Manhattan Notebook
To New York in the prime of a golden fall to do a television show. I am just dropping off to sleep, drugged to take care of the One Change, when Mr O'Malley rings. Mr 9Malley is what John Le Cane might call a 'burrower of the Dick Cavett Show — a pre-interrogator, a de-briefer. He is very Clever, and subtly extracts the truth from me as the night rides by. Is he taping our conversation? Perhaps, but he does it most considerately, and I begin to feel in our relationship some of that paradoxical intimacy We read about between captive and jailer1 am a bit dopy anyway, from the Mogadon, and his gentle voice soothes me. I am almost Sliding into oblivion again when he declares the session over. 'And I would just like to Y. Jan', Mr O'Malley concludes, 'that frunt what I have read of your work, from what I have heard about you, and from our little conversation tonight, I like you very much.' Mogadon takes over, less emollienuy.
brilliant in the morning! Brilliant autumn clay, brilliant sting of sea-breeze down the avenues. I engage in one of my favourite activities, walking briskly about cities. Manhattan has remarkably spruced itself, since its nadir of potholes and bankruptcy, and as big towns go, looks in good enough shaPe now. Distinctly better-shaped, too, are the New Yorkers, among whom I (*serve many fine and hearty pedestrians, rrhythmically marking time at the traffic ?hts and exchanging comradely smiles 71th me as we pass energetically on the sidewalk. The jogging craze has helped no d?obt, but New Yorkers also seem to be ei.ating less and better, drinking less and 'leiter, smoking hardly at all. Nobody could call the American nation as a whole un°._bese, but the fat New Yorker is becoming a true rarity: almost the only sagging bellies I the are the turns of New York's Finest, n e. cops. It's a curious thing — have you °tIced? — how old the New York policeinen are beginning to look.
We-,Ltn.._ --oss these matters, friends and I, over 'tuleh at my favourite Manhattan restaurant. Le Marmiton on 49th Street. After a tili!etime of constant travel, this is one of only k_ e restaurants in the world where they ,11°Nv me by name (the others are Harry's as in Venice and the Walnut Tree at Llan d kewi Skirrid). I have 'red caviare' with e °PPed onions and sour cream; grilled s,_" dulPed bass with salad; a carafe of California wr.Y White. They tell me I have chosen ,„,..13e.IY, because the striped bass will soon be :Mulct: I detect a moral ambivalence Khnewhere, but enjoy it all the same. White wine is apparently all the rage in Manhattan, as a trendy substitute for the stereotypical Martini, and certainly the appellation 'domestic' has lost its perjorative overtones—just as posh Manhattan waiters. I notice, havp abandoned their excruciating habit of addressing their customers in French. But excellent though the California wines can be, I maintain that even the best of them leave me with a somehow uneasy head in the morning, as though they have been chemically laced. My hosts mock me. It's not the quality, they say, it's the quantity. 'Yeah, and what about that Mogadon? You been mixing that stuff with Pinot Chardonnay?'
The TV show goes enjoyably — at least I enjoy it, which is perhaps not the same thing. Cavett has lately switched from ABC to PBS, and seems to have achieved saturation audiences among the kind who read books. I faintly plug my Pax Britannica trilogy: he remarks my use of the word 'footling', and says he used to think it was a noun, 'a kind of lackey, somewhere between a footman and an underling'. We sit and talk on stage afterwards as the mock library is dismantled unnervingly around us, and I am introduced to two Finnish television executives, remarkably like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, who sometimes buy the show. Maybe they'll buy this one? They bow dubiously in unison, rather as though to say, in Finnish dumb show, not bloody likely. Mr O'Malley sees me off. 'Now that I've met you in person, Jan, and now that the show has gone so stunningly, I want you to know that we all of us thought you adorable'. I most willingly suspend my disbelief! I love the Manhattan nonsense!
Like a fool, having an hour to kill, I look in at the animal prison they call the Central Park Zoo which is dressed up in whimsy and kiddy-charm, but is really a horrific thing to find in the middle of Manhattan. I hate all ZOOS, not least those that pretend to be agencies of ecology or conservation, but I think I hate this one most of all. Captive for ever within its hideous cells, the creatures live on there in degradation, and all around them are the authentic trappings , of punishment: the bars, the echoes, the cat-walks, the disinfectant smells, the warders chatting over their coffees in their offices at the end, while the prisoners pace round and round their concrete floors, or sharpen their useless claws on bare dead tree-trunks. New York should be ashamed of it: I'm sure many New Yorkers are, and wander its awful halls as miserably as I do, impotently projecting my apologies into the eyes of the beasts.
I am taken to 'Ain't Misbehavin', which I have been educated to refer to as the Smash Broadway Musical of 1978. It is a tribute to the late Fats Waller, performed with astonishing virtuosity by five black artists, and it leaves me with oddly mixed feelings. I had not realised the intensity of Nostalgia, in the showbiz sense, until I heard that middle-aged white audience ecstatically humming Honeysuckle Rose, or clapping to the beat of Your Feet's Too Big— turning the calendars back almost mystically to the years of their young hope. Then I am struck by the ever increasing un-blackness of the American black he really is, as a Jamaican novelist once put it to me, 'breeding out brown', and with the dilution of his negritude goes some of his grace and litheness too. And finally, I wonder that those brilliant performers are willing to take part in the show at all, for tremendously entertaining though it is, it potently revives the image of the New York black man as he was before the black renaissance began — Uncle Tom of Harlem, dancing his heart out in charade for the amusement of Whitey in the stalls.
That's it. In the morning Mr Jimmy Taylor of Belair Limousines drives me to the airport in his gigantic Cadillac. He is a perfectionist — he arrives at the hotel an hour before time, just to be on the safe side, and he manoeuvres us brilliantly through the Queens hinterland to avoid the traffic back-log of the bridges. 'That's the way I like it', says Mr Taylor, who can always retire to his family farm in Carolina if he wants to, like to do things properly, I like to be of service to somebody. Why, Ms Morris, I am being of service to you at this very moment, by driving you to the airport'. You sure are, Jimmy. Thanks a million. See ya.
Jan Morris
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