Reflections In a Jaundiced Eye

by Florence King

  No American can avoid the national disease of “decaditis”—I indulge in it in this book. We type people according to the decade that matches their personality. The uptight are very fifties, nonconformists are very sixties, the self-absorbed are “coming from” the seventies. No sooner is a decade over than we start waxing nostalgic about it, no matter how bad it was. Our practice of zeroing in on the past so we can hurry up and talk about it makes me feel as if I were trapped in a batty time capsule with a bevy of ancient Romans who keep saying “Boy, this decline and fall is really something, isn’t it?”

  Fiddling with the past is a sign of deep national stress, like the Brumaire and Thermidor nonsense that grew out of the French Revolution when the Jacobins renamed the months. Confident people are relaxed about the past. Consider that intriguing dodge favored by Victorian novelists:

  “In the spring of 18—, Lord Devon called on the vicar.”

  Or the Sir Walter Scott sentence:

  “When the reign of the Plantagenet Lion still shimmered in the noonday sun … .”

  Richard the Lionheart reigned from 1189-1199, a nice neat decade, but neither Scott nor his readers felt obligated to arrange themselves for the convenience of people who make miniseries like “Call To Glory,” whose whole point was a slavish obeisance to the sixties. They could afford to be vague about dates because they enjoyed a healthy sense of participation in the national continuity celebrated by such novels. By contrast, Americans must get what we can out of the Lesley-Ann Down, Harrison Ford movie blurbed “Love hasn’t been like this since 1943!”

  Americans have regularly fallen victim to the disease of decade loyalty. Our foremost casualty was F. Scott Fitzgerald, troubadour of the twenties, whose adherence to the Flaming Youth lifestyle that he recorded killed him at forty-four. Another casualty is that stormy petrel of the New Deal known as the “little old lady in tennis shoes” who never got out of the thirties. Today’s yuppies, whose materialism would go unnoticed had they not been hippies first, acquired the habit of going to extremes in the sixties, the decade they cannot shake off.

  The latest victim of America’s time warp is Nancy Reagan, who has made it obsessively clear that she wants her husband to have “a place in history.”

  Okay, babe, here it is:

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the Paradigm of the United States.”

  P: Well, my opening statement is with regard to the annexation of Schleswig-Holstein. I was awakened at four this morning to take a call from our ambassador in Copenhagen, who asked not to be identified. He informed me that King Frederick VII of Denmark has seized the German-speaking Danish duchy of Schleswig and the Danish-speaking German duchy of Holstein. The king justified this dastardly act on the grounds that he is Duke of Schleswig and Holstein even though the Almanach de Gotha lists him as Duke in Schleswig and Holstein. America’s vital interests are clearly at state, so I have dispatched Fort Bragg. Now I’ll take questions. Sam? No, you forgot your red dress. Helen?

  Q: Mr. Paradigm, isn’t there more to the Schleswig-Holstein question than the dispute over the duke’s title?

  P: You know, I’d like to share with you something Margaret Thatcher told me. She said only three people have ever understood what the annexation of Schleswig-Holstein is all about. One was Prince Albert, who died at forty-four. The second was a Heidelberg professor who went mad, and the third was Lord Palmerston, who said he forgot whatever it was that he understood. It’s a troubled land. Sam?

  Q: Sir, what American interests are there in Schleswig-Holstein that could possibly justify the deployment of so many troops?

  P: They’re not troops, they’re a presence. To counteract the force.

  Q: What force, sir?

  P: The evil force. It’s everywhere. That’s why we have a presence in Llanfairpwllgwngllgogferychywll. Vice Paradigm Bush toured it last week wearing a leek deflector. Afterwards he called me and said we’re not going to let a cowardly bunch of force change America’s policy with regard to the wars of Edward the First.

  Q: Mr. Paradigm, what is the force up to in Schleswig-Holstein?

  P: The same thing it’s up to in Bosnia-Herzegovina—the destabililization of political parties. As you know, these consist of the Progressive Conservative Liberals, the Constitutional Reactionary Democrats, the Counterinsurgent Anti-Revolutionary Republican Royalists, the Anti-Clerical Revisionist Moderate Socialists, the Neocapitalist Reform Syndicalists, and the Doltz. The force is trying to turn them into warring factions.

  Q: Mr. Paradigm, is the force behind Holstein’s anti-woman declaration?

  P: Well, Sarah, I’ve never heard of any anti-woman declaration with regard to Holstein.

  Q: You have so. It’s been on your desk for eight hundred years. It’s called the Salic Law and it says that no country in the Holy Roman Empire can have a woman king.

  P: Sarah, we’re going to have an X-rated force here in a minute.

  Q: You know what I’m talking about. Frederick VII doesn’t have any children. When he dies, Prince Christian of Glucksberg is going to claim the Danish throne on the grounds that he married Frederick’s cousin. Holstein still considers itself part of the Holy Roman Empire, and they said they won’t accept a king who goes through a woman. What are you going to do about that?

  P: We’re doing everything we can.

  Q: Mr. Paradigm, what is America’s role in the Holy Roman Empire?

  P: The same role we’re playing in the War of Jenkins’s Ear. Peacekeeping.

  Q: Sir, many people fear that our involvement in the War of Jenkins’s Ear is going to become ‘another Punic.’

  P: Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Our commitment in the Punic War was to guarantee safe passage across the Alps for Hannibal’s elephants. Jenkins’s Ear is a lot smaller.

  Q: Mr. Paradigm, why should America care that a Spanish pirate cut off an English naval officer’s ear? What’s the clear and present danger in that?

  P: Escalation. Vice Paradigm Bush toured Captain Jenkins’s ship wearing a steel-lined … . Well, I guess I’ll take another question.

  Q: Mr. Paradigm, the Elector of Saxony has taken advantage of the confusion surrounding the War of Jenkins’s Ear to have himself crowned King of Poland with the support of Russia and Austria, over the objections of Spain, which has threatened to declare war on Italy for the return of the duchy of Tuscany now held by Austria, which is demanding that France cede Lorraine to Prussia in exchange for making Don Carlos king of Naples and Sicily. Do you foresee our involvement in this?

  P: You bet. That’s what America’s all about. If you want to be a peacekeeper and Mary Queen of Scots isn’t available, always look for an Elector of Saxony.

  Q: Sir, is there any truth to the rumor that Queen Draga of Serbia was defenestrated?

  P: I’m not going to get into that. As far as this administration is concerned, she was thrown out the window.

  Q: Mr. Paradigm, there seems to be some confusion about our involvement in the attempted flight of Louis the Sixteenth and Marie Antoinette from revolutionary Paris. Yesterday Secretary Schultz said we helped them escape, but this morning White House Chief of Staff Howard Baker said we helped capture them. Who’s lying?

  P: Nobody. We wanted to be fair to both sides, so Bob planned their escape and Howard planned their capture.

  Q: Mr. Paradigm, if we could move on to domestic matters. Now that Thomas De Quincey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Edgar Allan Poe have all been forced to resign as chairman of the Just Say No To Drugs Commission, who’s the next candidate on Ed Meese’s list?

  P: You know, I’d like to share with you something that the first Eskimo graduate of West Point said as he lay wounded at Marathon. “Wherever there’s a force, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a faction, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s an archduke beatin’ up a count, I’ll be there. You might never see me again but you’ll be hearin’ about me ‘cause I just signed up as a non-combat advisor to Vercingetorix the Gaul.”

  Well, God bles
s America, and God bless us every one.

  “Thank you, Mr. Paradigm.”

  11

  THE COLOR PURPLE: WHY I AM A ROYALIST

  I felt as if the world had come to an end on that hot April day in 1945 when the announcer broke into “Tom Mix” with the news that Roosevelt was dead.

  I was home with Granny and Jensy, our cleaning woman. We stared at each other in mute shock, then did what apartment dwellers all over America were doing at that moment: we ran out into the hall.

  It was near dinnertime; all the neighbor women had been cooking and their floured hands looked like white gloves. While we were huddled together in the hall, Mama returned from the grocery store. Granny had discovered that we were out of pepper and sent her to buy some. Usually when she had a small package she could not resist tossing it in the air, but this time her tomboyish swagger had deserted her. She held the little bag at her side in an uncharacteristically sedate way, behaving for once like the perfect Southern lady of Granny’s dreams. She looked at the weeping women and spoke in a flat voice.

  “Now that little hick is president.”

  No one had thought of Truman until now. The mention of his name provoked exclamations of despair and fear that rose up like a collective moan. Orderly transition meant nothing to the crowd in the hallway; in those first shocked moments, Harry Truman was not the vice president but a usurper.

  Being reminded of small-town men who wore stetsons and spoke in rural accents was all Jensy needed. She screamed and fainted. Everyone ran for ice. They worked over her, fanning, patting, and pulling her arms up over her head until she came to. We got her back into our apartment and helped her to the sofa; Mama moved the electric fan to the table beside her and I got her a glass of water. The radio was still on, playing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Looking out the window, I saw a streetcar motorman put his head down on the controls and sob. Across the street, the Chinese man who ran the laundry stood in front of his shop, gripping his elbows as though longing for the comfort of an ancestral garment in which to hide his hands.

  Herb came home. Always stoic, he was now more so. Clearing his throat, he spoke with difficulty.

  “I think we should drink a toast to Mr. Roosevelt.” Glancing at Jensy’s tear-streaked face, his remote British features softened. “How about a whiskey collins, old girl?”

  She drew herself up in outraged virtue. “Mr. King, you knows me better den dat. Whiskey give you a purple nose, a green liver, a red eye, a black heart, an’ it put a yeller streak right up de middle of yo’ back. Jes’ bring me a glass of mix widout de motion.”

  We relaxed; she sounded like her old self again. Herb fixed three whiskey collinses, a frosty glass of lemon juice, soda, and sugar for Jensy, and ginger ale with a dash of sherry for me. We raised our glasses.

  “He was a gentleman,” said Herb.

  “Quality,” Jensy agreed, blowing her nose. “Dat new l’il peckerwood ain’t.”

  “He sold shirts!” Granny trumpeted.

  We drove Jensy home. Lately she had been complaining about the trash who neither sowed nor reaped who were ruining her neighborhood and giving respectable colored people a bad name. But on this night the Sodomites, Jezebels and Satan’s limbs of her tirades were nowhere in sight. The street was deserted; decorum reigned everywhere on April 12, 1945, the day that women cooked in white gloves.

  I am a member of the only generation of Americans since 1776 to have experienced something very close to the permanence and psychological security of monarchy.

  Adults regarded the New Deal as the heyday of the Common Man, but we children of the thirties cut our teeth on absolutism. Like Addie Pray in Paper Moon, our imaginations were fired by this “Frankie Roosevelt” who did so many magical things. It was obvious that he was eternal and immortal because he had been president for as long as we could remember, so long that the words “president” and “Roosevelt” ran together like the “Now-Ilaymedowntosleep” that we rattled off each night. Because we became aware of him while we were in the fairy tale stage, it was easy to believe that his voice floating out of the radio was like the royal touch that banished evil and restored happiness. Easy, too, to transform his “Martin, Barton, and Fish” into a litany that made us nod three times as we rolled church and state together into one soft bed.

  The modus operandi variously attributed to Jesuits and totalitarian governments—“Give me a child until he is seven and he is mine forever”—also applies to Roosevelt babies. At least to this one. I can’t take another election; I’m ready for an American monarchy.

  The people who can be counted on to disagree with me most violently are those who devour supermarket newspapers about Charles and Di, Andrew and Fergie, and the alleged meeting between the ghost of Princess Grace and the ghost of Elvis the King.

  My enemies on the other side of the socio-economic fence are the left-leaning liberal intelligentsia who unplugged their phones during “Upstairs, Downstairs” and videotaped “Fall of Eagles” so they could follow the fortunes of Bertie, Alix, Nicky, Vicky, Dicky, Willy, Fritz, and Sasha. Would the Kaiser’s withered arm give him an inferiority complex? Was Elisabeth of Austria going to have a nervous breakdown over Rudolph’s suicide? How much did Alix know about Bertie’s affairs?

  Americans are the Uriah Heeps of democracy, wringing our hands over equal rights from the depths of a purple velvet closet. Though few will admit it, in many ways we already have a monarchy. The fanfare surrounding our summit conferences recalls Henry VIII and Philip of France meeting on the Field of the Cloth of Gold. We crowned the world’s last czar—of energy—and our lust for titles is so consuming that, alone of all nations, we let our politicians retain elective and appointive titles after leaving office: Joseph P. Kennedy was called “Ambassador” for the rest of his life even though he served only three years in London.

  The itch to crown someone, if only a Corn Harvest Queen, pervades our populist heartland. Our street gangs are Dukes, our marauding businessmen are Barons, and the favorite headline word in women’s publications is Milady. Our television talk shows resemble court levées; we have turned People magazine into our very own Debrett’s Peerage, and we invade the privacy of public figures like courtiers crowding into Louis XIV’s bedchamber as he sat on the royal pot.

  The celebrity look-alike craze a few years ago had all the earmarks of the medieval changeling myth. Ostensibly in the name of feminism, complex marriage contracts fit for the Landgravin of Hesse-Darmstadt have replaced the hope chest in the hearts and minds of American brides. The historical novel is back, more Sir-stuffed and Lord-laden than ever, and we have fallen so in love with the aristocratic ideal of heroism that we attribute it to absolutely anybody: the mentally retarded housewife with cancer of the feet who enters a jogging marathon is received as Boadicea.

  The most glaring examples of our closet royalism involve the occupants of the White House. Our president is the world’s only democratically elected head of state who has his own personal anthem, with lyrics by that foremost champion of heraldic pageantry, Sir Walter Scott. “Hail to the Chief” is from Canto II of “The Lady of the Lake.”

  Every other democracy calls its leader’s wife “Mrs.” but we call ours “First Lady,” a rarefied appellation borrowed from British royal etiquette that goes back to medieval times. When the king is unmarried and there is no Queen Dowager (his mother) and no Princess Royal (his oldest sister), the wife of the oldest Royal Duke (the King’s brother) becomes the ranking woman of the realm. Because she goes first in processions and receives other perquisites normally enjoyed by a Queen Consort, she is designated “First Lady of England.” Designated, not called; having at least one and probably several titles to begin with, she does not, like her ostensibly egalitarian White House counterpart, crave another.

  Forced to elect our presidents, we do our best to ennoble their children. John Van Buren returned home from a visit to England to find himself dubbed “Prince John” merely because he had danced with the
young Princess Victoria. We called Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter “Princess Alice,” but the fun really started in her cousin Franklin’s administration.

  Following the scrapes of Royal Dukes has always been a favorite pastime of bona fide subjects. The English were mightily entertained by the seven dissipated sons of George III, who sold army commissions and tortured their valets. Not to be outdone, and willing to make do with anything, New Deal Americans kept tabs on the traffic tickets amassed by Jimmy, Elliott, Franklin Jr., and John. As time went on, tracking the marriages, divorces, and preppily named offspring of the Roosevelt sons and their sister Anna became a national obsession; Depression-era Americans sounded like gouty squires poring over a stud book as they discussed the lineage of the various Sistys and Buzzys who swarmed through the decade of the Common Man.

  The royalist excesses of the Kennedy years are too familiar to list, except to note that the most startling addition to the national vocabulary accrued not to a Kennedy but to Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson: suddenly a large Texas ranch was called a fief.

  Richard Nixon gave us some respite from our dirty little secret by forging an “imperial presidency” that we could criticize in self-righteous democratic tones, but he stuck us with an unelected successor like a Roman emperor adopting a nephew. When the nephew announced the self-evident truth, “I’m a Ford, not a Lincoln,” we relaxed, secure in the knowledge that we really were an egalitarian democracy after all. But two years later, something terrible happened.

  Enter the House of Hookworm. Jimmy and Rosalynn served up a Nicholas-and-Alexandra marriage; Brother Billy was the regicide Philippe Egalité; Sister Ruth the preacherwoman was Cardinal Richelieu; Gloria’s star-crossed son languishing in prison supplied a Stuart touch; Miz Lillian was Franz Josefs mother, Archduchess Sophie, who was known as “the only man the Hapsburgs ever produced”; and little Amy was a horse-faced Infanta straight out of the Almanach de Gotha.