New York
In Brisbane there was, and may yet be, an old-fashioned shopping arcade with a little tea shop on an upper gallery. There you could sit at a table with a cup of tea, a lamington or perhaps an asparagus roll (two Queensland staples) and, having drained your teacup and inverted it over the saucer, receive a ‘reading’ from one of the psychic ladies who shuffle from table to table ministering to the credulous. You may assume that I am a regular patron of astrologers, palmists, tarot readers and assorted sibyls. I can’t resist a glimpse, however occluded, into the future. At Byron Bay, a famous New South Wales beach and hippie time-warp, where barefoot and patchouli-scented odalisques still loiter, I found an authentic Irish witch who has converted the ramshackle tool shed in her garden into a spooky consulting room. It was there, in Sidonie’s tenebrous grotto, that I learnt, several months in advance, of the success of my present Broadway show, thus sparing myself the torments of self-doubt and first-night jitters other artistes experience as they wait up till dawn to read the reviews.
Living in New York again and performing my Vaudeville show seven times a week in Irving Berlin’s Music Box Theatre is a lot of fun as London becomes less inhabitable. I love sitting in restaurants here without being engulfed in cigarette smoke. However, it’s mesmerising to watch Americans wrestling with their knives and forks. They don’t seem to be able to use them properly. First of all they twine their fingers around the fork handle in the left hand, holding the instrument vertically over their steak or fish, and then with extreme awkwardness they hack away at it with their knife until they have assembled a plateful of bite-sized chunks. Both utensils then go back on the table, the fork is switched to the opposite hand, and the dissected dinner, by now cold, is forked mouthwards. This maladroit ritual is accompanied by the rattle and crash of iced water constantly administered by illegal immigrants to whom the adjuration ‘no iced water please’ means fuck all. Soup is always cold because a few years ago a woman, possibly of Midwestern decent, burnt her mouth on a cup of McDonald’s coffee and sued for a zillion.
Not that I dislike the Midwest, having in recent times done good business in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus and Louisville, with their marvellous museums, orchestras and rapturous audiences. (I had been warned ages ago that my act was too ‘East Coast’, but then nearly 50 years ago, when as a student actor I went up to wicked old Sydney, they said I would probably be ‘too Melbourne’ for the convict spawn in the harbourside city.) I noticed in Louisville, Kentucky, where the Governor kindly conferred upon me the title of Honorary Colonel, that the heart of the city, like that of so many once prosperous Midwestern cities, was, well, dead, and that in streets of boarded-up shops and derelict banks and offices the only thriving businesses were strip clubs, fortune-telling establishments and wig shops patronised by very large jolly black ladies. Although I did not consult any of the local psychics, I noticed that, along with fingernail reconstruction and penile enlargement, clairvoyance is one of America’s growth industries. In San Francisco in the window of an organic ‘wellness’ shop was the sign ‘Free tarot reading for all metaphysical purchases over $20’.
If I had not been told by a medium at a spiritualist meeting in Melbourne in 1953 that I would be living in the United States, I would have never believed it. Australians have always had ambivalent feelings towards the Seppos (septic tanks: Yanks) since we had so many rich and randy Americans in our midst during the second world war and Vietnam. Secretly, however, we rather touchingly want to be like Americans. There’s always a bit of excitement, especially in Adelaide, when they think they’ve found a serial killer, or a Serbian runs amok with a weapon in a supermarket. That feels sort of American, and when we gave up pounds and pennies for decimal currency we loved talking about ‘bucks’ and driving ‘Ks’ instead of miles. It made us feel we were in the movies, though more travelled Australians were dismayed to visit the United States and find they still measure distances in antiquated miles. We now call men, even women and children ‘guys’, but then so do the Poms these days, and railway stations in Australia are now annoyingly called ‘train stations’, if you will. Fortunately two weeks in Australia is still a fortnight, but Americans don’t understand the word, and though actors like me do shows twice on Saturdays, the word ‘twice’ is absolutely unknown in the United States and if recognised at all is thought of as a puzzling archaism. It’s ‘two times’ over here, and I don’t get off the train at the train station in America either — I get ‘off of the train’, a silly and inexplicable usage.
Ihaven’t been to the new Moma yet. I hope it’s possible to dodge the restaurants and boutiques and get to the pictures. That would also mean dodging the very large spaces devoted to ‘contemporary art’. On museum binges in the States I have seen enough neon tubes at 45-degree angles, piles of rocks and minimalist installations significantly called ‘untitled’ (meaning without ideas) to last a lifetime. There’s a thing that crops up all the time in the ‘contemporary’ wasteland of these museums which is a blob of white Styrofoam on a tripod on to which a little projector beams the flickering face of the lezzo or pooftah who created it. Unfortunately the film is not silent, for this installation usually screams things like, ‘Don’t, don’t, don’t, you’re hurting!’ or ‘Harder harder’ or some other equivocal injunction to his or her tormentor. In Baltimore I was reprimanded by a gallery attendant for telling it to shut up, but you don’t speak to ‘artworks’ like that. So I fled to a remote part of the museum and tried to enjoy a small Tiepolo Circumcision. Alas, in the distance I could still distinctly hear that eldritch litany of pain and protestation. Thank God, I thought, that Francis Bacon painted in the silent era.
In my early years on the stage I got used to chocolates. It wasn’t just on matinee days that one heard the constant rustle and crackle of stealthily unwrapped confectionery, but even at night eating sweets and watching a show were almost synonymous. Now you never see them. They have been replaced by — water! Younger members of the audience seem to be in constant need of rehydration and I look out at a sea of tilting Evian bottles, Poland Springs, Volvic and exotic Fiji Water in the more expensive seats. Dame Edna always reprimands the guzzlers, ‘No one has ever died of dehydration at one of my lovely shows,’ she says. ‘Are you frightened you won’t be moist enough later?’ It’s impossible to know what she means by this, but the guzzlers continue swilling their tepid fluids. Now Sidonie in Byron Bay emails me and tells me that it’s only a fad and after Christmas theatregoers in the know will revert to Black Magic.
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