I am in San Francisco where I began an American theatrical
adventure ten years ago. It is a beautiful and stylish town but it is impossible to enjoy a stroll in the city centre without being pestered by beggars. Not seldom hostile, these pungent tatterdemalions seem to be accepted by the locals as though they existed, like the cable cars, Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge, in order to lend their city its special identity, as did the flower children of the Sixties.
During the big sales last week, the walk from Saks to Neimen Markus was like struggling through a crowd scene in Les Misérables. Marie Antoinette populated her park with faux milk maids, shepherds and picturesque peasants, and a whimsical 18th-century grandee — was it Beckford? — liked to decorate his estate with peasants, banditti and beggars who would slip into their habiliments before dawn, and take up their assigned positions in grottos and follies. Perhaps the beggars of San Francisco are really actors employed by the city to enliven its pavements, or perhaps they are former hedge-fund managers and stockmarket brokers, America’s nouveaux pauvres. I recall a rhyme from my childhood which always produced a frisson of fear:
Hark Hark the dogs do bark, The beggars are coming to town...
As the nicely dressed Christmas shoppers and well-heeled townsfolk steer themselves past mendicant claws and rattling cups, turning unseeing eyes on scrawled placards bearing words like ‘Hungry’ and ‘War Victim’, they must feel a faint premonitory chill; a fleeting vision of the future.
At a Thanksgiving dinner here the other night a woman on my left, whose name may have been Shirlee-Anne, told me how much she adored a French singer called Edith Pilaf. She may have been a close relation of a woman I know who called the Greek singer Nana Moussaka and the New Zealand diva Piri Piri Te Kanawa, or the lady I heard in a London restaurant ordering, rather loudly and confidently, a caftan of wine. During the meal, which featured delicious dishes incorporating pumpkin in various disguises, I became fascinated by Shirlee-Anne. She wore a strange knitted A-line smock of fawn and grey wool which descended in scallops to the middle of her sturdy calves, giving her the appearance of a dusty lampshade from which no light would ever be diffused. She also wore a thin omniscient smile and when she learnt that my wife had attended a birthday party for Prince Charles she asked ‘Is his mother still alive?’ ‘Don’t you think that if the Queen of England had died you might have noticed?’ snapped my normally polite wife. ‘I know a few of you Californians can be rather insular but surely the Coronation of King Charles III would have come to your notice?’ Shirlee-Anne’s little smile intensified. ‘This is California,’ she said. ‘We’re not all interested in the British royal family.’ Choking on a turkey breast, I realised that I slightly enjoyed the surge of rage and adrenalin which ShirleeAnne had engendered. Later, my friend, the sapient Amy Tan, also a Thanksgiving guest, told me ‘every holiday dinner and all weddings and funerals need the presence of some irritating person or drunken uncle to unify the other guests, and provide fodder for us writers’.
We have decided to invite this lady to my present show, should a seat in the middle of the front row still be procurable, and then entice her on to the stage where Dame Edna will no doubt take care of her.
Ihave just ordered an interesting book called The Invasion of the Prostate Snatchers. It may well appear in my next Best Books of the Year entry in the Sunday Telegraph. On second thoughts it won’t, because I have given away the joke, but it would look funny in such a sedate context.
A very jolly woman called Charzelle, whom Edna besought to come on stage last week, explained that she was a writer of children’s books, especially books of a cautionary nature. What was her latest offering? Charzelle explained that it was bound to be a bestseller and would help children resist the vile importunings of the predatory paedophile. Proudly Charzelle announced its title, Don’t Touch My Botty Where I Go Potty. It seemed a worthy enterprise and certainly a title which would leap from the page in any Books of the Year list. In recommending this book to the audience Oprah-style, the Dame suggested that a sequel could be undertaken addressed to young adults, where the title would remain the same, except for the substitution of Please for Don’t.
The death of two friends has clouded the year. Simon Gray is a huge loss to the theatre, to literature and to those who loved him. Richard Hickox died suddenly a couple of weeks ago. He was a magnificent conductor and interpreter of Britten, Finzi and, in particular, Vaughan Williams. Also of that favourite of my youth, Delius. Australia, and Sydney in particular, has a dubious record in its treatment of distinguished musicians, ever since the Sydney Conservatorium of Music declined the application of the young Maurice Ravel to be its director. Since then, Eugene Goosens was banished from our shores in disgrace for having imported a little anodyne pornography with a satanic flavour, and there have been others.
Hickox, adored by both the Opera Company and the Orchestra of the Sydney Opera, became the victim of two disaffected singers who accused him of nepotism because, in accordance with his contract, he gave a couple of roles to his wife Pamela, who is a fine singer with an international reputation. These chipon-the-shoulder complaints were taken up by a vindictive philistine in the Melbourne press. There was a chorus of ill-informed pommybashing thereafter. The Maestro had made a home for himself, his wife, and his family in Australia, but the vicious attacks had certainly put him under tremendous strain and shaken his health. He has left a legacy of grieving friends and music lovers, and a definitive series of recordings on Chandos. A letter from me in his defence to a Sydney newspaper was unpublished.
Some years ago we spent Christmas in Fiji in the South Seas, on a beautiful island unfortunately infested with black-and-whitestriped coral snakes; the most poisonous snakes in the world. Only later did I learn that the island’s romantic Polynesian name meant ‘Isle of the poisonous snakes’.
Undeterred by the herpetology of our abode, Santa paid us his customary visit and, as a recently divorced father, I was eager that my two young sons, Oscar and Rupert, should experience a flawless and traditional Christmas in spite of the exotic setting and the shortage of seasonal stationery in the resort’s gift shop. On Christmas morning, as they unwrapped their pressies from both me and Santa Claus, it was Oscar, prematurely sophisticated as some readers may know, who piped up at breakfast ‘Isn’t it funny, Daddy, that Santa Claus uses the same wrapping paper as you? He must have stopped by the resort shop... ’ And to all of those politically correct Americans who beam at me next week and say ‘Happy Holidays’, I will defiantly respond, ‘And a Merry Christmas to you too!’
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