by Roger Ebert
One winter’s day I set out to walk across Hyde Park from Kensington Gardens to Hyde Park Corner. It was raining, but that was fine with me; I had my Simpsons umbrella. What I didn’t know was that the gates to the park were locked at dusk. This I discovered on a notice inside the gate I’d intended to leave by. I could see the traffic hurrying past up the road from the direction of the Albert Memorial. There were a lot of taxis. Unfortunately, an iron fence topped with spikes stood between me and the road. It began raining harder. I scouted and found a low tree branch that might just allow me to stand atop the railing. That meant climbing a hill slippery with wet grass. I failed twice and became smeared with mud. Digging in the point of my umbrella, I finally made my way up the hill and onto the limb and balanced on the fence, but it was a good leap down to the sidewalk and I could easily imagine myself with a sprained ankle. Or worse: impaled on the fence.
Pedestrians hurried past, apparently not seeing me. I tried calling for help. I was ignored. Well, if you were hurrying through the park in the rain and saw a fat man with a soaked coat smeared with mud, balanced on a fence with a filthy umbrella, what would you do?
“Hey, look, it’s Roger Ebert!” an American kid said. He was with a group of friends. “No way! Is that really you?”
“Yes it is,” I said. If I had been Prince Charles I would have answered to “Roger Ebert.”
“Far out, dude! What are you doing up there?”
“Trying to get down,” I observed.
They helped me down and asked for my autograph, which I gladly supplied. I opened my umbrella, hailed a cab, and was at 22 Jermyn Street in ten minutes. That was one of the occasions when I lit the gas fire and treasured it beyond all reason. After warming up, I filled the big tub for a bath. It was deep, and as long as I was tall. I tinted it a bright green with Wilberg’s Pine Bath Essence and inhaled warm pine and reflected that you are never warmer than when you have been cold.
Word came in 1990 that Henry Junior had taken over operations and closed the hotel for renovations. In his announcement, he wrote, “I agreed to buy the hotel from my father, famous for his wonderful eccentricity.” Chaz and I stopped in to inspect. He was filled with enthusiasm. He was fitting it out elegantly with new rugs and draperies, sofas and chairs, beds, the lot. Of course he removed the gas fires. I was pleased to see he was keeping the old furniture, purchased in 1915 by his grandparents. “After we had it refinished,” he said, “it turned out to be very good stuff. You couldn’t touch it today.”
Henry Junior said the workmen had sorted through the memories of three generations. In the basement, he said, he discovered a cache of naughty French postcards from the 1930s. Inside a walled-over hall closet on the second floor he found his mother’s hoarded supply of sugar from the days of rationing in World War II. I realize that never during all those years did I ever figure out where the hotel’s kitchen was.
The Eyrie Mansion was renamed 22 Jermyn Street. Perhaps “Eyrie Mansion” was possibly not an ideal name for a hotel. Chaz and I stayed there many times. I liked it, she adored it. When I said I missed the gas fire that you lit with a match, she gave me one of those looks I got when I said I would rather drive a 1957 Studebaker than a new car. As a luxury hotel, 22 Jermyn Street prospered. Croissants and cappuccino were now served as an alternative to full English breakfast. There’d be a flower on the tray. Clients included movie stars and politicians like Gary Hart, who valued its privacy and its absence of a lobby. Doddy and Henry Senior would have been proud. But in autumn 2009 Henry Junior wrote to us: “Sadly the lease has expired and the greater part of the city block in which the hotel is located is to be redeveloped by the Crown Estate as a project named St James’s Gateway, over the next two or three years. Like much else in London, it is planned that this very comprehensive and handsome project will be completed in time for the Olympic Games in 2012.” Just what Olympic guests will be looking for in London. One more goddamned comprehensive and handsome project.
In the mid-1990s, after Cannes, Chaz and I were staying at Champneys health farm in Tring, an hour or so outside London. One morning the Telegraph carried news of Henry Senior’s death. I took an early train to London and arrived in time for the funeral at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Soho Square, where Henry had served as an usher for decades. So much was made of Henry Senior’s devotion to the Church that I could imagine his eyes twinkling. In Catholic churches they don’t customarily ask friends of the departed to come forward and share a few words. It’s just as well. Had I been called upon, I have no idea how I would have begun, or how long it would have taken me to finish. And I didn’t really even know Henry that well. Was there a Dickens quote I might have used? I think only an entire character would have done. Perhaps Mr. Pickwick, with a touch of Mr. Micawber and a dash of David Copperfield’s jolly impractical optimist friend Mr. Dick.
19 ALL BY MYSELF ALONE
IN VENICE THERE is a small bridge leading over a side canal. Halfway up the steps crossing this bridge there is a landing, and a little café has found a perch there. In front of this café there is one table with two chairs. If you choose the chair with its back to the café, you can overlook the steps you climbed and also the steps leading toward you from the canal path ahead of you. This is an obscure neighborhood crossroads, a good place to sit with a cup of cappuccino and the newspaper you got from the newsstand behind Piazza San Marco. Of course you must have a newspaper, a book, a sketchpad—anything that seems to absorb you. If you are simply sitting there, you will appear to be a Lonely Person and people will look away from you. If you seem preoccupied, you can observe them more closely. In any event, I do not sit there for the purpose of people watching. No, I am engaged in the pastime of Being by Myself in a City Where No One Knows Who I Am and No One Knows Where to Find Me. I have such places in many cities: London, of course. Paris. Rome. Stockholm. Edinburgh. Cape Town. Cannes.
I have another private place in Venice. The night of the day in 1965 when I disembarked from Cape Town, I wandered into a little bar in Piazza San Giacomo, behind San Marco, and was greeted by the exuberant owner, a young man whose wife was minding their son in a corner. Lino, for that was his name, knew the name of everybody who came in. He hurried around the bar and, without asking, deposited a plate of oysters in front of me. They were alive and began to click. I had never eaten a raw oyster. It was the wise Jonathan Swift who told a friend, “It was a brave man who first ate an oyster.” I opened the oysters and ate them. I’d never tasted one before except in Uncle Bill’s turkey dressing. I returned to Lino’s every time I came to Venice, and returning to Venice became a necessity. Once in Lino’s an old man who ran a tourist gimcrack shop on the other side of the square personally cooked everyone gnocchi. No charge. Lino always recognized me, or made signs indicating he did. I went once with my friend McHugh. Every subsequent time, Lino used his hands to indicate a man of Falstaffian dimensions and we would agree on my friend’s name: “Giovanni.”
One year I returned and there was no Lino. I asked inside: “Lino?” I was pointed around the corner to the Trattoria alla Rivetta, with canal steps passing its front window. Lino had moved up in the world to a restaurant with a back room. I walked in. Giovanni! Giovanni! He used sign language for Santa Claus. During the 1972 Venice Film Festival, I took everyone I knew there: Dusan Makavejev, Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson, Thomas Quinn Curtiss. Usually I would go alone and sit in the back room, reading during dinner. Lino and I had only one word in common, but we always remembered it.
On our honeymoon in 1982, Chaz and I visited Lino’s. I waited for Lino to say “Giovanni!” He did. Chaz was surprised: “I thought you were making that up.” Nearly thirty years had passed. In 2004, we took my stepdaughter Sonia and her children to Venice. I looked in at Lino’s in the afternoon. There was no Lino. His son, now nearing forty, explained: “Lino, he a little retired. Here only in morning.” The next morning I looked in through the window. All the lights were off except those in the kitchen. L
ino, now bald and grey, was kneading pasta. I could have knocked on the glass and had his attention and heard Giovanni! again, but I didn’t. That would have been pushing it.
In Two Weeks in the Midday Sun, my book about the Cannes Film Festival, I wrote that I always wake up very early on the morning after I arrive, because of jet lag. I leave Chaz sleeping in our room at the Hotel Splendid and walk down the rue Félix Faure, passing the flower sellers setting out their bouquets, the fishmongers unloading iced oysters, and the street cleaners hosing down the pavement. I walk through the market, inhale the scents of the melons and the roses, and buy the International Herald Tribune. I turn down the hill toward the old harbor, and at a particular café, Le St. Antoine, at a particular table on the sidewalk, I order, in shameful French, a café au lait, a Perrier, and a croissant. This is a ritual. One year I looked up and saw Jeannette Hereniko, the founder of the Hawaii Film Festival, approaching me from the direction of the bus stop. She was in a bit of a crisis. It was six a.m., the airline had lost her carry-on bag, and she had no idea of the name of her hotel. She had been reading my book on the flight over and decided to see if she could find me at that café. Of course she could. I couldn’t tell her where she was staying, but she had a cup of coffee.
Of all the words I have written, a brief passage in that out-of-print book is the one most often mentioned to me. People tell me they know exactly what I’m describing. Here it is. It takes place on the other end of town from the old harbor:
I walked out of the Martinez and was made uneasy again by the wind. So I turned inland, away from the Croisette and the beach, and walked up into one of the ordinary commercial streets of Cannes. I cut behind the Carlton, walked past the Hotel Savoy, and before long was at the little fruit and vegetable marketplace, at the other end of town from the big market. I took a table at a cafe, ordered an espresso and a Perrier, and began to sketch.
Suddenly I was filled with an enormous happiness, such a feeling as comes not even once a year, and focused all my attention inward on a momentous feeling of joy, on the sense that in this moment everything is in harmony. I sat very still. I was alone at a table in a square where no one I knew was likely to come, in a land where I did not speak the language, in a place where, for the moment, I could not be found. I was like a spirit returned from another world. All the people around me carried on their lives, sold their strawberries and called for their children, and my presence there made not the slightest difference to them. I was invisible. I would leave no track in this square, except for the few francs I would give to the cafe owner, who would throw them in a dish with hundreds of other coins.
After a time the intensity of my feeling passed, and I sat absolutely still at the table, a blank, taking in the movements before me. There are times when I think it would be possible to lead my life like this, a stranger in a foreign land, sitting in a cafe, drinking espresso, sketching on a pad, sometimes buying a newspaper which would tell me in my own language what was happening in other places to other people. I would see myself in the third person—that anonymous figure in the distance, crossing under the trees. Most of the time I am too busy to entertain such fantasies. I have filled my life so completely that many days there is no time to think about the fact that I am living it. But these still moments, usually in a strange city, give me the illusion that in some sense the person that is really me sits somewhere quietly at a table, watching it all go by.
I’ve been back to the café several times again, always hoping for the same seat at the same table. Such returns are an important ritual to me. Chaz says it is impossible to get me to do anything the first time, and then impossible to stop me from doing it over and over again. After we were married, we went to Europe on our honeymoon.
“What did you visit?” her best friend Carolyn asked her.
“We visited Roger’s previous visits,” she said.
It is true. “I always go to Sir John Soane’s house,” I would tell Chaz. And, “This is my favorite Wren church.” And, “This is the oldest restaurant in London. I always order cock-a-leekie soup, toad-in-the-hole, bangers and mash, and, to follow, spotted dick.” I always say it exactly that way: “… and, to follow, spotted dick.” Chaz studied the menu and told the waiter she would have the lamb chops. “Excellent choice, madam,” he said, giving me a look that translated as, I remember you, all right.
My new bride was also made to take a particular train from the Liverpool Street station to Cambridge and accompany me on a walk in the meadows above the River Cam to the village of Grantchester to visit the Rupert Brooke memorial and have lunch at the Green Man. And of course we had to walk slowly past the Old Vicarage, as I recited:
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?
And we had to ascertain that the church clock indeed still stood at ten to three, the irrefutable evidence cited by generations of Cambridge students who protested it was not yet Closing Time. The villagers have recently raised the money to repair the clock, so that for the first time since before the Great War it keeps accurate time. The repair amounts to vandalism.
I may appear to suffer from some sort of compulsive repetition syndrome, but these rituals are important to me. I have many places where I sit and think, “I have been here before, I am here now, and I will be here again.” Sometimes, lost in reverie, I remember myself approaching across the same green, or down the same footpath, in 1962 or 1983, or many other times. Sometimes Chaz comes along on my rituals, but just as often I go alone. Sometimes Chaz will say she’s going shopping, or visiting a friend, or just staying in the room and reading in bed. “Why don’t you go and touch your bases?” she’ll ask me. I know she sympathizes. These secret visits are a way for me to measure the wheel of the years and my passage through life. Sometimes on this voyage through life we need to sit on the deck and regard the waves.
I first visited the Moscow Arms near Pembridge Square in 1970, when the room fee at the Hyde Park West Hotel, now named the Blue Bells, was four pounds a night. I have never met anybody in that pub. I always sit in the same corner. There is a man who comes in every lunchtime, tattooed, bald, and wearing a motorcycle jacket. He is nearly forty years older now, but he is still there, and it appears to be the same jacket. Has he noticed me crossing his field of vision fifty or seventy-five times in his lifetime? Certainly not. But if he still comes at lunchtime every day, it is my duty to bear witness, because by now I have become the only person in the Moscow Arms who knows how long he has been doing this, or cares. I believe this includes him.
I always visit a used bookstore, Keith Fawkes, in Flask Walk, Hampstead. I’ve found many precious books there. Then I go to the Holly Bush pub, up Heath Street to Holly Mount, where there are snug corners to ensconce myself. A corner is important. It provides privacy and an anchor and lets you exist independently of the room. It was while walking down from the Holly Bush that I first saw the Catto Gallery and made my best friends in London. In the opposite direction there is a pub I have been visiting so long that I remember when Helena Bonham Carter moved in upstairs, and when she moved out. I’ve had some pleasant interviews with her, going back to 1986, when she made Lady Jane and was nineteen. Did I ever ring her bell? Certainly not.
In the years when I was drinking, I drank in these places. I haven’t had a drink since 1979, and I still visit them with the same enjoyment—actually more. The thing about a British pub is that you don’t have to drink booze. If you don’t, nobody looks at you funny. They provide tea, coffee, lunch, atmosphere, a place to sit, a time to think. At the Holly Bush I always have the ploughman’s lunch with an extra pickle.
But let me stop place-dropping. These places do not involve only a visit, but a meditation: I have been here before, I am here now, I will be here again. Robert Altman told me he kept track of time not by the years, but by the films he was working on. “I’m always preparing the next film,” he said. That is living in a time outside time. Of course everyone’s ti
me must run out. But not yet. Not until I’m finished touching a few more bases. I will sit in the corner by the fire in the Holly Bush again, and stand in the wind on top of Parliament Hill, and I know exactly how to find that café in Venice, although I could never describe the way. Oh, yes I do.
20 SUN-TIMES
AFTER RETURNING FROM Cape Town I did another two semesters of graduate school at Illinois. I’d been accepted as a Ph.D. candidate in English by the University of Chicago. I needed a job, and wrote to Herman Kogan, editor of the weekend arts magazine of the Daily News. He’d bought some freelance pieces from me, a review of a collection of John O’Hara’s short stories and an elegy for Brendan Behan. For O’Hara I tried out the “first-rate second-rate writer” dodge, and Herman told me O’Hara called to thank him for assigning a “smart-ass college punk” to review his book. Kogan forwarded my job application to Jim Hoge, then the city editor of the Sun-Times, who wrote asking me to come to Chicago for an interview.
Chicago was the great city over the horizon. The typography in the News-Gazette’s nameplate and its standard eight-column Railroad Gothic banner headline were copied from the Trib. We read Chicago’s newspapers and listened to its powerful AM radio stations. Long after midnight I listened to Jack Eigen on WMAQ, broadcasting live from the Chez Paree, chatting with Martin and Lewis or Rosemary Clooney. Thomas Wolfe had taught me that my destiny waited in New York, but Chicago was obviously the first step on my path.
I arrived in Chicago one morning on the Panama and walked up Wabash Avenue to the Sun-Times/Daily News Building, which looked like a snub-nosed ship on the banks of the Chicago River. A boat was moored at its dock, and a crane was offloading huge rolls of newsprint. Hoge and Ken Towers, the city editor, took me out the back way to lunch at Riccardo’s and offered me a job. I would work under Dick Takeuchi, the editor of the paper’s Sunday magazine. He was a cigar smoker, calm, confiding, tactfully showing a green kid the ropes. He gave me a desk close to his, in the back row of the city room. At lunch I began joining Takeuchi and Jack McPhaul, the magazine’s copy editor. McPhaul wrote the 1943 articles that became the movie Call Northside 777; his reporting freed Joseph Majczek, the “Stop Me Before I Kill Again Killer,” from prison after eleven years. He also wrote Deadlines and Monkeyshines, the best account of the Front Page era when the Chicago dailies went at each other with hammer and tongs and hit men. He was my living connection to the Front Page era.