A Writer's Life (61 page)

H
OPING TO SIMPLIFY FOR MY EDITOR WHAT
I
HAD NOT YET FIGURED
out for myself, I began the first draft of my outline with the suggestion that my forthcoming book would be in the genre of a famous novel written a half-century ago and entitled
Grand Hotel
. I had not read the book, which had been written by a Vienna-born author named Vicki Baum, but I had seen a film version of it recently on television and it seemed to me that there was a similarity between what I was trying to do—recounting the tales of many people who at various times had occupied the old building at 206 E. 63rd—and what the filmmakers had presented on the screen: They had dramatized several stories involving a number of employees and guests who regularly crossed paths within the corridors and suites of the Grand Hotel, which in the novel was situated in Berlin in the years between World War I and World War II.

As I gave more thought to my outline, however, I began to doubt that my editor would be impressed with my seeming lack of originality in mentioning
Grand Hotel
as a point of comparison. But why, I asked myself, should I even acknowledge
Grand Hotel
in my outline? It had
not
been a source of inspiration to me. The idea of recounting a variety of stories from the vantage point of a single place had been on my mind long before I had been made aware of Vicki Baum's novel, and indeed this approach had probably been used by storytellers in centuries past. Did not Boccaccio in
The Decameron
relate the stories of a group of people who were gathered together in a country manor near Florence? And, in a different location, wasn't this narrative structure employed by Chaucer in
The Canterbury Tales?
On the other hand, wasn't I definitely stretching the point here and deviating from what I was supposed to be doing in my out—lineselling my editor on the idea of what I was doing?

I decided perhaps in the interest of expediency to restrict the scope of my outline to the story about the restaurant business rather than the building, because I knew that my editor cared somewhat about food
preparation. (He had recently published a cookbook by David Burke, then the chef of the popular Park Avenue Café, though his primary interests lay elsewhere—five of the books he had published had won Pulitzer Prizes.) My editor had also dined with me once at Tucci and had seemed to share my fascination with the fact that so many of the employees were foreign-born. And so in the outline to Jonathan Segal, my editor at Knopf, I wrote:

Let's talk about what? I asked myself, distressed with his response. Should I send him a revised proposal, shifting the emphasis away from the restaurant and back to the building? One of my problems in writing about the building was the absence of a lively contemporary figure who could singularly personify the place, who could represent it with enough panache and distinction and individual appeal to satisfy even my minimum needs as a nonfiction writer with a soft heart for secondary characters. As it was, I had been picking my way through the atavistic plaster
dust and cobwebs of this building for many years in a vain attempt to discover something more useful than what I already had, which was a stack of photographs of Schillinger with his horses, and Catalano with his trucks, and the tenants' rental records loaned to me by the building's largely absentee leaseholder, J. Z. Morris.

I had followed up on Morris's suggestion that I interview his former wife, Jackie Ho, and even before I had arranged a meeting with her—it took me months to do this, as she regularly professed to being engaged with matters that were more important than whatever I had in mind—I began to ponder the possibility (while striving to uplift my sagging spirits) that she might represent the missing link in my quest for a figure to embody my chosen building. She had been associated with it for nearly twenty years, beginning in 1979, when she began helping J. Z. with the building's management and the rent-collecting chores. She undoubtedly knew lots of stories about the tenants who presently or in the past had occupied space on the fifth, fourth, and third floors, like the Gypsy fortune-tellers who had been evicted for forgetting to turn off their bathtub's water, drenching the diners in the restaurant below. Her personal background was also said to be uncommonly eventful, which I learned not only from conversing with J. Z. but with her first husband as well, a cordial fifty-five-year-old gentleman of youthful appearance named Winter Evans, an executive in the knitwear business on Seventh Avenue, with whom I dined a few times at Elaine's along with his German boyfriend, an international banker.

Evans told me that he had married Jackie Ho during the winter of 1970, after being paid a few thousand dollars to do so by a tycoon in the electronics industry. Evans had initially met the man through a mutual acquaintance in New York, and had Evans not been told in advance that the man was a rich and resourceful mensch who commanded a global enterprise, Evans would never have guessed it. The man was a shy, unprepossessing, slope-shouldered individual in his middle fifties who, when meeting Evans for the first time, limply shook hands and introduced himself quietly as “Mel.” Evans would never know Mel's last name, nor would he know much about Mel's private life beyond the fact that he was married, supported a wife and children in the suburbs, and did not wish to alter his family situation even though, as Evans later described it to me, Mel was “gaga” over Jackie Ho.

Evans believed that Mel had met her in 1969 when he was traveling on business in Tokyo. Jackie was then living there as a nineteen-year-old student who had come from Hong Kong to continue her education; but she had become so enamored of her newfound freedom in Tokyo that she
never got around to registering for classes. Mel was eager to bring her to New York and set her up in an apartment convenient to his midtown office, and it occurred to him that the simplest way to arrange this, as well as to establish her legal residency, which was what she wanted, was to have her marry an American citizen who was a homosexual—and the individual who came to mind, since he was aware of no other candidate, was Winter Evans.

Evans was then twenty-seven, and, though well educated (he had earned a degree in biology from the University of Wisconsin in 1965, and had later taken postgraduate classes in hotel management at Cornell), he had not yet found a satisfactory career when he came to know Mel in 1970. Evans then held a junior position in a New York public-relations firm owned by an older man who had been his lover for a few months but was becoming difficult to deal with. During the previous year, Evans had served as a bartender at a club in Miami and had also taken a turn modeling bathing suits in Palm Beach. But while financial considerations were certainly a factor in enticing Evans to marry Jackie Ho in 1970—in addition to the bonus from Mel, Evans would live with Jackie in a rent-free apartment—he also discovered after their introduction that she was physically stunning, and he suddenly fancied the notion that she might influence him in ways that would be considered normal by most of his friends and relatives back home in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

During the first year of their marriage, however, he would make love to her on only two or three occasions, he told me. He actually thought that he was beginning to enjoy being in bed with a woman, but Jackie thought differently. “Oh, this isn't what you want,” she told him one night, convincing him that their marital arrangement would be best served if the two of them restricted their sexual intimacies to other men. And so during the remaining eight years of their marriage, Winter Evans had his boyfriends, and Jackie Ho had hers, going off with whomever she pleased when Mel was not around. Evans had never imagined, until knowing Jackie, that a woman could be so self-directed and determined to do as she pleased. Mel's money had earned him neither her fidelity nor gratitude, Evans told me; and one day in the apartment after Mel had handed her ten thousand dollars to cover the costs of her forthcoming visit to Hong Kong, she became very upset after she had removed the cash from an envelope and had counted it.

“This
is chicken money,” she declared to him, and she quickly proceeded to tear up dozens of hundred-dollar bills and hurl them at Mel, who was seated across from her on a sofa. Mel said nothing at first, but Evans, who was standing nearby, noticed that he was beginning to blush
and then the corners of his mouth began to turn upward, forming a tricky, frozen smile. “I think he was actually enjoying this,” Evans told me. “He had this big cigar, and Jackie was throwing money in his face, and he had never seen anything like this before—it was a
first
for him, seeing all that money torn up. It was like a guy with a lot of money going to Las Vegas and losing ten grand at roulette in an hour, and thinking it was a terrific deal.…

“And yet, not every man gets turned on by the same thing,” Evans conceded, citing as an example Edward VIII's decision to give up the power and glory of the British throne in 1936 in order to marry a twice-divorced American woman from Baltimore, Wallis Simpson. “He'd been sheltered all his life in that domineering Victorian family, and then he falls for this woman,” Evans remarked, “who maybe had a trick pelvis, but in any case she was an eye-opener for him, and he says to himself, This is real life!, and he suddenly no longer wants to be a king, and he says to his mother, ‘Get my brother to do this, because I'm walking off'… and he walks off to become the Duke of Windsor.…” History is replete with women who turn the heads of rich and powerful men, Evans went on to say, mentioning Pamela Harriman and Jacqueline Onassis, and what he suggested was their Chinese equivalent—Jackie Ho.

“It's not necessarily a sexual thing that these women have going for them—it's more of a head thing,” Evans speculated. “These women get into certain men's heads and make these men crave being around them. In Jackie's case, it's the strength of her spirit—she brings to men a kind of backbone; she's basically a stern woman. She's no dominatrix. She's no tomboy. But there's something vaguely masculine about her—never mind her beautiful body, her clothes, her hair, all her beautiful jewelry—
she
is in control, and she gives certain men what they want, which is denial. She never calls men; they're always calling her—‘Can I see you?' ‘No, I'm busy,' ‘What are you doing Saturday?' ‘I'm out of town.' ‘Where will you be next Thursday?' ‘I don't know yet.' It goes on and on, a cat-and-mouse game, and certain guys love it. She doesn't get close to many women. The only woman who played any important role in Jackie's life was her paternal grandmother in China.…”

I had been told the same thing by Jackie's second husband, J. Z. Morris: It had been this grandmother who had influenced Jackie's character and style, her solipsistic nature and tendency to be more pragmatic than romantic. The grandmother was a worldly and well-to-do woman from a distinguished Cantonese family, and after her opium-addicted husband had died prematurely, she moved the family from Canton to Hong Kong in advance of the Communist takeover of the mainland. Jackie's father
grew up in Hong Kong as an underachiever who resisted hard work and hardly ever expressed himself, deferring most often to his mother's judgment. After he had gotten married and saw his first child, however, he admitted to his wife his irrepressible disappointment. He had wanted a son instead of the daughter who would be born to them in 1950 as Ho Ching Sheung, and would be called “Jackie.” His daughter would resent him throughout her girlhood, and, shortly after her eighteenth birthday, with her grandmother's financial support and encouragement, she left China for Japan.

Her guardians in Tokyo were members of a Japanese family that had met her grandmother during previous visits to China. One member of the Japanese family was a socially active woman in her mid-thirties named Mia Kobayashi, who regularly held receptions in her Tokyo apartment, where the guest list often included Americans—employees from the U.S. embassy, American military officers on leave from Vietnam, and American civilians on business trips. Mia sometimes invited Jackie to attend these events not only because Jackie was a lovely young adornment and was mature beyond her years but also because Jackie was eager to practice her English. Jackie learned English quickly and well, and, after a year and a half in Tokyo—meeting Mel during this time—she had a better understanding of English than did Mia Kobayashi herself. Mia had in the interim become involved with a middle-aged American whom she thought was a mogul in the movie business. But after Mia had visited the man's home in Las Vegas and had noticed that his residence was surrounded by trucks, she wondered aloud, “Aren't you in the
movie
business?” “No,” he said, “I told you I was in the
moving
business.” Mia's visit to Las Vegas was quite brief.