Читать книгу Gilliamesque - Terry Gilliam - Страница 11

found graduating from Oxy quite depressing. It wasn’t my final slump into academic mediocrity that troubled me – that was a done deal – but rather the prospect of breaking up the Fang gang. We’d had such a grand time doing that magazine – taking it up from three issues a year to six, and sweeping the whole student body along with us – and now those days were over. I had absolutely no idea of what I was going to do next, so for the first few months after leaving college, I took the stop-gap option of another eight-week summer-camp counselling job, this time up in the Sierra Nevadas (where Burt Lancaster’s daughters were our highest-ranking Hollywood progeny). It was there that I read the book Act One – the memoirs of the aforementioned theatrical eminence Moss Hart – which would give me the plan of action I so urgently needed.

$400 for two months less valid state and federal employment charges didn’t seem like such a bad deal with food and lodging thrown in…and Camp Trinity did live up to its ‘party ranch’ sobriquet to the extent that I finally managed to divest myself of that possession which no self-respecting twenty-one-year-old man – even one who had gone to college on a missionary scholarship – would wish to carry with him too much further over the threshold of adulthood. This landmark was passed in the company of one of my fellow counsellors, I hasten to add, not one of my impressionable young charges. No names, no pack-drill beyond that, though – who do you think I am, Zsa Zsa Gabor?

In later years, once I’d been lucky enough to get the chance to direct movies of my own, I would learn to identify a mysterious – sometimes magical and sometimes disastrous – process whereby ‘the making of the film becomes the story of the film’. But I would never have found myself in the director’s chair (a largely metonymic furnishing concept in itself, as you’re generally spending too much of your time rushing around in a panic to sit down all that much) without an approximately equal and opposite propensity for imagining my way into pre-existing narratives. This staple resource of the child’s imagination is one I have adapted to become the motor of my adult life. The big question I have never quite been able to answer is, ‘Am I driving the car, or merely hitching a lift?’

It never feels like I’m in control of the direction the traffic is going in, and yet somehow it always ends up reaching some kind of destination, and more often than not the one I originally intended. Reading Moss Hart’s autobiography at Camp Trinity in the summer of 1962 was one of the most influential events of my whole life. So complete was my identification with the character of the director of disastrous summer-camp drama productions who somehow progressed to co-writing Broadway hits alongside his hero George S Kaufman that it motivated me to pursue my own goal of working for Harvey Kurtzman with single-minded dedication. I’ve never thought of myself as a particularly ambitious person, and yet those who have read that book more recently than I assure me that I actually twisted its narrative framework quite considerably to fit the requirements of my own professional advancement.

Either way, it’s a great book. And the story of the callow youth who suddenly found himself in a creative partnership with his hero had enough plausibility to sustain me through Harvey’s rejection of my initial Hart-inspired overtures. I’d cheekily sent a couple of copies of Fang to the Help! offices in New York while I was still at Oxy, and he’d been very positive about them (to be honest, it was kind of him not to sue us for copyright infringement), but when Act One inspired me to contact him again to raise the possibility of my heading to the home of Help! – rapidly becoming a mecca for a new generation of what would later be known as underground cartoonists – Harvey did not exactly encourage me. His reply was roughly along the lines of, ‘Don’t bother – there’s a million people in this town with no jobs. Why would you want to join them?’

When I refused to take his no for an answer, he agreed to meet me at the Algonquin Hotel in NYC – a key location in Hart’s story: the former home of the distinctly non-Arthurian Round Table of literary wits Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, George Kaufman et al. Surely this had to be a good omen? So it proved, as just as I walked in through those most elegant of revolving doors, Harvey’s now former assistant Chuck Alverson was – if not physically, then at least in career terms – on his way out.

The Algonquin Hotel, scene of my auspicious first meeting with Harvey kurtzman.

I’d gone there with no expectation of getting a job, but I’d saved enough money working at Camp Trinity to buy a bit of time, and I just wanted to give myself a chance to make something happen. The first time I stepped out of the station at Times Square, the impact of the looming tall buildings hit me right in the guts. That’s the fundamental difference between LA and New York – the former is flat, while the latter is way over your head. People didn’t generally look at the best part of the buildings – which was the tops – because their gaze was glued to the pavements, but my neck was always craning upwards. I think that’s why so many of my films (Brazil and The Fisher King being the obvious ones, but it applies to Baron Munchausen and Time Bandits as well) ended up having a vertiginous aspect – because it’s taken me decades to process the overwhelming impact of my first arrival in New York.

Knocking on the door of that suite in the Algonquin was no less of a headrush. Inside that room were all the famous cartoonists I’d grown up admiring (or at least so it seemed to me at the time – Willy Elder, Al Jaffee and Arnold Roth were definitely there). And what were this pantheon of the cartooning gods working on? Why, a salacious spoof comic for Playboy called Little Annie Fanny – just as Zeus had decreed they should be. Harvey had popped out for a minute, but when he did turn up, he was a lot smaller than I expected (perhaps inevitably given the superhero status I had accorded him) – this little brown nut of a man, vibrating with compressed energy.

As if this scenario was not already idyllic enough, Harvey offered me Chuck’s job more or less on the spot. This was beyond luck, it was destiny. OK, so the $50 a week he was going to pay me was $2 a week less than the dole would have been, but as excited as I’d been by the dream of working on Help!, the reality was even better. Life was moving so fast that it felt like the city was setting a beat – every morning I’d wake up and New York would say, ‘Ramming speed: Boom! Boom! Boom! ’

My old Fang buddy John Massey, moon-lighting in deep water as a Help! cover star.

Chuck Alverson – who hadn’t been sacked, he just had other things to do such as working for the Wall Street Journal – kindly took me under his wing and let me sleep on his couch for a while until I got a place of my own. At one point I found myself rooming with a bunch of air stewardesses who wanted to act but in the meantime would come in at all hours of the night from long-haul flights. Then I got my own room in an avariciously subdivided mansion block right up by Columbia University.

It was fully 8-foot by 8-foot, with a basin and my own toilet somehow crammed in. There was just enough room for a bed and the desk I shared with a pet cockroach (who loved paint and would come out to sniff the plate I used to mix the colours on), so I’d move everything onto the bed when I had work to do, and then back onto the desk when it was time to sleep. Whenever I sat down to work, the cockroach would come scuttling out from his quarters in the desk (which were proportionately a good deal more spacious than mine) to get a lung-full – if cockroaches have lungs – of whatever noxious lead fumes were on offer. I would later pay tribute to our interspecies friendship in one of my first extended animations, Story Time, but for the moment I certainly appreciated the company.

Living in New York wasn’t exactly lonely, but it did teach you how to be on your own. I was doing a lot of communicating at my desk and in the office, but the only way to speak to anyone back home was to send a letter to my parents or friends and fix a precise time for them to call the public phonebox outside the apartment. Then I’d be there to pick up the receiver at the appointed hour, the operator would ask if I was willing to accept a collect call, I would generously say ‘Yes’, and the company running the box would inadvertently pick up the tab. It was a black day for American students when the telephone companies got wise to that little scam.

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?’