A Colossal Wreck (15 page)

Steingarten describes how his researcher, Martina, begins to pale as he outlines his scientific endeavor: “By the time my oration has finished, Martina’s nutty skin has turned a ghostly white. At least she has grasped the heavy responsibility that now weighs upon her handsome shoulders.” Actually, Martina was grasping the dreadful truth that she had to spend the next several days with an idiot thinking that science alone can capture the ineffable.

November 5

One of the Republicans’ problems is they’ve always overstated the case against Clinton, so they’ve devalued the currency of abuse. Now no one pays any attention and Bill’s popularity ratings remain high, whatever dirt laps about his knees. The thing to do is wait until he’s dead and then let him have it. This is what happened to the Roman Emperor Nero. The sweaty plebes of Rome liked him. He was populist in political tilt, snooted the upper-crust Senators and threw terrific parties, to which the ordinary folks were invited.

But history took its revenge, in the form of the denunciations of Nero by Tacitus, Suetonius and the rest, propagandists for the Roman upper crust. But the Christians hated him too, for obvious reasons. Then after nearly 2,000 years of maltreatment by these mythographers,
poor Nero got chewed up again by the French religious mythographer Ernest Renan, who depicted him in pitiless terms as the Antichrist. Eagerly reading Renan was a Polish nationalist, Henryk Sienkiewicz, who wrote
Quo Vadis
, serialized in
Gazeta Polska
between 1894 and 1896, earning him the Nobel Prize in 1905. Nero got excoriated once more, not only as the Great Beast, but also as somehow the proto-foe of Polish nationalism.

The first
Quo Vadis
came in 1901, and by 1912 Enrico Guazzoni produced the third adaptation, running for a full two hours and blessed with incredible success, including a premiere at the Royal Albert Hall in the presence of King George V, and in New York, where it was the first film ever to play in a Broadway theater. With Guazzoni’s
Quo Vadis
the new medium reveled in long shots and pans around crowds (sweaty plebs) enjoying the martyrdom of Christians, under the supervision of Nero.

By now,
Quo Vadis
was becoming a weapon of the Catholic Church in Italy in its battles with the new secular state, and once again Nero proved useful in his beastliness. Next came DeMille’s
The Sign of the Cross
in 1932, once again offering the easy contrast between the depravity of Charles Laughton and the Christian purity of Mercia. Nero’s doom was sealed in 1951 with the released of Mervyn LeRoy’s
Quo Vadis
, when he was represented by Peter Ustinov in all his foreign decadence, set against the manly strength of Robert Taylor and the American way. So Nero stood for Stalinism and everything foul. The voiceover at the start of the movie talks about AD 64 as a period when “the individual is at the mercy of the state … and rulers surrender their subjects to bondage.” But simultaneously the hounding and suicide of the novelist Petronius is taken by Maria Wyke as an allegory of Hollywood blacklists.

November 19

Nanny-gate is winding down. At its height it represented the fiercest stress to Anglo-American relations since the war of 1812, when my ancestor Admiral Sir George Cockburn burned down the White House, then hastened along to the
National Intelligencer
to avenge
himself on the press which had treated him roughly. Sir George told his men to destroy the newspaper’s type fonts saying, “Be sure that all the C’s are destroyed so the rascals cannot any longer abuse my name.”

Woodward wasn’t a nanny but an au pair. Back in the 1950s in Britain the au pair was usually a Swedish girl. The headmaster of my boarding school had two—the only females under the age of thirty in our fastness in Perthshire. Fitzpayne and I faced expulsion for having tea with them in the headmaster’s study at a time we thought the man was safely absent on some official function.

The nanny was the pivotal figure in male upper-class character formation. Mothers were seen once a day for about thirty minutes, when the youngster was brought down from the nursery quarters to be displayed in the drawing room. After the onset of boarding school at the age of eight, these contacts between mother and offspring shrank to the four months’ vacation time. The son and heir’s maternal substitute was of course the nanny, in Churchill’s case (Mrs. Everest) along with many others the only woman such men loved. Heirs to large estates would get their own back on Mummy by booting her out into the “dower house,” a structure—sometimes converted stables—detached from the main house.

Among the many anguishing
rites de passage
was the transition from care by nanny to supervision at the boarding school by Matron, in my case an austere figure in starched white who would line all us little boys up and then, one by one, have us come forward so she could briefly cup our testicles in her chill hand. There might be useful employment for Amirault prosecutors here. There was a successful restaurant in London in the 1980s in which waitresses were dressed as nannies and matrons and barked fierce commands like “Eat up your carrots, young man!” at a clientele whimpering with pleasure at this
temps retrouvé
.

After Matron’s ministrations we would head off to chapel and once a term have the pleasure of hearing the headmaster announce that we would “now sing the one hundred and thirty-sixth psalm, verses one to six.” We would naturally look at the omitted verses which concluded with the psalmist’s delighted cry, “Blessed
be he who taketh the little children and dasheth them against the stones.”

I should note that in my case contact with Mama was extended far beyond the half hour display at cocktail time, since she bred horses and we all rode a lot though we feared the dangers of the chase. How we yearned for snow and ice in the winter months which meant riding was off, instead of which we would hear the exuberant, ominous cry, “Lovely day for hunting.”

November 23

Behind every fortune lies a crime, Balzac wrote, and no doubt that was true in the case of the steel dynasty of Jones and Laughlin, in Pittsburgh. But the Laughlin side of that enterprise produced James Laughlin, who shunned the family business in favor of publishing and launched New Directions—the most sustained presentation of good writers in the history of one publishing company: Pound, William Carlos Williams on down.

I said to my friend Ben Sonnenberg, the day after Laughlin died last week, that it was probably one of the most culturally productive uses of surplus extraction in the history of American capitalism. Ben suggested the Mellons, but that’s because Ben is an Anglophile and loves those eighteenth-century paintings of horses the Mellon family purchased out of Gulf Oil loot. Think of what some of the other American fortunes have produced: from Singer sewing machines to … the
New Republic
. I asked Ben—who used his patrimony to found
Grand Street
(now the property of Jean Stein)—whether he thought crime lay behind his dough and he said that alas, it wasn’t a fortune. I suppose “tidy sum” would better describe it. Ben Sonnenberg Sr., the famous publicist, wanted to have written on his gravestone, “At least I never took a cent from Joe Kennedy or Howard Hughes.” His house was number 19 Gramercy Park South, and Ben Jr. once told me his father’s butler sneaked out late one night after his master’s death and planted the urn under some bush in the Square itself.

We turned to discussion of another productive fortune, that of Pirandello’s father who was in the sulfur business on Elba, enabling
young Luigi to get on with his writing. Last week I saw Pirandello’s final play,
The Mountain Giants
, at the La Jolla theater, well acted and staged by students in the theater department of the University of California at San Diego. It is a wonderful piece of work and not, so far as I could see, particularly “unfinished” as it is usually described. Ben Jr. said that in the years when he’d been active in New York theater he’d tried endlessly to get
The Mountain Giants
produced there, but without success.

Then he told me a good joke. Grasshopper goes into bar. Bartender: “Good lord, we’ve got a drink named after you.” Grasshopper: “Why would you call a drink Bob?”

November 26

OSWALD’S TALE

Dear Mr. Anderson,

Alexander Cockburn, ever obstinate, is of the opinion that JFK’s “assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, shot the President because he believed, not without reason, that this deed would help save the Cuban Revolution.” Oswald disagreed.

From his arrest until his summary execution, Oswald spent almost 48 hours in police custody. Reportedly, 12 of those hours were spent in interrogation by state and federal police. There are no stenographic or taped records of these interrogations, and Oswald was denied legal representation. However, memoranda by some of the investigating officials were published in the Warren Commission Report. These officials report that Oswald vehemently denied shooting either the President or officer J. D. Tippit, and two of these officials also report that Oswald expected Cuban policy to remain unchanged with the death of JFK.

According to Inspector Thomas J. Kelly of the Secret Service: “[Oswald] said there would be no change in the attitude of the American people toward Cuba with President Johnson becoming President because they both belonged to the same political party and the one would follow pretty generally the policies of the other.”

Also present, Capt. J. W. Fritz, of the Dallas Police Department writes: “Someone of the federal officers asked Oswald if he thought Cuba would be better off since the President was assassinated. To this he replied that he felt that since the President was killed that someone else would take his place, perhaps Vice-President Johnson, and that his views would probably be largely the same as those of President Kennedy.”

Sincerely yours,

Jock Penn, Petaluma

P.S. Alexander Cockburn urges Alex (
Repo Man
) Cox to “concentrate on making a decent movie for once,” instead of uttering Malthusian heresies. Cox’s latest movie is more than decent.
The Winner
, now on video, appears at first to be a lame neo-noir
Pulp Fiction
knockoff, but hang in there and Cox’s nihilistic apocalyptic allegory will get to you. If you liked
Dr. Strangelove, Grosse Point Blank, Natural Born Killers
, and
King of Kings, The Winner
is your meat.

Alexander Cockburn replies:

If we proceed with my view that Oswald was a rational assassin, it’s not likely that he would have told the authorities cited by Penn that he killed Kennedy to save the Cuban Revolution. He would have said—as he did—that he didn’t kill the President and that it would make no difference to US policy toward Cuba that JFK was dead. A pro-Cuba Oswald would certainly not wish suspicion to be directed toward Cuba.

But in fact with the death of Kennedy, the efforts to kill Castro so hotly promoted by Jack and Bobby diminished. Oswald was right in his calculation.

December 3

One area in which British journalism is indubitably superior is in the writing of obituaries. Sometimes the
New York Times
will produce something readable, even piquant, but jaunty frankness about the departed one is not tolerated. Every now and again, down the years,
I’ve shouted a few insults at some freshly tamped grave, and the disrespect invariably provokes outrage.

The quality English newspapers, by contrast, have turned obituaries into an important sector of their coverage. In this respect the
Independent
(which pioneered the obit renaissance) and the
Daily Telegraph
are particularly well edited. Before me this Friday, November 28, is the
Telegraph
’s obituary of Dan Farson, covering two-thirds of a page of this respectable broadsheet, read mostly by an upper and middle-class conservative audience.

Farson was a famous homosexual drunk, emblem of London’s old Soho, whose pubs and restaurants my father took me to in the early 1950s. I suppose an equivalent in terms of
mise-en-scène
and boozy louch-ness, would have been the old Lion’s Head in the Village which I never knew. Dan was the son of Negley Farson, a famous US correspondent who wrote for the
Chicago Daily News
in the early 1930s, reporting from Europe. His memoirs,
Way of a Transgressor
, often turn up in the second-hand bookshops. Dan made his living as a photographer and journalist. The
Telegraph
’s obituarist evoked his life with humor and bracing honesty. The obit begins in traditional style and then rapidly changes tempo. “Daniel Farson, who has died aged 70, was a talented television journalist, writer and photographer; he was also a nightmare drunk.” I doubt you’d get such a lead in the
New York Times
.

From that opening the anonymous obituary keeps up an ebullient tempo of reminiscence: “He never lost his hair, which was fair; in old age he presumably dyed it … He would go off at nights to such places as a pub nicknamed The Elephants’ Graveyard. It was some surprise that, with his alarmingly risky sex life, he had not been murdered … Over and over again Farson’s assaults on London meant drinking all day, picking up a rent boy and very often being robbed by him at his hotel. He was barred from several hotels for trivial offenses such as being found with his trousers round his ankles in the corridor. One Sunday afternoon in the Coach and Horses [a bar in Greek St., later HQ for the satirical weekly
Private Eye
] an angry rent boy (aged about 30) came into the pub and tried to shame Farson into paying for his afternoon services. Farson was shameless: ‘But
you didn’t bloody do anything,’ he shouted back. ‘And I bought all the drinks.’ ”

With such anecdotes the obituarist not only offers good entertainment but draws a vivid picture of the old Soho, frequented by painters such as Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon, about whom Farson wrote a book called
The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon
. The old Soho, where Karl Marx also lived his Soho life in terms once excitedly described by a Prussian spy, is certainly dead and gone. Farson’s obit concludes: “On the day of the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, Farson went to the Coach and Horses in Soho, straight from a trip to Sweden. He stood at the bar, noisily impersonating a friend, Sandy Fawkes, bursting into tears. Behind him young people told him to shut up because they were trying to hear the speech of Earl Spencer on television. Such had become the bohemia that he was shortly to leave for the last time.”