LA, or by voluntarily exiling myself to the colonial motherland as an adult). You know that feeling you get as a kid at Christmas when you see your relatives sitting around and think, ‘I’ve got to get out of here . . . ’ Surely it can’t just have been me who felt that way? It wasn’t that I’d had a bad time in the bosom of my family, or that they were genetically unsound, I just wanted to see a bit more of the world.
My grandfather on my dad’s side was an early stepping-stone into a different kind of landscape. He was a Baptist preacher (albeit one who qualified via mail order rather than theological college), a big, charming guy who lived in the South, in Hot Springs, Arkansas. We’d driven down there from Minnesota a couple of times and my memories of those early trips are a splashy blur of swinging out and jumping into creeks on big tyres on ropes. All that shit was great, except that when you rolled around in the tall grass you’d get covered in ticks and chiggers – a.k.a. nasty little biting fuckers that burrowed under your skin, and when you tried to pull them off their heads broke off inside you, causing days of painful itching.
Another thing that stuck in my mind about the South in the forties and fifties was how civilised it seemed. Everybody was always so polite – black and white, everyone would say ‘Good morning’ on the street – you couldn’t have asked for nicer people. Of course, I’d realise later on that all this politeness was conditional on everyone staying in their place. (Although many years later I did meet a black woman who shared my surname in the foyer of a London film company, so the Gilliams must have done the odd bit of mixing and matching on the quiet.)
The first time I went out to Hot Springs on my own, in the summer of 1955, I experienced a foretaste of later dissenting tendencies, but in this case the seeds of disenchantment were planted – as so often – in the fertile mulch of self-interest.
The same July weekend that I was first trusted to embark on the long train journey East from LA all by myself also turned out to be a historic occasion on a larger scale – the grand opening of the original Disneyland, an hour down the road from Panorama City, in Anaheim, California.
I was tremendously disappointed to be away from LA for what, by my reckoning – then as now – was one of the major cultural events of the twentieth century. Missing out on what turned out to be a famously disastrous opening ceremony (notwithstanding the reassuring presence of Ronald Reagan – a man from whom both California and the world in general would later hear more than they might’ve expected – as one of the three TV anchors) was about the closest I ever came to real childhood trauma. That’s what kills me; I’ve always wanted the scars, but I just don’t have them. In fact, that’s probably why I had to go into film-making – to acquire the deep emotional and spiritual wounds which my shockingly happy childhood had so callously denied me.
Once back from Arkansas, I wasted no time in making good my Disneyland deficit, returning to Walt’s magical kingdom many times in the years that followed. The thing that made Disneyland a genuinely enchanting place for me was the quality of the craftsmanship. Previously, theme parks had always been pretty tacky, gimcracked places, but so much love and care went into making Disney’s dream a reality – there were no shortcuts.
Everything you could ever think of, he put in there . . . it wasn’t just about seeing the favourite cartoons of your childhood in 3-D. Disneyland was also where I first learned about architecture – the way the windows would be scaled on Georgian buildings to give them a greater sense of height – and Sleeping Beauty’s castle became the template for all my ideas about Europe. OK, it was a fantasy land, and some might say I’ve been living there ever since, but at least now I know where the dirt is hidden.
It wasn’t all about Yurp (as Europe was pronounced in America). On the African ride, you’d get on the boat from The African Queen, and the animals would poke their heads up from the water or suddenly appear roaring from behind a tree – it was everything you could want from travel, but without the bugs. Then there was the World of Tomorrow, featuring the Monsanto House of the Future (which didn’t seem as sinister an idea then as a genetically modified future does now). You could drive little cars in the miniature Autopia, even though you weren’t yet old enough to have a driving licence. And Main Street was like a dream version of America: idyllic and historical at the same time.
My imagination was always stimulated by enclosed worlds with their own distinct hierarchies and sets of rules – whether that be the virtual reality of Disney’s Tomorrowland, or the medieval castles or Roman courts of the ‘sword and sandal’ movie epics, which I loved just as much. Such well-defined social structures give you something to react against and take the piss out of, and I’ve always – and I still do this – tended to simplify the world into a series of nice, clear-cut oppositions, which I can mess around at the edges of. It’s when things become more abstract and unclear that I start to struggle.
There are few more exotic and compelling examples of a self-contained community than the travelling show, and some of my most vivid childhood memories were supplied by the annual visits of the Clyde Beatty circus, which used to set up in the car park in Panorama City and put the word out for local kids to come and help raise the tents. They’d give you a bit of money in return for the work you did, but I found the carnival atmosphere so intoxicating that I’d probably have done it for nothing. They always needed extra pairs of hands and one year, when I was thirteen or fourteen, I ended up helping out in the freak-show tent. The experience of seeing all the exotic circus acts sitting around playing cards – just like everyday people, except they were pin-heads or dwarves – has stayed with me to this day. It wasn’t just the revelation that these extraordinary people would behave in such a normal way that fascinated me – in retrospect, that should have been obvious – it was the moment when the show would begin, the barkers would introduce them, ‘All the way from darkest Africa . . . ’, and they’d have to instantly make that transition to being ‘the leopard man’ or ‘the alligator boy’.
I must have been about fourteen when I helped raise clyde Beatty’s freak-show tent. It was not to be the only circus in my life.
The idea of someone subsuming themselves completely within another identity has always intrigued me, I suppose because that’s something I’ve never felt quite able to do myself. As far as my first forays into public performance as a junior magician were concerned, I was so bad that I’d generally find myself fucking up the tricks themselves and then having to do something ridiculous to get myself out of the resulting mess. It seemed much easier to just act the goat as a way of keeping people at a certain distance – for a while I earned myself the nickname of ‘clown’ from other kids of my age for my willingness to make a fool of myself in order to distract audiences from my technical shortcomings.
I was always very gregarious and loved making people laugh, but I think ultimately the reason I was never going to become a performer first and foremost – and certainly not an actor – was that at heart I don’t have the neediness or incompleteness that will ultimately drive you in that direction. I like showing off, and I don’t mind making a fool of myself or playing the grotesque, but I’ve never been comfortable exposing whatever subtler sensitivities and emotions I may or may not have buried deep-down inside. That’s the well a good actor is willing to dip into and reveal to the world. I prefer to hide behind a mask or a cartoon.
The most important single cultural influence on my teenage years was Mad comics. They had a very distinct brand of humour, which kids of my generation had in common (and subsequent ones too, as the magazine went from strength to strength – commercially, if not artistically – in the years after its co-founder and my comic book superhero Harvey Kurtzman moved on in 1956), in much the same way that Monty Python or South Park would end up uniting people in later years.
Still a little way to go here in terms of background detail, although the trash-can is a start. But I make no apology for