Carey laughed. ‘It is a revelation. To write two easy paragraphs in a book. Then they come to film those two paragraphs, and it costs $35 000.’
When Terry Parker went off to the lavatory, one of the crew told Carey: ‘Don’t ask him about where that girl of his is. She’s a hooker. If she didn’t like Terry a bit he wouldn’t be able to afford to have her.’
With something close to authentic gratitude, Carey watched the clock creak towards his time of departure. Then, on his way back to the furniture store to catch the little red bus to Nice, he saw Andy across two lanes of traffic. The producer-director-writer of The Cut-Rate Kingdom was on his way back to the apartment for lunch. Andy looked at Carey across the roofs of Fiats. There was a weary knowing ness in his face.
Someone on French television – so Carey would find out later – had asked him that no-win question: why he hadn’t brought his Aboriginal actor with him? But the French critics who had written of the movie this morning had praised it. So Carey supposed that McNiell was already balancing up win against loss.
The two of them yelled greetings. ‘I’m going back to London,’ Carey called out. Would Andy be there? ‘I’m going on to the US on Monday to do ten days’ research. Flying over on one of those new standby tickets.’ Would Andy be in the United States?
‘Coming to the Melbourne premiere?’ Andy yelled.
‘I’ll try to,’ cried Carey. At the premiere with the Premier. ‘I hope I’ll be back in Sydney in about two weeks,’ he screamed, holding up two fingers to indicate the time he’d be absent. And so, gratefully, he loped off.
Late that night, on a friend’s phone in London, Carey called his wife and told her he couldn’t come back till the Melbourne corroboree had taken place. ‘I can’t sit through it again,’ he told her. Nor could he face resenting what McNiell had done to his novel.
And Mrs Carey agreed to go in her husband’s place. For she was, like Maureen McNiell, what is called a ‘supportive’ woman.
Kitsch
At the stage of the gouda, jatz & french bread
now the party is darker & limp,
the plump girl elbows pensively
from patio to lounge room with
languid semblance, having read
‘11.30 – Movie – Adventure – Set
in the French Revolution’
in TV Times, & being
– perhaps in some interior
espionage against the march
of academe – secretly
an expert on minutiae
in the 1930s film
Kneeling in an armchair she explains
the when the why the which
the where the wear of it,
& I reluctantly admire
again its svelte convention:
Apart from the sails, which must
be present first & last: their great
lissom fable tautened
by the moon & flight: it begins
with the rumble of the tumbril
in the cul de sac below
& shows
a lady,
dresden & creamy, her form
petalled like a wedding cake
(‘100 yards of tulle & satin
stitched by Edith Head
by hand’);
lips drawling in a lacquered sulk
the eros of mistrust against
the husband or the hero, safe ‘away’
but really
spying with the best of them
to gull the guillotine & save
her head for his shoulder beneath
that silky last minute of sails
The girl at last, relievedly
disenthralled, puffs at
badly blended hash & sips
sour White, declaring that
the long finesse of kitsch is still
a question of consistency:
‘The hero’s eyebrow always
arching at the coarseness of
the knife against his throat,
the way
the heroine faints backwards
into someone-handy’s arms
not forward to dash brain out on
those blood-encrusted flags …’
She shrugs into her poncho, leaves
with me, but driving home
past beaches of neon & tidewrack, small
poniards in her eyes will be
glancing at the frosty sea
& waiting for sails, prepared.
Jennifer Maiden
(from Southerly, 3/1974)
CAFES AND BARS
So much of our life was lived out in bars and restaurants – things planned, relationships begun and ended.
One of the memorable restaurants of the seventies in Sydney was Tony’s Bon Gout, which was in Elizabeth Street.
It is now at Berowra Waters and known as Tony’s and Gay’s. Run by Tony and Gay Bilson, it is acknowledged as the best restaurant in Sydney.
The following story, from Conference-ville, recreates an actual incident at Tony’s in the old days – but it is not a typical incident.
Cafe Society: Table-to-table Fighting
(from Conference-ville, 1976)
In the week that I was back from the conference a few things happened in the aftermath.
I turned full around on the proposal that Julia had made at the conference that she and I should spend a regular night together – ‘an arrangement’.
At the conference I had said something about ‘my life being full up’ but that was after lust had been fed. Now lust for her had crept back and was leaning on my shoulder again.
Even though I told myself that it was lust and that lust might not sustain a weekly arrangement, I felt compelled to ring her and to approach her on the terms she had approached me.
I rang her.
‘Julia?’ I said, even though she had proposed it and I had initially rejected it, it was I who now felt my … face was at risk.
I had been wrong, I told her, I had mis-read myself at the conference. I had felt a self-sufficiency which I did not, in fact, have. It had been an illusion. My life was much more disorderly, uncertain. Probably the illusion had come from being personally over-equipped, over-defended for the conference situation. Anyhow, I told her, maybe we should try her experiment.
‘Welllll,’ she said. It was drawn-out; it meant – things have changed, haven’t you heard, there’s something you should know.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘my life has changed somewhat. This is going to make me sound dreadfully ratty – after what I said at the conference about living with men – but well, Newell has moved in with me.’
‘Newell Smith. It wasn’t, I suppose, that unexpected.’
‘He’s left his wife.’
‘Oh … well then.’
‘The situation is rather fraught. It came together rather quickly. Your piece about the night at the motel didn’t help. That was a breach of confidence. You could’ve changed the names at least.’
But what of Easton? She had left the conference midway with Easton, an American professor – or agent.
‘What about Easton?’
‘Easton?’
‘You left the conference with him.’
‘No – no I didn’t. I left the conference with a toothache. Not with Easton.’
‘Oh – a misunderstanding on my part.’
‘Yes, indeed.’
‘All I can say, Julia, is that I hope you keep it all together.’
‘My “act” you mean? But thank you. You never know how things go …’
‘No, you don’t.’
So I went to Tony’s restaurant to meet Dick with some gossip and a pocketful of unfulfilled desire.
He wasn’t there when I arrived. I took out a book but didn’t read. Instead, I brooded with fantasies about great luncheon tables. The Punch Table, the Round Table at the Algonquin, David Astor’s lunches around the pool for the Observer people, Lambs, now closed. Surely they weren’t witty and
clever at every lunch. Didn’t alcohol get to them? I worked up a hypothesis that our lunches were, in fact, wittier and cleverer than these legendary tables because we competed with the legend. Paced ourselves against those great tables at their recorded very best. That’s what I told myself. But I didn’t convince myself.
I brooded that no one read the New Yorker now. No one I knew. Bert Christie, one of the last philosopher-editors did but I didn’t see him much.
Everyone reads Rolling Stone.
A barman told me recently that he worried he read ‘too many magazines’. I told him I was a magazine person myself.
My brooding was expending all the grim things I should have been keeping until Dick arrived – to begin our lunch on a proper note of disillusion.
Cindy came in, a lecturer in history, an old friend who’d been at the conference also. A heavy-drinking, flamboyant woman with a beguiling neurosis.
‘Wasn’t that conference endsville!’ she said.
I said that I found it ‘useful’.
‘You got some good stories out of it, you mean.’
She said she’d sit with me while her friend was out buying the wine.
‘I hope he gets enough but I have a feeling that he thinks I’m civilised,’ she said. ‘Too bad, he’ll have to go out and get more. I hate training young men.’ She muttered that she was having enough trouble with her child.
She helped herself generously to my wine.
‘What’s that you’re reading?’ She picked up my book, Hearing Secret Harmonies. ‘What’s this Powell like? Any relation to Gareth?’
‘No, no relation to Gareth.’ I told her that some of us were planning a mock conference on Anthony Powell. Widmerpool Defended and such papers.
‘Fascinating,’ she said, dismissively. ‘Did you hear who got the great job in the new department?’
‘No.’
A smile of great gossip pleasure crossed her face.
‘Guess.’
I made a stab or two.
‘No – Kerry Piper.’
‘But at the conference – the Access Media thing …’
‘Correct – Dreyfus tore him apart.’
‘But why didn’t Dreyfus block the appointment?’
‘Block it – he supported him!’
Her smile was out of control.
I was really puzzled. ‘Dreyfus savaged him at the conference.’
‘You want a theory. Transactional analysis?’
‘Any theory.’
‘I think it’s oedipal really. The father slays the son – he was Dreyfus’ protege a year or so ago. Dreyfus at the conference does this ritual slaying before a thousand people. The father protecting himself against the son by striking first – to maintain, test his power and status above the son, to see if he’s still got it. He finds that he has the status still and so …’
She took a long, generous drink of my wine and continued.
‘… and so establishing that he’s still stronger than the son he for gives the son, embraces him and brings him back into a situation of dependence and gratitude – gives him the job.’
‘Excellent.’
‘It sound biblical. I made it sound a bit biblical,’ she said, pleased with herself.
‘They did share a woman,’ I recalled.
‘Yes – serially, not simultaneously – but yes.’
‘Nice.’
‘My guess is that within a year there will be bloody slaughter – one of them will slay the other. Conclusively. Probably at some damned conference.’
Before I could comment, she characteristically tired of the subject and, looking around, changed subject: ‘It’s like the old Vadim’s.’
‘Were you a Vadim’s person?’ I asked. She was roughly my age. I always put Vadim’s Café before our time. But Cindy had started life pretty early.
‘Yes, yes I belonged everywhere then,’ she put out a sigh. ‘All the good ideas in this country started at Vadim’s. Fitzgerald. The Nation people.’
‘We’re all Rolling Stone people now,’ I said, unenthusiastically.
Cindy became regretful: ‘We just don’t have a magazine anymore.’ She again looked around. ‘Cafe Society in the antipodes.’
Dick came in.
‘Richard,’ she said, ‘I was just saying,’ she gestured about, ‘Cafe Society – just like the old Vadim’s – except that no one has new ideas any more. And no magazine.’
‘That actually isn’t the precise meaning of Cafe Society,’ Dick told her. ‘Cafe Society meant high society – not this,’ he waved a hand, ‘whatever this is. God help us. But maybe it’s proper for us to get things ironically twisted.’
‘And here’s my Young Man,’ she said, ignoring Dick’s elucidation. ‘I’m introducing him to Cafe Society.’
The Young Man had correctly interpreted Cindy’s capacity and had three bottles of wine.
‘Look at what he’s bought – three bottles,’ Cindy screamed. ‘I believe that might be sexist – I think he’s working on the premise that liquor is quicker.’
They went off to their table.
‘Friedman’s joining us,’ Dick said, ‘and maybe Bunny Stockwell Anderson.’
Friedman came in.
‘Unemployed at last,’ I said to him.
‘I really understand that line now,’ Friedman said.
‘I’ve heard versions of your dismissal: faking expense account claims was the last.’
‘Is that the story now?’ he said, uncommunicative.
‘Well, what is the story?’ Dick asked.
‘Oh,’ he twisted with impatience, ‘a long boring argument over super annuation.’
‘Are we getting old enough to argue about that?’ Dick said.
We didn’t go on with it. Dismissals are a personal trauma but usually talked of as personal victory.
He turned the conversation to me: ‘I hear you came out of that conference on the side of the CIA.’
‘Is that how it looked?’ I said, shrugging. Oh well, we are imperfect transmitters of imperfect positions and other people are imperfect receivers.
‘Actually it was put quite seriously to me,’ Friedman said, through his entree, ‘that you’ve changed. Style – position. Drifted some what.’
‘Where was I to drift from?’ I said, moodily.
‘Two people have said it.’
‘Who?’
‘Markham was one. My lips are sealed on the second. There’s nothing you can do about that sort of thing. It’s because you’re so ubiquitous.’
‘You mean – amorphous. It might get me a trip to the US as a guest of the State Department.’
We went on to other things and were about three-quarters of an hour into the meal when I became aware of Friedman’s name being loudly and pointedly used at the nearby table.
Dick and I looked at Friedman almost at the same time, for explanation, protectively, not knowing the people at the other table.
Friedman obviously didn’t need to look.
He replied to our glances: ‘If you’ve been in my sort of job you are forever meeting people you’ve poked in the eye at some time.’
The other table, or at least one person at it, was beaming the conversation at Friedman while appearing to be talking to his companions.
We tried to talk over it but it was intrusively just on the edge of our attention.
What I caught, recurringly, was reference to ‘leaking’ and to a leak to a stockbroking firm.
I saw that Friedman was close to being upset.
I heard another remark and by deduction gathered the suggestion was that Friedman had been dismissed because he had leaked some information to a share-broker and had made money from buying or selling shares.
Interesting.
It was about now that Friedman asked Alain to bring him a jug of water.
This was brought.
Dick caught on first, and covered his face with his hands. He resignedly said: ‘Oh yes.’
Friedman got u
p, took the jug of water and, in one stride, walked to the other table, and emptied it over the person, without a word. He returned to our table, put down the empty jug and sat down. He went through the motions of resuming the meal but he was trembling from the execution of it and the possibility of repercussion.
I don’t think many people in the restaurant saw it happen.
I’d never seen it done before.
The victim shouted: ‘You bastard, Friedman!’ and he shook himself, dripping wet, in a stagey way. He allowed himself to be restrained by his friends.
I think he gave exaggerated attention to his clothing as a way of avoiding having to take retaliation.
‘I saw it done in a movie once,’ Friedman said.
After noisy consultation the wet, damp man and his friends left Tony’s. There was no retaliation apart from vituperative references to the shares as they passed.
‘He’s a slimy creature,’ Friedman said. ‘They’re still standing around hotel bars making moral judgements and pretending to be non-moralistic. That queer superiority they affect.’
But he didn’t enlighten us about the share business.
Our conversation continued. I found that, although I didn’t like the idea of Friedman being involved in this sort of thing, it didn’t really affect me. He was an old mate. We’d swum the Shoalhaven River together. I believed him capable of corruption but I couldn’t care less.
We finished the meal in good spirits although Anderson had not arrived. We retold and embellished what would be known as the Jug of Water Incident.
Alain came over and said: ‘You are finished with the jug, Monsieur Friedman, yes?’
We drank a toast to the End of the Golden Years and then went off separately.
As I waited for a taxi I went back to the earlier remarks about my having changed ‘position’. I knew my position very well; it was one of those days when my identity had clarity. It was nonsense and although only gossip, it was disquieting. Maybe it would be me who was pelted with blood at the next conference. Obviously my position contained certain contemporary heresies. Oh well.
I caught a taxi and we hadn’t travelled far when the driver turned around and said: ‘Do I have leprosy or something?’
Days of Wine and Rage Page 26