So, Anyway... Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Picture Section

  Index

  Picture Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Candid and brilliantly funny, this is the story of how a tall, shy youth from Weston-super-Mare went on to become a self-confessed legend. En route, John Cleese describes his nerve-racking first public appearance, at St Peter’s Preparatory School at the age of eight and five-sixths; his endlessly peripatetic home life with parents who seemed incapable of staying in any house for longer than six months; his first experiences in the world of work as a teacher who knew nothing about the subjects he was expected to teach; his hamster-owning days at Cambridge; and his first encounter with the man who would be his writing partner for over two decades, Graham Chapman. And so on to his dizzying ascent via scriptwriting for Peter Sellers, David Frost, Marty Feldman and others to the heights of Monty Python.

  Punctuated from time to time with John Cleese’s thoughts on topics as diverse as the nature of comedy, the relative merits of cricket and waterskiing, and the importance of knowing the dates of all the kings and queens of England, this is a masterly performance by a former schoolmaster.

  About the Author

  John Marwood Cleese was born in Weston-super-Mare in 1939 and educated at Clifton College and at Cambridge. He achieved his first big success in the West End and as a scriptwriter and performer on The Frost Report. He went on to co-found the legendary Monty Python comedy troupe, writing and performing in the TV series and in films that include Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Life of Brian. In the mid-1970s, John Cleese and his first wife, Connie Booth, co-wrote and starred in the now-classic sitcom Fawlty Towers. Later, he wrote and co-starred in A Fish Called Wanda and Fierce Creatures. He has appeared in many other films, from James Bond to Harry Potter to Shrek, and has guest-starred in TV shows that have included Cheers, 3rd Rock from the Sun, Will & Grace and Entourage. He lives in London.

  So, Anyway . . .

  John Cleese

  To Dad and Fish

  Acknowledgements

  My grateful thanks to Jim Curtis for his extraordinary scholarship, his constant support and his ability to clarify chronologies at a moment’s notice; also to Howard Johnson for turning up masses of good stuff about At Last the 1948 Show; and to my publishers on either side of the Atlantic, in particular Susan Sandon, and not least Kevin Doughten and my publicist Charlotte Bush.

  I’d like to thank all the people who have been part of my life, and who have therefore helped me to write this book. I don’t want to name them all, because there are quite a lot, and if I miss two out they will be very upset and never want to speak to me again, and I don’t want to risk that.

  Finally, a word of warning about my editor, Nigel ‘Spats’ Wilcockson, who will try to take sole credit for this book when he only deserves three-quarters of it.

  And . . . three cats and a Fish, who put up with me while I was, etc., etc.

  Chapter 1

  I MADE MY first public appearance on the stairs up to the school nurse’s room, at St Peter’s Preparatory School, Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, England, on 13 September 1948. I was eight and five-sixths. My audience was a pack of nine-year-olds, who were jeering at me and baying, ‘Chee-eese! Chee-eese!’ I kept climbing the steps, despite the feelings of humiliation and fear. But above all, I was bewildered. How had I managed to attract so much attention? What had I done to provoke this aggression? And . . . how on earth did they know that my family surname had once been Cheese?

  As Matron ‘Fishy’ Findlater gave me the customary new-boy physical examination, I tried to gather my thoughts. My parents had always warned me to keep away from ‘nasty rough boys’. What, then, were they doing at a nice school like St Peter’s? And how was I supposed to avoid them?

  Much of my predicament was that I was not just a little boy, but a very tall little boy. I was five foot three, and would pass the six-foot mark before I was twelve. So it was hard to fade away into the background, as I often wished to – particularly later when I’d become taller than any of the masters. It didn’t help that one of them, Mr Bartlett, always referred to me as ‘a prominent citizen’.

  In addition, as a result of my excessive height, I had ‘outgrown my strength’, and my physical weakness meant that I was uncoordinated and awkward; so much so that a few years later my PE teacher, Captain Lancaster, was to describe me as ‘six foot of chewed string’. Add to that the fact that I had had no previous experience of the feral nature of gangs of young boys, and you will understand why my face bore the expression of an authentic coward as ‘Fishy’ opened the door and coaxed me out towards my second public appearance.

  ‘Don’t worry, it’s only teasing,’ she said. What consolation was that? You could have said the same at Nuremberg. But at least the chanting had stopped, and now there was an expectant silence as I forced myself down the stairs. Then . . .

  ‘Are you a Roundhead or a Cavalier?’

  ‘What?’

  Faces were thrust at me, each one of them demanding, ‘Roundhead or Cavalier?’ What were they talking about?

  Had I understood the question, I would almost certainly have fainted, such a delicate little flower was I. (And perhaps I should explain to the more delicately nurtured that I was not being asked to offer my considered views on the relative merits of the opposing forces in the English Civil War, but to reveal whether or not I had been circumcised.) However, my first day at prep school was not a total failure. By the time I got home I had learned the meaning of two new words – ‘pathetic’ and ‘wet’ – though I had to find Dad’s dictionary to look up ‘sissy’.

  Why was I so . . . ineffectual? Well, let’s begin at my beginning. I was born on 27 October 1939, in Uphill, a little village south of Weston-super-Mare, and separated from it by the mere width of a road which led inland from the Weston seafront. My first memory, though, is not of Uphill but of a tree in the village of Brent Knoll, a few miles away, under whose shade I recall lying, while I looked through its branches to the bright blue sky above. The sunlight is catching the leaves at different angles, so that my eye flickers from one patch of colour to the next, the verdant foliage displaying a host of verdant hues. (I thought I would try to get ‘verdant’, ‘hues’ and ‘foliage’ into this paragraph, as my English teachers always believed that they were signs of creative talent. Though I probably shouldn’t have used ‘verdant’ twice.)

  Of course, I’m not sure it is my first memory; I’m sure I used to think it was; and I like to think it was, too, because it would make sense, baby me lying in a pram, contentedly watching the interplay of the glinting verdant foliage and its beautiful hues.

  One thing I do know for certain, though, is that shortly before this incident with the tree, the Germans bombed Weston-super-Mare. I’ll just repeat that . . .

  On 14 August 1940, German planes bombed Weston-super-Mare. This is verifiable: it was in all the papers. Especially the Weston Mercury. Most Westonians were confident the raid had been a mistake. The Germans were a people famous for their efficiency, so why would they drop perfectly good bombs on Weston-super-Mare, when there was nothing in Weston that a bomb could destroy that could p
ossibly be as valuable as the bomb that destroyed it? That would mean that every explosion would make a tiny dent in the German economy.

  The Germans did return, however, and several times, which mystified everyone. Nevertheless I can’t help thinking that Westonians actually quite liked being bombed: it gave them a sense of significance that was otherwise lacking from their lives. But that still leaves the question why would the Hun have bothered? Was it just Teutonic joie de vivre? Did the Luftwaffe pilots mistake the Weston seafront for the Western Front? I have heard it quite seriously put forward by older Westonians that it was done at the behest of William Joyce, the infamous ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, who was hanged as a traitor in 1946 by the British for making Nazi propaganda radio broadcasts to Britain during the war. When I asked these amateur historians why a man of Irish descent who was born in Brooklyn would have such an animus against Weston that he would buttonhole Hitler on the matter, they fell silent. I prefer to believe that it was because of a grudge held by Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering on account of an unsavoury incident on Weston pier in the 1920s, probably involving Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan.

  My father’s explanation, however, makes the most sense: he said the Germans bombed Weston to show that they really do have a sense of humour.

  Whatever the truth of the matter, two days after that first raid we had moved to a quaint little Somerset village called Brent Knoll. Dad had had quite enough of big bangs during his four years in the trenches in France, and since he was up to nothing in Weston that was vital to the war effort, he spent the day after the bombing driving around the countryside near Weston until he found a small farmhouse, owned by a Mr and Mrs Raffle, who agreed to take the Cleese family on as paying guests. I love the fact that he didn’t mess around. We were out of there! And it was typically smart of him to find a farm, where, at a time of strict rationing, an egg or a chicken or even a small pig could go missing without attracting too much attention.

  Mother told me once that some Westonians privately criticised Dad for retreating so soon. They apparently felt it would have been more dignified to have waited a week or so before running away. I think this view misses the essential point of running away, which is to do it the moment the idea has occurred to you. Only an obsessional procrastinator would cry, ‘Let’s run for our lives, but not till Wednesday afternoon.’

  Back to the tree. I revisited the farm many years later, and, just as I thought I remembered, there was a huge chestnut tree in the middle of the front lawn, under which I might easily have lain in a pram. In 1940 the farmhouse had been one of a row of houses of medium size strung along a road, with fields opposite; it didn’t look very farm-like from the front, but when you walked up the drive and got to the back of the house you saw there was a proper farmyard, with mud and chickens and rusty farm equipment and ferrets in cages and rabbits in wooden hutches.

  And it was this location that provides my second memory. (It must come after the first because in it I am now standing up.) I was bitten by a rabbit.

  Or rather, I was nibbled by a rabbit, but, because I was such a weedy, namby-pamby little pansy, I reacted as though I’d lost a limb. It was the sheer unfairness of it all that so upset me. One minute, I was saying, ‘Hello, Mr Bunny!’ and smiling at its sweet little face and funny floppy ears. The next, the fucker savaged me. It seemed so gratuitous. What, I asked myself, had I done to the rabbit to deserve this psychotic response?

  The more pertinent question, though, is: why was I such a wuss? And the obvious answer is that it’s because I was the only child of older, over-protective parents. I have a memory (No. 3) to support this. I’m now about three and am in the Red Cow Inn, the hub and beating heart of Brent Knoll. Somehow I bang my hand, and just before I burst into tears, I hold it up to my father and howl, ‘Daddy, look! I’ve hurt my precious thumb!’ This, to my astonishment, gets a big laugh. Is my thumb not precious, I wonder? Dad certainly thinks it is. When the occasion demands, he always says, ‘Oh, you’ve hurt your precious –– [fill in applicable body part].’

  I hesitate to criticise Dad because what sanity I have I owe to his loving kindness. But there’s no doubt that he did pamper me, and such early coddling was one of the reasons I embarked on a wussy lifestyle. Throughout my schoolboy days I never felt very manly, or strong, or virile, or vigorous, or healthily aggressive. At school I avoided playground ‘gangs’, because I didn’t understand why anyone would want to behave like that. I loved ball games, but was always appalled at how rough, for example, rugby looked, even at the safe distance I kept while pretending to play it. When I was seventeen, my assistant Clifton College housemaster, Alec MacDonald, finally took me to task for funking tackles. Describing my efforts as ‘dancing around like a disabled fairy’, he ordered me to watch while he gave a demonstration of how to tackle properly. He asked a member of the first XV, Tony Rogers, to run at him. He closed in on Rogers, and then went in hard, just as Rogers tried to sidestep him. The result was that the top of Mr MacDonald’s head came into sharp contact with Rogers’ right hip. Mr MacDonald was unavailable for teaching later that afternoon; indeed he did not reappear for forty-eight hours. When he did, I was too cowardly to remind him that he had specifically told me that ‘if you go in hard, you never get hurt’. So when I see international rugby teams lumbering out at Twickenham, I look at them with awe, but also with a sense of being genetically disconnected from them. I was not born to be butch, and I have accepted my innate unmanliness without complaint. Besides, it seems to me that cowards very seldom cause trouble, which is probably why there is a history of them being shot by people who do.fn1

  None of this, incidentally, is to say that my infant wussiness was in any way admirable. But while I was undeniably a gutless little weed there was an upside: at least I didn’t display the habitual mindless aggression of some young males. Better a wuss than a psycho, I say, and I am proud that I have never been able to force myself to watch cage fighting.

  If part of my weedy outlook on life came from my father’s pampering, a fair proportion was down to my complicated relationship with my mother. And in this context another early memory comes to mind. I am lying in bed, falling asleep, when a noise causes me to turn and see shadows moving on the half-open door of my bedroom. They are shadows of my parents fighting. Dad has been coming into my room and Mum has started attacking him, pummelling him with a flurry of blows which he is trying to fend off. There is no sound – I sense they are both trying not to wake me – and the memory has no emotion attached, although it is very clear. Just the shadows which last a few seconds and then . . . silence. As I write this, my throat tightens a little. The level of violence I’m describing is low: there are no shillelaghs or chainsaws here, just lower-middle-class fisticuffs, with no prospect of Grievous Bodily Harm, as English law calls it. Nevertheless, my beloved dad, a kind and decent person, is being attacked by this unknowable creature who is widely rumoured to be my mother.

  Young children have so little life experience that they inevitably assume that what happens around and to them is the norm. I remember that when my daughter Cynthia was very young she was surprised to discover that some of her friends’ fathers did not work in television. So it would have been hard for me to describe my relationship with my mother as problematic because I had no idea what the word ‘motherly’ conveyed to most people. Dad once described to me how, during the First World War, he had witnessed a wounded soldier lying in a trench and crying out for his mother. ‘Why on earth would he cry for her?’ I wondered. When, over the years, I began to hear friends tell me that their mother was their best friend, someone with whom they routinely discussed their daily life, and to whom they looked for emotional support, I simply thought, ‘How wonderful that must be . . .’

  Mother (left) and me.

  Please do not think that I am loftily labelling her a ‘bad mother’. In many ways she was a good mother; sometimes a very good mother. In all day-to-day matters she was extremely diligent: preparing good meals, making
sure I was properly clothed and shod and warm and dry, keeping the house neat and clean, and fiercely protective of me. Under light hypnosis, I once recalled a German air raid, with the sound of the bombers not far away, and Mother throwing herself on top of me, under a big kitchen table. If it was a false memory, it’s still what she would have done.

  From a practical point of view, then, she was impeccable. But she was also self-obsessed and anxious, and that could make life with her very uncomfortable indeed.

  A clue to her self-obsession, I always felt, was her extraordinary lack of general knowledge. On one of her visits to London in the late 80s, a salad was prepared for lunch which contained quails’ eggs. She asked what kind of eggs they were and I explained that they were moles’ eggs, and that when we wanted them, we would go up to Hampstead Heath very early in the morning, as moles laid them at the entrance to their burrows during the night, collect the eggs and make sure we ate them the same day before they had time to hatch. She listened with great attention, as my family’s jaws sagged, and said she thought them ‘delicious’. Later that day she caught a mention of Mary, Queen of Scots. She recognised the name and asked me who this was. With my family listening, I pushed the envelope a little, telling her that Mary was a champion Glaswegian darts player who had been killed in the Blitz. ‘What a shame,’ she said.

  I was being a bit naughty, of course, but I also wanted to prove to my family the truth of a comment I had made earlier about Mother, which they had not accepted on first hearing. I had told them that she had no information about anything that was not going to affect her life directly in the immediate future; and that consequently she possessed no general knowledge – and when I said no general knowledge, I didn’t mean very, very little. Naturally they had thought I was exaggerating.