Gilliamesque Page 8

  But all that would come later. When Art Mortimer, Dave Crossley and I got together to fool about and make little silent movies – putting on top hats to make a speeded-up Victorian melodrama, with a sympathetic girl of our acquaintance agreeing to lie down in sled tracks in the snow and be ‘tied to them’, like a damsel in distress – it was Dick Lester who was the presiding spirit.

  It was amazing how fast Bob could draw – he was so brilliantly focused on what he was doing that, as we walked around Harlem, work of this quality just seemed to be appearing out of nowhere on his sketch pad.

  I also remember us trying to do some stop-motion animation of surreal little stories by drawing on spacing leader we got out of film company trash bins.

  Sadly, none of these formative works seem to have survived, but it was fun doing them at the time. We’d get up on a Saturday morning and, depending on what the weather was like, we’d write something accordingly, and go out and shoot it on a 3-minute roll of film (all we could afford).

  Guerrilla film-making experiments aside, Help! was still occupying the bulk of my waking hours. Even though the magazine began to falter financially as the early sixties turned to mid-, Harvey retained his happy knack for attracting the brightest new cartooning talent from all across America. One such fresh-faced out-of-towner was Robert Crumb, who in order to make the bold move to New York left behind the security provided by the Indianapolis greetings card industry. In years to come, Crumb would be rightly celebrated for the intensity of his engagement with various aspects of Black American culture, but when Harvey sent him uptown to draw in Harlem for the first time, he was still on distinctly unfamiliar territory. Luckily for him, he had Help!’s famously streetwise Assistant Editor to show him the ropes.

  It was obvious from very early on that Bob was going to be a star. As well as the notebook that he always carried with him, there usually seemed to be a crowd of acolytes in tow. The funny thing was, he seemed to think I was the cool one. OK, I might have been slightly more sharply dressed, but he was the one getting the girls.

  In mid-sixties Harlem, the spectacle of two white men sketching and and taking pictures (never mind eating an apple) was always going to be greeted with a measure of suspicion, so obviously Bob and I felt slightly nervous that’s probably why my focus isn’t too great on these shots – but we were having fun and probably radiated a certain goofy innocence. Either that or everyone was convinced we were narcs and decided to leave us alone for that reason.

  New York had at least one more crucial formative encounter in store for me. My fumetti press-ganging missions into Greenwich Village were still a big part of my Help! duties, and when I came across a tall, angular Englishman called John Cleese in a struggling student revue, I sensed he’d have what it took (i.e. a willingness to work for $15 a day). The original Beyond the Fringe theatre show had been a huge success in New York, but Cambridge Circus – a slightly rickety vehicle for the next generation of Footlights graduates, including Bill Oddie, Tim Brooke-Taylor and a certain Graham Chapman – did not strike quite such a chord with American audiences. I think all the participants were enjoying themselves well enough (coming straight out of college to perform in Greenwich Village couldn’t be bad, could it?). John was the one who stood out, though – as he always did – and we became friendly quite quickly.

  I think it was Cleese’s fearlessness as a physical performer that was most striking at that stage – we’d be riding the subway together, and he’d suddenly start doing very freaky movements with his arms and hands, magnificently oblivious to the reactions of his fellow travellers (and the New York subway wasn’t necessarily somewhere you wanted to be making enemies at that time).

  What amazes me about this slightly warped tale of a man’s burgeoning passion for a doll is now prescient it was in terms of John’s later life, though this particular blonde American Barbie didn’t end up costing him quite as much as some of the later ones.

  hile JFK´s inferior replacement president Lyndon Baines Johnson was getting his feet firmly under the White House table, things were definitely hotting up in South-east Asia. Like all sensible Americans of my generation, the Vietnam War ranked quite low on my list of desirable holiday destinations. The first time the shadow of the draft really loomed over me – in the spring of 1964 – I was determined to do everything in my power to get myself passed unfit for military service.

  I made sure I didn’t sleep properly in the week leading up to this potentially fateful face-to-face encounter with the military-industrial complex. I drank heavily. I took up smoking – something I’d never done before – and generally did anything I could think of to completely waste myself. The night before the draft interview, we had a huge ‘going off to war’ party in our basement flat on West 83rd Street, and I stumbled out of bed the next morning and made my way to the place where you had to queue up to get drafted.

  The first thing you have to do is take the physical – cough, bend over – and by the time the long queue had snaked me round to the main guy you had to give the paper you’d been sent in the post to, I could barely stand up, I was so fucking gone. Obviously it was nothing they hadn’t seen before (we were all looking for a way out . . . pretending to be blind, gay, mad, whatever it took), but the unique feature of my case was I’d arrived a month early. For some reason – probably not an unconscious desire to do deeds of heroism in far-off lands – I’d somehow got the date wrong.

  When the formally scheduled day of my appearance at the draft board finally came around, I couldn’t face repeating the whole smoking and drinking rigmarole – it’s not like the authorities were going to take any notice of that anyway – and was duly deemed fit to serve my country. For me, as for many of my college-educated peers, joining the National Guard seemed the best option. Setting aside the whole danger issue, if you’d been lucky enough to come out of college and get a good job, the last thing you really wanted to do was disappear off to Saigon for two years. Not that you’d automatically have to, as the Viet Cong hadn’t really started to bite yet, but going to war was a definite possibility.

  The National Guard on the other hand restricted the initial leave of absence from your actual life to a more manageable six months of basic training, followed by monthly meetings and ten annual fortnight-long summer camps to keep you up to speed. So I signed up for what was disparagingly known by more combat-ready regiments as the ‘Silk-Stocking Brigade’ – its regimental offices conveniently located on Park Avenue, just a few blocks from the flat on Madison – and was sent down to Fort Dixin New Jersey for half a year’s intensive indoctrination in the essential principles of grunt-dom.

  Check out my VS army dog tags – it seems I was still a Presbyterian.

  Luckily, Fort Dix wasn’t too far from New York, so I could get weekend passes home to keep as many of the pigment-covered plates of my old life as possible up in the air. Unfortunately, there was no perfumed training enclave for the effete skivers of the National Guard – we were all out there on the ranges together, and most of the other guys were proper shit-kickers who just couldn’t wait to get out there and kill some ‘gooks’. I’m not being disparaging about my fellow draftees: I realise that for someone from a tougher background than my own, the army offered opportunities to earn respect and broaden your horizons that might well not have been accessible in civilian life. Also, some people really thrive on the order and rigidity of the military – attentive readers will not be surprised to find out that I was not one of them.

  Any inclination I might have had (which was infinitesimal) to subsume myself entirely in the business of soldiering would certainly not survive the absurdities of basic training. I just found the whole thing very hard to take seriously. Even when we were out there in the wilds of the Garden State on full-scale military manoeuvres – having to ‘take that hill’ and all this kind of thing – I’d be running around like a kid playing soldiers, shouting ‘Boom!’, ‘Bang!’ and ‘Taka-taka-taka’ (my best shot at a convincing machine-gun
sound).

  For the duration of my basic training the Fort Dix Post became an unlikely out post of the underground comics revolution.

  ‘What’s wrong with you, Gilliam?’ an exasperated commanding officer would ask. ‘C’mon, these blanks are practically silent,’ I would reply. ‘If you’re going to fire a gun, it should at least make the right noise.’ Obviously I was taking the piss, but I was also trying to make this foolishness as entertaining as possible for myself and others, and as a result soon found myself widely acknowledged as a bit of a joke.

  One thing you discover fairly quickly once you put on a uniform is that if you have any kind of talent, the army loves it. And I soon found ways to elude as many of the more onerous duties of military life as possible by reverting to high school and early Oxy type as a theoretical promoter of social cohesion through the medium of cartooning. When I was working (if you could call it that) on the Fort Dix Post newspaper, the colonel and his wife had raised money for a new chapel, and he wanted me to go and do a drawing of it that they could use in the Bugle. I dragged this out for I don’t know how long – certainly a week or two of sitting in the post library, which was all I really wanted to be doing.

  You know what they say, you can take the cheerleader out of the man, but you can’t … Oh no, sorry, that can’t be right.

  When it comes to swinging the lead, there’s no better prop than a pencil, and my immediate commanding officer – who was a man I found it quite hard to salute, because he was a few years younger than me, and somewhat dumber – was kind enough to hand me another ‘get out of the firing-line free’ card. He’d seen me sketching one day and wondered what I was doing, so I showed him some of my drawings and he asked me to do a portrait of his fiancée. Everyone else was outside crawling around in the mud simulating the terrifying impact of heavy machine-gun fire, and I was inside in the barracks, drawing the lieutenant’s wife (from a photo – a charcoal drawing from life would have been pushing even my luck).

  He was going crazy for this picture, he wanted it so badly, but I just kept him at bay by insisting, ‘it’s got to be great,’ until he finally uttered the fateful words: ‘Gilliam, the great is the enemy of the good.’ This was a lesson I steadfastly refused to learn in my subsequent cinematic career (even after enduring the ordeal of screening a film I’d made for the Weinstein brothers – ‘It’s really good, Terry, it’s really good . . . but it needs to be great.’).

  The lieutenant liked the result so much that he got me to do one of him as well, and drawing him in a sequence of different unflattering guises became a reliable source of hilarity in the barracks. One night I was turning him into Napoleon and regaling my fellow raw recruits with what I was fairly confident was a very comical impression of the man himself (the lieutenant, not the little general) when I noticed some of my audience looking behind me with fearful expressions. It turned out he had snuck up the fire escape to get a surprise glimpse of the artist at work on his portrait, and was now so embarrassed that there was no way he could punish us. Does this kind of power (on my part, not his) make someone a better person? I wish I could say it did.

  There was one lesson basic training taught me that it took me a long time to unlearn, and that was how to skive. It was something I’d never really done before, having previously been an active and industrious youth. But by the time I got back to civvy street and was trying to get energised to do things again in my old creative milieu, I suddenly found I had a whole armoury of new default responses – avoiding, shirking, those kind of-ings – to over-ride.

  I wasn’t born to duck and dive, but the army had brought out my closet malingerer. This inner opportunist had been seen at his most brazen in my single-minded pursuit of no-cost military dental treatment. It all started innocently enough, when I had a wisdom tooth that became very infected, so the Fort Dix dentist pulled it out. I knew that once one went, the other one probably would too, so I asked him if he could extract that for me as well, but he refused on the grounds that as yet there was nothing wrong with it.

  Designing greeting cards like this one a clear case of ‘draw what you know’ – was a useful extra source of income during my New York period, but as a from of employment it definitely lacked the personal touch. You never actually got to meet the guy or gal from Hallmark.

  That night I went back to the barracks and systematically ground my teeth – just clamped them together and twisted – until my whole mouth became so inflamed that the dentist had no option but to go in and finish the job for me. I’ve always been very pragmatic about such things, and free dentistry is too good an opportunity to pass up in America. Some might see the principle of natural justice at work in the nasty case of mumps which subsequently put me in the infirmary with a temperature of 104, and a sadistic arsehole of a corporal who still had me up out of my sick-bed cleaning the latrines to save him from doing it, but that would not be my interpretation.

  The National Guard summer camp, which I had to attend for a couple of weeks in 1965, was even more of a joke than the basic training had been – at least first time around we’d been thrown in at the deep end with people who were actually going to be soldiers. Now we found ourselves being bossed around by a lot of older part-timers who liked the idea of becoming officers to make up for the fact that they hadn’t got to serve in the Korean War.

  Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (first published in 1961) was required reading for reluctant draftees like me. That book really captured the tragic foolishness of the whole business – you’d be out in some god-awful place and guys would actually be dying because they’d skived off to hide in the grass where tanks were doing their exercises. Or someone would get positioned on a distant outcrop of rock and the commanding officer would forget they were there, so they’d eventually wander in the next morning, freezing cold and hungry. At this point you realised why so much of what you learn in the army is about projecting a coherent show of capable authority – because of the desperate need to conceal the reality of institutional incompetence.

  Someone once worked out that the amount of money they were wasting on trying to turn people like me into soldiers was upwards of a hundred thousand dollars. And all the time this was happening, the war was getting worse, as the shocking reports being filed daily by journalists like the New York Times’ David Halberstam were making only too clear.

  Luckily for me, I was able to take advantage of that military susceptibility to absurdist logic that Joseph Heller so astutely noted. As the situation in Vietnam continued to worsen, and the gossamer threads of Help! magazine’s administrative structure finally began to fall apart, I decided to head off to Europe for a while. I wrote to the National Guard and told them that I was being relocated and the magazine was sending me across the Atlantic to run a new bureau for them, so unfortunately I wouldn’t be available to go to the monthly meetings and summer camps.

  Happily, the army had a system in place for just such eventualities – what they did was allocate you what’s called a ‘control group’. Mine was based in Germany, but as I hitch-hiked around Europe, I found myself staying longest in Lindos on the Greek island of Rhodes, where my former Help! colleague Dave Crossley was now living (Pink Floyd had a house there too at one point). Once all my correspondence with the army was going through Rhodes, I wrote to them again saying, ‘Our European office is here in Lindos – which unfortunately is a long way from Germany, so I won’t be able to attend the meetings . . . blah, blah, blah.’ They were gracious enough to see the sense in my arguments, and this system continued to work very nicely long after I had returned home to the USA. The army and I had a wonderful correspondence. Their letters would be sent from St Louis, Missouri (why they started there I can’t quite remember), to Germany and then on to Rhodes, where Dave would then mail them on to me wherever in America I happened to be. I would fill out my response and send it back to him, then he would stamp it in Rhodes and send it on to the control group in Germany, then they would send it back to St Louis. I think that
’s what they call ‘the circle of life’ . . . or even Catch 22 in reverse – either way, I couldn’t lose!

  This is a draft of one my letters to the army. It is – quite literally – a tissue of lies, but note significant doodles of rustic Lindos dwellings (right) and what would later come to be known as a ‘Monty Python-style’ foot (bottom left).

  As for how I came to want to leave New York – the city that had given me so much excitement, and made all my Moss Hart-ian dreams come true – by the latter half of 1965, that same adrenaline mood which I’d found so captivating on first arriving in the city had become something I couldn’t really deal with any more. That early morning drummer was beating time far too quickly for me.

  I’d never fallen prey to the delusion that often takes hold of New Yorkers that there is no world outside of Manhattan. I used to really enjoy going home to LA at Christmas. There was a scheme where people would fly across the country and want their car delivered, so if you were willing to do the drive, you could go from East Coast to West (and back) for the price of the fuel. My and John Latimer’s (he too was now in New York) record for the journey from George Washington Bridge to the California border was fifty-two hours, which basically meant driving without stopping – we’d pull into a petrol station and one of us would run in to grab snacks and pay while the other filled up the car and then gunned the engine.

  We smashed up quite a few cars in the course of those journeys. One time in Missouri I lost control of the wheel at 80 mph and went straight into the dip that divided the road, tearing out a great chunk of earth in the process. On another occasion, when I and a different group of friends decided to go through North Texas on Route 66, the car got out of control in an ice storm (who knew they even had those in Texas?) and skidded through a petrol station, just missing the pumps. We couldn’t get out at first because the door on one side was blocked by the pole holding the big Chevron sign – that’s how close we were to a spectacular Hollywood ending.