The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks)

by Lillian Ross

  It is with Candidate Vidal that we are concerned at the moment, and we recently sent a man who represented himself as a seasoned political observer up to Barrytown, in Dutchess County, where Mr. Vidal lives. His home is a resplendent masterpiece of Greek revival built by John R. Livingston in 1820 and named, inevitably, Edgewater. Unlike most of the houses along the Hudson, it sits smack on the bank of the river, no more than three or four feet above water level. One of its former owners was the essayist John Jay Chapman. Its present owner acquired it ten years ago, when he was twenty-four. He greeted our representative on the front steps, and consented then and there to an exclusive press conference, the official verbatim transcript of which follows:

  Q—Why are you in politics?

  A—Because I find it exhilarating and satisfying.

  Q—Who is your opponent?

  A—The incumbent, J. Ernest Wharton, Republican, of Schoharie County.

  Q—Is he formidable?

  A—A foeman worthy of my steel. A five-time winner. A leading member of the Interior and Insular Affairs Committee. A creature of infinite cunning. No sooner had I entered the race and described him as a do-nothing congressman than he put me on the defensive by sponsoring a bill—I believe his maiden effort at legislation—making it a federal offense to spread false information about bombs on airplanes, buses, and the like. What could I do but applaud? Now I’m guilty of me-tooism. First round to Wharton. But I shall return.

  Q—Do you think you can win?

  A—Certainly. All I have to do is overcome a two-to-one Republican lead. I must create a new voting pattern.

  Q—How do you expect to do that?

  A—In the main, by superior industry. Actually, I have labored in the vineyard for almost a year now. Why do you suppose I’ve been turning up like a bad penny on television? And I have addressed practically every Rotary, Kiwanis, Chamber of Commerce, and Young Marrieds Club in the Twenty-ninth District.

  Q—Have you talked politics in those places?

  A—Couldn’t do that or I wouldn’t have been asked. I’ve talked Hollywood, television, Broadway, what Liz Taylor is like, and that sort of thing. They’ve heard the name Vidal all over the District, and it’s an easy one to remember. Now and then I have injected politics in a mild way. I have a little bit about my being asked to the White House to write a speech on integration for the President.

  Q—Did that happen?

  A—Oh, yes. Sherman Adams asked me to do it, and he liked the speech. Q—Did the President deliver it?

  A—No.

  Q—Does any machine control you?

  A—No. Next question, please.

  Q—Do you have a machine of your own?

  A—I’m lunching with Arthur Krock next week. At the Morosco, we’re selling tickets for December performances.

  Q—What are the issues hereabouts? Please be commendably brief.

  A—The big one is schools. We need more of them. I stand foursquare for federal aid to education. Pollution of the lordly Hudson is another, and one dear to me. As you can see, the river is a hundred feet from my door. In summer, I swim in it every day. I shall need my health to serve my people.

  Q—Can you resist lobbies?

  A—With the greatest of ease. I can also resist making jokes about them.

  Q—Brooks Atkinson, of Greene County, has announced in the Times that he will vote for you. Do you welcome his support?

  A—Cordially. Though nothing that votes is alien to me, I particularly welcome the approval of Mr. Atkinson. I am hoping for that of Mrs. Atkinson, too. There is immediate seating on my bandwagon.

  Q—Do you consider yourself a candidate for the Pulitzer Prize?

  A—I am running in Columbia County but not at Columbia University. I have not actively sought the Prize, nor will I do so. If, however, the Prize should seek the man, I would not—repeat, not—decline so signal an honor.

  Q—Do you aspire to office even higher than that of Representative from the Twenty-ninth District?

  A—I have, since childhood, said that I would rather be President than write.

  Q—Have you a campaign slogan?

  A—Yes. A fine one. It’s from Alfred North Whitehead: “No code of verbal statement can ever exhaust the shifting background of presupposed fact.”

  Q—What does that mean?

  A—It means that questions are quite as important as answers. I lack many answers, but I think I know the right questions. For example, what kind of society do we want? Only by examining presuppositions can we approach any kind of truth. In “The Best Man,” I have tried to raise important questions about politics and the Presidency. I would like to go to Washington and perhaps head a Congressional investigation of what we mean when we speak of “the free world.”

  Q—Have you mentioned your campaign slogan to your managers? And, if so, what do they think of it?

  A—To your first question the answer is yes. To the second it is that they made no audible response.

  Q—Thank you, Mr. Candidate.

  1960

  NICHOLS, MAY, AND HORSES — John McCarten

  HAVING read in the program of the show called “An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May” that Mr. Nichols had represented the United States on an Olympic equestrian team, we suggested last week that the partners join us at a session of the National Horse Show, at Madison Square Garden. When we met them at the entrance to the place, Mr. Nichols was quick to inform us that he hadn’t been on any equestrian team in any Olympics, and Miss May told us that whatever interest she’d once had in horses had ended when she fell off one a couple of years ago on a Central Park bridle path and twisted all kinds of ligaments in her left arm.

  “The horse was just walking,” Miss May said, “and I kind of slid off him, and you should have seen the hurt look he gave me.”

  “Nobody ever falls off a walking horse,” said Mr. Nichols. “You could fall down on the floor more easily than you could fall off a walking horse.”

  “Look,” said Miss May, “I fell off this horse, and he was embarrassed and I was embarrassed, and so there. I had my arm in a cast for a long time.”

  Mr. Nichols, a blond and most amiable young man of twenty-nine, conceded the fall, and Miss May, who is brunette, rosy, and ebullient, seemed pleased.

  “Now, about this Olympic business,” we said.

  “Oh, that,” Mr. Nichols observed. “You see, when the program said that Elaine is a distant cousin of Ed Sullivan—we’re all cousins if you take it right back to Adam—I thought it would be only fair for me to look pretty distinguished, too. Actually, I’ve known quite a few horses in my day, and I’ve ridden in horse shows in Chicago. I don’t want to put on any side, but I was an instructor at the Claremont Riding Academy, up on West Eighty-ninth Street, when I was going to high school in Manhattan.”

  “It was one of those Claremont horses I fell off,” said Miss May.

  Any further discussion of Miss May’s traumatic experience in the Park was interrupted by Mr. Edward Bimberg, a horse fancier and official engaged in stimulating attendance at the Show. It soon developed that Mr. Bimberg had also, in his day, been an instructor at the Claremont. Horse riders, like horse-players, are a companionable crew, and in a jiffy we all went, arm in arm, down into the basement of the Garden to have a look at the horses stabled there. At the bottom of the ramp, we encountered a large gray horse, which was walking around, accompanied by a groom, in front of the area devoted to the beasts of the Dodge saddle-horse stables.

  “Biggest in the country,” said Mr. Nichols knowledgeably.

  Miss May made a tentative pass at the muzzle of the big gray, and it blinked its great eyes and turned its head away.

  “Imagine!” said Miss May. “I’m being rejected by a horse. This is a shattering experience.”

  We continued past orderly rows of box stalls until we came to one occupied by a splendid black animal that was being petted by a gentleman in a blue serge suit. The horse’s lips were moving ner
vously, and Miss May proposed that we stick around until the gentleman was bitten.

  “Horses will not bite you if you let them get the scent of you,” said Mr. Bimberg. “Of course, if you exude salt in your palms, they will try to get it. They are crazy about salt.”

  “I think I’m exuding salt,” said Miss May, backing away from the stall.

  Not far from the nervous animal, we came upon a groom braiding the tail of a placid chestnut. Mr. Nichols pointed out that this would improve the horse’s appearance and would help to ingratiate him with the Horse Show judges.

  “Imagine!” said Miss May. “You get up in the morning, you have a nourishing breakfast, you say goodbye to the wife and kids, and then you spend the rest of the day braiding horses’ tails.” She was looking about reflectively when Mr. Nichols suddenly advised her that just beyond there was a man combing a tail with no horse attached, as indeed there was.

  “Among the gaited horses,” said Mr. Bimberg, “they are allowed to put on false tails.”

  Mr. Nichols and Mr. Bimberg got into a perceptive chat about gaited horses, Miss May wandered off, and we went over to watch a jumper being prepared for a contest. When the party reassembled, somewhere farther along, Miss May was trying to outstare a brown dachshund, which was snarling. “He hates me,” she said.

  “Never look a dog in the eye,” said Mr. Bimberg.

  “If I sweat, I get bitten by a horse, and if I look, I get bitten by a dog,” said Miss May dolefully.

  We went on to watch a handsome bay having his front feet soothed in a whirlpool bath, and then made our way to the pressroom, where Miss May challenged Mr. Nichols to do his imitation of Audrey Hepburn’s first entrance in “Ondine.”

  “Not here,” he said. “Not here.”

  “You wouldn’t believe this,” said Miss May, “but my daughter Jeannie is a super rider, and she’s only eleven. I was riding with her when I slid off that horse and hurt my arm. I love the outdoor life—like walking. I was surprised,” she added unexpectedly, “to find all those horses being washed. I thought they just dusted them, or something.”

  “Give me a horse I can ride like a man,” said Mr. Nichols. “Washed or unwashed.”

  Mr. Bimberg said that he’d like to oblige but the schedule of the show would not permit Mr. Nichols to demonstrate his equestrian skills.

  “So now you’ll have to imitate Audrey Hepburn,” said Miss May. “You know,” she continued, without pause, “I had a terrible argument about Shakespeare’s sonnets with a man who interviewed us the other day. Just to make conversation, I said I hated them, and it turned out he loved them. But what can you do—just sit there?”

  At the behest of Mr. Bimberg, we took our chums up to see some working hunters with lady riders in the main ring.

  “I keep wondering whether I ought to buy a horse,” said Mr. Nichols as the ladies and their mounts went through their expert paces.

  “If you do, get one that really likes your scent,” said Miss May.

  1960

  ALBEE — Lillian Ross

  WE had a talk last week with Edward Albee, the thirty-three-year-old playwright whose three one-act plays now on the boards Off Broadway have established him as the critics’ current man-of-promise. “The Zoo Story” opened at the Provincetown Playhouse on January 14, 1960, and has been produced in London and in Berlin, among other places; “The American Dream” and “The Death of Bessie Smith,” which opened January 24, 1961, and March 1, 1961, respectively, are both at the York Playhouse. We found Mr. Albee at home, in a ground-floor, six-room apartment in a ninety-year-old, yellow-stucco-front house on West Twelfth Street—an apartment packed to the gills with modern paintings, a stereophonic record player, fresh white pompons, books on the drama, a roommate named William Flanagan (who composed the music for “Bessie Smith” and another Albee one-acter, called “The Sandbox”), and three orphaned cats rescued by Albee: Cunégonde, three and a half; Vanessa, two and a half; and a still nameless thirteen-week-old semi-Siamese kitten. Albee, who is a handsome, lean, dark-haired young man with a crew haircut and considerable charm, and who was wearing a gray tweed sports jacket, gray flannel slacks, a button-down-collar white shirt, and a black wool tie, directed us to avoid a collapsing modern sofa and to sit in a non-collapsing modern chair, out of which he shooed his cats with a few firm, authoritative, affectionate, non-sticky words.

  “I get them from the Greenwich Village Humane League,” Albee told us. “The League people go out and look for abandoned cats on the street, and save them from the awful things that happen to homeless kittens in New York, like being tossed into bonfires by mean kids. That sort of thing can happen in the Village, I’m sorry to say. Although I wouldn’t live anywhere but in New York. I like to be in the center of things. There are ten thousand things you can do in half an hour in New York if you feel like it. I’ve lived in a lot of places—a fifteen-dollar-a-month cold-water flat on the lower East Side, a great big loft right in the middle of the garment district, for seventy a month, and a couple of other places around the Village. All the good places in the Village, all the lovely nineteenth-century houses, are being torn down now and six-story tenements are being put up instead. Do you want to see something amazing in my back yard? A real one-story little cottage, with somebody living in it.” He showed us the amazing view through a rear window. “Will probably be torn down soon. But I’ll try to stay in the Village. It’s one of the few areas where you can be in the center of things and still feel removed.”

  Albee lit a cigarette and sat down carefully on the sofa, and we asked him to give us an autobiographical outline. “Born in Washington, D.C., on March 12, 1928, and came to New York when I was two weeks old,” he said. “I have no idea who my natural parents were, although I’m sure my father wasn’t a President, or anything like that. I was adopted by my father, Reed A. Albee, who worked for his father, Edward Franklin Albee, who started a chain of theatres with B. F. Keith and then sold out to R.K.O. My father is retired now. My mother is a remarkable woman. An excellent horsewoman and saddle-horse judge. I was riding from the time I was able to walk. My parents had a stable of horses in Larchmont or Scarsdale or Rye, or one of those places. I don’t ride any more. Just sort of lost interest in it. My parents gave me a good home and a good education, none of which I appreciated. I attended Rye Country Day School until I was eleven, and then Lawrenceville, where I got thrown out after a year and a half for refusing to go to classes. It was probably that I was too young to be away from home, but instead of going home I was sent to Valley Forge Military Academy—Valley Forge Concentration Camp—where parents send their children for one of three reasons: discipline, or preparation for West Point, or in the hope that they’ll get an education. You do get an education there, but it’s not a purely scholastic education. You march practically all the time and wear a grayish-blue uniform like West Point’s, with the hat with the patent-leather brim. I had the usual routine of discipline, institutional food, and dreary living quarters. When I finally left, after a year, I decided not to get thrown out of another school. I went to Choate next, and it was marvellous, but by then I was a few years older. I appreciated Choate after the aridity of a military school. I was very happy there. I went on to Trinity College, in Hartford, for a year and a half. I didn’t have enough interest in it to stick it out for four years. I wouldn’t go to chapel, and I wouldn’t go to one of the math courses. It was probably a basic discontent with myself that hadn’t taken a specific form yet. After a year and a half, the college suggested that I not come back, which was fine with me.”

  Albee gave a quick laugh and, inhaling with all the abandon of the carefree pre-filter age, continued, through the smoke, “I got my first job at Station WNYC, where I spent a year and a half writing continuity for the music programs. After that, I had an awful lot of jobs: forty-dollar-a-week office boy for Warwick & Legler, the ad agency; salesman in the record department of Bloomingdale’s; salesman in the book department of Schirmer’s; luncheon
ette counterman at the Manhattan Towers Hotel. Then, starting in 1955, I was a Western Union messenger for three years, all over the city. I liked it. It wasn’t a job that tired you out with mental work. I liked walking, and I met all sorts of interesting people. In 1949, I had come into a very small income, from a trust fund set up by my maternal grandmother, that was not quite enough to spoil me. In 1952, I went to Florence for four or five months and tried to write a novel. The novel was awful. I had written a lot of poetry, and had even managed to get one poem published, when I was seventeen, in a Texas magazine called Kaleidoscope. It had something to do with turning eighteen. Then, in the spring of 1958, when I hit thirty, a kind of explosion took place in my life. I’d been drifting, and I got fed up with myself. I decided to write a play. I was getting a little bit more money from the trust fund—thirty-five hundred dollars a year—and I quit work.

  “I wrote ‘The Zoo Story’ on a wobbly table in the kitchen of the apartment I was living in at the time—at 238 West Fourth Street. I did a draft, made pencil revisions, and typed a second script, and that’s the way I’ve been doing my plays since. I finished ‘The Zoo Story’ in three weeks and showed it to a few uptown producers, who said it was nice but they wanted a full-length play. Then Bill Flanagan sent a copy of the play to David Diamond, the American composer, who was living in Florence, and Diamond sent it to a Swiss actor, Pinkas Braun, in Zurich, who later did all the German translations of my plays. Braun made a tape recording of the play in English and sent it to Mrs. Stefani Hunzinger, in Frankfurt, who is head of the drama department of S. Fischer, one of the biggest publishing houses in Germany. From there it went on to a producer named Barlog, in Berlin, and that’s where I had my first audience—on September 28, 1959. ‘The Death of Bessie Smith’ was produced in Berlin about a year ago, before it was put on here. Aside from the interest that German audiences take in the contemporary foreign theatre, they seem to find some application to their own lives in my plays.”