Collectors' Pieces
By MARY HOLLAND
Without wishing to be unduly coy and/or vain I've never understood what is meant to be so heartwarming about the appreciative holler in the street, let alone the attempted pick-up; yet all my life I've been reading about how marvelously cherished and feminine women are meant to feel as soon as they set foot in a Latin country where the men whistle and shout com- pliments, follow them down streets and into the metro. An American photographer told me he couldn't work in England because his extremely beautiful wife hated coming here. The men in the streets just didn't notice her, no one tried to pick her up or even called after her. (It's obvious she's never walked along the tree-lined avenues of residential Kensington any evening after dusk but of that more later.) What I couldn't see then and still can't see now is how the average greasy, pock-marked youth of dubious antecedents who is the most constant follower of women in any city, Latin or otherwise, can possibly be sexually reassuring. At first I assumed that my photo- grapher's wife probably rated a more attractive class of follower, but inquiries among the best- favoured girls I know all confirm that the men who follow you into the metro in Paris, or along the slum streets of Barcelona, or sidle up to you in the hotel bar in Rome, are almost always singularly uncompelling.
In the face of this attention the first reaction of any girl must be one of appalled disbelief, followed by an anxious desire to look in the nearest mirror. Far from feeling a simpering, albeit outraged, vanity, the immediate thought is, `Do I really look so down on. my luck, so cross-eyed and unappealing, that he can possibly imagine I might accept his advances?' The only alternative is that he doesn't for a moment expect you to accept them and would flee if you did, and I don't see what is particularly flattering about that either.
This,! suspect, must be the explanation for most of the marauding cars which circle endlessly in most parts of London in the evenings. Where I live on the borders of Notting Hill Gate and Kensington, the performance as soon as dusk falls is extraordinary. And I'm not talking about Notting Hill Notorious either, but the residential streets towards Kensington High Street. There may be some dubious compliment in being mis- taken for a tart, but I imagine most of the drivers have nothing so practical in view. They can't really think that any girl with the groceries in one hand and a pile of papers tin the other is out looking for clients just because she happens to be walking alone at 8.30 p.m. Yet such is the out-
LESLIE ADRIAN is on holiday ward form at least of the ritual. The same cars weave in and out of side streets, stop a little ahead of you, call out an invitation as you pass. Ignored, they drive on a few paces and stop again, or else drive off around a corner only to re- appear from another street a little way up the road.
There is, of course, a basic difference between the attempt to pick up a girl on the street when she is already on her way somewhere and doing so when she is there. But even being accosted in a public place of entertainment doesn't strike me as flattering unless it's done with so much flair that the man has obviously given thought to the best way to please. The best lines are the most repeated, but the ease with which they trip off the tongue rarely strikes the recipient until much later. A young American told me he'd picked up his pretty and singularly unpickupable girl-friend by saying how much he admired her feet. (Why? Search me, but I expect it showed a perception akin to telling her he admired her mind.) I knew a Spaniard who found that if he paid for a girl's drink and told the waiter not to reveal his identity the girl nearly always ended up bribing the waiter to find out.
And even if the flair of the initial approach doesn't last beyond the first few words these at least are impressive. Like the American who breezed up to me as I was going into a theatre and said, 'How fortunate. We seem to be sitting next to each other.' We weren't, of course : but that didn't detract from its pleasing originality as an opening gambit.
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