Afterthought
By ALAN BRIFN 1 had never seen the shiny, black, boot-shaped boxes which are taxis in London. In my dreams, I shouted `cab,' or slipped a dollar to a giant in gold braid and a peaked cap who blew a whistle under the El Morocco awning, to summon a low-slung yellow projectile with a checkered strip along the side. Journalists were 'newspaper- men' with press tickets in their hat-bands, elastic garters round their elbows, green eye shields, chewed cigars and bottles of Bourbon in the bottom left-hand drawer of the desk. Policemen were 'cops' with silver shields on their breasts, revolvers in side holsters and Irish accents.
I had never actually been in a restaurant but I knew the Platonic ideal which existed across the Atlantic as well as I knew my own back garden. You entered it (in evening dress even for lunch) froni the left-hand side of the screen and walked across deep carpeting until you .Came to a white balustrade with steps leading., down to a great field of flat-topped white mushrooms. The maitre dee greeted you by name and, with a menu the size of a tombstone under his arm, led you to a table by the dance floor. There was always a dance floor, usually a cabaret too. Most times a bar, fenced off with trellis or potted plants, occu- pied one corner and was patronised by a comic drunk. The waiter was called 'captain' and a bill was a 'check.' Everybody was tipped especially the girl in fishnet stockings and a skirt which was rarely more than a cummerbund with frills, who brought cigarettes and dolls on a tray. Wine was always served in a silver bucket with ice. It was only after all this had been established that the camera moved into a two-shot and the plot started up again.
Until I- left the North-East at the age of eighteen I was never certain quite how much was uniquely American and how much also everyday practice among decadent and luxury-loving Southerners • in Britain. I • still have painful memories of the night in the Palatine Hotel, Sunderland, when I decided to move beyond beer and, stroking what I. hoped what would he recognised as a moustache, ordered a 'whisky sour.' By the time I set out for my first visit to New York at the age of thirty-one, I had become something of a London city-slicker. But I still retained in the vaults of my brain a 1,000 reels of old movies upon which my assumptions and expectations about Manhattan were indelibly engraved.
American experts always warn visitors to. forget the Hollywood image. When examined,
the experts usually turn out to be culture-snobs who have seen nothing between The Grapes of Wrath and On The Waterfront. It is the bad films, Made with no other motive than to entertain the customers and enrich the producers, which pro- vide the best sociology. Whatever else may be alleged against the Californian dream-factory in its palmiest days, it has given more comfort, pleasure and release from tension and anxiety to depressed millions throughout the world than all the churches, theatres, books, newspapers and psychiatric clinics put together. Hollywood may have started out travestying New York but New York very swiftly adapted itself to fit its own caricature. Once more, nature copied art. And the film-indoctrinated Britisher is far less likely to be taken by surprise in Manhattan than an unprepared Shetland islander would be in Soho. Its newspapermen have been known to wear green eye-shades—I've seen them. There are priests who act (usually rather better) like Bing Crosby and cops who out-blarney Barry Fitz- gerald. Cab drivers are recruited from Central Casting—Ernest Borgnine-type, Leo Gorcey- type, Stepin Fetchit-type, and so on through the character file index—and some even from the Front Office (I have watched several Louis B. Mayers drenching pedestrians with great waves of slush in Times Square).
Within half an hour of 'arriving in New York seven years ago, without an acquaintance on the entire continent, I was behaving like an accom- plished B-feature bit player. I knew that the road was the pavement, and the pavement the side- walk; that a bomb in show bizz was a flop and not a _hit; that cream could be put in tea because it is a kind of thin milk; that people only call on the telephone and when they visit with you they have come across the room for a chat. At first, I ordered a few things 1 did not want to eat because I had been waiting for years to rattle out `two eggs over easy, English muffin, coffee with.'
I quickly realised that American efficiency is often only Cellophane deep so that the wrapping improves while the product deteriorates. So many New Yorkers are inured to grandiose claims for everything and discount 90 per cent of every statement as exuberant• hyperbole—that strong English compliment 'very nice' is universally taken to be an insult. It is assumed that the 50- minute cleaners will take three hours—though this is, of course, an improvement on London 24-hour cleaners who take three days. Some of the private enterprise bureaucracy reaches pro- portions of Oriental deviousness which would be denounced by Pravda if it occurred in Soviet industry. Secretaries have secretaries, personal assistants have personal assistants and secretaries, even press agents have press agents. To reach any department of any firm you have to explain what you want down to the last detail to every person you contact before they will reveal that they are not the right person and pass you on to someone else who is also not the right person.
Even the banks, who beg in advertisements for people who cannot pay their bills to borrow from them on easy terms, erect elaborately pointless obstacles in the way of cashing a simple cheque. When last week I presented a cheque made out by my wife to cash at the Chemical Bank New York Trust Company, I was immediately ordered to consult a vice-presidential figure to have my identity verified. I explained that `cash' was not a person and therefore had no references. Their job, I pointed out, ended when they had made sure that the right signature was on the right cheque and there was money in the account. This had to be repeated to another vice-presidential figure who still refused to consider paying over to me without seeing three proofs that I was me. He then insisted on telephoning my wife to be certain that she had willingly given me the cheque. When this proved to be impossible be- cause only I knew her New York number, he eventually drew the line at calling long-distance to our empty flat in London, and coughed up.
Such experiences, admittedly, are rarely included in our film training. But despite the sometimes unexpected twists of plot, the players tend to perform their roles as if directed in every nuance by some invisible Elia Kazan. Each Londoner tends to be inarticulate in his own personal way. The typical New Yorker is impressively fluent in a group style so that the whole island appears to be one enormous Actors' Studio. Who is the initiator and who the imitator is hard to tell, but mannerisms in New York are as infectious as colds in London. A popular way of receiving a joke or a witticism just now is to take a step back, raise the eye- brows and say with great emphasis—That's verree funnee.' A couple of years ago, the fashionable response was to nod approvingly, point the index finger and say, 'That I like' or `I'll buy that.' The old-fashioned belly-laugh, or the older-fashioned poker-face, is no longer 'in.'
A good deal of New York can be conveyed on
print or on film. But physical presence is needed to understand the feel of the city which hooks many foreign visitors like a drug. It is a feel in every sense of the word—an intimate, sensuous contact, an excitement of the nerve endings, a dangerous titillation of the mucous membranes, which is overwhelming and yet invigorating. It is like being seduced by a monster from Outer Space. The whole metabolism begins to race so that you,go to bed late and get up early, untired. Your day expands and reveals innumerable pockets of time waiting to be filled. I suspect those who live here permanently snap before their hour like over-wound clocks. But for the transient outsider, a week working in New York can be more rejuvenating than a month's holiday in the isles of Greece.
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