It's a don't-mention-the-war moment, or for those who favour current cliché
over classic Fawlty Towers, it's an elephant-in-the-room thing. My interview
with John Cleese comes with a condition: “Please do not ask about Mr
Cleese's divorce.” That would be his divorce from his third wife Alyce Faye
Eichelberger, the divorce with which his friend Michael Winner has taken to
regaling readers of his Sunday Times column: “There's no doubt John's
hurting”; “I knew Cleese shouldn't have married that grim girl”; and so on.
But keep reading. The divorce elephant is soon rampaging - goose-stepping,
perhaps - all over the room.
And I don't even rattle its cage. I just ask the comedian, who made £7 million
from the sale of his training film business back in 1989, when will he be
wealthy enough to stop working and pursue his intellectual interests.
Cleese, you see, with his over-long, comically hinged body, may look a
figure of fun, but he is an homme sérieux. In less than an hour's chat he
references the Polish epistemologist Alfred Korzybski, the quantum physicist
Christopher Isham, and the 13th century mystic, Meister Eckhart. His take on
life is thoughtful, Freudian and, although he admits to having no direct
experience of the numinous, spiritual. When this week I ask him to comment
on the scandal of Jonathan Ross's and Russell Brand's phone call to Andrew
Sachs, Manuel to his Basil on Fawlty Towers, his response is almost
philosophical.
“I'm uneasy about censorship,” he e-mails me from California, “so I think that
it's important to hire people who have good enough taste to censor
themselves. I've always thought that Jonathan would have fallen into this
category.” It is a statement that recalls, perhaps, being on the wrong end
of a similar row when his 1979 Monty Python movie Life of Brian was accused
of blasphemy. There are, as he says, memoirs to be written and conclusions
to be drawn about a career that stretches back to 1963 and That Was The Week
That Was. Yet, at the age of 68, he has spent most of the year working on a
stage musical of A Fish Called Wanda, writing screenplays, voicing an
animated movie and making new commentary for a Fawlty Towers box set. He has
also - and this is the excuse for us talking - filmed segments for a new
show on the digital channel Dave called Batteries Not Included, in which the
Bond movies' chief geek, Q, asks inventors about their most fantastic
gadgets.
So when can he turn his back on this toil? “I don't know about that,” he says.
“People would think I'd have enough money, but I do have a very expensive,
or comparatively expensive, divorce. When I divorced Barbara [Trentham, wife
two] in about '88 that cost me £2.5 million then. And now this divorce with
Alyce Faye - I mean, I'm paying more than £1 million a year right now. And
we never had children.”
Alyce Faye Eichelberger, a psychoanalyst, has described their lifestyle as
“opulent” and may have got used to it. In contrast, at the Covent Garden
Hotel this afternoon, Cleese is frugally wearing a rather magnificent but
tatty jacket he bought for £200 in Clifton.
“When I got divorced from Connie [Booth, wife one], with whom I had dinner on
Sunday, and when I got divorced from Barbara, I didn't need lawyers on
either occasion, because I just sort of said, ‘Why don't I give you this?'
And they said, ‘That's very fair, very generous. Thank you.' End of story.
This woman now was asking my old St John's Wood accountants for 60 boxes of
documents, so many documents that they had to send people out from
California to go through them.
For Alyce Faye? “No, not really. In fact, Alyce Faye I think is losing money
by doing this. But it's not possible to get that idea to her because I've
been told that if I speak to her directly her lawyer will take out a
restraining order, which would not look very good when we got to court. I
mean, it's insane.”
The lawyers probably make her sound more bitter than she is? “It's hard to
know, because I haven't spoken to her. I mean, we broke up in the marital
therapist's office. We'd been seeing them for a couple of years. And we
agreed to break up and three weeks later I heard about the lawyer that she
was using and I rang her up and said, ‘Do you know this lawyer's
reputation?' And she said, ‘I hear that yours can be pretty nasty, too.' And
I said, ‘OK, here's an offer. You get rid of yours. I'll get rid of mine.
I'll appoint someone you're comfortable with, you appoint someone I'm
comfortable with and it could be fairly easy.' And she said, ‘No, I'm not
interested. I would like to stay with the present situation.'”
Her attitude would not shock Michael Winner who, despite being a guest at
their wedding in Barbados, has made it clear he never liked her. Among his
complaints is that her voice could “tear the testicles out of a rabbit”.
Cleese says he understands why friends are angry on his behalf. “I feel angry
sometimes. But my anger is not so much about sharing the property but having
to go on working hard to provide alimony for someone who's already going to
have at least $10 million worth of property, and who's getting £1 million
this year. At some point you say, ‘Well, what did I do wrong? You know, I
was the breadwinner.' The system is insane.”
So, I check, his anger is not at the failure of the relationship? “It's about
the fact that in my 70th year I will still be spending two months a year
doing work that is of no interest to me and which is probably slightly
spiritually depleting in order to feed the beast.” (The PR from Dave
looks a little crestfallen at this.)
Winner's theory is that Cleese was never “madly in love” with Alyce Faye but
married her 16 years ago because he thought it was “the right thing to do”.
The closest I get to an explanation from Cleese for its sticky end is this:
“It's very important for me that my friends have a sense of humour. To me
it's the kind of touchstone of communication. Alyce Faye's sense of humour
was not very European, because she was from Oklahoma and I used to joke that
the Oklahoma Sense of Irony is one of the world's short books.” How did he
cope? “Well I just didn't make certain kinds of jokes around her.”
Here's one she might not get: he is considering writing a movie called May
Divorce Be With You. Winner may think Cleese is hurting. To me, he exhibits
the euphoria of a man who has escaped a life sentence. His spirits are
almost inappropriately high. He says he is so happy he can hardly
concentrate enough to meditate. “This is the happiest I have ever been and I
feel that at 68 now I want as many years as I can get.”
The great contrast, he says, is when he broke up with Booth, his co-writer on
Fawlty Towers who played the maid Polly (like the wives who followed, Connie
was blonde, wholesome and American; like Alyce Faye, she now works as a
therapist). Their divorce, between the first and second series, when their
daughter, Cynthia, was 7, depressed Cleese profoundly.
“Two and a half years of depression, certainly. Connie and I really genuinely
loved each other very much, and it was wonderful to have dinner with her
[recently]. I mean, we've known each other since probably October 1964.
That's a long time, you know. And there's a real fondness there and we get
together and we laugh and she talks about her work in therapy. We talk about
movies.”
He calls the divorce “a terrible loss” exacerbated by his labouring under
certain “romantic attitudes” later extirpated by his therapist. “I'm much
more practical about it now.” He discussed these attitudes in a self-help
book, Families and How to Survive Them, co-written with his shrink, the late
Robin Skynner. He looks pleased when I praise it.
“I don't know. I sometimes think that my main task in this particular
existence has been to get to know and understand women better.” I smile. The
sentence seems to pack a couple of jokes.
But he is serious. “Truthfully. Because I had a very, very difficult
relationship with my mother, who was supremely self-centred. She was
hilariously self-centred. She did not really take interest in anything that
didn't immediately affect her.” The woman who ran the old persons' residence
where she spent her last years before her death in 2002 aged 101, called her
an “id on two legs”. Alyce Faye, he adds, called her “a killer”, and, he
points out - it's the only positive thing he says about her - she is a
highly trained analyst.
What he does not address is a prognosis by Alyce Faye that John would end up
just as “utterly selfish”. It seems unlikely but I can see that empathy is
not Cleese's strongest point. Not only does he take no account of how the
divorce may be affecting Alyce Faye emotionally, he fails to acknowledge how
hard it must have been for his mother to miss out, as he claims, on the
experience of parental love. Nor does his sense of irony engage with the
fact that the author of books on family survival has reached the end of the
road with yet another one. When I ask if he really feels he has benefited
from all his therapy, he replies: “Tremendously.” He is happy. He has his
old friends. He has two of the “best daughters in the world”.
And a new girlfriend, reportedly a 34-year-old blonde marketing executive
named Veronica Smiley? “Oh Smiley's great fun. She's helping me with a
speech I have to do on marketing. But that all got blown up.” He does not
want a partner right now. His reasoning is revealing. “I don't want to have
to start being unselfish again. The great thing about being on your own is
you do what you damn well like.”
Would he not have liked to have spent the past 40 years with one woman? “No. I
think it should be like dog licences. I think you should have to renew
marriage licences every five years, unless you have children. And I think
before you have children you should have to go and pass various tests and
get a licence to have a child. Because it's the most transformative and
difficult thing of your life.”
More important than work? “Far more important. People don't understand this,
and some people who are highly motivated by work, but when I worked I was
always motivated, funnily enough, by the fear of being bad. Because it is so
humiliating to make a joke and have no one laugh.”
Was it this fear that led him to sue the London Evening Standard six years ago
after it reported the cancellation of an American sitcom in which he had a
small recurring role? “The Standard ran a piece saying my career was in
ruins. And it was a flat-out lie and an invention which they didn't even
bother to check remotely. And I went after them because I didn't think they
should be lying to their readers. But, of course, I'm not allowed to go
after them on those grounds because the law doesn't recognise that, so I had
to pretend that my reputation was hurt. Which it wasn't. I could tell you
that straight. It wasn't hurt, because nobody in America cares what somebody
in the Evening Standard writes.”
You would not, I think, call Cleese a forgiving man. But making jokes, as
Cleese acknowledges, always invites humiliating failure. “I'll tell you
something quite funny,” he says. “When [Alyce Faye] had her hip replacement
I realised that there was a chance for a little humour and I sent a bunch of
flowers to her lawyer's office saying, ‘Would you please inspect these
flowers and see whether they are acceptable and would you please vet the
greetings card that comes with these and see whether that is also
legitimate. And if you are satisfied that both of them are not harmful,
would you be good enough to send them on to my wife as soon as possible?'
To which the lawyer replied: ‘As the trade papers say, he's not as funny as he
was.' The sort of leaden, nasty - what's the word? - black-hearted response
to a little conceit.”
I can sense John Cleese's disappointment. He lobs a joke into enemy territory;
it fizzes like a damp squib. But the story at least contradicts the
prediction that Cleese is on the road to utter selfishness. He remembered,
after all, to send Alyce Faye flowers, and that's not bad for a man who
can't stop mentioning their war.
Batteries Not Included begins tonight on Dave at 10pm
