DIARY
DAVID HARE Ihave been in New York for two weeks for the opening of Skylight. It's been the full Broadway experience, at once tense, highly charged and, at the last, exhilarating. The English like to sneer at Americans, saying that they worship success and that they have a horror of failure. But in my experi- ence Americans do something much more sensible with failure. They just forget it. In England, people can hardly wait to bring up the subject of your weakest piece of work. When they first meet you, they ask, 'Are you the person who wrote . . . ' and then mention whatever it is you most want to put behind you. Here in New York, I once had a painful, terrifying flop, but in the eight years that have followed nobody has ever once referred to it. It might never have happened. What this reflects is not fear of contagion, but simple generosity. You can't see this kind of good manners catching on back home. As Conservatism falls further into disrepute, you realise it has now intro- duced into Britain everything that is worst about America — its carelessness, its boast- fulness, its contempt for the weak — with- out ever managing to duplicate its good qualities: its genius for philanthropy, its native optimism, its breadth.
That said, much the most amusing book of the autumn is Monica Crowley's unin- tentionally hilarious volume, Nixon Off the Record. Crowley was a 23-year-old research assistant whom Richard Nixon employed in 1992 and to whom he confided all his pass- ing thoughts about politics, calculating rightly, as it turned out — that she would be young and foolish enough to reproduce them as posthumous evidence of her hero's greatness. Instead, the result is a portrait of a dispossessed ex-president, desperate for any scraps of recognition, unable to under- stand why no one will talk to him, and reduced to raging like King Lear at the 7 o'clock news. It's a book worthy to be kept a few shelves down from Trevor-Roper's great Hitler's Table Talk as a monument to rambling self-ignorance. Your mouth falls open as, time and again, the old crook misses the irony of his repeated complaint that Bill Clinton has lowered the tone of modern politics. Oliver Stone's rather wild film failed to get near its fascinating subject because it never answered the crucial ques- tion: at what level of self-knowledge did Nixon operate? One adviser who followed Nixon into his years of disgrace at San Clemente told me that he knew full well he had lied throughout his presidency. 'Why do you think he was in such agony?' Yet this new book presents the opposite case. It reveals a Nixon who has used the passage of time to deceive himself so perfectly that he can talk about defending the integrity of the president's office without breaking into peals of self-mocking laughter. In the most painful moment Nixon asks rhetorically, `Didn't anyone learn anything from Water- gate?' The answer is: Nixon least of all.
Everyone in this city is complaining that 1996 has produced the worst crop of movies in years. And so it has. The out- standing film is Stanley Tucci and Camp- bell Scott's brilliant allegory about a small Italian restaurant in the 1950s, The Big Night. Beautifully shot and wonderfully acted, it boasts as good a performance as even Ian Holm has ever given. But other- wise it's been a diet of dreck. The studios blame the stars, saying that their salaries have got out of control. But would they know how to make a good, modest movie even if they could? One influential studio was quoted as saying it was now a waste of time making films for only $40 million. You have to spend $70 million because then at least you have what they call an event. Meanwhile, a lot of good directors have been coming to grief. Robert Altman, who seems an outstandingly wise and decent man, is reported as being unperturbed by the commercial fate of his new jazz film Kansas City. More than anyone he has the advantage of perspective. Just one week after McCabe and Mrs Miller closed, he says, its reputation started to grow. He expects the same fate for the new one. It's true that in the cinema reputation is more arbitrary than in almost any other profes- sion. For years Michael Powell was almost entirely forgotten. David Lean suffered a similar eclipse. But when I went to see a Robert Hamer film earlier this month at `In the old days the money would have been delivered.' the NFT, there were still only about 20 people there. And he, as the creator of Kind Hearts and Coronets, is one of the best British directors who ever lived. Like the brilliant Alexander McKendrick, he's sim- ply out of fashion. When Louis Malle died, the Independent couldn't wait for the body to cool before pronouncing his work `uneven' (they trashed Nureyev on his way to the mortuary, too). Were it not staffed by fools who hate art, even the Independent would know that the work of all film direc- tors is uneven. It's the nature of the job. Even Renoir failed occasionally. Welles failed often. The interesting question is why some are forgiven, and others not.
The only unoriginal line in Tony Kushn- er's blazingly original play Angels in Amen- ca 'came when a leading character stepped out onto an ocean beach and declared, `This used to be one hell of a beautiful country.' How many American plays and films have included some variation on that predictable sentiment? But, my God, when you spend a weekend walking the strand on Cape Cod, or looking out over the slate- grey Atlantic from a lobster shack on a Massachusetts jetty, you do see why few writers, however good, can quite resist this cliché. The windblasted dunes and the slat- ted wooden houses make a landscape whose sheer freshness and vigour can never fail to seize your heart. Earlier, while I was still in New York, I'd watched a wonderful- ly festive trade union march going down Fifth Avenue. Blue-collar workers, mostly from immigrant backgrounds, were using the occasion to advertise strikes against their exploitative employers, usually in the catering trade. Their high-spirited children were out with them as cheerleaders, throw- ing drumsticks and playing in the bands which announced the elaborate floats. But what made the event so moving was that everyone marched under the Stars and Stripes. Here in America, not only is it pos- sible to be left-wing and patriotic, it makes perfect sense. Utopia is written into the constitution, so the flag is for all the peo- ple, not just one section of them. It's not like our flag, under which you expect to find only neo-Nazis, football thugs or fans of the House of Windsor. Michael Gambon told me that when he took the Circle Line boat around Manhattan, they played the music from 2001 as they approached the Statue of Liberty. Tears came into his eyes. Quite right, too. In our own country overt patriotism has never been an option for most of us. For people of my age, it has always been an embarrassment because it has been appropriated and cheapened by only one kind of political view, and often a distinctly dubious one at that.
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