by Lillian Ross
After this, cutting through the Hotel Wentworth to Forty-seventh Street will seem as easy as a promenade in Central Park. At Forty-seventh, we once again had recourse to the subway, and this time it cost us fifteen cents. After passing through the turnstile, we inched along the platform until we came to a sign pointing the way to the United States Rubber Building. Up silver sliding stairs, through vacant halls of pearl-pink and ash-blue marble, into the open air we moved. Where were we? There was no mistaking those momentous slabs, those quaint half streets, those flat-muscled bas-relief ladies so dear to the hearts of sculptors commissioned to body forth the concepts of Labor, Valor, and Communications. Rockefeller Center.
1956
BON VOYAGE — Philip Hamburger
ONE bright, salty day last week, we went over to Pier 86, North River, to wish Harry S. Truman Godspeed on his seven-week pleasure trip to Europe. He was sailing on the S.S. United States, and he was to be found in Cabin U-89 (“U” for Upper Deck). A solid phalanx of plainclothesmen stood duty at the cabin door. We announced ourself, and were ushered in. The cabin was a cornucopia of floral arrangements, shrimps on sticks, assorted canapés, friends, and relations, and, it being a sailing, bottles of whiskey. The former President, looking as fit and trim as a growing boy, was seated on a sofa, talking with John W. Snyder, former Secretary of the Treasury. Mr. Truman was wearing a dark-blue suit, a white shirt, and a quiet blue tie. In his lapel was the bronze Victory Medal button of the First World War.
“Hi,” said Margaret Daniel, the daughter of the President. “Good of you to come down to the boat.”
We spotted Mrs. Truman, at the far end of the cabin. She was wearing a blue print dress. “Hope you have a fine time,” we said.
“It’s going to be hectic,” she said. “The schedule has been wonderfully prepared—Paris, Rome, Naples, Venice, Salzburg, Brussels, The Hague, London, and Assisi, Bonn, Munich, and Florence—but it’s tight, and I don’t see how any of it can be changed. It’s going to be tiring, but I am certainly looking forward to the trip.”
We spotted Eugene Bailey, Mr. Truman’s secretary, a scholarly-looking young man. “Hi,” said Bailey. “Last night, I went over with the group to Mrs. Lasker’s house and I have never in my entire life seen such a magnificent collection of modern art. Everywhere you turned—”
Sam Rosenman entered the cabin and went over and wrung the President’s hand. Miss Margaret Carson, formerly in charge of public relations for the Metropolitan Opera, and a close friend of Mr. Truman’s daughter, told us that she wanted a cup of coffee. “The coffee on this ship,” she said, “is the finest coffee in the world.”
We spotted Mrs. Stanley Woodward, the wife of the former Chief of Protocol of the State Department and former United States Ambassador to Canada. The Woodwards are travelling with the Trumans throughout their trip abroad, and the Trumans will stay at the Woodwards’ European house, at St. Jakob am Thurn, Puch bei Hallein, near Salzburg, from June 2nd to 6th. “Last night,” said Mrs. Woodward, “we all went to see ‘Inherit the Wind.’ The President and Mrs. Truman and the rest of us arrived at the theatre at eight-twenty, plenty of time before the curtain. We took our seats. Hardly anybody saw us come in. At the end of the show, the entire audience stood up and applauded and cheered the President. He went backstage, and when he left, there were several hundred people standing in the street, and they cheered and applauded. The President was deeply moved.”
Mrs. India Edwards, of the Democratic National Committee, entered the cabin and went over to say hello to the President. “Golly, it’s good to see you,” he said.
“I don’t know what’s happened to my husband,” said Mrs. Woodward. “We took separate taxis from the hotel, and he hasn’t showed up.”
Mr. Woodward entered the cabin.
“There you are,” said Mrs. Woodward.
“Here I am,” said Mr. Woodward.
The President asked for a bourbon and branch water, and it was instantly produced by a slightly flustered waiter. Mr. Snyder said that he would like the same. The two gentlemen clinked glasses. “To the former Secretary of the Treasury,” said Mr. Truman. Mr. Snyder smiled warmly, and downed his drink. He rose to leave. “Have a wonderful trip,” he said to Mr. Truman.
We sat down beside the former President. “I have a bad swollen ankle,” he said, pointing to a brown cane perched alongside the couch. “I was carrying some empty suitcases downstairs the other day in Independence and I turned it and I spilled, and I got caught in the banister, and I tumbled right down to the bottom of the stairs. It isn’t really a sprain; it’s got something to do with the ligaments. I’ll be all right if I stay off it.”
“Looking forward to your trip?” we asked.
“You know,” he said, “last night I wanted to get right back on the train and head home for Independence, Missouri. We have a tremendous schedule. I am a former President of the United States, and people that we entertained when we were in the White House have kindly invited us to visit with them. I have had invitations from the Queen of England, and Eden, and Churchill, and the Queen of Holland, and Adenauer, and many, many others. The Pope has also graciously asked me to visit him.”
There was a deep, long, all-ashore blast from the S.S. United States. We shook the President’s hand and wished him a good trip.
“Terribly kind of you to come down to the boat,” he said.
1956
LOVERLEE, LOVERLEE — John Updike
LIKE ranks of herald angels, a display of gramophones, Echophones, Zon-O-Phones, and just plain talking machines guarded the entrance of the 1956 New York High Fidelity Show, in the Trade Show Building. The cardboard images of Edison, Eldridge R. Johnson, and Emile Berliner glared above rows of brass trumpets ranged as if to signal Judgment Day. But they were silent, and long had been. Within, a placard announced, the Ultimate had been achieved. (Hi-fi lingo is consistently transcendental; “super” is almost a diminutive.) An amplifying system, equipped with the new Catenoid horn, cried, in time to a Hispanic tune, “Ya ya ya-ya ya ya, ya ya ya-ya ya YA.” “Loverlee, loverlee,” the Sonocell Bass System answered, “loverlee, loverlee.” And from another room, though from the same Broadway musical, a third device insisted, “With a little bit, with a little bit, with a little bit . . .”
Each of the hundred and four exhibitors had one or more little white rooms, many hung with hushing draperies, and even strung with velvet rope, like a funeral parlor. In attitudes of grief and respect, a dozen souls were listening to a large walnut box describe the famous difficulties of getting a cannon boom worthy of Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture.” “. . . failed to pick up the booming reverberations to best advantage. We set a single microphone seventy-five feet in front of the cannon, loaded the cannon to the limit of safety, and now listen.” Even to our uneducated tympanum, it seemed an exquisite boom— plump in sound, rather flowery in its aftertones, yet withal thoroughly masculine, even austere. Over in the Zenith suite, a demonstrator holding a small black box in one hand was surrounded by activated television sets. On the largest of them, a woman singing turned abruptly into an old Shirley Temple movie, which became a confident man in a double-breasted suit talking about bacteria. “Zenith’s new remote-control tuning,” said the demonstrator. A boy with a drab face and the hi-fi bug’s black spectacles asked, “It doesn’t work on radio waves?”
“No,” the demonstrator said in a condescending way. “Sound waves.”
“—our hearts will be throbbing in time,” the singing woman promised, her lips shaking to prove it. She vanished, and the confident man said, “But after disinfection—” and held up a tumbler of water that became a moon beneath which Shirley Temple wept.
“You aim it?” the bug pressed on.
“Only vaguely.”
“Sound waves?”
“Ultrasonic.”
“What keeps my dog from jumping out of the window?”
“A dog whistle has a frequency of around twenty-five thousand cycles. This is ab
ove forty. A dog can’t hear it. It’s not generated. It’s just little hammers in there. Like a piano.”
“And you don’t have to aim it.”
“Not within forty feet,” the demonstrator said curtly, and, in his irritation, destroyed Shirley Temple, just when we were picking up the thread of the plot.
The show offered listening pleasure but not sustained listening pleasure. In among the Grundig-Majestic radios, we were promised that Hoagy Carmichael would sing his own composition “Hong Kong Blues.” Sure enough, the familiar reedy voice began to sibilate, and we were taken back fifteen years. Then, hideously, between the rising tide of a German waltz and a constant barrage from a girl who couldn’t help loving that man, Hoagy began to pale, and was gone. We searched frantically among the radios. We couldn’t tell which were on. We gazed into the broad, blond face of one. “Ferrite Antenna,” it told us mirthlessly. “BC SWI SWII FM.” It had compound knobs, multiple bands! We scoured its dial, reading:
Ceylon India
Italy Brazil
Dazed by this bopster’s geography, we were washed out of the room on a great waltzing breaker of Stereophonic, 3-D, ultra-highly faithful sound.
We drifted after that. Strange adjectives—“stroboscopic,” “binaural,” “orthosonic”—befuddled us. “I’m just saying it’s as ultra as yours,” a man passing us claimed. Inside a replica of an 1890 recording studio, a male mannequin with painted fingernails held his hand immutably poised over a banjo while a tape-recorded voice discoursed on the scratchy, metallic, staccato tone of wax-cylinder recordings. “Is there anything new?” a wild-haired woman beseeched us. “I just can’t find anything abso lutely new.” Then she disappeared into a room where “The Cartridge with the Highest Compliance and Lowest Inter-modulation Distortion” was advertised. Compliant cartridges? Catenoid horns? We were leaving. On one side, Harry James swung sweetly from octave to octave; on another, Bach calmly built his intricate stairs. Burl Ives told of the big rock-candy mountain, and, fading in the distance, a clarinet and a trombone promised to dance off both our shoes when they played (on a shock-mounted, non-resonant turntable) the Jelly Roll Blues.
1956
GOOD-NATURED MAN — Geoffrey Hellman
JOHN OSBORNE, the twenty-seven-year-old playwright whose “Look Back in Anger” has had the British upper-middle, middle-middle, and lower-middle classes hanging on the ropes since it opened in London, last year—and the Broadway bourgeoisie equally excited, if less hurt-feelinged, since it opened here, a couple of weeks ago—may well be, as local critics have said, “an eloquent spokesman for his irate generation,” a man who “spews out . . . ferocities,” and “not the man for temperate statements,” but when we had a tomato juice with him at his hotel, the Algonquin, the other day, he was as mild and urbane as Sir Gladwyn Jebb, and, to our colonial eyes, every bit as upper-class. Elegantly dressed, aristocratic of feature, with curly Edwardian sideburns, he lit a slender pipe and said, “I’ve been here only a week. The longer I stay, the more I like it. The critics here seem more responsible, more literate, and more serious generally than in England. The audiences don’t get as angry as in England. Of course, not many people here feel they’re being got at. In England, some of them walked out, yelling things like ‘Keep quiet!’ At home, everyone got the impression that the play was very dreary and dull and turgid and boring. Here, they’re inclined to laugh. They sometimes laugh in the wrong places, but they laugh.”
We asked what kind of tobacco he smokes, and are happy to report it is Edge-worth. “Do you know it’s only twenty cents here?” he said. “In London, it’s eleven shillings—about a dollar and a half. I’ve been to a theatre every evening—I liked ‘West Side Story’ immensely, and also saw a couple of musicals I didn’t like—and I’m writing a screenplay and rewriting an old play, but I’m rather taking a rest at the moment. I generally work at night. I spend the daytime worrying about working and then at night I work.”
A beautiful young girl joined us, and Mr. Osborne introduced her as his wife, Mary Ure, who is the leading lady of “Look Back.” “I’ve been too busy to see much here,” she said. “I want to go to Brooklyn. In London, I was in ‘A View from the Bridge’ for six months, with a Brooklyn accent.”
Mr. Osborne said that Miss Ure, who hails from Glasgow, had also played Ophelia and had appeared in Jean Anouilh’s “Time Remembered,” and that they had met when both were working at the Royal Court Theatre; she was in “The Crucible” and he was rehearsing for “The Desk of Satan.” He was born in London and went to Belmont College, which he described to us as an obscure public (i.e., private) boarding school in Devonshire. “I hated the place,” he said. “I left after four years, at sixteen; worked on some trade papers, such as the Gas World; and at eighteen got a job teaching English and arithmetic to the child actors in a provincial touring company. After six months, a local educational inspector inspected me, and I had to quit. I stayed on as assistant stage manager, and then began to act. I still do. I’ve been in five plays in the last eighteen months. I don’t act in my own plays, though; one gets enough slung at one’s head without inviting it two ways. I find acting a great relief from writing. When you’re with actors, you have some sense of community. When you’re writing, you’re on your own.”
Upon our soliciting a comparison between the American and the British theatrical worlds, Mr. Osborne said, “I think that, in a very superficial way, everything is a bit more panicky here. Reputations seem more at stake, perhaps because much more money is involved. In London, things are more relaxed. Success isn’t quite so important. Or, at least, failure isn’t so important. Let’s put it that way. There’s nothing like the ghastly business of going to Sardi’s and waiting for the reviews. Of course, you’d have a long wait, as the English reviews don’t come in until four in the morning. Here, if you have two flops in a row it’s the end of the world.”
We asked about fan, or non-fan, mail, and Mr. Osborne told us that in England he had received many unenthusiastic letters from colonels and bishops. “I usually answer them,” he said. “I’ve been getting abusive letters internationally. I had one from British Columbia that simply said, ‘Why don’t you shut up?’ My mother liked the play. Both my grandmothers are alive. One saw it on television. I think she liked it.”
“It was thrilling when people walked out,” Miss Ure said. “Exhilarating! But there were never more than three at one performance.”
1957
THE MUSHROOM’S EDGE — John McCarten
RENÉ CLAIR, one of our favorite moviemakers, was in town last week, and we had a pleasant lunch with him in the Pierre Grill. M. Clair, whose English twenty years ago consisted of a brisk “O.K.,” has become quite voluble in the language. “Although I am French,” he told us, “I am now able to think pretty well like you. You know what I am thinking?”
We told him we didn’t.
“I am thinking,” said M. Clair, “that there should be a pension for young people. When you are young, you should pursue the wine, women, and song, and the government should provide for this. Then, when you are old, you should be able to do your work without distraction. Right now, I am past distraction, but the idea for a picture is hard to discover.”
M. Clair, a lean, handsome man of sixty who looks only a bit of it, pondered for a moment, sipped a whiskey sour, and plunged ahead. “The scientists,” he said, “are putting the satirists out of business. They want to go to the moon, which has been minding its own business for years, and nobody says why. They build missiles that fall into the sea, and nobody says why. And they bring us close to annihilation, and nobody says why. It reminds me of my father, who was, in his day, a cavalry officer and an expert on mushrooms. He used to go into the forest on a fine big horse, with big bags strung across his saddle, and seek the mushrooms. When he returned, he would have the cook make a dish of his discoveries, and while we ate, he would tell us about what we were eating. He would say that most of the mushrooms were ordinary stuff, but jus
t as your fork was going to your mouth with a pretty little fungus, he would say that if its narrow yellow edge were only slightly broader it would mean death. I’m still afraid of mushrooms, and I don’t think I have as much confidence in these scientists as I had in my father.”
M. Clair paused to offer us a French cigarette, which gagged us. As we gasped, he continued his remarks. “Everybody nowadays thinks that parents are guilty of the children’s crimes,” he said. “All kinds of movies make this point. But if a bad child, trying to shoot somebody, misses, does anybody give the parents credit for having bad eyesight? No! It seems to me that if you pursue this line of thinking—that parents are guilty of the sins of their children— then all of us back to poor Adam have nothing on our consciences. With nothing on our consciences, we have nothing on our minds—at least, nothing you could make a good drama from.”
M. Clair proceeded to inform us that he had been in Moscow a couple of years ago and had met a colleague on a sound stage. “He asked me what percentage I got on my pictures,” said M. Clair. “He sounded like the director of a B picture in Hollywood. When I went to Hollywood, some years ago, I was hired as a director, but presently, since I am a writer, I collaborated on a script. When my agent suggested that I ought to be paid for this endeavor, the producer said O.K., he’d give me one-tenth of my salary as director as a fee for writing. I had to tell him it should be the other way around. I believe in the script. And yet, even with a meritorious script, you never know what will appeal to the public. I put two lines in ‘A Nous la Liberté’ about a belt line coming to a halt because one individual refused to be mechanized, and they turned into the funniest scene in the picture. Had I known, I would have stopped not only the belt line but the town, the province, and possibly the country. But you never can tell how people will react to comedy.” M. Clair sighed heavily. “It’s so hard to be funny about anything now,” he observed. “Even so, it may be that, with independent productions and no bureaucratic supervision, some funny fellows will come along. In the days when I started, just after the First World War, the movie business was a pleasure. I was working on L’Intransigeant, as a writer, when I was hired to play the part of a suave Parisian with the Loïe Fuller ballet troupe, in a short film. That was when I changed my name from René Chomette to René Clair. Later on, I graduated into being the hero of a serial, still very suave. But I always thought of myself as a writer until a publisher, looking over a philosophical novel of mine, insisted that ‘René Chomette’ must be ‘René Clair,’ or otherwise the thing might just as well be signed ‘Anonymous.’ It was the movies for me from then on. Maybe now, at sixty, I’ll have to think about television. It has its points.”