Roundabout

Champagne

'I'M A displaced person all right.

But I've been displaced to some- , where I like more than I liked .2; where I used to be. It's only due to a ridiculous mistake on the part of providence that I wasn't born here to begin with,' says Carl Foreman. Where he used to be was Hollywood. Where he has been for the last six years is London. The scriptwriter of High Noon, Cyrano de Bergerac and Home of the Brave was a refugee from the Un-American Activities Committee and so full of enthusiasm for his new home that even the most captious Un- English Activities Committee would find it hard to discover a reason for shipping him back.

He had the long-nosed, dark-complexioned, heavily-bespectacled look of the 1958 model, English intellectual and he wore a conservative blue lounge suit. His name could easily have been Wolf Mankowitz and his birthplace could easily have been the Jack-the-Ripper backstreets of East London. Oddly enough, he was the• guest of honour at a party given by Wolf Mankowitz, who was far and away the most American-looking type in a room stuffed with refugee Americans. Mr. Mankowitz needed only a pair of riding breeches and a green eye-shade to be a Hollywood film director of silent days. Despite the calculated streak of Cockney in his speech (which he has made the fashionable accent for Left-wing egg- heads everywhere in Britain today) Mr. Man- kowitz talks like a Broadway impresario from a back-stage musical. 'That was a good piece you did about me, boy,' he said to an abashed guest who had interviewed him for the Daily Mail the week before. 'Very warm, very friendly. You were going to make it a scalp job, weren't you kid? But I poured on the charm and sweet-talked you out of it. Have a glass of champagne.'

Also liking it here and taking on some of the protective colouring of the British landscape were Mrs. Fleur Cowles Meyer (I'm beginning to slow down to a cruising speed') and Mr. Irving Kristol (`My kids are always telling me to say "barth" and "grarss" like everyone else').

Beer

NORMAN GRANZ is a 39-year-old jazz impresario from Beverly Hills who is in London at present and not liking it much. With his 'Jazz at the Phil- harmonic' show—an assembly of top-flight instru- mentalists and Ella Fitzgerald—he suffered a customs search at London Airport. which was given front-page treatment by most newspapers.

Norman Granz had his tube of toothpaste split open, said the News Chronicle. Ella Fitzgerald's cigarettes were torn apart, said someone else. 'All lies,' said Mr. Granz, and called a press con- ference at his Dorchester suite to tell the reporters so in person.

Mr. Granz wore a check jacket and a red tie. His grey slacks were pulled up to show pastel- pink socks. With his grey hair and craggy face he looked like a freshman who was working his way through college by acting as'sparring partner to the local heavyweight. 'I thought of having a tape-recorder 'fake everything down so I wouldn't be misquoted,' he began. 'People warned me about the kind of treatment I might get from the British press, and everything has happened just the way they said.'

Not only inaccuracy but poor taste was what he was complaining about. The Sketch said that pianist Oscar Peterson weighed 250 lb. 'Have you actually weighed him?' demanded Mr. Granz. And there was this business of alleged idiomatic reporting. Ella Fitzgerald was quoted as having called Gerald I,ascelles 'Honey.' And that was a word Ella never used to strangers. It made her sound like a character from Uncle Tom's Cabin.

'As far as publicity goes, we need each other,' said Mr. Granz. 'I need you to sell the show, and you obviously think I'm newsworthy. All I ask is that you keep to the facts and keep off the lies. Would anyone like a beer?'

Three people had a beer, but a trolley full of cheese sandwiches remained untouched. Mr. Granz forgot to offer them round.

Vodka

THE ONLY MEMBER Of the Moscow Arts, Theatre Company who did not look Chekhovian was their Director, Alexander Solodovnikov. He had the bone-stretched skin, the careful eyes and the saintly blue-grey hair of the old-style Clydeside revolutionary. He also wore a trim tweed suit and a loose tartan tie. The rest of the visitors were dressed with almost Edwardian country-house elegance.

Not for them the sail-cloth suiting which has been not so much cut as stabbed, the bell-bottom trousers, the sleeves which have been stitched on backwards by a mailbag-sewing machine, the shirts processed from cardboard, which mark the usual Soviet official. They were actors after all and used to seeing themselves reflected in the eyes of their audiences. They had grown so used to living in the Chekhov world of slightly seedy bourgeois luxury that even their off-stage props had a touch of pre-Communist chic—the amber cigarette-holder, the gold cuff-links, the decorated waistcoat. Until a few years ago the part of Madame Ranevsky in The Cherry Orchard was still played by Olga Knipper, Chekhov's widow and creator of the original role. This must be the only group left in Khrushchev's Russia in which she would not stick out like a grey topper in the Red Square May Day march.

At the mass interview given to the press, there was little opportunity to pick up any personal opinions from the company above the clinking of vodka glasses, the gurgling of poured Guinness, and the crunching of caviare in little pastry boats. 'I do implore you to be quiet at the back, other- wise there's no point in the whole thing,' shouted the golden-haired impresario Peter Daubeney.

During the tiny silence, the interpreter could be heard saying that rehearsal was the canvas on which the flowers of acting were woven, that William Shakespeare and John Osborne were the two most interesting British playwrights, and that dramatic art cannot exist without nervousness. Then the clinking, gurgling and crunching started up again and the rest was lost.