MY VOYAGE ROUND REAGAN'S AMERICA

John Mortimer searches for the symptoms

of war fever among a people which loves Brideshead and Rumpole

New York WE GOT into the stretch limo on Central Park South for the purpose of going to a dinner of television executives. The motor car was long enough to have held half a dozen coffins placed end to end and an appropriate crowd of mourners. In the Private living room, in the shade of the black glass windows, armchairs were set at casual angles round the bar. We had just passed the Plaza Hotel when one of the two telephones bleeped to tell his wife that American bombs had fallen on Tripoli. We switched on the television as we crossed Third Avenue. Soon the country would receive what its critics now say is its most Popular form of entertaiment, a small war going on somewhere at the other end of the world which it cannot lose. So a Victorian gentleman sitting in his club in St James's might have turned the pages of the Illus- trated London News and enjoyed drawings of another punitive raid by the army on the North-West Frontier. Her enemies have thus described America, but I have to report that the atmosphere in the stretch became truly funereal and at the large dinner party in 'Laurent' we heard no word of approval for the Reagan adventure. Such joy as there was seemed confirmed to taxi drivers, lift men and newspaper edito- rials.

Speaking of terrorism, which I suppose we were the news pictures, before Tripoli, were of a motor car blown up on a New York street and the murder of a certain Frank De Ciccio. When John Gotti, De Cicico's superior in the Gambino family and now on trial for racketeering in a Brooklyn Federal Court, was asked to comment on this extreme manner of set- tling the problems of power, he said, 'It's hard. to be a gentleman around here.' The ad rrunistratiori's defence of the Tripoli bombardment seemed, when it came, to express much the same sentiment.

IT WAS our last day in America when President Reagan ordered his F-111 bom- bers to leave the peaceful reaches of Lakenheath and Upper Heyford and go out and kill Libyan families. We had arrived ten days earlier in a New York glittering in the sunshine, with the cherry blossom and magnolias out with the de- pressed joggers, cheerful muggers and yelling paranoiacs in Central Park. Beefy girls wearing top hats and bits of dinner jackets were driving out-of-town tourists in hansom cabs. The traffic moved almost imperceptibly. Moments of danger were caused by the brutal cyclists who wear crash helmets and mount the pavements blowing whistles and mowing down pedes- trians. In the marvellous Fifth Avenue book stores I kept my ears open for scraps of dialogue. 'She left Treve City and went to live on Riverside Drive with a 90-year- old man. Of course, she threw herself out of a 15th storey window.' And, 'When I saw him last year his nose had gone completely.' In the quiet Frick mansion the Rembrandts testified to eternal human values and the discernment of the great American collectors. For me the most important ritual of a visit to New York is to pay a call on Calvin Trillin, a hugely talented humorist, food writer and expert on murder and groceries, who lives in the Village. Together we sample the Italian delicatessens and Cantonese restaurants, find the best beanshoots and mushrooms grown in New Jersey and end with a ceremonial game of Noughts and Crosses (know the the natives as 'Tick Tack Do') with a live chicken in a Chinese amusement arcade. This malign bird, squawking and ruffling its feathers, pecks viciously at a series of buttons in its cage, its human opponent pushes a button and a nought or a cross appears on the pattered screen. Every game ends in the same way; the screen lights up with the simple legend `Bird Wins'. We went with those well known American intellectuals, Joan Di- dion and John Gregory Dunn, who were somewhat miffed to find that they were quite unable to conquer a common and presumably uneducated fowl. At long last aggrieved Miss Didion suggested that the victor's button might have the assistance of a computer. Calvin Trillian professed him- self profoundly shocked at this suggestion, having always, it seemed, believed that the bird had learnt the art of Tick Tack do from years of long practice in some Chinese gambling den. Whatever the truth of the matter it gives a proper sense of humility to a visiting Brit. author to find himself not even able to force a Sino- American hen to a draw.

AS IMPORTANT as the visit to China- town, is the first lunch is in the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station, a huge art deco room, as brilliantly lit as La Coupole in Paris. Bringing the blue points and sword fish with Californian Chardonnay, the Cuban-Jewish waiter said we had lost a great Englishman. When I asked, 'Who?' he said, 'Peter Pears. Britten wrote Death In Venice to suit his character exactly, didn't he? I love that opera. I'm not doing badly at the Met. I just got tickets for Parsifal and Don Carlos.' The joys of America are a perpetual surprise. Who has ever eaten a dozen oysters in the buffet at Paddington Station, washed them down with an excellent white wine and discussed the Britten operas with the waiter?

UP THE coast of Connecticut the Yale students are concentrated on law, business methods or accountancy and there are few revolts. The Reagan intervention in Nicar- agua and the funding of Contra terrorists, who have nothing to learn from the appall- ing Colonel Gaddafi, have few supporters, even among taxi drivers and lift attendants. Nicaragua is not Vietnam and it produces no student marches. The American re- sumption of nuclear testing seems to have passed without a single demonstration. However, apartheid is the protest flavour of the month and some students have built a small shanty Soweto on the campus outside the principal's office in protest against the Yale shareholding in South Africa. Right-wing alumni came by night and knocked Soweto down with sledge- hammers. Then the police were called in to remove the demonstrators. Now the voice of the youth seems to be silent as they sit behind the ivy-clad walls engrossed in computer studies.

Our hosts in New Haven told us that their friends were cancelling all holidays to Europe except to safe spots such as Budapest. They take the view that behind the Iron Curtain law and order prevail, the airports are ruthlessly guarded and cars rarely explode in the streets. Perhaps this provides a glimmer of hope for the world. A new Disneyland and Miami Beach might be developed on the shores of the Black Sea and the way be opened for an era of East-West understanding.

THE Boston journalist was a plump and maternal-looking lady and an expert on British crime writers. She told me that she had been determined to join the Sherlock Holmes Society but that that chauvinist organisation prohibits women members. She had an uncle in the theatre who had a gentleman's suit made for her, advised her to sound like a high-voiced man and not a low-voiced woman, never to move too far because her walk would betray her and to mend bicycles and then wash the oil off her hands to open the pores of her skin. Her disguise was so effective that she not only penetrated the meetings of the Baker Street regulars but a number of gay Holmes experts made passes at her. I was left to wonder at the American attention to detail and to consider that no amount of reading crime stories produces competent detectives.

WE WERE too late to catch a regular airline so we flew People's Express, affec- tionately know as `People's Distress', from Newark. This company, owned by its employees, provides extraordinarily cheap flights which leave from a basic building which looks like a vast, uncarpeted garage. Out of the night crowds of young people came in shorts and sweaters, extremely overweight and carrying bags of tennis equipment. They lay on the ground or sat in chairs to the arms of which were fixed tiny, quarter-in-the-slot televisions which they peered at until the money ran out. Posters at the airport carried slogans such as 'Support Star Wars or Start Learning Russian' and 'Nuke Jane Fonda'. Carrying these messages were pale and depressed looking volunteers, as ignored as the mis- sionaries of some extremely unattractive religion. It seems that they are the adhe- rents of a Mr Lyndon LaRouche, a new politician who believes that Walter Mon- dale is an influential KGB agent and that the Queen of England is the centre of an international league of drug-peddlers. LaRouche leads a nomadic life, sheltered by his disciples, in order, as he says, to avoid death at the hands of communists and Zionists. Incredibly two LaRouche supporters won nominations as the Demo- cratic lieutenant-governor and secretary of state in Chicago. This astonishing choice seems to have been made because the LaRouche candidates had Anglo-Saxon names and weren't known as machine politicians. Perhaps the event proves little except the amazing inefficiency of the Democrats, who weren't aware that a couple of loonies had been chosen to run with Adlai Stevenson. Meanwhile the LaRouche fans at the airport seem only slightly more embarrassing than those who used to offer us flowers, and the fat- thighed, open-necked, silent army of ten- nis players goes on its way, unperturbed by the news that the White House chief of staff, Mr Donald Regan, has, according to LaRouche, joined the Queen of England in the drug trade.

IN CLEVELAND we met our first com- pletely dedicated Reagan enthusiast, a defecting Polish diplomat. Romuald Spa- sowski, a tall man in his sixties with gold glasses and a grey goatee, looked like a professor in a Chekhov play. He had been ambassador to India and to the United States and Poland's deputy foreign minis- ter. His father, whom he clearly admired, If I'm young enough to be President of the USA, I'm young enough to be a doctor.' was a Marxist philosopher and an atheist, but since his defection Spasowski has been received into the Catholic Church and sentenced to death by General Jaruzelski. I asked him if he wasn't depressed by the apparent reluctance of the Great Powers to attempt an agreement on disarmament. Why did the Americans have to go on testing? 'You can never trust the Russians. They always cheat.' Perhaps they think the same thing about the Americans?' wondered, and the ex-ambassador replied, `I know Mr Reagan. He is a very simple man. A very emotional man. I don't think he'd cheat.' Spasowski said he felt that his death sentence, pronounced in his abs- ence, had lightened his guilt after years of supporting communism. We sat in a televi- sion studio before breakfast, making small jokes about the rigours of a book tour, and I wondered how hard it would be to reject the beliefs and preoccupations of a lifetime and give such a warm welcome to sentence of death. The city we were in had been devastated by the collapse of the steel industry. Although it has its slums it also has a remarkable orchestra and an art gallery. Snow was falling on the grey building and another Polish dissident, a sailor who jumped his ship at the port on the lake: turned up at the literary lunch. 'Welcome, the chairman said to him. `And thank you for choosing Cleveland.'

`CHICAGO,' said the girl who worked on the Sun-Times, 'is the one place where, whenever I vote, I feel sordid. I've got a friend who hasn't lived here for 20 years and she says that she knows that her name is still put down as a voter for someone at every election.' Even the judiciary partici- pate in the city's cheerful but dubious way of life. In an operation called `Graylord attorneys from another state penetrated the courtrooms and alleged that a consider- able number of judges were bribable. A. public lawyer who represented children 10 trouble said that rich parents could even pay not to have their abused offspring ordered into care. It seems an unbelievable situation in a court which has to deal, not only with child drug-pushers, but child prostitutes and child ponces. Behind the tall lakeside buildings the slums are sullen with racial tension, and yet the city is bursting with life, there are packed theatres and a new generation of important playwrights. It also has Studs Terkel, small, grey-haired man who wears an old open mac, an open-necked shirt and sneak- ers, chews a cigar, talks in the gravelly accents of The Front Page and writes splendidly. Studs Terkel seems to have met everyone, from Al Capone to Ivy Compton-Burnett. Born in the year the Titanic sank, he spent his youth playin gangsters in radio soap operas. `I only haa, two lines,' he said: " Get in the car!" and "My God, they've got me!" I used to o:. with Nancy Reagan's mother. Now Oa' Eastwood's been elected Mayor of Carmel it seems you have to be an actor in politics, preferably an actor that's performed with apes. What are we doing round the world? Trying to recover from losing in Vietnam. Were you surprised we managed to beat Grenada? Would you be surprised if Mohammed Ali managed to knock out Woody Allen?' Studs Terkel professes himself proud to come from a city which has produced some extremely patriotic gangsters. 'Mom Giancano,' he says, 'one of the jewels in our city's crown, was called by the CIA when they wanted to do in Fidel Castro. And who can ever forget the moving plea of Al Capone, dying in Alcat- raz? "Set me free and I'll help you fight the Bolsheviks."

We sat at dinner looking down on the string of lights by the waves on the lakeside beach, the jewelled necklace, they call it, on Chicago's dirty neck. Our host was a Psychiatrist who had made a study of the traumatic mental effects of severe burns, having travelled to England to meet those Young servicemen horribly disfigured in the Falklands campaign. I asked him what nervous disease brought the most patients to his couch in the Windy City. He answered with a single word, 'Greed'.

IN MINNEAPOLIS a local Supreme • Court judge told me that a play had been written about one of the strangest of courtroom gambits, the so-called 'Twinky defence'. Students of recent American crime will recall the unfortunate Harvey Milk who, together with the Mayor of San Francisco, was shot by a fellow council member named Dan White. Mr White received a lenient sentence for manslaugh- ter. It was suggested that his victim's homosexuality may have had something to do with the result, but part of his defence was that he lived on junk food and a diet of `Twinkles' had addled his brain. It almost tempted me to go back to the bar and try it on at the Old Bailey. 'It wasn't insufficient weaning, my Lord, or the pressure of life in the inner city. Blame it on the Wimpy Bar.

BACK in New York I stood in a room at the top of a huge, oil corporation tower looking out over the Statue of Liberty. On one of the roof tops below us a track had been built for the shapeless employees of a neighbouring publisher condemned to jog during their lunch hours. The oil men seemed nervous about the consequences of the American treatment of Libya, although the theory was gaining ground of some sort of tacit Russian agreement. The Russians must have tracked American ships in the Gulf of Sidra as well as the F-111 bombers and yet they clearly failed to warn Gaddafi. Is it possible that, when it comes to matters of war, the world's two greatest powers understand each other better than anyone thinks?

In a short stay in America, meeting publishers, journalists, bookshop owners, even readers, we were bound to encounter the opposition to Mr Reagan. What was surprising was its extent and its bewilder- ment at his continuing support. All the mistakes, the speeches loaded with misin- formation about every subject from the distance of Nicaragua to Russian nuclear testing, leave the old boy apparently un- stained, so he has become known as the `Teflon' President. Nothing, it seems, can impair the actor's essential lovability in the eyes of a great part of the public who fear, for instance, his interference in South America. On the whole, journalists fail to cross-examine his spokesmen and a televi- sion news editor said that he'd stopped pointing out the mistakes in the President's speeches as to do so might be unpopular. The myth that has grown up seems to be, not that what Reagan does is right, but that he is too nice a chap to be blamed for being wrong. It doesn't seem to be a belief we have to share, however much we love America.

Most of the people I have met asked about the television version of Brideshead Revisited. I remembered that Evelyn Waugh had written that he didn't think that more than eight Americans would ever enjoy Brideshead. Now they have ' Lord Sebastian Flyte look-alike contests in the streets of San Francisco. Even old Horace Rumpole, that most British of barristers, has American restaurants named after him and societies on the West Coast which meet to study his cases. I would advise Mrs Thatcher, in all friendli- ness, to be as British as possible if she really wants the Americans to like her. It's no good ruining our reputation for political wisdom and common sense, falling over ourselves to become the American aircraft carrier or rushing to join President ,Reagan's somewhat doubting constituen- cy. Apart from the deaths in Europe and Tripoli, the tragedy of the last ten days is that Britain has lost its identity and is in danger of becoming a tasteless mid- Atlantic mess, like the food in an interna- tional airport hotel.