Weird geniuses, lots of them. Few people could disagree that the six stars of Monty Python, the troupe behind the most surreal sketch show on television, were all individually brilliant.
With a combined IQ of nearly 1,000, they might be the most intellectually qualified comedians in history. John Cleese has a law degree from the University of Cambridge. Terry Gilliam studied physics, political science and fine arts in Los Angeles. Everyone else – Michael Palin, Eric Idle, the late Terry Jones and Graham Chapman – graduated from Oxbridge.
But apparently there isn't a business brain cell between them. With the possible exception of Palin, their record of financial mismanagement, legal entanglements and ill-fated investments is incredibly pointless.
You wouldn't trust them to run the proverbial whelk stand. In fact, the whelks themselves could probably do a better job.
The surviving Pythons have been feuding on and off for years – and now at least two of their daughters are involved, spreading animosity across generations. This week, 80-year-old Idle lamented his poverty. “I don’t know why people always assume we’re full,” he complained on X (formerly Twitter). “Python is a disaster.” I have to work for a living. “Not easy at this age.”
At back Eric Idle and from left Michael Palin, John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones in Monty Python's Life Of Brian, 1979
Idle was the driving force behind Spamalot, the hit West End and Broadway musical based on her 1975 Arthurian film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. During its long run, the company generated sales of almost £120 million, with Idle receiving the lion's share of the royalties – more than ten times the amount most others received, according to a disgruntled John Cleese.
But last year Idle put his five-bedroom home in the Hollywood Hills on the market for $6.5 million (£5.14 million). It features a wine cellar, swimming pool, koi carp pond and gardens that Idle describes as “an enchanted forest.” He bought it with his wife, former model Tania Kosevich, for more than $1 million in the mid-1990s, and ex-Beatles George Harrison and Ringo Starr were regular visitors. It has now been sold, he says.
Idle blames his changing fortunes on Terry Gilliam's 43-year-old daughter Holly, a media lawyer who took over as head of the Python brand in 2014.
“I think if you put a Gilliam kid as your manager, you shouldn't be that surprised,” he snapped. We don't know how true the claim is, but Idle doubled down by claiming, “One Gilliam is bad enough.” “Two can take out any company.”
Idle's daughter Lily, a 33-year-old photographer and mental health activist, chimed in on social media: “I'm so proud of my dad for finally, finally, finally starting to share the truth.” He always has fought back against tyrants and narcissists and absolutely deserves affirmation and affirmation for that.”
Gilliam, meanwhile, had his own doubts – in a careless moment at a party a few years ago, he commented on his least favorite pythons. Idle was a pathetic case, he said, and clung to his life in Hollywood long after his career was over. Cleese was slightly more bankable, but just as “miserable idiot”.
Holly Gilliam co-produced the Monty Python Live (Mostly) reunion shows in 2014 at the O2 Arena in London, which took place at a time when Terry Jones was showing early signs of the dementia that would kill him six years later should.
At the time it was estimated that each of the five stars earned £2.2 million from the ten appearances.
For most people, that's a lifetime's worth of work crammed into two weeks. But for the Pythons, it was a reluctant obligation forced upon them through a disastrous legal process – the result of a series of guileless decisions and poor financial judgments over the past decades.
Terry Gilliam and daughter Holly, 43, who took over the management of the Python brand in 2014
This created an atmosphere of intense distrust between the stars, rising to the point of complete disgust in some cases. When Idle mocks Gilliam and his family, the comments are not meant in jest. There's real acid in there.
Even when the Pythons were writing their Flying Circus sketches for the BBC in the early 1970s, there were cracks in the group. Cleese threatened to leave after the second series and quit after the third in 1973.
But he was able to take part again in 1975 for the film “The Holy Grail”. Idle, a keen admirer of British rock groups, persuaded bands to invest money – around £10,000 each from Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Genesis and Jethro Tull.
“You are the best supporters,” he cheered. “They don't care and they don't interfere, they don't say, 'Oh, there should be another scene here.' And they didn't want the money back.”
However, donations from rockers were never enough to finance the Holy Grail. Palin's diaries reveal that the Pythons had negotiated with producers and distributors for years, often with a naivety that boggles the mind. At a party for the release of a potboiler of a Python book in November 1973, a producer worked his way around the room with a stack of documents.
“John Gledhill had a sheet of suggestions with him that he had people sign toward the end of the party,” Palin noted in his diary. “I couldn't imagine much of it, but when I saw other signatures I assumed it was just a story development contract to get the £6,000 front money and I signed too.”
Four days later, everyone had concerns. The Pythons met at Cleese's house: “Nobody seemed to talk to each other.” “It was like a morgue,” Palin said.
Another producer named Mark Forstater “went through the clauses.” It became increasingly clear that we were being asked to sign over our copyright to the film, which would be the equivalent of signing every negotiating counter that Python ever had. Palin feared that all this wrangling would end in a “personal dispute” – made worse because “there is no villain in this, no easy target for us to slander and slander.” Both Gledhill and Mark are nice People.” There is no higher praise for Palin, a truly kind and loyal man.
Few people ever describe Cleese as “nice.” But he also didn't recognize the dangers of trusting self-confident producers and financial advisors.
In a candid moment two years ago he admitted: “I never knew how much money I had.” I remember someone in America asked me where my investments were and I said: “I have no idea at all. “
“I never understand money and don't find it very interesting, which is a real disadvantage in the world we live in. I advise anyone who is vague about it to be less vague because it cost me a lot.”
“I just relied on people and in one or two cases it was very good, but in one or two others it was disastrous.”
The “personal dispute” with Mark Forstater reached a crisis in 2013 when the producer – who now described himself as “the seventh Python” – claimed that he was owed royalties as the film's co-creator.
“Maybe that's what he wanted, but the Pythons would never accept it,” Palin protested at a Supreme Court hearing. “He wasn't the creator of the film. He came on board, he became a producer, but I don't think he's entitled to anything beyond that.”
A judge disagreed and the Pythons were ordered to pay more than £1m in royalties and legal costs. At this point, Cleese was so angry about the unequal distribution of Spamalot's loot that he referred to Eric Idle as “Yoko”.
Comparing Idle to the woman who supposedly broke up the Beatles was a particularly malicious innuendo since Idle was so proud of his friendships within the band.
Idle removed Cleese's recorded Voice of God post from Spamalot, saying: “I surgically removed it.” He already had a lot of money – he's always in a financial crisis. “I just sit at home and watch the checks come in and then send them to John in case he gets married again.”
That was a barbed reference to Cleese's disastrous £12.5 million divorce from third wife Alyce Faye Eichelberger in 2007. The settlement freed him and forced him to also sell his art collection and memorabilia from blockbusters such as A Fish called Wanda” for sale as his home in Holland Park, west London, which cost £2.5 million. He also handed Eichelberger the deeds to her £1million apartment in New York's chic Upper West Side. The O2 shows in 2014 helped a little to rehabilitate his finances, but the sell-out performances did not satisfy Idle, who wanted to carry on. Palin blocked this, partly because he knew that his closest friend in the gang, Terry Jones, was worse off than most people realized.
Eric Idle's daughter Lily, pictured with her father, is a 33-year-old photographer and mental health activist. She chimed in on social media: “I'm so proud of my dad for finally, finally, finally starting to tell the truth.”
“This is the last time we will work together,” Palin told the BBC this year. He also suggested that Idle and Cleese were responsible for being prima donnas.
“John and Eric had lifestyles, how shall I put it, they were a bit more complicated.” They wanted to go on holiday to Barbados and so on, much more than Terry and I, who were just looking forward to having a pint in the pub. They were stars and we weren't, and the problem with stars is that they can be a bit difficult. So there were occasional difficulties between those who had higher expectations of life and those of us at the more modest end of the writing spectrum.”
Despite signing the film rights deal he knew little about, Palin showed the Pythons' greatest financial acumen by purchasing and eloping two houses on either side of the north London terraced house where he had lived since the late 1960s. Jones left behind a financial mess when he died in 2020 at the age of 77, eight years after marrying his second wife, Anna Soderstrom – a Swedish knitwear designer who was 41 years his junior and almost a decade younger than his two children from a previous one marriage was.
In 2016, he signed a will in her favor, which children Bill and Sally claimed was an “actual complete disinheritance”. He had already transferred his £2.8 million north London home into Anna's name along with his own. It was alleged that two days after signing the will, Anna moved out, taking her daughter Siri with her and leaving Terry in the care of carers.
Although he directed the Python films, including Life Of Brian in 1979, and pursued a second successful career as an academic (he was an expert on Chaucer), Jones was constantly broke.
The money from the O2 shows, he admitted, could finally help him pay off his mortgage.
Terry Gilliam, the Flying Circus cartoonist, enjoyed the most famous career after Python as a Hollywood director. His films include “Brazil” with Robert De Niro, “The Fisher King” with Robin Williams and “Twelve Monkeys” with Bruce Willis.
But he had a reputation for financial ruthlessness, which frightened even the most spendthrift L.A. investors. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen opened in 1988 with a budget of $23 million and over time doubled to $46 million – £47 million, or £94 million in today's money. Despite this, only $8 million (£17 million) was needed.
LR: Michael Palin, John Cleese, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam and Eric Idle attend the IFC and Bafta premiere of Monty Python: Almost The Truth (Lawyers Cut) in New York in 2009
Yet in 2015 he was considered the richest Python, with a bank balance of perhaps £25 million. Cleese was the worst off at a reported £6m… and that was probably optimistic. Since splitting from Eichelberger, he has staged repeated “entertainment tours,” a grueling schedule of live performances that he calls “Feeding the Beast.” He left his homes in Britain and Montecito, California, to live on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, which has no income or capital gains tax.
“Apparently I got off lightly,” he complains, “because my lawyer points out how much more I would have had to pay if my ex-wife had contributed anything to the relationship – if we had children or even had a two-way conversation .'
This financial catastrophe was also caused by incomprehensible naivety.
When Cleese told his friend, film director Michael Winner, that he and Eichelberger were getting a divorce, the comedian announced lightly, “It'll be nice and quick.” Winner replied, “What planet are you on?” It will be terrible.'
A year later, long after the event, Cleese grumbled: “If ever there was a reason for a prenuptial agreement, this is it.”
He's still paying. Unable to tour during lockdown, he had to record “a personal threat, insult or taunt” for fans.
Cleese, who was charging £249 apiece, was hardly looking for money. But if Idle is as penniless as he claims, maybe he should think about that too.