the family table, and my own adolescent egotism.
The one upside of my dad’s job was that he’d come home with these giant 8-foot by 4-foot cardboard boxes that his pre-fab partitions came in, which were great for making stage sets with – you’d have this huge slab of a thing that took paint beautifully. All you had to do was stick a frame on it and it was practically a canvas. I was constantly laying these things out on the patio at the back of our house, rushing against the clock to finish some ludicrously over-ambitious school project or other. My parents would always be there to help me through when I needed more hands to get a job done. Far from resenting me for these demands, they seemed to really enjoy it – marvelling at the fact that there was this kid living in their house who was so excited about having all these ideas and making all these things.
By the time my junior prom came around, I was building this huge castle out of cardboard boxes for the set. Inevitably, the project fell behind schedule – though luckily there were no studio executives on hand to pull the plug – to the extent that by the time my classmates were arriving with all their tuxes and corsages immaculately in place, I was still rushing around the hall covered in paint.
A year later, the famous jazz musician Stan Kenton played at our senior prom, which probably wasn’t where his ambitions would have lain at the start of his career.
This not-remotely embarrassing appearance in a local newspaper’s ‘Teen of the Week’ spot reassures those who might have worried about me appearing insufficiently clear-cut that my cartooning is only a ‘hobby’ and I ‘do not plan a career in the art world’, preferring to focus my energies on higher-minded philanthropic goals of the kind with which my name is now rarely, if ever, associated.
How did I come to be trapped in such a suffocating web of civic virtue? Sporting mediocrity probably had something to do with it. I was reasonably athletic at school and had always remembered myself – perhaps encouraged by the local print media’s wildly inaccurate description of me – as a ‘pole vaulting star’. Sadly, mediocrity had a firm grasp on my skinny legs and I never rose above the ‘B’ team. Still, I sported a cool ‘Balboa’ hairstyle (crew cut top, Fonzie-like back and sides) to distract from my failings.
Obviously sporting achievement has a much higher social value at school than academic excellence. I think that is one truth that holds good equally on both sides of the Atlantic. And if I wasn’t going to be in the forefront of the action on the field of play itself, there was one other option, a strategy to which any red-blooded American adolescent male could not help but feel himself drawn: I became a cheerleader, inserting myself between the crowds in the bleachers and the ‘jocks’ tens of yards further out on the playing field.
As a pole vaulter, I made a pretty good physical comedian. The worst thing that can happen to you in that athletic discipline is to come down straddling the crossbar. It is as painful as it looks, and I suffered this indignity, all too often, invariably (or so it seemed to me) with a large crowd gathered watching in the stands. On those occasions, I found the secret was to round the humiliation off with a nice little showbiz flourish – ‘Ta daah!’ That way you could win the public over and turn the whole situation in your favour, much in the same way as (say, for the sake of argument) an incompetent magician might redeem themselves by getting a laugh out of the failure of a trick.
I had always sung in the church choir - following my mother’s and grandmother’s leads – and how better to adapt and expand that primal impulse to collective music-making than to surround myself with the pom–pom waving cream of Birmingham High School’s pulchritudinous crop of senior cheerleaders? Naturally there was an element of emotional awkwardness involved, in that however much we fancied the girls, they were only ever interested in the jocks who were actually on the football team, but at least we could lurk yearningly in their midst.
Observant readers may well have found their eyes being drawn to the good-sized Bs adorning the alluring frontage of my fellow cheerleaders. In case anyone was wondering, the ‘B’ stood for ‘Braves’. Birmingham High School was one of many US institutions to include Native American imagery as part of the rich stew of iconography upon which mid-century sports fans were invited to dine. Lurking at the left-hand edge of the yearbook (page 33) – as if about to be edged out into the margins of history – you can see the beautiful ceremonial head-dress that was brought out on grand sporting occasions. This was later banished to the back-rooms by a new kind of McCarthyism – one which deemed such powerful and aesthetically meaningful historical images ‘derogatory’. The ‘Brave’ in this case was none other than Larry Bell, who went on to become a famous sculptor in the 1960s and ’70s, and interestingly is one of the cut-out figures on the cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Cheerleading in animated form via the school newspaper. These ‘trophies’ are pretty basic, but there is some character in them. As you can see, I’m still refining my signature at this point – the big V in the middle was an experiment I soon dropped out of a prudent desire not to emphasise the fact that my middle name was (and is) Vance. Why do you think I blessed my own progeny with the middle names Rainbow, Thunder and Dubois? I’d suffered for my parents’ thoughtless disregard for naming convention, so why shouldn’t they?
Pondering my collection of high school badges, it’s interesting how large the kind of heraldic imagery I would later explore on film loomed. By the time I was an American film-maker in Britain some years later, people found it strange and anachronistic that an upstart colonial would have such an interest in the knights of the round table. Yet this stuff was actually the common currency of my education – and once you got to college, with all the fraternities vying for your attention with their fancy Greek names, things would get even more classical.
The Tiger actually came from college a little later on, but check out the natty blue chariot on a pink and grey background, which was the beermat-like insignia of my senior class, The Phaetons. The original Phaeton, as the classical scholars among you will already know, lost control of the sun chariot in a bid to prove himself the son of a deity – not an example I would be following in any way.
By the time I was in my final year of high school, a complex overlapping network of school, church, sporting and charitable organisations seemed to be forming a kind of protective cocoon from which a grown-up, responsible Terry Gilliam – at once a man of action and a pillock of the community – would inevitably emerge. One day I was approached by several girls, who turned out to be the behind-the-scenes kingmakers, asking if they could put me forward as a candidate for student body president. I had no ambitions along these lines, but I find it hard to say ‘No’ to lovely ladies, so I agreed, and before I knew what hit me I was banging a gavel and pretending to be in charge. Again, I had no knowledge of what was required to lead the student body and had to learn as I went along while pretending I knew exactly what the job entailed.
Here I am with the Knights