – he didn’t really drink or take drugs – that his status as Godfather of the Underground probably came as something of a shock to him, but in political terms, given his stalwart opposition to McCarthy (I remember him launching a devastatingly sharp and angry attack on the witch hunts in Mad) and his very humane response to the horrors of the Korean War (the gruesome pre-Vietnam warm-up that nobody talks about these days), it actually made perfect sense.

  Harvey lived quite a cloistered existence for such a smart guy. So when I’d be off out on the prowl around the clubs of Greenwich Village, in search of suitably switched-on-looking people willing to take bit parts in fumetti for the measly $15 a day we were offering, I’d sometimes come back with a big name who was new to him. Judy Henske was one such – Judy was this incredible tall, funny folk singer who was playing a lot on Bleecker Street at the time, and eventually became a good friend of mine. When I asked if she fancied doing a day’s photo-story acting for Help!, she agreed, on the condition that she could bring someone along with her.

  That someone turned out to be Woody Allen, who while not yet making films of his own was already a well-known stand-up comedian on the New York club circuit. His fumetto – ‘The Unmentionables’ – was scripted by my Help! mentor Chuck Alverson, who would later co-write Jabberwocky and a first draft of Brazil with me. Fumetti were the perfect training ground for would-be film-makers (Henry Jaglom was another of our extras who went on to do great things on celluloid). You were framing shots and bringing storyboards to life, even if these were motion pictures without any motion – and the meticulous attention to detail of Harvey’s film parodies would be very influential on my own later efforts in the cinematic sphere.

  Where Fang’s fumetti where entirely no-budget affairs, Help! had the cash to take us to the Adirondacks or Fire Island (before it went gay) for lavish location shoots like these. And if an actress needed carrying or help finding her way into the scene (which they often did), what choice did a conscientious Assistant Editor have than to oblige?

  My income may have increased slightly, but the basic principle of my household accounting system – save every last cent for the important things that you want to buy (note stolen stationery) – had remained, unchanged since childhood. There was progress in other areas, though. Not every man can boast a payment of $40 for services rendered from the glamorous feminist pioneer Gloria Steinem. Gloria had been Alverson’s predecessor in what became my job as Harvey’s assistant and was still writing funny picture captions for Help! at the same time as becoming the global face of feminism. This was an aspect of her career she tended to keep quite quiet about later on, so when she came forward to speak warmly of Harvey at the time of his death, I thought, ‘Good for you.’

  Gloria was certainly an impressive character – smar
t, funny, good-looking. Men loved her but women didn’t seem to be threatened by her, which is quite an unusual combination. It was a measure of how good she was at getting people to do things that I once helped her complete the production of a lavish coffee-table-type book about being cool on the beach, for which she had somehow elicited a foreword from the celebrated liberal economist (and well-known hater of beaches) J K Galbraith. She was also involved with an organisation whose brief was to bring people over from behind the Iron Curtain and show them life in the West which subsequently – although she did not know this at the time – turned out to be run by the CIA.

  My own film-making ambitions had begun to coalesce by this time. I was somehow managing to set aside almost half of my meagre weekly wage to save up for my first Bolex camera, and spent months denying myself even the luxury of a five-cent packet of chewing gum in the interests of realising my vague dreams of auteurhood.

  One of the themes of my New York years was the wonder of discovering foreign films – whether they be Ealing comedies, Kurosawa or Buñuel – and realising that not everyone in front of the camera had to look like Rock Hudson or Doris Day (or Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, come to that). Or even be filmed in colour. I’d devour Chaplin retrospectives, and come out of Eisenstein films in a reverie thinking, ‘Wow, angles.’

  Obviously my secret life as a commie manqué – as opposed to a commie monkey, which is probably what Senator McCarthy would have called me made old Sergei particularly appealing to me. In fact, Eisenstein’s The Film Sense is probably the only technical book on film I have ever read. He combined storyboards with camera moves, which I found very instructive, although a certain reluctance to take direction could already be discerned on my part, even in the company of such an illustrious teacher. I remember taking strong exception to his theory that if a scene is visually rising from left to right, then the music has to go that way too.

  The Outsider’s Newsletter was another satirical magazine I contributed to-an offshoot of the better-known Monocle, put together by the same people, victor Navasky and Richard Lingeman. It had a harder, newsier edge than Help!, more along the lines of Paul Krassner’s underground press staple The Realist, and this cover was in honour of the controversial visit to New York by South Vietnam’s then de facto first lady Madame Nhu, in the autumn of 1963. Her hatred of Buddhists was one of the causes of all those monks setting themselves on fire – hence the petrol can and cigarette lighter.

  I did briefly try going to film school – it was an evening course at New York’s City College, and I went once a week for a month – but that was the one place where I felt like the more laid-back attitude to life inculcated by my West Coast adolescence really counted against me. I just found that, coming from California, my general attitude towards life was quite different from the New York kids, who were very aggressive and always grabbed the equipment. After a few of those kinds of run-ins, I just thought, ‘Bugger that, I’m not going to hang around here.’

  Then I worked as a volunteer for a while in a studio that did stop-motion photography (dancing cigarette packs, that kind of thing). It was through an actor friend, Jim Hampton, who’d been in some fumetti and played the role of the trumpeter in the TV show F-Troop. Ted Nemeth, whose studio it was, said, ‘Well, we don’t really have a job here, so we can’t pay you,’ but I told him I didn’t care. I just wanted to be around all this stuff – handling the equipment, moving cameras, even sweeping up if that was what they wanted me to do.

  It was really important to me to understand film-making’s physical manifestation, and when Mary Ellen Bute, Nemeth’s wife, began work on an adaptation of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, I also got a valuable early lesson in doomed adaptations of unfilmable literary classics – a field in which I would later come to be considered something of a specialist.

  Green as I was, I still knew I had a contribution to make. One day they were trying – and failing – to get a shot with a kind of crown effect, using upturned chairs on a round table. Understanding the spatial relationship between different bodies is something I’ve always been good at, and this was just a matter of simple physics – if you want that thing to look like it’s turning, you’ve got to either go around it yourself, or find a way to make it actually turn. The more clearly I explained that the alternative strategy they were adopting was never going to work, the more they struggled to get the message, until finally they had a ‘Who the fuck are you to be telling us what to do?’ moment.

  Dave Crossley took time out from his busy sexual schedule to write Help!’s Madison Avenue-style brochure for the Ku Klux Klan for me to illustrate. Thanks, Dave.

  ‘Who the fuck am I?’, I dutifully asked myself. ‘I’m the person who knows how to do this when you don’t!’ was the devastating comeback (at least, in the safety of my internal dialogue). At that point, my informal paying-my-dues cinematic apprenticeship effectively came to an end. From then on, I knew all I needed to do as far as film studies were concerned was go to the movies – that’s always been enough for me – get myself a camera, write some little stories and get together with some friends to try to shoot them.

  Happily, as I gradually found my New York feet, I’d begun to get another gang together. Well, two-thirds of it was the old gang (i.e. me and my old Fang-buddy Art Mortimer, who had eventually followed me in making the big move to the East Coast), with Dave Crossley, one of the Texas Ranger crowd – a talented writer who was inexplicably irresistible to women – joining us as the third man.

  Help! baldly imagined The Beatles in middle age. Sadly, destiny had different plans for the group’s long-term future.

  I moved out of my old eight-by-eight room, said a fond farewell to my pet cockroach and ready supply of Columbia University Library notepaper, and joined Art and Dave in an Upper East Side flatshare, which – somewhat miraculously given how cheap it was – offered us the eye-catching calling card of a Madison Avenue address (at 71st Street to be precise). Never mind that it was basically a two-room apartment with three very small beds in the bedroom, one of which Dave was perpetually banging away in.

  Art, Dave and I held a lot of good parties in that flat, and were planning to have another one on what turned out to be the night of President Kennedy’s assassination. Although not so widely remembered for this reason, 22 November 1963 was also the occasion of my twenty-third birthday. You know those mornings where you wake up late thinking, ‘Great, it’s my birthday’, then you turn on the TV and think, ‘Whoops’?

  Everyone still came over and got drunk anyway, but it was more like a wake. Whatever the rights and wrongs of some of the things JFK was doing, there was a horrible sense – just as there would be five years later with the deaths of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy – of, ‘They’ve killed our guy.’ It was hard to believe that there’d been this charismatic young leader with all this energy who seemed to be changing things, and then all of a sudden, he was gone.

  In a strange way, I think that only energised people to push even harder. Also, The Beatles stepped into the breach to cheer America up. ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ came out just a month after the Kennedy assassination, when much of the country was still effectively in shock, and the Fab Four’s first trip to the US was just a few weeks later in early 1964. I’m sure part of the amazing excitement they generated was down to that – it was as if they’d picked up the mantle of youthful change out of Dallas’s blood-stained dust.

  By the time John, Paul, George and Ringo hit New York for the first time, I’d finally saved enough to buy that first Bolex camera. Art Mortimer had spent his money on a motorcycle, so I rode pillion up to Park Avenue where The Beatles were staying to film the crowd breaking through the barrier. The British invasion was on, and from that point forwards, we sort of became awash with England for a while.

  Richard Lester’s 1960 Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers short The Running, Jumping & Standing Still Film had been one of the formative influences on the way The Beatles conducted themselves (b
oth in public and on film), and was the reason they hired Lester to direct A Hard Day’s Night and Help! Along with the Goon Show recordings that were belatedly becoming available in America on state-of-the art long-playing records, this ground-breaking 11-minute film (made by an American cineaste in Britain, lest we forget) also helped set the tone for our Madison Avenue household’s first forays into film-making.

  This is a contact sheet of the three of us fooling around out the back of the basement flat on West 83rd Street. I’m not sure if we were trying to put together a storyboard for a 3-minute short that never happened, or perhaps this is a homespun fumetto that never quite got finished. Either way, you can see the kind of shit-hole this place was, and the pith helmet testifies eloquently to our encroaching Anglophilia.

  I’d never seen anything that felt so free. Famously budgeted at just £70 (including a fiver for the rent of a field) Lester’s frenetic and fun-packed jeu d’esprit was a far cry from the more studied and sombre work coming out of New York’s experimental scene of the early sixties. I must admit I never really liked Andy Warhol’s stuff – I thought it was pretentious bullshit – but I didn’t mind a bit of Stan Brakhage. And I was shocked on seeing some of Stan Vanderbeek’s work again a few years ago – especially 1964’s Breath Death, which I saw soon after its original release at the Thalia (the ultimate art-house cinema, which made a cameo in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, when Diane Keaton takes her new boyfriend to see The Sorrow and the Pity there) – by how many of the ideas for my later cut-out animations I borrowed (to put it politely) from him – the tops of heads come off, feet go in mouths, it’s the same shit, I just (oh, alright then . . . ) stole it – but not consciously, your honour.