Cleese Encounters – Jonathan Margolis, 1992 ★½

Man of the Middle

When I first watched “Fawlty Towers” as a teen, I thought the humor was the awful, demanding people coming to Basil Fawlty’s hotel. I didn’t realize Basil himself was a problem. He seemed a rock of middle-class authority.

Reading Cleese Encounters, I wonder if a teenaged John Cleese might have seen him the same way.

Jonathan Margolis’ 1992 biography profiles Cleese, co-creator and star of both “Fawlty Towers” and that mothership of sketch comedy, “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” Margolis dubs him “the funniest man in the world.” But in his early days, before anyone knew Cleese, it might have been said that middle-class was his middle name.

His father was an insurance salesman. He grew up in the beachside village of Weston-super-Mare with an overprotective mother and no aspects of note beyond being unusually tall.

Young John Cleese, pictured with his mother Muriel, his father Reginald, and fellow students at St. Peter's Preparatory School. His family name was actually Cheese until his grandfather changed it: “The confusing thing for me as a child was that Dad always pronounced it to rhyme with cheese, while Mum pronounced it to rhyme with fleece. I remember thinking at the time that if your parents couldn’t agree on how to pronounce their name, they weren’t likely to agree on much else.” Image from https://lady.co.uk/im-finally-happy-75.

“The one thing you have to bear in mind at all times about John Cleese is that, particularly before he started growing tall, he was an insignificant person, quite insignificant,” a classmate at St. Peter’s Preparatory School explains.

Yet a rich vein of dark humor and an eye for absurdity eventually forged a formidable comic talent, in part in the way they rubbed against Cleese’s ever-present, very-British conformist sensibilities. It made him special among the anarchic British comedy pioneers of the 1960s.

This core thesis of Margolis’ is brought out early and often; certainly uncontaminated by Cleese himself:

If John Cleese is sure of one thing, it is that he does not want this book to exist.

Always with the utmost politeness, he declined to co-operate with it, and, when asked by friends whom I had approached if he minded them speaking to me, he would ask them to be “restrained.”

A restrained Cleese, pre-Python. Margolis notes he took his time before settling into comedy, teaching at his old school St. Peter's Preparatory and writing copy for Newsweek: “Uncertain about where he belonged, he felt, wherever he was and whatever he was doing, that he would rather be somewhere else, and otherwise engaged.” Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/359373245257158806/?lp=true. 

While the book’s title is a groaner, it does suggest what you get, a Yeti-like figure who shows up unexpectedly in a random person’s life, makes a memorable impression, and then disappears.

It could be a film producer heartened by Cleese’s interest in a script only to discover Cleese just wants to chat about its ideas. Or a Newsweek editor Cleese worked with pre-Python, recalling a reunion with Cleese the star who calls being funny “the worst cross I bear.”

Miriam Margolyes knew Cleese from Cambridge University, where they worked on a Footlights Club revue together. Years after Cleese Encounters, they’d share billing in a “Harry Potter” movie. She was a rare colleague who didn’t like Cleese, finding him cool and snobby:

“I suspect that John, coming from that curious middle grounds of the English class system, was feeling a little uncertain privately. He may have been putting on the English gentleman because he felt he wasn’t quite it.”

Often the impression he left makes clear how unconventionally conventional Cleese is. Clinical psychologist Oliver James recalls meeting Cleese for the first time over lunch. Cleese broke the ice with a frightfully intense question about epistemology and continued in a manner James recalls as “really extremely earnest:”

“There is this astonishing discrepancy between the man who’s made you laugh more than anyone else and this man who is probably more humourless than anyone else you’ve met.”

Yet Margolis’ book also notes how much Cleese revels in shock humor, whether famously sending off his Python friend and writing partner Graham Chapman at a public wake (“Good riddance to him...I hope he fries”) or telling an interviewer he loves his mother so much he plans on having her stuffed and mounted in a glass case.

Cleese (at left) with fellow Pythons Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam, and Terry Jones in 1976, when the troupe was between film projects. Margolis: “Cleese often grumbles that...he has spent more time talking about the group than he ever devoted to writing and performing with them.” Image from https://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/early-comedian-john-cleese-says-he-had-good-timing-little-else#stream/0.

As a public-school student, Cleese razzed teachers mercilessly and throughout his life has reveled in conflict and argument. At the same time, he didn’t leave home until college, is known for being rather shy, and keeps his private life private unless he happens to be telling a reporter about his latest session of psychoanalysis.

Cleese is a man of contradictions, and Margolis does his best to identify and sort through them. But a thesis and a few observations from fleeting acquaintances isn’t enough to sustain a biography. Cleese Encounters offers about 50 pages of solid analysis on the more familiar parts of Cleese’s career, with much repetition and padding.

Did you know that, on the day Cleese was born in 1939, the local paper pointed out how “A. Hitler” was an anagram of “The Liar?” No, I don’t know the point of that observation either, except apparently to reveal how “Weston-super-Mare was no intellectual hothouse.”

Margolis does try, but he can’t make up for his lack of Cleese, or people who really know him. Other negatives include much chronological skipping around; a lot of name-dropping of names which won’t resonate today, or even with non-British audiences back in 1992; factual slackness (Margolis writes that Cleese’s performance in A Fish Called Wanda was nominated for an Oscar – it wasn’t); and a paucity of Python, a key reason people will have for picking up this book.

About all the Python you get from Cleese Encounters was how imprisoned by its popularity Cleese became. Margolis’s Cleese is a man under continuous threat of being asked to do another silly walk. “…it was painful for a man who prided himself on his ability as a wordsmith to be remembered throughout his career for a couple of minutes of exaggerated goose-stepping in a largely visual sketch which he had not even written.” Even being asked about Python came to annoy him.

Cleese took more pleasure from his other great television series, “Fawlty Towers.” This time his only collaborator was his wife Connie Booth, whom Cleese divorced between seasons but stayed friends.

Connie Booth and John Cleese, as they appeared together in “Fawlty Towers.” Only 12 episodes aired between 1975-79, but Cleese pronounced himself satisfied with his output: “We made eight hours of Basil Fawlty. Shakespeare only managed four with Hamlet.” Image from https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3931546/I-wish-dead-John-Cleese-makes-shocking-remark-ex-wives-hails-children-cause-misery-world-grow-like-mothers.html.

“Fawlty Towers” gave Cleese’s penchant for conventionality a turn in the sun, and connected with viewers in an arguably more personal way than Python did. Margolis reports how a guesthouse owner in Devon even changed his name to Basil Fawlty to attract clients.

Early in his career, Cleese developed a lucrative side career as advertising pitchman, using his stiff-upper-lip persona to hawk candies, watches, and everything else. He made a mint starring in management-training films under a company he helped run called Video Arts.

All this annoyed the other Pythons as well as other Brits who found Cleese’s entrepreneurialism gauche. Cleese would have none of it:

“Fawlty Towers,” as he points out, was something of a loss leader, earning him £1,000 for an episode that took six weeks to make. It was income from commercials and Video Arts that made “Fawlty Towers” possible; he has said he would have had to sell his house had it not been for his commercial ventures.

That Margolis works so much from newspaper and magazine articles is not terrible in itself; he manages to synthesize them well enough to avoid the stench of a straight clip job. But the absence of sourcing not only leaves out needed context but strikes a false note, as if Margolis is pretending he spoke to Python comrade Michael Palin when he really just pulled a quote from an unattributed article.

The more Margolis goes on, the more he returns to the middle-class boy from Weston-super-Mare pushing against his own conventionality:

He could play members of the establishment with ease because he had the training, the accent and the bearing, but insists that he chose to play them because the more pompous characters were, the funnier it was when they did silly things.

I found Cleese Encounters interesting for that, but mainly for the way it captures a moment in time that has come and gone, when a fifty-something John Cleese seemed poised at the vanguard of comedy for many years to come. Published just four years after A Fish Called Wanda restored Cleese to the limelight as writer and star, one expected more big things from this multi-faceted entertainer.

A revealing look at Cleese during a comic highlight from A Fish Called Wanda. Margolis notes Cleese became quite the fitness buff in his late 40s, and the results spoke for themselves. Image from https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/07/the-oral-history-of-a-fish-called-wanda.

Certainly Margolis did:

It is possible that he will end up one day better known for his evangelistic espousal of psychology than for comedy, nor would this displease him.

But in all the time that followed, Cleese stepped back, adding little to his legacy, comedic or otherwise. He’s done stage shows as a solo performer and with the other surviving Pythons (just three now, with the passing this month of Terry Jones), appeared in small parts on television and film, and has riled progressives with his take on multiculturalism much the same way he did religious traditionalists back when Monty Python’s Life Of Brian came out. Otherwise, nil.

Part of that is getting older (Cleese is 80 as I write this), but part of it is being Cleese. Margolis notes several times how much happier Cleese is idling in a garden. One of many second-hand Cleese quotes used in the book sums this up well: “When I arrive at the Pearly Gates and St. Peter asks me how many TV shows I’ve produced and I say ‘about 150,’ I don’t think he is going to say: ‘Well, you should have made 250.’”