Country Girl: A Memoir

by Edna O'Brien

  I used to stay at the Wyndham Hotel, where the welcome from Mrs. Mados was unfailing. Randy, the concierge, would be standing at the desk to present me with a single red rose in a flute of glassy paper. Then a bellman (one of whom was later to become a famous Hollywood agent and whom, years later, by chance, I would see escorting Nicole Kidman in a restaurant in Los Angeles) would bring me up to Suite 1006; there, waiting, were more flowers and telephone messages on slips of pink paper, with a tick on the sign that read YOU WERE CALLED. The whole world, like the Statue of Liberty itself, opening its arms to me, and England was a nunnery by comparison.

  When I recall the many people I met there, it still comes as an amazement. Several introductions were through Milton Goldman, a theatrical agent whose parties in Sutton Place were legendary, as was his habit of strenuously introducing everyone to everyone else, including Arnold Weisberger, his companion of many years, to Arnold’s own mother. It was with Milton that I met Stravinsky’s second wife, Vera de Bosset, in her nineties, sitting totally composed, while we queued to exchange a few clichéd words with her. At a swish party given by the designer Halston, to which Milton brought me, I met Martha Graham. She was tall and commanding, and seemed to me to be the reincarnation of a tribal ancestress. I remember our conversation and the coincidence of the fact that we each had a title for a work yet to be done and that title was “Blood Memory,” which she would use for her autobiography, in which she claimed life was dance and dance was life.

  In the lobby of the Wyndham there were always celebrities, and once I was introduced to Coral Browne, who, with barbed glee, since she was going out to dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Mados, promised to bring me back a doggy bag. The rebuff was short-lived, because the next night, for a St. Patrick’s Day celebration along with Gregory Peck, I would recite Irish poetry from the pulpit of St. Patrick’s Cathedral to the accompaniment of Phil Coulter’s music. To the rather deserted dining room, where the red color scheme owed a distinct debt to the Russian Tea Room on nearby Fifty-seventh Street, I invited people, Vincent, the operatic maître d’, treating us to some of his favorite arias. My children wondered when I was coming home, and Carlo reminded me that the washing machine was broken. Sasha, however, was jubilant to report that, along with Laurence Sterne, Gene O’Neill, Oscar Wilde, and Samuel Beckett, I had been featured in a song by Dexy’s Midnight Runners.

  On an earlier visit, for the publication of August Is a Wicked Month, I had stayed at the Algonquin, and also by chance met a galaxy of people. There was a long session in the Blue Bar with Thornton Wilder, who next day was setting out on a Greyhound bus across America, admonishing me for my yearning heroines, enjoining me to follow the pluck and dauntless humor of Rosalind in As You Like It. I would receive a handwritten letter, which read, Dear Edna O’Brien, Will you meet me in Blue Bar at seven o’clock this evening, and if we like each other after five minutes, we will go and eat big fish or other animal. Yours, Günter Grass. PS: This is my first letter in English. When I came down the stairs a few minutes after seven, he was already on the house phone, presumably ringing my room. It was in those days that I was sometimes mistaken for Maureen O’Hara, and once in a taxi, irked with being asked yet again, I said, “Yes, yes, I am,” to which the driver replied, “You’re a goddamn liar, ’cos she was in this cab yesterday and you’re not her.”

  So why had he asked me? Only because he thought I might be her sister or something.

  Oh yes, there were other New Yorks, apart from these gilded haunts, the New York I had read of in many works of fiction. There was Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day, a New York for which the celluloid dream, through aggrandizement and delusion, though different from that of Gatsby’s, had also turned to a “valley of ashes.” There was Isaac Bashevis Singer’s New York, immigrants who met in old-fashioned cafés, without a groschen, but with rich memories of rabbis and matchmakers, imbuing life with improbable tales of love and riches. There were the bohemians of Anatole Broyard’s down in Greenwich Village, and the junkies and hoodlums and hookers and transvestites in Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn.

  Brooklyn, just across the bridge, where my mother had lived for eight years and where I intended to go to research the novel I would write about her. For Brooklyn, New York, was the “vast Gomorrah across the water.” I had read that. I had read also that Walt Whitman recited Shakespeare from the top of a stagecoach, drew inspiration from its people, and drew water from the street well. There, too, Henry Miller would chart his spiritual initiations from his time in the flophouses, and it was also where Norman Mailer was known to have stabbed a wife.

  From Brooklyn my mother had brought a cache of memories that she kept locked, and only once, as she was confiding in another woman, did I overhear her talk of the man she loved, ah, the man she should have married, and how, strangely, as he walked her home one night and they passed a house of ill repute, he had suggested that they might go in. She had worked first as a maid in a house and then graduated to becoming a cutter in the tailor room of a big department store. She had brought back glamorous clothes, for which she found little wear—a black gauze fan, appliquéd with splashes of white rock rose, a georgette dance dress, and silver shoes. What I have is not those fal-lals but the scissors from the cutting room, half the size of a shears, rusted now and kept in a drawer, a prized possession, as if between us there is still something waiting to be cut.

  The first thing I would do when I arrived in Suite 1006 at the Wyndham, half-believing that it was mine, was to look under the papers that lined the drawers of bureaus, to see if notes I had left were still there, and sometimes they were and sometimes they were not. I would go out onto the terrace, where there was a terracotta tub, to see if the packets of seeds that I had sprinkled had flowered, and occasionally a few limp petals of pansies had braved the city clay. My visits were usually in December, the zesty time, when real snow was no match for the artificial pageantry in the windows on Fifth Avenue. I was constantly surprised that from the volumes of books in the glass-fronted bookcase nobody had stolen Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities.

  Up the street from the Wyndham and two doors away from Sixth Avenue was my favorite restaurant, Jean Lafitte. At that corner a maniac drove by regularly with the window down, shouting obscenities at well-dressed women, believing they were prostitutes, and in my long green coat I too was the butt of his rage. In that stretch of street by a luggage shop three shamrocks had been beveled into the tarmac, and nearby was a delicatessen, the specialty being chicken soup with dumplings, which they were famous for.

  I was with the film director Neil Jordan, and from a nearby table Miloš Forman carried on a lively conversation. I knew Miloš from Prague, remembering that first day I met him when I visited him in a tiny apartment in which the heat from the black iron stove was tepid. I had searched him out because of my admiration for his films Black Peter and Loves of a Blonde, and on that first visit he said, “How do I ask a woman to take her coat off, without taking her clothes off?” I said that, for some, there was not an appreciable difference. There in Jean Lafitte he scolded me again for preferring his friend, the director Ivan Passer, when they had stayed with me in Deodar Road in Putney, and he remembered a dinner I gave, where four people, including himself and Rita Tushingham, had been allergic to lobster.

  My evenings were always full, thanks to my two stalwart friends Arthur and Alexandra Schlesinger, who had included me in nightly invitations. I can still see those gatherings and “that brooch of faces,” as Philip Larkin once said, the sanctums that exuded rose-breath and privilege. The reception halls of the apartment buildings would be full of flowers, seas of red poinsettias on the chessboard marbled floors, and in the autumn one could be excused for thinking one had strayed into a forest, what with the cornucopias of leaves, fruits, branches, and berries. There would be a porter to escort one up in one of the waiting elevators that were padded in red leather, with a narrow velvet seat. Ah, the voices, the voices, as one was disgorged from the eleva
tor into the penthouse suite. Famous faces, writers, actors, politicians, and a phalanx of jewels, enough to support a starving country. The hostesses always had such composure, like Thomas Dewing’s Lady with a Lute. I recall a Magritte, a garden in blue dusk, with blue cedars that led up to a ghostly house. In a different salon there was a Picasso, in which, astonishingly for a bullring, he had chosen pale green colors and not the hot red blood of the corrida. The audacity of genius. In the Frick Collection, where I often went to sit, I was astonished that for Saint Francis in the Desert, Bellini had draped rock in whey green and added a donkey, bamboo trees, and a little lectern for homeliness.

  The seating at those grand dinners would be carefully, sedulously, planned, and one was either above or below the salt. Often I was lucky enough to be next to Norman Mailer, who had mellowed with the years. I had known him in his swaggering days, the very first being at a party of George Plimpton’s, when he called out to the author Bill Manville as he left, “Manville, tell Plimpton I said good night.” Another time he suggested that we might have been married, since my voice reminded him of that of his former wife Jeanne Campbell, who was Scottish. There were many Mailers: Mailer the artist, Mailer the bruiser, Mailer the intellectual, forever trying to shrug it off with fights and confrontation, and Mailer the boyish man who shyly kissed me in Saint John the Evangelist Catholic church in Brooklyn, where we had gone to shelter from a shower of rain. He gave me a walking tour of the city, as I was researching the novel I was intending to write about my mother. When I told him the gist of it, he shook his head, said it was too interior, then repeated it, “You’re too interior, that’s your problem.” He suggested that instead of that I should go with him and George Plimpton to Havana, where they were putting on the play he had written about Fitzgerald and Hemingway and their wives. Their Zelda had dropped out, and I could fill in for her, except that I was due to teach at Bard College. Truth to tell, I would gladly have swapped the sedate environs of Annandale-on-Hudson for the racy nights in Havana. His literary heroes were Dos Passos, Thomas Wolfe, Henry Miller, and, most of all, Hemingway, Hemingway, so great and so lamentably misunderstood. For a man who had gone on record as saying that he had less connection with the past than any writer, Norman’s memories of Brooklyn that day were acute: the boardinghouse where he wrote his first book, the house where he lived with his first wife, his mother’s house, and the famous house where during a party he had thrust a penknife in his second wife’s chest. People recognized him in the street, men touched his arm as we went by, and in the various pubs to which we repaired for a quick shot, the owners and the bartenders were all beholden to him.

  The grand dinners, on the Upper East Side, or Sutton Place, or Central Park West, always passed surprisingly quickly, since there was the ritual of speeches and especially the awaited speech of the guest of honor. A little bell would be tinkled, at which my heart invariably sank. Some pundit—it was always a male who had just returned from Beijing or Istanbul or Jerusalem—was about to disclose his findings, air his sagacities, put the world to rights, the world nevertheless going its mad, murderous, money-crazed way. One such night I escaped to the bathroom, and there, just sitting on the lavatory seat, was Mrs. John Kenneth Galbraith, simply passing the time. She had heard it all before. That bathroom, like all the bathrooms, was a temple of quiet: vials, glass-stoppered bottles and amphoras, balms and salves and perfumes that might have come from the apothecaries in Florence in the reign of the Medicis.

  Having received so much hospitality, I was honor-bound to give a dinner. It was on a Sunday, when people would have returned from the Hamptons or Connecticut. It was a warm evening, and those at the bar at Jean Lafitte huddled by the opened window, with noises from the street drifting in. The first to arrive were the Schlesingers, who brought Yevtushenko and his wife, Masha, then Bill Walton, Marietta Tree, Carlos and Sylvia Fuentes, and Al Pacino, with his beautiful girlfriend Lyndall Hobbs. There were also several children and the friends of children, more people than I had bargained for, and a center leaf had to be added to the round table. Mayhem. Coke, Diet Coke, Stoli, Grey Goose, bourbon. No oysters. They never served oysters. No shellfish, as it was Sunday. Al Pacino, quite shy, wearing a bandanna and trying to be invisible, nevertheless created a stir. It was as if a bush telegram had gone round to say he was there, and the place filled up. The maitre d’, Claude, erstwhile a paragon of tact, asked for a private word with me; his friend had appeared as an extra in a film with Mr. Pacino and would like to come over and say “Hi.” I pleaded with him to wait. Yevtushenko stood, to have his wife take a picture of him with Al, then said that he had sent a play to Dustin Hoffman, and not having had an acknowledgment, he would now like to send it to Pacino. I began to feel embarrassed, especially as I barely knew him. We had met two nights before, backstage, when he and Suzanne Bertish had starred in Oscar Wilde’s Salome. It had taken some coaxing to get him to come out to dinner with us, and I can still recall the little jugs of red and white wine, and flatbread, thin as communion wafer, with specks of rosemary. Whereas in Jean Lafitte he fell silent, in Orso’s the conversation rippled—Oscar Wilde, his mother Speranza, John the Baptist, Herod—while at intervals Suzanne got up to have a smoke by the coat rack. There he had stories to tell. Maybe he had not been a janitor in the Bronx as a young man, but it was enough to hear it, to enter into it, marveling on how the future Michael Corleone, who knew nothing about boilers, was called one Christmas Eve to one of the apartments where a boiler had burst and, finding a ravishing woman answering the door, had insanely asked her if she would care to dance.

  The place was packed, and the service understandably erratic. Someone got a steak tartare who hadn’t ordered it, to which the overwrought waiter said, “You’re down for it anyhow.” Arthur was adamant about onions. “No onions,” he kept saying loudly. A soufflé expired before my eyes, and children were having tantrums about their chips not having arrived. I swore I would never invite famous people to a restaurant again. Were it not for Arthur, the evening would have been a disaster. People were beholden to him. He was being asked about the Presidents he had known, their foibles, their greatness, their pluses and their minuses. He loved JFK with an uncritical love and made no secret of it, but he had to concede that no President of his acquaintance answered to Emerson’s ideal—“The great leader suppresses himself.” No Russian. Or Japanese. Or German. Or Cambodian. Or Chinese. Drink pepped things up. I prayed that the Gypsy woman would not come around with red roses, as that would lead to more anarchy, but then remembered that she showed up in a different restaurant over on the West Side, where there were booths with colored glass paneling. I ate almost nothing. Our table, as they say, was the cynosure of all. Why did everything in New York have to be extreme, the good times and the bad times, the welcomes and the snubs? Why did Robert Mapplethorpe, whom I met in a loft down in the Village, look at me and look through me with such cold, compassionless eyes? Why did I receive so many roses all in one day? Why, when sitting aimlessly in a café on the Upper East Side, with a little bit of plastic trellis separating it from the adjoining café, was I accosted by a group of angry, vociferous men, who were handing out leaflets that poured shame on a scab employer on Ninety-third Street who hired nonunion contractors? Why, when I skittered along a parquet floor in Lindsay Duncan’s rented apartment and broke my shoulder, was I too embarrassed to say so as the group watched the Oscars?

  I paid the bill in Jean Lafitte after they had all left. Still sitting on the high stool was the large black man, who had been an extra on the film with Pacino and was chuckling at the fact that they had exchanged a few words.

  Afterward I sat on a stone seat that circled a tree, halfway down to the Wyndham, exhaling, exhaling. I was alone now but still unnerved, as if it were an inquisition I had narrowly escaped from and not a dinner party. No Lady with a Lute, I. The skyscrapers came into their own, with the street almost deserted; they seemed to sway at their summits, up there in the languid heavens. Elderly couples fr
om the various restaurants strolled by, and vendors were pushing their carts, their dark skins blended into the darkness, while in the carts, under cover, lay the handbags and scarves that on the morrow would be on display over at the corner on Fifth Avenue or up on Sixth Avenue, where the raving zealot cruised.

  My play Virginia was in rehearsal at the Public Theatre, and Kate Nelligan was asking me to take her through Virginia Woolf ’s last walk, across the fields in Sussex, before putting stones in her pockets to drown herself. A stagehand beckoned me aside to say there was a phone call from Jackie Onassis, but that most likely it was a hoax. It wasn’t. There was Jackie at the other end of the phone, wondering if I had any time for her. I had, and so I was invited to dinner for the following evening. Her apartment was exquisite: there were modern paintings and sculptures, along with torsos and figurines from the ancient world. Jackie, feather-light, girlish, affectionate, capricious and willful, a Scheherazade who, instead of telling stories, encouraged them in others. That night, as she inquired into what I was writing and if the teaching curtailed it (which indeed it did), I remember her saying, “I want you to have a piece of the pie.”