Gilliamesque Read online

  Such good luck seemed to be worth pushing on a transatlantic basis. So when the fast-moving allure of New York began to coagulate into a creeping sense of claustrophobia, as Help! plummeted into a financial abyss and none of my diverse portfolio of replacement activities – automotive comics (Hank Hinton’s snappily titled Car-Toons), greetings cards, dot-to-dot puzzle books, even a brief period as Managing Editor of Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, which I can’t actually remember – could quite fill the gap, it was only natural that I should succumb to the lure of the continent that inspired Disneyland.

  ‘Is this the only world that’s out there for me?’ was the kind of question I was asking myself on an increasingly regular basis as my twenty-fifth birthday loomed. There had been girls in my life (although never as many as in Robert Crumb’s). The mid-1960s was an exciting time to be a young single man in New York – mores were changing, and the difference the pill made to us is hard for people who grew up taking it for granted to understand – so I do have some happy memories from the roof-top of that Madison Avenue flat. But there was no one I was serious enough about to want to stay in America for. It was time to escape to Europe.

  Mortimer, Latimer and Gilliam prepare to head west in someone else’s undamaged (as yet) glossy-firmed beast.

  The Beatles weren’t the only siren voices calling me to England in 1965. Herman’s Hermits and The Dave Clark Five (who at one point were bigger than the Fab Four – well, I suppose there was always one more of them) added to the chorus. And by the time I’d booked my passage on a ‘student ship’ – a crappy ocean liner that charged something like a hundred dollars to get you from New York to Southampton in eleven days – the song I was dancing the night away to was The Rolling Stones’ ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’.

  The thing you learn by travelling on your own is that people are incredibly generous and interested in someone from another country, especially if you make a big hand to carry with you. My enlarged appendage always got a laugh, even from people who didnt pick me up.

  Once I’d run around the ship to see if there were any girls on it that I fancied and discovered that there weren’t, Mick and Keith’s disingenuous lament (after all, if they weren’t getting any satisfaction, what hope was there for the rest of us?) became the theme song of the voyage. Dancing yourself insensible did seem like the best way to get through those interminably tedious days with nothing to look at but the grey circle of sea. And when we finally docked, there was a magical surprise waiting for me – not the kind the Rolling Stones would have been looking for, but none the less welcome for all that.

  Disembarking from that ship in Southampton, I remember carrying my bags off the gang-plank and feeling something very different to the rush of alarming novelty that is meant to overwhelm you on arriving in a new country. What I felt was new alright, but it was a feeling (possibly illusory, as some of the scurvier denizens of Southampton’s dockside could no doubt have demonstrated had fate given them the opportunity) of, for the first time in my life, being totally safe – safe from people who might want to hit me, or do things to hurt me.

  It wasn’t like I’d been a victim of systematic bullying throughout my childhood and am now going to lurch unexpectedly into A Child Called It territory, far from it. But one of the weird things about America – and I think I always found this a bit strange unconsciously, even before I’d lived anywhere else – is the feeling you get there that if someone doesn’t approve of you, there’s a good chance they’re going to pop you one. It’s probably just that go-ahead American attitude which dictates that guys who don’t like you feel they have to do something about it.

  I’d only been on the receiving end of this national propensity a couple of times when I was growing up. Once, when I was thirteen or fourteen and got separated from my parents – in central LA, down by the Coliseum – a group of slightly older black kids came along and started saying things like, ‘You’re the guy who called my brother a bastard.’ It was one of those incidents where you’re thinking ‘This is ridiculous, they just want to hit me’, and then they do.

  Another time at a school dance, a gang from south-central LA turned up to deal with a rival group from our neck of the woods. All the lights went off and – Boom! – the main doors smashed open. Suddenly the dance floor was full of kids with knives and chains who were ‘looking for someone’. Luckily, that someone wasn’t me, but a sense of America being a dangerous place to live was something I never really shook off. So when I got to England and suddenly didn’t feel threatened by anyone – even if this was just as a consequence of being somewhere new and not knowing the rules – I just thought, ‘This is fantastic.’

  The more I’ve pondered this divergence in transatlantic threat perception – especially from the perspective of abandoning my ancestral homeland to forge a new life amid America’s erstwhile colonial oppressors – the closer I’ve come to ascribing it to the fact that people in England seem to have a much better sense of personal space than people in America. They don’t feel entitled to invade your territory the way Americans do, at least that’s how it’s always felt to me – perhaps they just scratched that itch sufficiently with the whole British Empire thing.

  So I pootled happily around England, savouring my newly enhanced sense of security and well-being. One weekend, while I was staying at some crappy London B&B, I was heading off to Hampton Court for the day when I realised that Shepperton Studios was also around there somewhere (well, eight miles away). So, having found my way to the old gatehouse and seen the closed faces of the guards on duty, I detoured through a neighbouring garden centre, climbed over a fence at the back, somehow made my way across a moat-like stream and eventually managed to gain entrance to the studio where so many films I’d loved had been made. It was all shut up for the weekend, so there was no one there to stop me strolling around the standing sets on the back lot and editing rooms, just getting the feel of the place, before walking blithely out past the guards on the gate. If my 1965 self had only known I’d end up making the studio segments of Jabberwocky there, a decade or so later, I could even have essayed a cheeky, ‘I’ll be back.’

  When you go abroad on a budget, it always pays to get a list of friends’ contacts to sponge off, and it was through this useful document that I found myself having Sunday lunch with someone’s parents in Tunbridge Wells. I asked them, ‘How often do you get up to London?’ And they said, ‘Maybe once every year or two.’ To an American, the insularity of this (England’s capital being only about thirty-five miles away) seemed very exotic and quirky.

  There was something about London when I first arrived in the late autumn of 1965 – it wasn’t quite a cartoon version of itself, but there was certainly a medieval simplicity to the social hierarchy. The place was still uptight enough to be interesting. Businessmen in the city still wore bowler hats. There were still walls to be broken down and cocks to be snooked, whereas by the time I returned a couple of years later, everything had burst into flower.

  The English as a people were kind of a surprise to me. I’d assumed we’d speak the same language for a start, but my first attempt to communicate with a cockney waitress at a Lyons Corner House soon relieved me of that particular delusion. The general atmosphere of diffidence was something to get used to, but in a way it came as a relief after the rapid-fire aggression of New York. There was an occasional undercurrent of anti-American prejudice as well – especially when I tentatively dropped in on Help! tribute publication Private Eye, where it was made fairly clear to me that a recommendation from Harvey was not going to be enough to overcome the social handicap of coming from the land of the free.

  Strongly opposed as I was to all the shit America was doing in the world, it was still a shock to find myself defending my homeland against people who assumed it – and by extension I – was an instinctive warmonger. Once I left England and started to make my way around Europe, I started to encounter even more challenges to the assumptions I’d been brought up with, i.e.
that the American way of life was the good one, and in foreign policy terms we were just there to help.

  To be able to run from one culture to another, discovering all these different ways of looking at things, gave me an extraordinary sense of freedom. People were travelling more by 1965, but the ‘hippie trail’ hadn’t really got going as an idea yet – Graham Nash wrote ‘Marrakesh Express’ the next year, but no one would let him release it till 1969. This was the time before things were named – the Garden of Eden period, when we didn’t know what the apple was called, but it sure tasted good.

  We might have heard of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, but it was taking the rest of us a while to catch up. In our own minds we were probably still more intellectually aligned with the beat generation of Kerouac and Ginsberg – the past always being easier to cling on to, whereas the future can only be understood once it’s actually happening. The civil rights and anti-war protest movements had been well underway back home before I left for Europe – people were motivated and angry – but the full flowering of hippiedom (which some might say dissipated the political engagement of the early sixties anyway) was still a way off yet.

  In the meantime, I was really enjoying myself. Whether I was randomly bumping into an old friend from New York in a café in Dean Street, Soho; swimming in the Aegean on Christmas Day, 1965; or jumping in the back of a Spanish pick-up truck and sleeping wrapped in just a sheepskin – my ramblings around Europe were the epitome of picaresque.

  A three-quarter-length suede coat – bought on my travels and costing 200 Turkish lire – would make a great impression on my Monty python colleagues when I wore it to our first formal meeting two years later. I wasnt very interesting, but my coat was.

  I’d started off with a thousand bucks in travellers’ cheques, and it was just a question of making that last as long as possible. I did anything I could to keep going – in Spain you could make a bit of money by selling your blood for transfusions. In Istanbul if you hung around the right Aladdin’s cave-type hutch in the bazaar you could become a ‘ten-per-center’ by drawing in fellow Western tourists in return for a percentage of the take.

  I was never quite alone. There always seemed to be somebody around, and nobody had the fear that people have now. I remember meeting this beautiful blonde Swedish girl who had hitch-hiked down to Istanbul. She said a guy in a truck had made a half-hearted attempt to grab her once, but that was as far as it had gone. There was also Lucille Rhodes, a friend from back in New York who I’d agreed to meet in Gibraltar (she accompanied me to Tangier). When I got to Florence I bumped into Danny’s daughter Dena Kaye, who was there as an exchange student, so we hitch-hiked up to Bologna together to sample the cooking.

  The photos I took on this trip were the first I ever tried to develop myself – Help! ones always used to get sent to the lab. These test prints are pretty crappy, but they do capture some of the excitement I felt at finally encountering the artefacts and architecture – and people – of Europe for the first time.

  I like the body positions on this one, which is right in front of the cathedral in Florence. When you’ve only got thirty-six Kodachromes in a roll, all the photos have to be considered, not like that digital shit where you can just keep hammering it. I suppose it’s the difference between a rifle and an AK-47 – you’ve got to make the individual shots count rather than just pulling the trigger and hoping you get something.

  If you’ve lived for large parts of your life fantasising about Sleeping Beauty’s castle, there’s inevitably going to be an element of disappointment when you actually get to visit real ones. But my European trip was the next step on from those childhood jaunts to Stoney Point – a chance to appreciate the incompleteness of something, where your imagination begins to fill in the gaps. I love ruins for that reason – they’re like broken statues, sometimes you get a more vivid sense of the bits that are missing than the bits that are still there. And stepping off the edge of Europe into the souks of Istanbul, Morocco and Tangier was another new dimension, with all the bustle and the narrow spaces.

  By the time I was heading back north-wards to Spain from Morocco, I’d got bored of hitch-hiking and decided to try buying myself a motorbike instead. I had to waste a couple of weeks monkeying around in Gibraltar while they got it ready, then the moment of total freedom finally arrived. I drove off into Spain at night and within an hour, maybe less, I’d hit an Alsatian which ran out in front of me and got spread out all over the road (at least, I did – the dog jumped up straight away and bolted off, apparently none the worse for the experience).

  Luckily, the crash happened right in front of a bar, and a few of the locals were kind enough to come out and drag me inside. Where I’d landed my arm was basically raw meat, and my hip was painfully swollen as my pockets were full of loose change from my travels, which had created a kind of mincing-machine effect on impact with the road surface. First they got a bottle of some fiery Iberian liquor and poured that on to cauterise the wounds.

  Kids hanging on the back of lorries – health and safety wouldn’t let you do that now. This quarter of Istanbul, which was all mud streets, has been pulled down since and rebuilt in a less characterful fashion, but looking back at these pictures I can see how they informed the sense of scale and visual drama I’d be looking to create once I got into film-making.

  This serious-looking Florentine character seemed to have turned up fourteen years early for a LIFE OF BRIAN crowd scene. I wasn’t quite sure what was going on, but there were a lot of nuns around so I assumed some major bishop or cardinal was floating through.

  The contract of ill omen – I’ve signed a few these in my time.

  I can say without fear of contradiction that my screams woke many a sleeping baby. Then they found a doctor who was drinking (presumably heavily) in the back room. He bandaged me up, and said I’d be OK.

  So I staggered off back into the night, realigned the bike where the frame had got bent out of shape, and resumed my journey. Apart from my arm and hip, the front headlight was the main casualty of the accident, which meant trying to stay as close as possible to any car which came by so I could use their front beams to follow the course of the road. It was blacker than a Hollywood studio executive’s heart that moonless night, and inevitably just about everyone else driving through the wilds of Spain was going at speeds higher than my infernal – and quite seriously damaged – machine could manage, so it was a constant struggle not to lose control and go flying off the road once my four-wheeled help-meets had left me eating their dust.

  As the night went on, that bike (which was a Putsch – although the name would have made more sense without the t and the c) started to take on genuinely satanic properties. Every so often it would stop, and I’d invariably have to push it up a hill. Then, when I finally made it to my destination – which was Malaga – I was heading along the main drag, momentarily feeling pretty good about myself as I passed the crowded bars, when it broke down one more time, so I had to ignominiously push the demon bike past the cool, not to say smug, revellers – grunting and staggering – to the youth hostel, with everyone thinking, ‘What a putz!’

  After a week reading old Mickey Spillane paperbacks at a house on the beach near Alicante, a bit further up the coast, my wounds had finally healed enough for me to consider getting back on the bike. I came off again on a wet corner on the way to Barcelona – not as badly this time, but when I finally got into the city, the wheel got stuck in a tram-track in rush-hour traffic. All these cops were blowing their whistles and shouting as I ploughed on, afraid to slow down, and once I finally got the wheel out of the groove, I knew I had to get out of there, so I just raced on out of the city without stopping at any red lights.

  By now I’d become obsessed with this bike, which must have been prophetically possessed by the spirit of Don Quixote, because it seemed to be doing everything it could to humiliate me. Apart from anything else, it was always running out of petrol – which might not sound like the Putsch�
�s fault, but I can assure you it was. This thing was a demon sent to destroy me – I’d drag it into a garage and the fucking petrol cap wouldn’t come off. Once I reached the next youth hostel after Barcelona I just said, ‘That’s it – this bike must die.’

  I went out early in the day and hid it on the cliff top, covered in brush and bamboo. When night fell I got all the guys and girls from the hostel to march up with me for the act of sacrifice, but the infernal machine got the better of me one more time. The petrol cap I’d never been able to loosen had now come undone of its own accord. Most of the fuel had leaked out so the grand explosion I’d planned to impress everyone with was now not going to happen. Luckily there was just enough fuel remaining to get a fire going, so I pushed it off the cliff with just enough aplomb to save face.

  What I hadn’t reckoned with was that this was an area where a lot of smugglers operated and the Guardia Civil were always on the look-out for their signals. So the minute the bike went up in flames suddenly there were police all over the place. Everyone ran like mad and I remember hiding in a clump of bamboo for over an hour until the coast was clear, then hitching out the next morning having resolved never again to buy a two-wheeled conveyance from a Gibraltarian.

  By the time I eventually ran out of money, I was in Paris – living in a freezing cold place on the West Bank for eight francs a night, with no means of financing the return journey across the Atlantic that I found myself increasingly ready to make. Luckily, I managed to persuade René Goscinny (a small man composed largely of concentric circles who was co-creator of the immortal Asterix the Gaul), whom I’d met through Help!, to find me some work, and he gave me two pages of his magazine Pilote to fill up with jokes about snowmen. I sat there and drew until I had enough money for a flight back to New York. Here are the icy fruits of my labours . . .