Desperately boring times, but very healthy ones. No parties, no girls, not too much boozing, lots of smoking and reading very late into the night. And nonstop training and sport. What else can one do when locked in with one’s wife and one’s son and with nostalgic thoughts of a time when people gathered in groups? It seems very long ago, but do any of you remember when people gave parties?
Desperate times demand desperate measures and make for desperate columnists. Meditation might be good for philosophers and their ilk, but correspondents need to get out and get the story. The only thing to report nowadays is the sleeping habits of cows (standing up), plow horses (ditto), and Swiss peasants (with one eye open, in case some billionaire foreigner robs them of their hay).
For some strange reason I keep thinking back to my youth and the ’50s, the best decade since the Golden Age of the Athenians in 430 BC. Hemingway was alive and Fitzgerald was making a posthumous comeback. Christopher Fry’s verse plays such as Venus Observed fascinated, not to mention The Lady’s Not for Burning. The London Journal of James Boswell revealed that the biographer was a horny little guy who tried to pick up girls nonstop and bragged about the size of his you-know-what. Budge Patty, Frank Sedgman, Vic Seixas, Jaroslav Drobny, Tony Trabert, and Lew Hoad (twice) won Wimbledon, followed by Ashley Cooper and Neale Fraser, all gents and all really nice guys. (Well, Drobny was a prick, but he was my mentor for a while—then we had girl trouble.)
Unlike the unreadable crap posing as novels today, the ’50s produced Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun, William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness, and—hooray—Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Greek Passion.
T.S. Eliot’s verse play The Cocktail Party opened on Broadway, and my parents took me to see South Pacific, The King and I, and Call Me Madam. I was through with school and on my way to university in 1955, playing junior tennis tournaments, dating three great Hollywood beauties—Linda Christian, our very own Joan Collins, and Janet Leigh—and attending the premiere of The Bridge on the River Kwai with Dame Joan in the Big Bagel.
Yep, those were the days—and nights, especially the latter at El Morocco, where the system was hardly first-come-first-serve. The near side of banquets was reserved for “superior” people, the far side, or Siberia, for the rest. I know, I know, this is 2020, and the Extinction Rebellion creeps might not like it, but to hell with them. Graham Greene forewarned us with a small masterpiece about foreign entanglements, The Quiet American, and Vladimir Nabokov preempted Mr. Epstein with Lolita.
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