by Lillian Ross
“What do people think about all this stuff you have?” I asked her.
“They’re usually a little embarrassed,” she said. “It escalates from ‘Oh, really?’ to ‘You’re kidding.’ ”
“I don’t think anyone else has a handbag like that,” I said. “How did you get so organized?”
She said, “Most people just let their anxieties build. You know—‘I wish I had my hand cream.’ ”
She blamed herself, however, for not buying more notebooks with red spirals when she was in Norway. In one—her Rapportblokk—she had made notes to herself about such things as where to find the best film processors in the country, and had copied down a recipe for fried chicken. The boarding pass for American Airlines was in there by mistake.
The inventory she gave me of her handbag was like every parent’s dream of a child who doesn’t say “I dunno” the day after Christmas when some relative asks what he or she got but instead remembers every single thing.
“What kind of handbag did you carry in high school?” I asked.
She looked slightly surprised. “A pencil clipped to the front of my notebook,” she said. “It was too bulky to go inside.” She sipped her tea. She said, “In the Midwest, nice girls carried everything in full view of the world.”
Behind her, in the center of the room, was a large spray of flowers: it included spider mums, other kinds of chrysanthemums, and—what seemed miraculous to me on such a cold winter day—branches of forsythia just starting to blossom. Somehow, from somewhere, one of the first signs of spring had been found and brought inside the hotel.
1983
SPEED AND ROSES — William McKibben
WHEN last we spoke with Barbara Cartland, it was at her home outside London, the year was 1976, her years were seventy-five, and her vital statistics looked like this: two hundred and seventeen books—a hundred and seventy of them novels—with a total of seventy million copies in print. We are happy to report that Miss Cartland, whom we encountered last month in the lobby of Penn Station, where she was greeting people coming to the second annual Romantic Book-Lovers’ Conference, has since our last talk set aside her idling ways and got down to some serious work. In the intervening seven years, in which she has attained the age of eighty-one, she has had something or other to do with the Princess Di side of the Royal Wedding and she has written a hundred and forty-five more books—an average of more than twenty a year—to bring her total to three hundred and sixty-two. Now, with something more than three hundred and fifty million copies bought and paid for, she may well be the best-selling author of all time. “I was in Honolulu recently, and I wrote ‘Island of Love,’ and on the way back we stopped in San Francisco, so I wrote ‘Love Goes West.’ No, it’s ‘Love Comes West,’ I think,” she told us. A book takes the disciplined Miss Cartland a week to complete, and she writes for only a shade over two hours each day.
And Miss Cartland, though she is the reigning speed queen, is not alone in her literary approach, we found as we wandered through the corridors of the Hotel Roosevelt, where the conference was held, and talked to some of its participants—who were almost uniformly female and were nearly all either published writers of romance fiction or unpublished writers of romance fiction. For instance, the second-best-selling romance author, Janet Dailey, who has produced seventy-eight novels, announced, “By trial and error, I’ve found the best ways to write—at least for me—and now I finish a book in about nine days.” One reason romance writers write so quickly is that the market for their products never dries up. Rebecca Brandewyne, who was promoting her latest work, “Love, Cherish Me,” at the conference, said she sometimes reads from seven to ten Harlequin romances (which stretch a hundred and eighty-odd pages) in a single evening. And apparently there are others like her. We picked up the following facts about Harlequin Books, the leading publisher in the romance industry:
Fact: Last year, Harlequin sold over two hundred million books—about six books per second.
Fact: If all the Harlequin books sold in a single day last year were stacked one on top of another, the pile would be sixteen times as high as the World Trade Center (or, alternatively, eight times as high as the two towers of the World Trade Center stacked one on top of the other).
Fact: If all the pages of all the Harlequin books sold over the past ten years were laid side by side in the proper places and in the proper configurations, they would completely cover Colorado and Pennsylvania.
Fact: If all the words in Harlequin books sold last year were placed end to end, they could stretch ninety-three times to the moon (a fact that is especially noteworthy when you consider that many Harlequin authors avoid long words).
Fact: If the Harlequin books sold last year were placed end to end, they could run along both sides of the Nile, both sides of the Amazon, and one side of the Rio Grande.
(During that last paragraph, we got up from our desk, bought a diet Coke, joked with several friends about their writing speed, and, in general, wasted time. All the while, the clock was ticking.)
One reason some writers can do romances with such dispatch is that thoughtful publishers provide recipes for them to follow. For example, we talked with Denise Marcil, who, with her partner Meredith Bernstein, “came up with the whole concept” for a new series of Avon paperback romances, which will appear once a month under the over-all title Finding Mr. Right. Ms. Marcil said, “In most romances, what happens is the woman falls in love with a man, there’s a little conflict, and things work out. What’s different in our books is that there are two heroes, not one. And the woman has to choose between them.” Ms. Marcil assured us that none of the jilted heroes do anything rash, and that the breakups are always “handled in an adult way.” As an example of the new genre, Ms. Marcil cited “Dancing Season,” by Carla Neggers, the second title in the series, which features a young woman who runs a bakeshop in her native Saratoga Springs and must decide between a home-town boy and a dancer in a New York City ballet company. She takes the local, leaving the dancer to leap morosely, one of her reasons being that she doesn’t want to give up her ambitious plans for culinary expansion.
It would be less than honest of us to report that the seas of romance fiction are altogether glassy. On the contrary, they’re stormy and roiling—even tempest-tossed—when it comes to the issue of decorous behavior for female characters. Such a fog of photographers had enveloped Miss Cartland at Penn Station that we couldn’t hear everything she said, but we distinctly made out the words “disgusting” and “animals.” And her voice was resolute when she declared that romance fiction was “in rather a torrid period, where everyone feels they must be modern and put in some dirty bits.” Miss Cartland, none of whose heroines find themselves in bed until the necessary vows have been traded in the presence of a cleric, said it was a “medical fact” that promiscuity could damage young women. “Anyway,” she added as she walked off, clutching a bouquet of red roses, “the most exciting thing in the world is still to hear someone say, ‘I love you.’ ”
1983
THE FLOAT COMMITTEE — Alec Wilkinson
THE piece of sidewalk on Fourteenth Street outside Woolworth’s, between Fifth Avenue and University Place, belongs to the Float Committee. It’ll probably be there any minute. In the meantime, here’s its card:
THE HIGH VOLTAGE DANCE ENSEMBLE
THE ELECTRIC SHOCK DANCE ENSEMBLE
AN ORIGINAL GROUP WHO
CHOREOGRAPHED THEIR OWN ELECTRIC
DASHING STYLE
THIS CHOREOGRAPHY USHERS IN A NEW
DANCE VOGUE, FRESH AND EXCITING
The heart of the Float Committee is two brothers, John and William Rich, eighteen and seventeen, who live on East 106th Street and dance at parties and affairs and concerts, but mostly on the street. They usually hit this spot around three, work it an hour or two, and then head for the southwest corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue. If you ask them how they settled on the Float Committee name, they look at you as if you were th
e biggest kind of fool, and say, “It’s just some words.” If you say, “Tell me about dancing,” they become articulate.
JOHN: At home, I always be chilling out, doing some moves, just ticking or regular popping—twitching your joints so it looks like they’re popping out of the socket. William got interested, so I taught him some things, and he developed his own style.
WILLIAM: For a while, we did strictly break dancing. The break is a dance where you bend your knees and keep one hand on the floor and spin around or kick your legs out or do handstands or flips and whatnot.
JOHN: After breaking, we started jamming—just dancing, doing some routines during the summer in a park on our street. It be falling night, and we start jamming, and everybody’d be coming around, and they’d all want to battle us.
WILLIAM: To start a battle, you challenge somebody by doing a move in front of them—any move to catch their attention—and the crowd will see it, and back up and form a circle, and sometimes we have to get people to link their arms to hold back the crowd, it can be so packed.
JOHN: Then you do your move, and they do their best, and you do your best, and the crowd decides the winner by applause.
WILLIAM: If you battle around your block, you’re better off. One time, I was battling this guy Kippy by his project, and I was doing extra good, and he wasn’t doing a thing against me, but he had all his friends cheering him.
JOHN: The last time I battled was last summer. I was dancing along and some guy came up to me and said, “You think you’re doing all right? Deal with my friend.”
WILLIAM: We make routines to records. We have one routine to “Planet Rock,” by the Soulsonic Force, one to “Beat Box,” one to “Big Beat,” and one to a rap record by Spoonie Gee.
JOHN: There’s five of us for our shows, and we have uniforms. We used to wear brown-and-white striped shirt and pants and now we wear all white. We bring the other guys to the street sometimes, but they get tired and run out of moves. You have to learn how to dance without losing energy.
WILLIAM: The best crews in our neighborhood are Larry Love, the Twins—the Twins are double-jointed in their arms—Fable, and Loose Bruce.
JOHN: There’s also a real good kid on a Hundred and Seventy-sixth Street called Spud.
WILLIAM: We don’t battle with any of these people, because they are our friends.
The first time you see William and John, a lot of the things they do may appear random and haphazard, or even improvised. (There is some improvisation, but not much.) The names of some of the standard moves that their routines are based on are the 3-D, the roller coaster, the chain, the wave, the electroresuscitation, the worm, and the vibration, which looks like a person imitating a heat shimmer on a summer runway. John is double-jointed around his ankles, and when he performs the standard moves exploiting this ability he is able to give them a crowd-pleasing appearance. John’s style is abstract; William’s is more literal. William occasionally mimes certain routines; for example, the basketball, the football, the jump rope, the rain, and the bike. In addition, he performs the glide. The glide wins a lot of battles. It is a very strange maneuver, and people really appreciate it, because they have never seen a person pull off a thing like that before. What happens is, William is dancing here and suddenly he’s there, and it seems he did it by shooting out a leg, like a vine, and floating just slightly above the sidewalk to catch up to it. While the glide makes some people jealous, it opens wallets really well.
So here they are on Fourteenth Street, outside Woolworth’s, midafternoon. William is the one with the purple pants and the black shirt. John has the black pants and the blue plaid jacket. Those are Kangol hats. John and William don’t know if Kangol refers to the brand or the style, but they say everybody wears them. John turns up the volume on the box just enough so that you can hear it at the curb. A crowd forms. John dances out from the wall. That’s the vibration. William joins him, and they clasp hands and face each other. That’s the roller coaster—the wave that begins at one pair of hands and travels up William’s arm to his shoulder, across his back to the other shoulder, down the arm to the other hand, and across John’s body in the same fashion. John dances back to the wall, and William continues alone, on his face a look of haughty aplomb. John says softly, “Do your glide, William,” and the crowd, which has been only curious, is startled awake.
“Well, I am too through,” says a woman.
“He look like he made of rubber and whatnot,” says another.
“He look like a Gumby,” says a third.
Many people part with coins and a few with dollar bills, and William, catching his reflection in the store window, permits himself a sly, bashful smile.
1983
TOURIST — Susan Lardner
THIS time, we ran into Janet in a department store, stocking up on massive books at fifty per cent off ticketed price, one day only. “I’ve been to Greece,” she said. “Now I’m doing my Christmas shopping.” We stumbled over a coat on the floor at the foot of a display of reduced games. Janet was struggling with a volume the size of a small tombstone, called “Michelangelo.” “I don’t know if I should get more than one of these,” she said. “I think I’ll get a couple of Hieronymus Bosches, one of these, two Kremlins, one Picasso, and one Art Buchwald.” She piled the books on the corner of a table. “What’s this?” she said. “ ‘Christianity Through the Ages.’ This ought to be for somebody. Yoohoo! Is there a salesman here? Can I buy eight heavy books?” She pointed out the pile of books to a passing store employee. “Eight very heavy books,” she said to him, flashing a smile, and added, “Unfortunately, I’ve lost my coat.” We disentangled our feet from the coat and joined the procession to the sales desk.
“I think I’ve overdone it,” Janet said to the man at the cash register. “Is everything half off? Who am I giving Picasso to?” Another fifty-per-cent-off table caught her eye. “I don’t think I want ‘Estate Planning,’ do you?” she asked us.
We pursed our lips in thought.
The salesman asked Janet for her address and phone number. “We call you if something happens,” he explained.
“To the books or to me?” Janet asked.
“I want to tell you about my trip,” she said to us as we stood with her on the subway platform. We looked interested. “I have a lot of things on little pieces of paper, as you know,” she said. “The whole experience on little pieces of paper.”
We watched a train come and go. Too crowded.
Janet went on with her story. “In Rome, I was sick,” she said. “I had planned to look up some of my favorite statues, but I ended up on the beach at Ostia, and there was no sun. When I arrived in Italy, I waited for Nunzia, my secretary in World War II, to pick me up at the airport, but she had come to pick me up on Sunday and I didn’t get there till Monday. Do you know the difference between direct and non-stop?”
We shook our head.
“Direct flights all stop in Paris, and the non-stop ones don’t stop,” she explained. “One whole day, I was looking for Mr. Antinori, where I got all my leather boxes in World War II—the bygone days. Nunzia said he might be dead. Not only was he not dead but he’s the exact same age I am. And I met a wonderful, handsome couple in this ritzy restaurant on the Piazza Navona, who had been married for thirty-two years and holding hands their entire marriage. They invited me to stay with them in Sorrento the next time I go back. I just talked to strangers and bought things; I was too tired to do anything else. I didn’t see the ‘Moses’ or the other one—the ‘Pietà.’ I spent a lot of time taking pictures of cats and writing postcards. I can never get over the Colosseum. You drive down the street and there it is. You forget about unrequited love or that you can’t hear out of your right ear, and you realize you’re just a little speck.”
Another train came in. Janet got a seat and we hovered over her, trying to hear a story about a Yale man, but the train was too noisy. When it stopped at Forty-second Street, Janet was saying, “One washcloth and three pi
eces of soap. I had to go down to the bar to get an ashtray. Wait a minute—let me go back to Dubrovnik. I loved Dubrovnik.”
Through the roar of the train heading uptown, we heard “A room that looked like a Communist cell—no mirrors, the phone didn’t work, and the only room that had a tree in front of it, so there was no view.”
At the Fifty-ninth Street stop, we caught “Little streets that start low and go up high. ‘What’s the name of this water?’ ‘You’re swimming in the Adriatic Sea.’ I went all by myself, because the tour guide left without me.”
At Seventy-second, “Two Yugoslavian brothers with gorgeous bodies. The people from New Hampshire were for anybody except Reagan.” Something about Pavarotti’s wife and someone from the Dalton School.
By the time we accompanied her off the train, at Ninety-sixth Street, Janet was in a hotel in Athens, inviting herself to share a table with a man from Sweden. “I don’t like to eat alone, so I asked if he minded,” she said. “I was going to pay for myself. He was what you would call overdelighted. He seemed all right until he decided to tell me how to eat a baked potato. ‘First salt. Then pepper. Then butter. No, more butter. Now you take a spoon.’ ‘A spoon?’ I asked. ‘Yes, a spoon.’ He invited me to his hotel, because there was a pool on the roof. ‘Do you realize what it’s like to see the Acropolis from a pool?’ Right after the potato, he explained to me why men like to have affairs with women. ‘Because for that one or two minutes,’ he said, ‘you own her.’ He scared the hell out of me. By the way, a baked potato with a spoon is delicious.