by Lillian Ross
The telephone rang again, and Wright, racing to it, exclaimed, “ Damn the thing!” He made an appointment for ten the next morning, hung up, ruffled his bright-blue flowing tie, took a deep breath, and asked us please not to consider him a member of the architectural profession. “I’m not a member of any profession,” he said. “I’m a one-man experiment in democracy, an experiment that worked. An individual who rose by his own merits, beholden to no one. When Sullivan and I came to architecture, it had been slumbering for five hundred years. We woke it up. We gave it a fresh start. We made it organic. We said architecture was space to be lived in, not a façade, not a box, not a monument. Wallie Harrison says the slab’s the thing. I say the cemeteries are full of slabs, but who wants to be in a cemetery? Does all this sound arrogant? Let it sound arrogant, then! I defy anyone to name a single aspect of the best contemporary architecture that wasn’t done first by me. Or a single aspect of the worst contemporary architecture that isn’t a betrayal of what I’ve done. Like those awful U.N. buildings. Or that Corbusier thing in Marseille. Massacre on the waterfront, I call that. Or any of those skinny glass boxes! Why, I wouldn’t dare walk on the same side of the street with them. Fool things might explode. There! That’s from a fellow who knew what architecture was when all these glass-box boys were just so many diapers hanging on the line.”
We could see that Wright was, if anything, freshening as he went along, but we felt our own strength ebbing, and between telephone calls for him (a date for eleven the next morning, a date for an early lunch) we hastened to ask about his latest work. “I’ve designed a white marble building to be built in Venice, right on the Grand Canal,” he said. “The first new building to go up there since heaven knows when. It’s to be a memorial to a young Italian architect who was killed in an accident in this country, and aside from the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, it’s the only work I’ve designed for anywhere outside the United States. I’ve always felt that the rest of the world was entitled to its own kinds of culture. Then, I’ve designed a new bridge for San Francisco. They’re holding a referendum out there to see whether they want to put it up or not. And a housing project for Madison, Wisconsin. They’re holding a referendum on that, too. And a skyscraper for Bartlesville, Oklahoma. A beautiful thing, in its own park. I designed it first for New York, thirty years ago. It was going to be built down on the Bowery. By now, I’m used to waiting for my buildings to come true. Six hundred and forty of them have come true so far. I’ve never had a building in New York. This little pavilion is my first.” He jumped up and peered out the window, to where Fifth Avenue glittered and shook with the roofs of cars. “I’m flying home to Taliesin tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “We have thirty-five hundred acres out there. My family followed the Indians onto that land. The name of our town is Spring Green.” He said the name twice over—“Spring Green. Spring Green”—then burst out happily, “Out there, chickens give eggs, cows give milk, and old Wright he rides his Tennessee walking horse.”
1953
MR. HULOT — Lillian Ross
THE French comedian Jacques Tati, whom we make no bones about calling one of the funniest men alive, was in town briefly for the opening of his movie, “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday.” As was the case with his previous movie success, “Jour de Fête,” M. Tati is not only the star of the picture but also its author and director. We called on this great benefactor of humanity one warm afternoon recently and found him perplexed in the extreme by the air-conditioning of his hotel suite. He had on a blue-and-white striped sports shirt and a heavy topcoat. “My first experience of your winter-in-summer machines,” he said in admirable English, fingering his topcoat and shivering. “I do not yet understand the principle. You take off your coat when you go outside and you put on your coat when you come inside. Bien! But where is the gain?” M. Tati is well over two yards tall and looks taller. He has broad shoulders, long arms, and big hands, and wears an expression of perpetual pleased surprise. No sooner had we sat down than he volunteered to show us a snapshot of his two children— Sophie, who is seven, and Pierre, who is five. “They are simple and honest,” he said with a father’s pride.
While Tati and his wife were in New York, their children stayed at Tati’s father’s house in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a suburb of Paris. Tati was born a few miles from there, in Le Pecq, in 1908. His real name is Jacques Tatischeff, and if he liked, he could call himself a count. His grandfather, Count Dimitri Tatischeff, an attaché of the Russian Embassy in Paris, married a French-woman. On Tati’s maternal side, his grandmother was Italian and his grandfather was Dutch. This man, van Hoof by name, ran a picture-framing shop in Paris and numbered among his customers Toulouse-Lautrec and van Gogh. On more than one occasion, van Gogh offered to pay his bill with some of his paintings, but canny old van Hoof held out for cash. Tati’s father took over the business, and Tati, at sixteen, was sent to a college of arts and engineering to prepare him for a prosperous picture-framing future. After a year’s fumbling with more mathematics than he knew what to do with, Tati gave up college, and his father bundled him off to London, to serve as an apprentice to an English framer. He boarded with a family whose son, also seventeen, had a passion for Rugby, and in six months Tati learned much English, much Rugby, and very little picture framing. “Rugby is not a gentle game,” he told us. “Sometimes the players hurt each other quite badly, and afterward they wish to be friendly again, so they have dinner together and try to make one another laugh. I used to imitate the way Rugby players look during a game. Everyone would laugh at me, and I was encouraged to start imitating people playing tennis and other sports. My friends said, ‘Why not go into the music halls?’ I went back to Paris and told my father I wanted to quit picture framing and do imitations. You can imagine his anger. He said at last that I could do as I pleased but that he wouldn’t give me a sou.”
Young Tati’s specialty was so peculiar that not an impresario in Paris would look at him. “For years, I was broke,” Tati said. “I slept every night in a different place. I sat in cafés and talked with friends, and when I needed to eat, I would go to a certain cabaret and imitate a drunken waiter who is constantly making mistakes. For an evening of supposedly drunken waiting, I would be given my dinner and fifty francs. It was the happiest and most free time I have ever known.” Tati got his big break in 1934, when a friend arranged for him to appear on a program at the Ritz with Chevalier and Mistinguett. “I was so frightened that though I was supposed to go on first, I couldn’t stand or talk,” Tati said. “I hid in a corner backstage and the show started without me. When it was over and the people were leaving, the manager of the show saw me hiding in the corner. He ran out on the stage and shouted that one of the entertainers had been forgotten. Then he introduced me. The people returned to their seats and I had to go on. The next thing I knew, I heard them laughing. I could not imagine that they were laughing at me. I looked around for the entertainer they were laughing at. No one else was onstage. It had to be me. Soon they were applauding and shouting, and the manager was shaking my hand. Then came the impresarios, and I was playing in music halls and circuses all over Europe.”
This was Tati’s first visit to the United States. He was scheduled to play at the Radio City Music Hall in 1939 but wound up in the French infantry instead. He attended several baseball games in the course of his visit and plans to add a baseball pantomime to his sports act. It took him a year and a half to make “Jour de Fête” and as long to make “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday,” and he is only just beginning to think about a new movie. His favorite comedian is an English music-hall performer named Little Tich, whom he saw when he was seven. The comedian who makes him laugh most is the late W. C. Fields. He admires Chaplin, but for the most part Chaplin doesn’t make him laugh. “Chaplin is full of ideas,” Tati said. “I am so busy watching the working out of his beautiful ideas that I never find time to laugh.”
1954
NOTES AND COMMENT — Maeve Brennan
THAT long-winded lady we hear fr
om occasionally has sent us another communication, this time on the subject of modern design. “I like to have a cup of tea first thing in the morning,” she writes, “and for that reason, whenever I have to spend a night or two away from home, I pack a small electric kettle and a box of Keemun. I usually get the hotel to leave a cup and saucer and a teapot in my room. Recently, when I was about to have my apartment painted, I called several of the ordinary hotels to reserve a room, but they were filled up with one of those conventions that you never hear about but that fill up the ordinary hotels from time to time just the same, so I found myself staying in an odd hotel in the West Forties that had no restaurant. As there was not a teapot or a cup and saucer to be found in the building, I took myself across the street that afternoon to a five-and-ten to get some. I realize that this procedure gives an impression of fussiness that is not at all a part of my nature. It is simply that I do like my cup of tea in the morning. Well, I got the cup and saucer—in a rather pretty thistle design—and I was delighted to find just the size teapot I wanted, and in the regular old brownware, very homey, the sort of teapot we used to call brownies, except that this teapot, instead of being round and squat, with the regular curved handle, was boat-shaped. It had been designed in one graceful line from the tip of the spout to the back of the pot—a very handsome object from every point of view. I thought to myself, Well, that’s nice, they’re finally getting somewhere with modern design. This little teapot I bought was boat-shaped, as I said, and was really rather amusing, the old-fashioned brownware, you understand, being in mad contrast with its shape. You’ll get the idea of this teapot more clearly if I explain that the thing you grip to pick it up with is all in one piece with the pot, so that you are supposed to put the four fingers of your right hand into a kind of hole and grip the rim of the hole when you pour the tea, much in the way you would grip a real handle. Well, I took my new tea things back to the hotel and washed them carefully and left them in readiness for the morning, along with my kettle and my Keemun. In the morning, I got up as usual, brought the water in the kettle to a good, furious boil, and made the tea. I left it to sit for about five minutes, as I always do, while I turned on my bath and pinned up my hair. Then I went back to the window, where I had arranged my tea, sat down, glanced out, and saw that it had begun to rain and that the person in the hotel across the street had left a cardboard container of milk on the window sill and that it had toppled over a short time before. It was lying on its side on the window sill and traces of the last drops of its milk were still on the sill. I hoped no passerby had been caught when the first flood of milk came down, and it occurred to me that if anyone had been caught, and if it had been raining at the time, he must have been confused. Smiling at my little fancy, I lifted my new teapot to help myself to my first cup. Well, I dropped it in a hurry, and it broke my cup and saucer, flooded the table, and ruined the front of a brand-new challis robe I had bought only the day before at Altman’s. Believe it or not, the handle of that teapot, being all of a piece with the pot itself, was hollow, so that when you filled the pot with boiling water, the handle filled up, too, and of course was scalding hot by the time I was ready to pour. I was extremely angry, but when the pain in my hand died away, I experienced some satisfaction, because I saw that everything I have felt, and usually kept to myself, about modern design may easily be true. I have sent an informatory note to that five-and-ten and am now waiting with a good deal of curiosity to see whether I will hear from the store directly or whether they will pass along to the manufacturers who employed the designer my warning that a lot of good people are going to get their hands burned if those handles on those teapots are not somehow plugged up so the boiling water can’t get in. Having been made out of the old-fashioned brownware, my pot didn’t break when I let it go, although it plumped to the floor after destroying the cup and saucer, flooding the table, and ruining my robe. I bought another cup and saucer the next day and used the pot once more, after wrapping a bath towel around it, but when I checked out of the hotel, I left it on the window sill.”
1955
ROCKEFELLER CENTER HO! — John Updike
FIFTH and Sixth Avenues teem these days; the thronging pedestrians maneuver under rules skimpier than those of bagataway. As a service to readers who are too frail or shy for good-natured hurly-burly, we decided to plot a course from the Empire State Building to Rockefeller Center that would involve no contact with either Fifth or Sixth Avenue. So, early one morning, armed with a box lunch our wife had insisted on packing for us, we found ourself in front of the Cantigny Printing & Stationery Corporation, on Thirty-third Street, facing the tallest structure in the world. Fifth Avenue was to the east, Sixth to the west. Indomitably, we charged into the Empire State’s dimly lit and brownly marbled lobby, resisted the suave pleas of uniformed attendants to ascend with them to the Observatory, cleaved between the elevator banks, and emerged on Thirty-fourth Street, opposite the great bland façade of Ohrbach’s. We threaded our way among handbags, gloves, and tailored cotton shirts ($1.99), took the escalator to the Budget Balcony, wriggled through a tight crevasse at the Customers’ Accommodation Desk, and thus reached Thirty-fifth Street. There we bore west until we struck a Meyers Brothers System parking lot, feebly guarded by a sign reading, “NO WALKING OR TRESPASSING THRU THIS STATION.” Crouching low between the automobiles, we attained the Thirty-sixth Street end of the lot, only to discover a tall wire fence. Would we, then, have to fall back? No; under the gate, a gap of around twenty inches permitted easy egress to anyone willing to crawl on his stomach. We did this. On Thirty-sixth Street, after futilely exploring a series of shallow luncheonettes and furriers’ shops, we came to the Herald Square Garage, at whose farther end the light of Thirty-seventh Street gleamed. As slack-mouthed young men in coveralls stared, we exploited this tunnel.
Thirty-seventh Street resisted our advances. The sole block-deep building in this backward area is owned by Franklin Simon & Co. A door with the store’s name on it and a tantalizing view of the men’s-clothing department, with salesmen pensively studying their reflections in three-way mirrors, promised quick triumph, but the door was painted black, the handles had been removed, and instructions to use the Fifth Avenue and Thirty-eighth Street entrances were lettered upon it. We tugged brutally at the recalcitrant portal, wedging our fingers in a crack left by the imperfection of the carpentry, until a spectator said, “There’s a burglar alarm on that door, you know.” Chastened and despairing, we backtracked and discovered, on Thirty-fifth Street near Sixth Avenue, a dismal cave mouth titled “Independent Subway System.” We descended a crooked flight of stairs, turned right, and were appalled by the extensive cavern before us. The floor tilted Surrealistically; overhead, mammoth white beams suggested the molars of an unthinkably huge whale. A few ectoplasmic figures shuffled back and forth. At the faraway end, they could be seen dissolving in mist. Only our own footsteps made noise. Our panic mounted, and eventually we did also, at Thirty-eighth Street. We walked east to Lord & Taylor’s, whereby we passed over to Thirty-ninth Street. Near Sixth Avenue, we entered the back door of Schumacher’s and continued through the store. The Schumacher passage is one of the trip’s pleasantest; the deep repose of stacked carpets, uncut fabrics, and middle-aged couples turning the leaves of wallpaper books provides an appropriate prelude to the two-block open-air run of Bryant Park, fragile and silent in winter.
At Forty-second Street, the footsore traveller must not be dazzled into indecision by the variety of through passageways—Stern’s, Woolworth’s, the Salmon Tower arcade. We chose Woolworth’s. The odors of cheap candy, cashews, cosmetics, and cookies, in that order, titillated our nostrils. Forty-third Street is simple enough. Arcades exist at our own 25 West Forty-third and at No. 37, though neither is as grand a throughway as that offered by the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, at No. 43. On Forty-fourth Street, the choice lies between the Berkeley Building and the Hotel Seymour, where a narrow corridor yields to vistas of affluence as the
main entrance, on Forty-fifth Street, is approached.
In our chain of passageways, the link between Forty-fifth and Forty-sixth Streets demands the most hardihood and perseverance to forge. The correct procedure is: Ask for the superintendent at 45 West Forty-fifth Street. He is benign, though burly. Accompany him as he leads you through a second-story window onto a brick-and-tar projection he terms a balcony. Listen respectfully as he explains that an easy jump of about twenty feet will land you on a parking lot that fronts on Forty-sixth Street. Indicate to him that your ankles are not firm. Follow him into the basement, where deep-throated boilers chug. Slither through an infinitesimal window. Finding yourself in a kind of concrete well, with a ledge and rusty fence perhaps three feet above your head, leap strenuously, seize the ledge and then the fence, pull yourself up, wipe your hands, and stroll through the parking lot to Forty-sixth Street.