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

by Lillian Ross

  Fellini smiled politely and lifted a crab-filled apricot half in a gesture of salute to her. “Molto bene,” he said.

  Mr. Cullman reappeared, now wearing a cream-colored Issey Miyake sweater shirt, cream-colored slacks, and white loafers, and led everybody on a tour of the old part of the house. “This is our pizza oven,” he said, with an air of amusement, indicating a large fireplace. “This was the kitchen, and that other room was the parlor, where the minister came, and there are two bedrooms upstairs.”

  “Pizza oven,” Fellini said, looking thoughtfully at Mastroianni, who gave his charming smile and shrug. Everybody regarded the fireplace with admiration.

  Gang members from the other limos arrived and joined the tour, which wound quickly back to the room with the view.

  “The rooms were small,” Mr. Cullman said. “With low ceilings, to keep them warm on cold nights.”

  “Yes, very cold in Conneckticut,” Fellini said sympathetically.

  Mr. Cullman looked pleased. “The farmhouse, when it was first built, had only four rooms,” he said. “Now we’ve got eleven.”

  “Very cold on a farm,” Miss Aimée said.

  Miss Masina said that the pâté on toast was very tasty, and she smiled gratefully at the host and hostess. Mr. Cullman invited Fellini to take off his coat, but Fellini graciously again said no. Mr. Cullman pointed up to the ceiling beams. “I got those beams from this guy who buys old farmhouses,” he said to Fellini. “There’s this guy Weiss, in Roxbury. Collects old barns, old timbers.”

  Fellini nodded respectfully.

  “Why all the houses made of wood, not stone, in Conneckticut?” Mastroianni asked.

  “Plenty of wood in this part of the country,” Mr. Cullman said.

  “I thought wood because the pioneers moved all the time—away from the Indians,” Mastroianni said, acting the part of an Indian shooting an arrow at Mr. Cullman.

  “Yeah,” Mr. Cullman said.

  Led by the host and hostess, the gang then trooped down the grassy slope to the boathouse, where Mr. Cullman pointed to a narrow wooden canoe hanging under the Japanese eaves. “It’s a New Guinea canoe,” Mr. Cullman said as the gang stared solemnly at the canoe. “Dorothy bought it there from a native for six dollars. It cost a hundred dollars to ship it home.” He laughed heartily, and the gang coöperatively joined in with mild laughter.

  On the boathouse deck, Miss Masina pushed some hanging Soleri bells, and they jangled, so she pushed them harder.

  “The Whitney used to sell them,” Mr. Cullman said. “Who’s for a swim?”

  Fellini looked at Mastroianni, who looked at Miss Aimée, who looked at Miss Masina, who turned from the bells, and all shook their heads. One gang member’s son, age nineteen, said all right, he’d take a swim, and he did, while everybody else, still looking solemn, silently watched him. Mr. Cullman called to the young man, asking him what he thought the temperature of the water was. About sixty-eight degrees, the young man called back. Mr. Cullman said it should be at least seventy-two degrees, and called to the young man to get the pool thermometer and take the temperature of the water. The lone swimmer took the temperature and reported that it was sixty-eight degrees. The silent gang nodded with distress at this news. Mr. Cullman remarked that the pool held a million gallons of water. Everybody looked obligingly bowled over. Then everybody trooped up the green slope toward the house as Mr. Cullman briefed us on the sculptures. “Recognize the bird?” he said. “It’s a Senufo piece, from Africa. Dorothy found it somewhere.”

  Back in the house, the gang again got to work on the crabmeat and the pâté. Mrs. Cullman sat with Fellini and discussed travel.

  “You haven’t spent much time here, Mr. Fellini,” Mrs. Cullman said.

  “In 1957, I came for some producers, as the guest of them,” he said. “They gave me people to show to me anything I want to see, and they said, ‘Do what you want.’ What I want was to go back to Italy, so I left. In the plane, as we flew away from New York, I looked down, and I felt very moved, very guilty that I was leaving.”

  “Do you find when you travel that you’re too close to it, and that later you feel differently about it?” Mrs. Cullman asked.

  “Language is the medium for the relationship to reality,” Fellini said, looking apologetic. “If I don’t know the language, I feel lost.”

  “Would that be true in another European country?” Mrs. Cullman asked.

  “Yes,” said Fellini.

  “Are you sure you won’t take off your jacket?” Mr. Cullman asked.

  We had a bite of crabmeat. Fellini came over. “Don’t eat too much,” he said. “These are only the hors d’oeuvres. There will be a lot of food.”

  He was right. He knew the script. The meal that followed was terrific: curried chicken, seafood pasta, steamed mussels, steamed clams, green salad, white wine, three kinds of cake, ice cream, candied-ginger sauce, fresh fruit, and espresso. Everybody ate for two hours. Then everybody hugged Mrs. Cullman and shook hands with Mr. Cullman and said very enthusiastically, “Thank you very much. Goodbye.”

  In the limo on the way back, Wendy Keys, the director and co-producer of the tribute, explained to Fellini how the program in Avery Fisher Hall would go—with projections of clips from his movies interspersed with three-minute speeches from Mastroianni, Miss Masina, Miss Aimée, Donald Sutherland, Martin Scorsese, and others.

  “It will be pictures, people, pictures, people, et cetera, and, at the end, you,” Miss Keys said.

  “I want the Rockettes,” Fellini said.

  THE next night was a black-tie occasion. Before the program started, Fellini ran into Mr. Cullman, whose bow tie, with his tuxedo, had spectacular blue polka dots the size of dimes on a bright-red background.

  “It is the tie of a Conneckticut Yankee,” Fellini said knowledgeably.

  The tribute went off nicely. It was pictures, people, pictures, people, et cetera, and then Fellini, who read a short speech: “My dear American friends: You are truly a simpatico people, as I always suspected since I was a child. . . . In the small movie house of my village—with two hundred seats and five hundred standing room—I discovered through your films that there existed another way of life, that a country existed of wide-open spaces, of fantastic cities which were like a cross between Babylon and Mars. Perhaps, thinking about it now, the stories were simplistic. However, it was nice to think that despite the conflicts and the pitfalls there was always a happy ending. It was especially wonderful to know that a country existed where people were free, rich, and happy, dancing on the roofs of the skyscrapers, and where even a humble tramp could become President. Perhaps even then it wasn’t really like this. However, I believe that I owe to those flickering shadows from America my decision to express myself through film. And so I, too, made some films and gave life to some flickering shadows, and through them I told the story of my country. And tonight I am extremely touched to find myself here, together with my beloved actors, and honored by the people who inspired me in those old years.”

  1985

  MONSTER TRUCKS AND MUD BOG — Ian Frazier

  ON the night of the sixth game of the World Series—which turned out to be one of the most exciting World Series games ever—twelve thousand people drove to the Nassau Coliseum and paid as much as $17.50 a ticket to see the United States Hot Rod Association Monster Truck and Mud Bog Fall Nationals. Outside the Coliseum, people waited in long lines. As usual, everybody was named Richie. Inside, they saw on the arena floor a long dirt ramp—known as the mud bog—and on each side of the ramp three undistinguished-looking cars parked close together. Everybody stood for the national anthem; there was a short parade; and then came the car-crushing competition, featuring the Monster Trucks.

  What Monster Trucks do is drive over cars. Monster Trucks have the bodies of stock cars (usually pickups), huge, seething engines, and wheels between five and six feet tall. The first Monster Truck was built in 1979, when a man in St. Louis named Bob Chandler jacked up a For
d pickup and fitted it with tractor tires and named it Big Foot, to promote his four-wheel-drive shop. Since then, Big Foot has appeared in movies and on TV, and toy companies have reproduced it, and Bob Chandler has built more Big Foots, and a number of people have built Monster Trucks of their own. Today, it is hard to find a ten-year-old boy in this country who has never heard of Big Foot or the Monster Trucks.

  The announcer said, “Ladies and gentlemen, my name’s Bret Kepner, and I’d like to welcome you and introduce you to some of the best-known names in the Monster Truck world today. First, from Fayetteville, North Carolina, is twenty-seven-year-old Kevin Dabney, in his 1968 Chevy Camaro, Blue Thunder. But before you start to cheer, all you Chevy fans, I should just mention that this monster has a four-hundred-and-fifty-six-cubic-inch Chrysler engine under the hood. Each one of those wheels is sixty-six inches tall and weighs twenty-one hundred pounds. The tires are ten-ply steel-belted Firestone radials built for an Army amphibious personnel-carrier, and Kevin got them at a steal from Army surplus for thirty-four hundred dollars apiece. It took him seven years of paychecks to finish that truck, at a cost of approximately a hundred and twenty thousand dollars, and if you’re looking for a steering wheel, don’t bother. Every single control on that vehicle except the throttle and the brake runs off a helicopter joystick. Next, we have Driver Robert Moore, from Bakers-field, California, in his ’69 Chevy truck, the original Cyclops. Robert’s got double sets of tractor tires all around and five hundred and thirteen inches of alcohol-burning big-block Chevy engine. But it’s not under the hood—that engine sits right next to Robert in the cockpit. Now it’s time for the other folks to cheer. Get ready, all you Ford fans, for Mike Spiker, in his 1983 Ford F-250, the All American, the Monster Truck of the South. Mike has developed a system of neon-gas tubes to bring the charge from the coil to the spark plugs. He says it fires quicker and smoother. Raise your hood, Mike, and show how that neon looks flashing in there—like the engine’s on fire. And, finally, we’ve got a 1985 supercharged Ford from Winchester, Virginia, built and driven by Diehl Wilson, and it’s called the Virginia Giant. This machine has a hydraulically operated body that raises up five feet off the frame—that makes it one of the ‘funny cars’ of the crushing circuit—and it is sponsored by Virginia Galleries, crafters of fine hardwood handmade Colonial-style furniture. All right, you Ford fans, let’s hear it!”

  Monster Trucks make a noise that lifts you up by the roof of your mouth. One by one, the Monster Trucks elephanted toward the parked cars, and then crunched up and over. They did plenty of honking and revving and light-flashing and raising of hoods along the way. The cars—a ’75 Plymouth Fury, a ’74 Chrysler Newport, a ’77 Mercury Marquis, a ’77 Ford Torino, a ’72 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, a ’71 Pontiac LeMans—did not cave in as fast as you might think. “Un-beleee-vable wheel stand by that Cyclops!” the announcer said. “Uhoh, looks like he’s got a broken axle. Tough break for the Cyclops.” The winner, decided by audience vote, was the Virginia Giant. The Monster Trucks drove off. Then a twenty-five-ton and a fifteen-ton Caterpillar front-end loader began pushing the cars over to the edges of the arena, out of the way. Through the Torino’s empty rear window you could see on its sagging rear dash two magazines without covers. One magazine had a full-page ad for Chivas Regal Scotch.

  Then it was time for the Mud Bog Competition. The object of mud-bog driving is to see how far you can go in the bog before you get stuck. The contestants drove four-wheel-drive vehicles divided into three classes—street, modified, and open. The winner of the street class, Dean Schultz, of Lindenhurst, New York, made it seventy-one feet and one inch. He skidded, bounced, plowed, plunged, and dug in. His front bumper slowly sank out of sight as each wheel spun its own solar system of flying mud. “He’s still moving,” the announcer said. “Still moving. Still moving. Still moving!” The audience leaped to its feet and cheered like a liberated nation.

  1985

  WORKOUTS — Lillian Ross

  DURING the past decade, Robin Williams, the thirty-four-year-old comic actor, who seems to connect with his audiences on some wild, deep level and to make them laugh in a special way, at once loud, true, and happy, has been featured in two television programs (“Mork & Mindy” and the 1977 revival of “Laugh-In”), six movies (“Popeye,” “The World According to Garp,” “The Survivors,” “Moscow on the Hudson,” “The Best of Times,” and the forthcoming “Club Paradise”), two concert performances on videocassette, and two record albums (“Reality . . . What a Concept” and “Throbbing Python of Love”). One kind of performing, however, Williams has been doing non-stop— before, during, and since his television, movie, concert, and recording activities—and that is working out, in unannounced appearances, in small, late-night comedy clubs: in the Comedy Store, in Los Angeles; in Yuk-Yuk’s, in Toronto; in the Second City, in Chicago; in the Holy City Zoo, in San Francisco; in Catch a Rising Star, in New York; and in others that have become established since the early nineteen-seventies in dozens of cities in the United States. Well, before flying west to be an Oscar host extraordinaire, Williams was in New York, helping to organize last week’s “Comic Relief” cable-television show—a benefit to raise money for the nation’s homeless—and we tagged along with him for a while as he embarked on his midnight-and-after workouts.

  When we met Williams, he had been sitting for four hours at the Public Theatre watching “Hamlet,” and he emerged looking wilted and done in. He is a stocky, mild-seeming man with a rubbery face and body, which we were accustomed to seeing, in performance, go in seconds from Barry Fitzgerald to William F. Buckley, Jr., and on to Jerry Falwell, to Jesse Jackson, to Nadia Comaneci, and to God knows who or what else—always, in his inimitable way, simultaneously sharp and gentle. Now, wearing baggy brown pants tight at the ankles, black hiking boots, and a yellow rain jacket, he was calm and subdued. He expressed admiration for Kevin Kline as Hamlet and for Harriet Harris as Ophelia, noting that both actors were, like him, alumni of the Juilliard Theatre Center. He said that Jeff Weiss, a first-timer in a legitimate production, who had taken the roles of the Ghost, the Player King, and Osric, the unctuous courtier, was impressive. Then, in the taxi heading for Catch a Rising Star (First Avenue near Seventy-seventh), Williams suddenly, quietly, became, successively, a Yiddish-accented Hamlet lamenting Yorick “buried in treyf ”; an insane Hamlet in a mental institution playing all the parts in the play; a “Hamlet” featuring George Jessel as the Ghost; a Woody Allen Hamlet, sounding exactly like Woody Allen saying “I don’t know whether I should avenge him or honor him”; a Jack Nicholson Hamlet, sounding exactly like Jack Nicholson saying “To be or not to bleeping be . . .”

  Then Williams retreated into his own calm, and we spent the rest of the taxi ride having him give us a quick refresher course in his history: Born in Chicago, an only child, his father an automobile-company vice-president (“He looks like a British Army officer”), who retired and moved the family to Marin County, outside San Francisco, and his mother a “very funny” prankster and cutup, originally from the South, who loves to tell jokes. “I was good in languages and thought I’d go into the Foreign Service, or something like that,” Williams told us. “In high school, I was heavily into cross-country running, which I loved, and wrestling, which gave me a chance to do some damage. I went to one of the Claremont Colleges, where I took courses in political science and economics and failed them. After the first year, I left Claremont and went to the College of Marin, near home, which had an amazing Drama Department, with teachers who told me about Juilliard. I auditioned for Juilliard, got a full scholarship, and stayed three years, doing Shakespeare and Strindberg. Back home, I started going nightly to a coffeehouse called the Intersection, on Union Street in San Francisco. During the day, I worked in an ice-cream parlor. One night, at the coffeehouse, for no reason at all, I got up and imitated a quarterback high on LSD. It felt great. This was fun. No one was telling me what to do. I liked the freedom.”

  By the time we arrive
d at Catch a Rising Star, it was packed: standees three deep at the bar in front; an audience of about a hundred and fifty in the back room, seated at little tables, having drinks, facing a small platform with a standing mike. On the wall behind the platform were signs saying “BREAK A LEG” and “MONOGRAM PICTURES CORP. ENTRANCE,” and nearby was a montage painting of famous comedians—Eddie Cantor, Charlie Chaplin, Milton Berle, and Abbott and Costello. On the platform, a young m.c.—short, chubby, with dark curly hair, and wearing a long-sleeved sports shirt over a T-shirt—was getting ready laughs with routine questions of and comments on the audience, which consisted mostly of young singles, young couples, foursomes of young women, threesomes of young men. The m.c. left after introducing his replacement, a tall, rangy man with thinning hair who wore jeans and a red sweater. The replacement worked for about fifteen minutes, getting dutiful laughs by telling “family” jokes: “My mother had four children. I was the only vertebrate one,” and “We have a dog. He’s half retriever, half vulture. He’s been circling Grandma.”

  The chubby m.c. returned and announced that Robin Williams was there, and the place went bananas. Screams, yells, whistles, shrieks, cheers, and tremendous applause. Williams took the mike. He said, speaking as an Oscar recipient, “Thank you for making this possible. [As a snobbish theatregoer] As long as I have my glasses on, the world is mine. I just went to see ‘Hamlet.’ I want to see Hamlet played by Sly Stallone. [As Stallone] ‘To be or what?’ [As himself] Maybe he and Schwarzenegger can do a movie together. [As Schwarzenegger] With subtitles in English.”

  Williams went, again in seconds, from being one human cell to being Central Park squirrels, New York City pigeons (“I could fly, but I like it here”), another Oscar recipient (“I’d like to thank anybody who didn’t try to kill me”), himself as penitent (“I’m sorry, God, I’m sorry that I made fun of everybody”), a Japanese manufacturer (“Not my faut, Amelican-made”).