'I'm finally happy... at 75'
John Cleese is laughing. ‘My wife and I are utterly soppy about our cats,’ he says. ‘We have three – Felix, Teddy and Heaven – and it’s absurd how much time we spend with them. It makes no sense to either of us. I suppose they’re like our family, and what I’ve decided is that I like them much better than babies. They’re so much less trouble.’
With that, he throws his head back for another strangely silent, wheezy laugh. These days, he claims that he is a very happy man. And the reason for that is not his recent reunion with his Monty Python cronies, nor his bestselling autobiography, but the wife he so frequently mentions.
‘It’s very nice to be in love at my age,’ he says, absentmindedly stroking his grey hair. ‘It makes almost everything else seem relatively unimportant. I’d never had that experience before.’
Clockwise from top left: John Cleese around the age of one, with his mother, Muriel; With his father, Reg, whom he says had always been ‘loving and kind’; John attended St Peter’s Preparatory School in Weston-super- Mare, where he did well at cricket
John met Jennifer Wade, a jewellery designer 31 years his junior, in 2009. They married three years later on the Caribbean island of Mustique. John has, of course, been married before: fi rst to actress Connie Booth in 1968 (they stayed together for 10 years), then actress Barbara Trentham (nine years), then psychotherapist Alyce Faye Eichelberger (16 years). John went through a fairly acrimonious divorce with his third wife, and it was often joked that Monty Python reunited in part to pay off his hefty alimony.
With Jenny, he finds he has recaptured the ‘joy’ and the ‘wonder’ of childhood. ‘She has an infi nite capacity for play. It’s quite extraordinary – our relationship is immensely playful. I look at other 75-year-olds... and, well, they don’t strike me as being terribly playful.’
Was this an element that was missing from his other marriages? ‘Oh yes. I think Connie and I had a sense of laughter. With Barbara, not so much. Alyce Faye could be a little playful sometimes, but it was a much more artificial relationship. We were both playing a role, and it wasn’t very authentic.’
John’s relationship with women is a topic he delves into in his autobiography, entitled So Anyway… His mother was, in his own words, a ‘tyrant’.
John during his rst Footlights Revue, 1962’s Double Take, directed by Trevor Nunn. Inset: The Chinese Song: ‘unforgivably racist now but deemed acceptable in 1963'
‘It cannot be a coincidence that I spent such a large part of my life in some form of therapy and that the vast majority of the problems I was dealing with involved relationships with women,’ he writes in one particularly revealing paragraph. ‘My ingrained habit of walking on eggshells when dealing with my mother dominated my romantic liaisons for many years.’
Understanding the psychology of women is a ‘lifelong task’ for him, but he says he is improving. ‘I really do think women think and behave very diff erently to men a lot of the time. But then there is a large area of overlap… I think after fi ve years with Jenny, I understand more about the way a woman’s mind works than I did when I met her.’
Psychology, regardless of gender, has always fascinated him. ‘I’ve always been introverted, and thus interested in the inside world. I can’t believe that anyone really wants to study rocks, or even information technology. If it isn’t about the human mind, I’m not really interested.’
‘A psychiatrist once said to me, “You know, the sad thing about most men is they know more about how their car works than how they work.”
‘It’s a slow process of finding the right attitude to yourself. I’m absurdly happy now. I can’t believe that at the age of 75 I’ve finally achieved it.’
It is interesting to discover that writing – and spending time away from the stage – is contributing to this Python’s contentment. ‘I’d much rather write a couple of pages than do a performance.’
Although he enjoyed interacting with the audience during the Monty Python reunion, he wasn’t excited by the show itself. ‘I don’t get much out of acting,’ he says. ‘I don’t want to learn lines any more. I don’t want to have to go on stage and say the same thing that I said last night.’
In fact, now he’s well into his eighth decade, he really doesn’t mind if his last comedic performance is behind him. ‘I think the whole business about leaving a comic legacy has always bored the a*** off me,’ he states, albeit jovially.
As someone who ‘would like to be a spiritual person’, what he does want to do is make a documentary about another of his interests: religion. ‘I would try to go back to the original founders of religion and see what they said, and then examine to what extent their professed followers are following their principles. I think the answer is that they don’t usually.
‘Take the Roman Catholic Church,’ he continues, warming to his theme. ‘Their behaviour towards the paedophile priests – it was that of a power organisation, not an ethical one. It was all about covering it up, making payments. It was not about dealing with it as I think a proper spiritual organisation would have done.’
Left: Terry Jones and John Cleese doing an Alan Whicker sketch. Right: David Hatch, a cast member of Cambridge Circus, and John fooling around
He is keen to point out that ‘there are many wonderful people operating within the Roman Catholic Church’ and other religions, and his gripe is not with religious beliefs. After all, he himself ‘needs the sense that this is a meaningful universe’. What he minds is the attitudes of organised religions. ‘Religions themselves start behaving egotistically, because they want to be more powerful. There is an intrinsic paradox between what the founder is teaching and what turns out to be the behaviour of the organisation that’s propagating it.’
He pauses. ‘Perhaps I should start a religion based on cats.’ His head goes back for another guffaw.
Until a television channel picks up the idea of his documentary, he’s happy to pass the time in a more relaxed manner. ‘I would like to spend my days reading, writing, exercising, talking with old friends, looking at paintings, going to the theatre occasionally and most importantly, playing with Jenny and the cats.’
So, Anyway...: The Autobiography, by John Cleese, is published by Random House, priced £20.
With that, he throws his head back for another strangely silent, wheezy laugh. These days, he claims that he is a very happy man. And the reason for that is not his recent reunion with his Monty Python cronies, nor his bestselling autobiography, but the wife he so frequently mentions.
‘It’s very nice to be in love at my age,’ he says, absentmindedly stroking his grey hair. ‘It makes almost everything else seem relatively unimportant. I’d never had that experience before.’
Clockwise from top left: John Cleese around the age of one, with his mother, Muriel; With his father, Reg, whom he says had always been ‘loving and kind’; John attended St Peter’s Preparatory School in Weston-super- Mare, where he did well at cricketJohn met Jennifer Wade, a jewellery designer 31 years his junior, in 2009. They married three years later on the Caribbean island of Mustique. John has, of course, been married before: fi rst to actress Connie Booth in 1968 (they stayed together for 10 years), then actress Barbara Trentham (nine years), then psychotherapist Alyce Faye Eichelberger (16 years). John went through a fairly acrimonious divorce with his third wife, and it was often joked that Monty Python reunited in part to pay off his hefty alimony.
LOVE, FINALLY
None of that seems to matter to him any more, though. With Jenny, he feels he has fi nally got it right. ‘I’ve never had this sort of connection before,’ he says. ‘I don’t mean that there was anything badly wrong with my former relationships, but I’ve realised that to love and be loved is a transformative experience, and I’m not sure how many people are lucky enough to undergo it.’With Jenny, he finds he has recaptured the ‘joy’ and the ‘wonder’ of childhood. ‘She has an infi nite capacity for play. It’s quite extraordinary – our relationship is immensely playful. I look at other 75-year-olds... and, well, they don’t strike me as being terribly playful.’
Was this an element that was missing from his other marriages? ‘Oh yes. I think Connie and I had a sense of laughter. With Barbara, not so much. Alyce Faye could be a little playful sometimes, but it was a much more artificial relationship. We were both playing a role, and it wasn’t very authentic.’
John’s relationship with women is a topic he delves into in his autobiography, entitled So Anyway… His mother was, in his own words, a ‘tyrant’.
John during his rst Footlights Revue, 1962’s Double Take, directed by Trevor Nunn. Inset: The Chinese Song: ‘unforgivably racist now but deemed acceptable in 1963'‘It cannot be a coincidence that I spent such a large part of my life in some form of therapy and that the vast majority of the problems I was dealing with involved relationships with women,’ he writes in one particularly revealing paragraph. ‘My ingrained habit of walking on eggshells when dealing with my mother dominated my romantic liaisons for many years.’
Understanding the psychology of women is a ‘lifelong task’ for him, but he says he is improving. ‘I really do think women think and behave very diff erently to men a lot of the time. But then there is a large area of overlap… I think after fi ve years with Jenny, I understand more about the way a woman’s mind works than I did when I met her.’
Psychology, regardless of gender, has always fascinated him. ‘I’ve always been introverted, and thus interested in the inside world. I can’t believe that anyone really wants to study rocks, or even information technology. If it isn’t about the human mind, I’m not really interested.’
WHAT NEXT?
John goes into humorous yet unflinching detail in his book about his feelings of inadequacy as a young man, revealing that he didn’t consider himself ‘remotely physically attractive’. Thankfully, that is no longer the case. ‘I’m fi nally comfortable with myself, and I think it’s only happened in the last few years.‘A psychiatrist once said to me, “You know, the sad thing about most men is they know more about how their car works than how they work.”
‘It’s a slow process of finding the right attitude to yourself. I’m absurdly happy now. I can’t believe that at the age of 75 I’ve finally achieved it.’
It is interesting to discover that writing – and spending time away from the stage – is contributing to this Python’s contentment. ‘I’d much rather write a couple of pages than do a performance.’
Although he enjoyed interacting with the audience during the Monty Python reunion, he wasn’t excited by the show itself. ‘I don’t get much out of acting,’ he says. ‘I don’t want to learn lines any more. I don’t want to have to go on stage and say the same thing that I said last night.’
In fact, now he’s well into his eighth decade, he really doesn’t mind if his last comedic performance is behind him. ‘I think the whole business about leaving a comic legacy has always bored the a*** off me,’ he states, albeit jovially.
As someone who ‘would like to be a spiritual person’, what he does want to do is make a documentary about another of his interests: religion. ‘I would try to go back to the original founders of religion and see what they said, and then examine to what extent their professed followers are following their principles. I think the answer is that they don’t usually.
‘Take the Roman Catholic Church,’ he continues, warming to his theme. ‘Their behaviour towards the paedophile priests – it was that of a power organisation, not an ethical one. It was all about covering it up, making payments. It was not about dealing with it as I think a proper spiritual organisation would have done.’
Left: Terry Jones and John Cleese doing an Alan Whicker sketch. Right: David Hatch, a cast member of Cambridge Circus, and John fooling aroundHe is keen to point out that ‘there are many wonderful people operating within the Roman Catholic Church’ and other religions, and his gripe is not with religious beliefs. After all, he himself ‘needs the sense that this is a meaningful universe’. What he minds is the attitudes of organised religions. ‘Religions themselves start behaving egotistically, because they want to be more powerful. There is an intrinsic paradox between what the founder is teaching and what turns out to be the behaviour of the organisation that’s propagating it.’
He pauses. ‘Perhaps I should start a religion based on cats.’ His head goes back for another guffaw.
Until a television channel picks up the idea of his documentary, he’s happy to pass the time in a more relaxed manner. ‘I would like to spend my days reading, writing, exercising, talking with old friends, looking at paintings, going to the theatre occasionally and most importantly, playing with Jenny and the cats.’
So, Anyway...: The Autobiography, by John Cleese, is published by Random House, priced £20.