Unfettered and Alive

by Anne Summers

  In July 1986, just a month after the Weinberger interview, I was scheduled to talk with Opposition Leader John Howard. I had booked a fancy restaurant in Washington DC for my dinner with him, hoping it would not be too noisy because he had indicated that he was going to have some things to say. I’d seen him the previous night at a private dinner in New York hosted by Australia’s Consul-General, John Taylor, at the plush Beekman Place apartment that went with the job, and attended by a small number of investment bankers and their wives. I was the only journalist present. I’d been startled to see the way that these bankers, especially the Managing Director of Morgan Stanley, put Howard through his paces. He had looked uncomfortable and had not performed well.

  ‘That man has no faith in himself,’ remarked the wife of one of those who attended as they drove me home.

  I disagreed with that assessment. John Howard was not impressive, but he was ambitious and he was game. He was clearly surprised at the tough time he was being given by these men who would, to a large degree, determine Australia’s financial standing in the world markets, but he did not shirk the questions or dissemble. I actually found it horrifying to see these men—these bankers—treat a putative Australian Prime Minister as if he were a schoolboy taking a test. He had, after all, been the Treasurer of Australia for six years until the change of government in 1983. The men at this table had already decided to back Vice-President George Bush as the next President. They were utterly confident their wishes would prevail. Wall Street was coming back into the political game in ways that had not been seen since President Roosevelt curbed its influence following the excesses that led to the 1929 crash. Perhaps I did need to pay more attention to what was happening there.

  During our dinner in Washington John Howard acknowledged that he was not popular but he felt that might actually be an advantage. People would turn to him because, like his political heroes Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, he would not be afraid to take tough action which, he argued, people were starting to realise was needed. He was earnest and spoke with conviction as he told me he thought there was an enormous sense of disappointment in Bob Hawke developing in Middle Australia. ‘If there’s a realisation that things are crook and that changes are needed,’ he said, ‘there can be quite a significant change in public opinion.’

  ‘The times will suit me,’ he said.3

  I hoped fervently that my tape-recorder, sitting in the breadbasket between us, had picked up this phrase. The restaurant was far noisier than I had anticipated. Howard had confirmed that we were having an on-the-record interview and he had given careful thought to what he was saying. The phrase ‘the times will suit me’ became forever associated with him. It would continue to be quoted the whole time he was in public life, although not always in the way he had meant. It was used to mock him when Andrew Peacock deposed him as Liberal Party leader in 1989. It would be ten years before John Howard became Prime Minister of Australia and by then the times were indeed very different, but he was nothing if not adaptable, and he recalibrated himself to accommodate them and went on to win three elections, becoming one of Australia’s longest-serving Prime Ministers. His ‘the times will suit me’ interview with me remained an early defining moment in Howard’s dogged journey to the top.

  In August 1986 I went to San Francisco, to cover a meeting of what had been known as ANZUS (the Australian, New Zealand and United States alliance). At this meeting the US formally suspended its security obligations to New Zealand, following that country’s refusal to allow nuclear-powered US ships into NZ waters. Since the US had a policy of declining to declare which ships were under such power, the refusal amounted to a banning of American ships from NZ. The US reacted swiftly and strongly: New Zealand is ‘a friend, but not an ally’, declared President Reagan. So it was just Australia and the US at this meeting, and it was a very big story.

  I loved the elegant architecture of San Francisco; the rollercoaster-like dips in the streets and the harbour with its Golden Gate Bridge forming a backdrop to the city views, just like in Sydney. American cities each had their distinctive styles. You would never confuse, say, Chicago with New Orleans or Boston with Los Angeles. In Australia, once you left the inner-city, the suburbs tended to meld into an homogenous sameness. San Francisco was divided into distinct districts: Chinatown, the Tenderloin, the Castro, Haight-Ashbury. I especially liked the Italian district, where in 1906 the local merchants had helped put out the Great Fire with casks of wine. Or so it was said. I went to Tosca’s, a coffee bar where the jukebox played only operatic arias—and Patti Page. I felt absurdly patriotic to find Joan Sutherland among the opera singers.

  I met up with Kim Beazley who, like me, had arrived a day early. I’d known Beazley reasonably well in Canberra, and liked him for his openness and his intellectual curiosity. I had thought that we would probably just stroll around the tourist areas but while in the United States Beazley, who was now the Australian Defence Minister, came with a black stretch limo and a Secret Service detail, so we saw the sights in style. I was amazed that the long vehicle was able to negotiate the notorious serpentine-like turns of Lombard Street. Each time we got out of the car to inspect something, or to duck into a café, the Secret Service men followed at a discreet distance. That did not matter until Beazley got the idea that he wanted to visit the famous City Lights Bookstore, opened in 1953 by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the renowned hangout of the Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg and writers such as Jack Kerouac. It did not look good arriving at such a place in such a car. It looked even worse when the Secret Service guys, with their buzz cuts and their walkie-talkies and earpieces, came into the bookshop with us. Beazley was fascinated by the place and spent a good hour browsing, including a fair bit of time in the Marxist section. The other patrons were astonished but managed to contain whatever outrage they felt at this intrusion by the enemy. Beazley made a few purchases, including a book on the justification for war. I could not help but compare Beazley and Weinberger, two men running Defence departments, at a time when global military tensions were high, who both had interests and curiosities beyond the responsibilities of their jobs. Perhaps this accounted for Beazley’s unusual approach to his. I don’t think any other Defence Minister had asked his department for a paper on the moral justification for war.

  Although I loved the Level Club, I was worried about how much it was costing me. I had underestimated the cost of living when I’d negotiated my salary. I was paying 60 per cent of my income in rent and I had to pay city, state and federal income taxes as well as social security and other deductions. I had to buy furniture for the apartment and I was finding it impossible to get by. I had not been this poor since I was seventeen living in Melbourne, and having to choose between having lunch or taking the tram to work. I had savings in Australia but I was reluctant to use them to subsidise my life in New York, especially as the exchange rate was terrible. Nor, I told myself, should I have to. I was earning what should be good money. It was having the security of a salary that had prompted me to come to New York, but in January 1987, although my pay was increased 3 per cent, all of it was taken up by Reagan’s tax ‘reforms’, and I was notified my rent would increase by $50 a month. I would have to find somewhere cheaper.

  I looked at an apartment at 14 West 10th Street, an elegant tree-lined street that was supposedly one of the best blocks in the entire city, in the heart of Greenwich Village. Mark Twain had lived in this house for a year in 1900. The apartment was elegant and light-filled, occupying the entire ground floor of the brownstone. It was the kind of place that New Yorkers lusted after. I was told I was extraordinarily lucky to even have a chance to bid for it. Yes, I would have to dip into my savings to pay the unrefundable ‘key money’ if my application to rent the place was successful, but at $1500 a month it was considerably less than the $2000 I was currently paying. Even so, I hesitated. I liked the security of a doorman building, and it meant my mail and dry-cleaning would be looked after when I was travelling, eve
n if the doormen were sometimes a little too inquisitive and, on one occasion when I brought an African-American man home, judging by the way he looked at me, censorious. Back in the Village, trying to picture myself living at ground-floor level, I found myself knowing I’d never feel safe. I decided I’d stay on the Upper West Side, look for ways to economise, and ask Suich if he would increase my rent allowance. It was in so many ways the right decision. My financial circumstances would change dramatically before the end of the year, enabling me to buy an apartment in the Level Club; it would be the only address I ever had in New York. But, more saliently, I was spared living in the building where an act of unspeakable violence took place later that year.

  The numbers of homeless people in New York horrified me. Many of them slept on the streets, even in the coldest weather. There were as many as ten people, bundled-up against the weather, most of them men, and African-American, just on the one block between my apartment and the subway station. They would rattle cups in the hope of attracting some change. At night, human bundles seeking shelter and rest were in every doorway. It was confronting but I felt impotent. How were you supposed to respond? Choose one person and become his regular donor? Spread around whatever you felt able to share? As an Australian, I strongly believed it was the government’s responsibility to provide shelter and other services, but I was in the US now. Things were different here. There was also a lot of street crime and I learned to be alert and defensive. I once found a man’s fingers inside my bag as I joined the crush of people threading their way into the 72nd Street subway. When I removed his hand, he just kept moving, avoiding eye contact or any acknowledgement that he’d been trying to pickpocket me. It was a little more dramatic the time I was mugged. I had broken my own rule of being constantly alert, and was strolling along my own street, just a few metres from my front door, my head in the clouds when I heard a terrible scream. I soon realised the noise was coming from my own mouth and that I was reacting instinctually to a man who, standing close behind me, had a knife near my throat as he slashed the strap and made off with my shoulder-bag. It was over in seconds. He’d ran back to his car which—incredibly—was idling right there in the street, holding up the traffic, and sped off. People came from everywhere to help and I quickly recovered my composure. I was upset, of course, because almost everything of value I possessed was in that bag, along with a lot of cash because I was taking a trip the next morning. I was surprised how seriously the police treated what I assumed was a run-of-the-mill mugging. I went to the precinct and was shown mug shots; I was given a crime number: it was 60 something.

  ‘Is that how many crimes have been committed in the city so far this year?’ I asked. It was New Year’s Day.

  The officer looked at me as if to say, ‘Get real, lady.’

  ‘That’s the number of crimes so far today in this precinct,’ he said.

  But not even this crime could daunt my enthusiasm for the city. Apart from the everyday theatre of the street, the best thing about living in New York was the ease with which you could see, hear and even meet some of the most powerful, creative or just plain interesting people of the era. I’d attended the wedding of Hester Eisenstein, an American who’d lived in Sydney for some years and become involved in the women’s movement. She had written a book on the phenomenon of femocrats. Hester’s was the first wedding of a contemporary (rather than, say, a brother) that I’d attended since the 1960s. No one I knew got married anymore. It was also my first Jewish wedding, and I was fascinated by the rituals including the stamping on the glass, but I was even more impressed to learn that Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy were among the guests. I’d written an undergraduate essay on their 1966 classic Monopoly Capital, whose extensive documentation of the Yankee invasions, takeovers and coups against elected governments in Latin America in the service of American capitalism had made it a bible of the student left. And now I would have a chance to meet these two god-like figures. Someone pointed them out. I suppose I did not exactly expect them to be wearing black berets and smoking cheroots, but I certainly could not reconcile the two balding fat men in suits sitting on the other side of the room with the romantic figments of my youthful imagination.

  New York is never boring, but sometimes it outdoes itself. In one magic week, in early November 1986, I went, in a state of giddy enthralment, from one amazing event to another. First, on Saturday afternoon, I had gone to an intimate benefit at the Juilliard School and heard both Isaac Stern and Yo-Yo Ma play. At drinks afterwards, I met the Australian architect Harry Seidler, who was in town to work with Donald Trump on the New York property tycoon’s bid for the Sydney casino. Then I was introduced to James Wolfensohn, the Australian expatriate of many years, a real Renaissance man who as well as being a leading investment banker, played the cello, would preside over the restoration of Carnegie Hall and, later in 1995, become President of the World Bank. On Tuesday I’d gone to a foreign correspondents’ event and heard the great economist J.K. Galbraith talk about the military power of the Superpowers. I was astonished to find that he was 78 (which I thought then was very old) and that not only was he amazingly lucid but he had a liberal outlook that was becoming so rare as to be almost extinct in America in the mid-1980s. Then on Friday I had interviewed the French film director Jean-Jacques Beineix, whose new film Betty Blue I’d watched at a private screening a few days earlier. Betty Blue went on to get on Oscar nomination and win various awards, but my real interest in Beineix was that he had directed the cult classic Diva. I felt quite the fan girl sitting down with him at the Parker Meridian Hotel. And then there was the morning when working my way through the Sunday New York Times I’d spotted a small notice about a workshop performance of a new Terrence McNally play that afternoon. An hour later, having paid my $12, I was sitting in the first row at the Manhattan Theatre Club. Right in front of me were F. Murray Abraham and Kathy Bates, in bed together, and about to begin their performance of Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune. I knew Abraham from his sullen Salieri in the 1984 Milos Forman movie Amadeus, always bitter at being outshone by the mercurial Mozart, but I had not then heard of Kathy Bates. In 1990 she would win an Academy Award, playing a deranged fan in the adaption of Stephen King’s book Misery, the first of many notable movie performances. Back on stage, the actors suddenly flung back the covers and Abraham leapt out of bed and, stark naked, began to pace around the stage. John Malkovich was doing the same in Burn This, another off-Broadway play that was running in New York at the time, and which also would go on to become a smash hit on Broadway, but I was startled to see stage nudity for the first time. You’re not in Canberra anymore, I told myself.

  I was grateful to be able to have these uplifting experiences after a gruelling visit from my parents a week earlier. I’d flown to London to meet them, together we’d gone on a driving tour of Ireland and then to New York, where I had planned to show them all the sights. They had never visited before. But my father was not well. In April 1986—just three weeks after I’d arrived in New York—he learned that he had prostate cancer. The recommended treatment was for his testicles to be removed, I learned from a panicked phone call from my mother very early one morning. He became immensely depressed about this.