by Lillian Ross
The delegation put up at the Waldorf, where we got in touch with one of the advisers, Ahmad-Abdul Jabbar, a short, chubby sheik of twenty-four. He was dressed in a white igal, white kufaya, white aba, white balto, maroon socks, and thick-soled maroon oxfords. You can take our word for this. He informed us that he is secretary of the Political Section of the royal court and a graduate, class of ’43, of the American University of Beirut, in Lebanon, where he learned to speak English. He was humming “I’m the Sheik of Araby” as we arrived and a moment afterward broke into “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” He was soon interrupted by music from another room. He smiled patiently. “Small Prince Nawaf is playing his records again,” he said. “His Royal Highness discovered a music shop in Brooklyn that sells Arabic records. He has purchased a large collection. He plays them until three in the morning. Some of us cannot sleep. Personally, I would prefer to listen to hot jazz, but he is the Prince.”
The party’s visit to New York was unofficial, and Prince Faisal didn’t drop in at City Hall. He attended only three formal dinners, one given by the Texas Oil Company, one by the Saudi Arabian Mining Syndicate, and one by the Near East College Association. He also had lunch with the Waves at Hunter College. Sheik Jabbar went to none of these affairs. “We go our separate ways,” he told us. “You can understand that we are weary of looking at each other and of hearing speeches. In Detroit, on the way here from the Conference, we attended a dinner where twenty-eight speeches were given. Twenty-eight! In your city we have but one aim—to build up resistance.”
Shopping was the most popular activity among the princes and sheiks. They all bought pin-striped business suits as soon as they got here. As Sheik Jabbar explained to us, “We were very uncomfortable when we wore the igal and aba in public. We would immediately be surrounded by several strange ladies. At least one of them was bound to tell us that we reminded her of Rudolph Valentino. As you may know, it is not our custom to speak to strange ladies. Once I went for three years without speaking to a single lady. A man usually speaks only to his wife. And a man usually has only one wife these days. The harem is a thing of the past.” Sheik Jabbar told us that he had limited his shopping to inexpensive earrings, bracelets, and necklaces for his four sisters (it’s all right to speak to them; he ran up that three-year record away from home) and shaving sets for his friends. “I’m no prince,” he said. “I’d rather spend what money I have on cheeseburgers.”
We asked if we could meet the small Prince Nawaf. He was still in the next room, under the guardian eye of a city detective. The Prince is thin, dark, and very active. He wears long pants and knows four words of English—“hello,” “goodbye,” “O.K.,” and “cinema.” Through an interpreter, he informed us that he is in the fourth grade at the School for Princes back home and that he studies geography, history, geometry, and religion. In his spare time, he goes riding and hunting birds in desert oases. While he was at the Waldorf, he spent a couple of hours every morning on his schoolwork, and then, accompanied by the detective, got into a livery Cadillac and explored the city. Among the places he and the detective visited were Palisades Park, Jones Beach, Rockaway Beach, and Coney Island. At Coney Island the Prince bought cotton candy, corn on the cob, whistles, dolls, and comic hats, and enjoyed eighteen consecutive rides on the Dodgem. Prince Nawaf went back to Coney Island so many times that his big brother, Prince Faisal, got curious about it and went out there too.
1945
ABSURDISTE — A. J. Liebling
ALBERT CAMUS, the young French author, is over here for a few lectures and the appearance of his novel, “The Stranger.” He has an idea for a daily newspaper that would take a lot of the fun out of newspapering. “It would be a critical newspaper, to be published one hour after the first editions of the other papers, twice a day, morning and evening,” he told us when we called on him in a hotel on West Seventieth Street, where he had spent his first five days in America. “It would evaluate the probable element of truth in the other papers’ main stories, with due regard to editorial policies and the past performances of the correspondents. Once equipped with card-indexed dossiers on the correspondents, a critical newspaper could work very fast. After a few weeks the whole tone of the press would conform more closely to reality. An international service.” M. Camus, who is thirty-two and dresses like a character in “Harold Teen,” retired six months ago as editor-in-chief of Combat, a Paris daily he directed during the German occupation, when it was extralegal. In the first year following the Liberation, he made Combat the most interesting independent journal in France. Combat now, he thinks, has passed from independence to a simple habit of negation, which isn’t the same thing.
For the time being, Camus is more interested in further novels, his play “Caligula,” which has been bought for New York production, and his philosophy of the absurd than he is in journalism. He is often called an Existentialist, like his friend Jean-Paul Sartre, but he says he is not. His philosophy is not the same thing at all as Sartre’s, whose disciples, he says, are impressed with the consciousness of existence, which is to them at times a mystic pleasure and rather more often a pain in the neck. What burns Camus is the necessity to stop existing. He believes man’s relation to the universe is absurd because man must die. But he also believes that acceptance of this relation is the mark of maturity. Sisyphus, who was condemned to push a rock up a hill in Hades and then see it roll down again, is Camus’s symbol: he knew what he was up against, but he kept on pushing. For a man arrived at such a grim conclusion, M. Camus seemed unduly cheerful, as did, in fact, M. Sartre when he was here some weeks ago. “Just because you have pessimistic thoughts, you don’t have to act pessimistic,” Camus said. “One has to pass the time somehow. Look at Don Juan.” He detests the kind of “realism” that confounds greatness with strength and material success; the dangerous part he took in the Resistance was an assertion of his disagreement with this concept. When we saw him, he was looking at the translation of “The Stranger” for the first time. “There are too many quotation marks in it,” he said. “I am sure that there weren’t that many quotation marks in the original.”
Camus has a snub-nosed face that looks more Spanish than French. His mother, who was born in Algeria, was of Spanish blood. His father, also born in Algeria, belonged to one of the Alsatian families that moved there after the war of 1870–71 rather than become German. Camus was born in Algiers himself, and is, we got him to admit without too much trouble, the first top-notch French writer born in North Africa. His birth there gave him a distinctive chemistry, because the European cities in French North Africa are as new and ruthlessly commercial as Birmingham or Detroit. They have their color problem, with accompanying overtones of guilt; their competing immigrant strains (Camus’s parentage combines two); and their savage and explicit anti-Semitism (the proportion of Jews to Christians is much higher than in Continental France). They also have their crude and desperate first- or second-generation millionaires who have never learned that it sometimes pays to be reasonable. The summers are extreme, like New York’s. Camus graduated from the University of Algiers and moved to France only in 1940.
The thing that bothered him about France at first was the oversupply of historic and literary associations. “What the heart craves, at certain moments, is places without poetry,” he once wrote. West Seventieth Street ought to suit him fine.
1946
TWELFTH NIGHT — Frances Lanahan
FOR eleven years, we have stoutly resisted the temptation to attend the Daily News’ annual Harvest Moon Ball, but last Wednesday afternoon we weakened to the extent of gliding over to Madison Square Garden and taking in a dress rehearsal held a few hours before the twelfth presentation of the spectacle, the World Series of ballroom dancing. Demure as a wallflower, we sat in awed silence while Ed Sullivan, the News columnist and, perhaps not quite perchance, the master of ceremonies, explained to fifty-one pairs of contestants the rules of the prom. “You must maintain bodily contact at all times,” he was
saying. “That means your fingertips must always be touching. Keep it clean and dignified at all times. The Eddy Duchin hop and the Westchester hop will be permitted only in the jitterbug. In the rumba, you may make moderate movements of the hips, but no trick novelties or shimmy stunts.” The hundred and two dancers listening to him seemed to understand all this perfectly.
The entrants, mostly young, and every one of them a bona-fide amateur, had been divided into five categories—Fox Trot, Rumba, Viennese Waltz, Jitterbug Jive, and Tango—and when Mr. Sullivan began to confer with the Jitterbug Jivers, we sought out the Harvest Moon editor of the News, a Mr. Fitzinger, whom we found settled in a loge, like a dowager chaperone. He revealed at once that he is not merely a Harvest Moon man. He is a versatile chap who also guides the destinies of such other News frolics as the Silver Skates and the Golden Gloves. “The way I look at it,” he told us, “this ball is a public service. People have a lot of troubles—they forget them for one night. What the hell? You could sell tickets to a cat fight in an alley for a dollar-fifty these days.” This year, the Garden sold twenty thousand tickets to the ball in two and a half hours. The winners in each of the classes were rewarded with contracts for a two-week appearance at Loew’s State Theatre, with Ed Sullivan, of all peripatetic people, as their master of ceremonies.
The victors in the waltz division (we learned this in Thursday’s News) were Mr. and Mrs. Angelo Pellegrino. We were delighted, because, as if by prescience, we had had a chat with them beforehand. The Pellegrinos are the only couple who have competed in all twelve Harvest Moon Balls. They were in street clothes when we saw them, so Mrs. P. assured us she would wear a feathery white gown flecked with Kelly-green sequins at the ball. “It really brings me out,” she confided to us. “I”m planning to flip my skirts.” Her husband is a drapery packer in Brooklyn, and he told us on the eve of their triumph that he and his wife had been dancing at the Roseland Ballroom two or three nights a week for the last fifteen years. “Teresa and I met at Roseland,” he added, with sentiment worthy of the News. “She was with a party of friends, and the first three times I asked her to dance, she refused. This year, we decided to better our dancing, and we got some people at Roseland to watch us and tell us what was wrong.” “It was mainly my posture,” said Mrs. Pellegrino gallantly. Next year, Mr. and Mrs. Pellegrino will be ineligible for the ball, having automatically become professionals by accepting their Loew’s State engagement. And next year, we may attend the ball itself.
1946
AFTER TEN YEARS — William Shawn, Niccolo Tucci, and Geoffrey Hellman
ALDOUS HUXLEY is in New York for the first time in ten years, and we have had a talk with him in a Central Park South apartment he sublet for a month from a friend of a friend who is in California for that period. Along with his wife and their twenty-seven-year-old son, Michael, he drove here from California, where he lives in Wrightwood, a mountain village fifty miles from Los Angeles. Wrightwood enjoys an elevation of six thousand feet, and Huxley, who enjoys an elevation of six feet four, bought a forest ranger’s house there and converted a nearby stable into a study. “The place has the quality of silence,” he said. “The desert is five miles down. It exerts an enormous fascination. The light is extraordinary, too.” Mornings, Huxley writes, using a portable and the touch system, which he learned as a boy, when he was almost blind for two years. His sight is still poor, but he continues to eschew glasses and goes in for the optical exercises he thinks have helped him. Afternoons, he walks in the neighboring pinewoods. He writes again for a couple of hours before dinner, and after dinner he and his wife play phonograph records or she reads to him—generally novels like “War and Peace” and “The Brothers Karamazov,” which he likes to reread, or relisten to, every few years. He has a small Hollywood apartment, where of late he has been staying a few days every few days while working on “The Gioconda Smile,” a film based on an old story of his that Universal will release in January. “It’s my only murder story,” he said. “I was very fortunate, because Zoltan Korda, its director, bought it on his own. We worked on it and then sold it to Universal. We didn’t suffer from the extraordinary Hollywood assumption that twelve incompetent writers equal one competent one. I remember working on ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and finding forty or fifty scripts on the story piled up in my office. It gave one the most peculiar feeling—all this wasted energy, this huge pile of pulp that no one looked at.”
Huxley has started a new novel, with grave misgivings. “It’s a sort of fantasy about the future,” he said. “I’m feeling my way toward the right form. There’s been a lot of hit and miss at the beginning, mostly miss. It postulates a situation in California after an atomic war. People are living in ruins. A scientific expedition comes from New Zealand, one of the few places not touched by the war, and gets captured by the strange savages who are living as parasites on what has been left—getting iron out of trolley lines, and so forth. It’s extraordinarily difficult to write a novel today. There’s such a sense of general precariousness. Novelists used to assume a stable background for their characters; you could assume that their fortunes would go on. Even during the war, during the blitz, you could hope that things were going to be O.K. Now the whole social order is running down in the most hopeless way, with no prospect of amelioration in the immediate future. There’s a general deterioration of the European economy, caused by the pressure of population on resources. It’s Malthus’s nightmare come true. What novels can the Germans write in their troglodyte existence? As for India, what one hears is horrible. Even in this country, the whole thing is fantastic. You’ve had eight wonderful harvests. You did better than Joseph; you had eight years instead of seven. And now a bad one comes along. Suppose you get six bad ones—what happens then? We’re obviously running on a margin incredibly narrow now. The touching assumption that man has conquered nature is absolute bosh. Two months of cold last winter, and the whole of Europe falls flat.” Huxley believes the widespread sense of insecurity may be responsible for what he calls the extraordinary efflorescence of historical novels. “What sense can you make of life when you don’t know you and your children won’t be living in caves?” he asked.
The sound of a pneumatic drill came through an open window, and Huxley turned, briefly, to local conditions. “The music of New York!” he said. “A Grand Canyon in every street! It’s unnecessary to go to Arizona.” We asked what impressed him most about the city after ten years away, and he said, “The striking thing now is that you can get into the city. It used to be a nightmare getting back from Long Island—we visit my wife’s sister in Islip every weekend when we’re in town—and now you just whiz in.” The Huxleys whizzed here from California in a Ford, Mrs. H. at the wheel, and are whizzing back next week. He is grateful for the absence of travel prohibitions on this continent. “The awful thing in so many parts of the world,” he said, “is that a human being cannot cross a frontier. Only a paper can cross it.”
1947
LUGUBRIOUS MAMA — A. J. Liebling
ONE of our men, who used to admire Edith Piaf, the tiny French singer, in Paris in 1939, was afraid that she might have brightened up her repertory for her engagement at the Playhouse here, on the theory that Americans demand optimism. He was so concerned that he went over to the Hotel Ambassador to see her before he took a chance on going to the show to hear her—said he wanted to remember her in all her pristine gloom, and not be disillusioned. In Paris, he said, she used to stand up straight and plain in front of a night-club audience—no makeup, a drab dress—and delight it with a long series of songs ending in a drowning, an arrest, an assassination, or death on a pallet. At the finish of each, the listeners would gulp a couple of quick drinks before the next began. “She was a doleful little soulful,” our man remarked sentimentally. He made an engagement with her for one o’clock, and when he called on the hotel phone at that hour, she thanked him in French for being so punctual. “I forgot to set the alarm clock,” she explained, “and if you hadn’t come
, I’d have gone on sleeping.” Our man went up to the chanteuse’s living room to wait while she dressed, and while waiting there saw some pencilled notes lying on a coffee table beside a book titled “L’Anglais sans Peine,” open to a chapter called “Pronunciation of the English Th,” which began, “Some people who lisp pronounce without wishing to do so the two sounds of the th as in English perfectly.” The notes were in English and were obviously for introductory speeches for songs that Mlle. Piaf was going to sing in French. Knowing that she had never appeared before an English-speaking audience, prior to her current engagement, he concluded that she had been memorizing the speeches with “L’Anglais sans Peine” as a reference.
“A woman is waiting for a suitor who promised to return to her when he becomes a captain,” the first note read. “In the corner a phonograph is playing a popular record it is cold as long as there is life there is hope. She waits for 20 years but he does not come back and the record keeps on playing until it is worn out.” The second said, “Perrine—and now the sad story of Perrine, a pretty girl who worked for a priest, but had a secret lover. One night the priest surprises them together and Perrine hides her lover in a large box, but alas forgets about him and leaves him to the mercies of the rats. When he is found a candlestick is made from his leg and a basin for the church from his head, and so ends the sad story of a young man who liked girls too well.” Heartened by what he had read, our man greeted Mlle. Piaf, when she appeared, like an old friend upon whom he could depend. She wore gold mules with platform soles about six inches thick, which increased her height to approximately five feet. Her mop of rusty-red hair, a stage trademark, was imprisoned under a tight turban. She looked sleeker offstage than on, our man said. Mlle. Piaf was born in Belleville, a quarter of Paris not generally considered chic, and made her first public appearance at seven, in a circus in which her father was an acrobat. She made her adult début in 1935, and was a hit almost from the start. When our man asked her—disingenuously, it would seem—whether she had any more of those wonderful sad songs she used to sing, she said, “No, I don’t feel the old songs any more. I have evolved. I was never really a pessimist. I believe that there is always a little corner of blue sky, nevertheless, somewhere. In those old songs, there arrived invariably, at the end, a catastrophe. But now I have one called ‘Mariage,’ which is quite different. It begins in the cell of a woman who has already murdered her husband. She reviews her life, she hears the wedding bells, she sees herself in the arms of this man whom she has killed, an innocent young bride. It’s very beautiful.” As for herself, Mlle. Piaf said, she has never married and never killed anybody. “For me, love always goes badly,” she said. “It is perhaps because I have a mania of choosing. I don’t wait to be chosen. That places me in a position of inferiority. And I always choose badly. So the relationships turn out badly. Sometimes only two or three days. But I’m always optimistic.” She is studying English hard, with the assistance of an associate professor at Columbia and of the night clubs of the city. She thinks Ray Bolger is formidable and had been to see him three times up to the day our man called.