Eduard Shevardnadze of Georgia

During much of the Soviet era, the Republic of Georgia enjoyed prosperity unknown to the rest of the Eastern Bloc, due first to the richness of the farmland and abundance of its produce; second to the region’s strategic importance; and finally to the preferential benevolence of certain Soviet leaders who happened to be Georgians themselves. Josef Stalin was Georgian; so was Eduard Shevardnadze, the Soviet Union’s last foreign minister.

By the time we got to Tbilisi, in winter 1994, Shevardnadze was president of the independent Republic. Ever keen for good press in the West, he granted us a lengthy interview. I’ve seldom seen anyone so depressed.

“He’s always like that,” said Mila Taubkina, the brilliant “fixer” from the CBS bureau in Moscow. Yet as Shevardnadze listed his woes (the war in Chechnya on his northern border; a civil war led by his predecessor, the nationalist Zvlad Gamsakhurdia; separatist uprisings in Ossetia and Abkhazia; interference by the Russians almost everywhere), I could understand that he might be discouraged, specifically and not merely habitually.

Reaching out to the American television audience was an uphill climb. Who the hell ever heard of Abkhazia? He patiently explained the background “for the viewers back home,” but I wonder whether the lesson took, whether the interview did him any good at all. When it came time to pose with us for a group picture, you could almost hear the creaking of his disused facial muscles, valiantly but vainly trying to force themselves into a smile.

Though officially outside the war zone, Tbilisi was far from peace. There was no customs official, no passport control at the airport. We’d arrived in a shuddering old Aeroflot plane that, I was certain, had carried Stalin himself and not been renovated, repaired, or even cleaned since. I guess folks figured that if we were willing to take our lives in our hands by flying in that bucket, they might as well let us into the country without obstacle. But there were checkpoints all over town: little groups of soldiers would stop us at intersections and ask to see our papers. In the evenings, they may have been vigilantes, the “neighborhood watch” and not soldiers, but it amounted to the same thing. They’d point their Kalashnikovs into the car and sniff, as if they could smell an insurgent. The streets were lined with bullet holes and burned-out cars.

When we got to the hotel, we had to step over a chalk outline at the front door. Was there an accident, Dan wanted to know.

“No, sir,” said the desk clerk, “there was merely a disagreement. The man left the bar without paying his bill.” The hotel was owned by an Austrian company; the clerk was at some pains to explain that it was not a representative of the hotel staff who had killed the customer.

Dan nodded thoughtfully and pulled out his wallet. He extracted a considerable wad of cash and said, “We’ll pay now, thank you.”

The lobby was a sort of atrium that rose up several stories to a skylight. Men sat in club chairs all afternoon, smoking cigars and drinking vodka, and fondling their Kalashnikovs. For several hours every day, a pianist would come in and play Broadway show tunes, even when the electricity went out, as it did every afternoon. We’d open our hotel room doors to catch the light from the atrium, and “What I Did for Love” would waft up to us, the cigar smoke not far behind.

In these surroundings, I said, “Don’t shoot the piano player” took on special resonance; if some drunk came up and said, “Play ‘Melancholy Baby’,” he’d damned well better. We tipped the poor guy. We tipped everybody.

We went to an outdoor market to see what was left of Georgia’s prosperity. Not much. Vendors lined up in front of little brown shacks and squatted in front of a few dirty sacks of dubious legumes. You could buy a couple of chicken feet, but the rest of the chicken was nowhere to be seen; the head of a calf drew flies but no buyers.

Some of the team remembered the golden days, before the Soviet Union dissolved. There were memories of a bountiful feast that our Tbilisi fixer, Manana, set out for a 60 Minutes crew, so lavish and so photogenic that it became an integral part of the report that Lesley Stahl broadcast from New York. This kind of hospitality was a tradition in Georgia, and it would have been sacrilege to offer his guests anything less: twenty courses or more, plates piled high with delicacies, and countless bottles of wine to wash it all down. You’d start in the afternoon and you’d still be going strong at midnight. Looking around the market, it was clear that the beautiful tradition of Georgian hospitality was gone with the wind.

But Manana invited us to dinner.

His apartment building was in a state of advanced decay; I couldn’t tell if it had been shelled or just neglected. Chunks of plaster and concrete blocked my way. But when we reached Manana’s apartment, everything was all right. Warm and clean, with more furnishings than the rooms could hold. (I gathered their previous apartment had been larger.) And above all — hospitable.

To this day I don’t know how he and his wife did it. There were indeed twenty courses, a staggering variety of foods that, we knew perfectly well, couldn’t be found at the market. Granted, these rich viands were served on very tiny plates — but everything was delicious, and we did not lack for wine. The red was sweet, almost syrupy, and robust; the white was close to turpentine. People kept filling my glass with white wine. I’d drink it up, the quicker to get back to the red. And then they’d fill my glass with white again. Generously. So I’d drink, and they’d refill. And so on.

By the third bottle, I spoke fluent Russian. Never mind that I was the worst student in the history of Brown University, and that the administrators asked me never to tell anyone I took Russian there. It is an official secret, guarded in a vault in the Hay Library. Despite the best efforts of Prof. Barbara Monahan, the most I could say that Sleeping Beauty was my favorite ballet. Suddenly I was a second Yevtushenko. Mila was delighted: from that moment, she resolved to salvage my study of her native tongue. “No more English!” she crowed. “Tolko po-russky!”

There was music, too. Manana’s youngest sons, little Bibi and his even littler brother, came out and sang for us, while their teenaged sister played piano. The little one, Lesley Stahl’s godson, three years old or so, so shy that he hid his face in his brother’s arm — all the while singing in the purest, sweetest voice I’d ever heard.

Then the knock came at the front door.

Manana’s eyes grew wide; his wife looked concerned. The rest of us fell silent, or dropped our voices to a whisper. Nobody knew who was at the door — but very few of the possibilities could bode well.

Manana went to answer.

We tried to hear what was said. Nothing.

Then Manana returned, grinning, with several bottles of wine. “From the president!” he said. “A gift to us for our party!”

The curious thing was that Manana didn’t remember telling Shevardnadze — or anybody from the government — that he was throwing a party.

The later years of Shevardnadze’s administration were not a success, and he was forced from office in the Rose Revolution, in 2003. He had become less democratic and more dictatorial with each year; his family and his cronies profited handsomely from their privileges (though Shevardnadze himself was not implicated in the corruption). Georgia was in a mess, and the mess got mostly worse. He never did find much to smile about.

But if he’d come to dinner at Manana’s house — who knows what might have been?

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Ethel Merman

In Merman’s New York, a secretary could become a superstar.

Ethel Merman sounds like nobody else, and even if you don’t like her voice — many people don’t — you sit up and pay attention when she sings. Those bright vowels, those popping consonants, the sheer hugeness of her sound, the force of her vitality sweep everything and everyone else aside. If you let her, she’ll set the sky on fire for you. If you don’t let her — too bad. She’s going to plant her feet square on that stage, stare straight ahead, and sing, regardless. “Stand back, world! Get offa my runway.”

My friend and former colleague Brian Kellow set himself a daunting task when he chose to write Merman’s biography. After all, Brian is roughly my age, he arrived in New York only shortly before I did, in the early 1980s, when Merman was on her deathbed, and he grew up even farther than I from the theaters of Broadway where she reigned supreme for four decades. He didn’t witness the stage performances of an artist whose best work, it is universally held to be true, was in musical comedy before a live audience. For kids in the heartland, like Brian and me, Merman existed primarily as a reputation and an occasional guest star on TV; cast albums and The Muppet Show can’t give us a complete understanding of her work. But Brian is features editor at Opera News, and opera fandom requires a certain amount of archival detective work that’s precisely suited to the task at hand.

We can’t know exactly what Maria Malibran or the castrato Senesino sounded like, but we can refer to contemporary descriptions, and we can examine the scores they sang to get an idea of their voices, their range and flexibility. By examining the theaters in which they performed, we may even get an idea of the size of their voices. By looking at photographs, we can piece together the blocking and gestures of Maria Callas (for example) in her greatest roles, though there’s film documentation of only one, Tosca. Some opera fans immerse themselves so thoroughly in this material that there’s no telling them they didn’t attend the performances of their favorite singers, and they use their notions of long-lost artists to belittle current-day performers. “Oh, Renée Fleming is good, but she’s no Giulia Grisi.” You can’t really argue with that kind of statement, which is the intent behind it.

Brian doesn’t have to go that far to reconstruct Merman’s work. She left plenty of recordings, film and television appearances, and many of her colleagues are still around to help fill in blanks in our knowledge. Brian diligently contacted them all, making wonderful discoveries, meeting memorable characters, and getting great yarns in the process. And he turned up terrific artifacts: Merman on Evening with the Pops, we know, but Merman on the Sha-Na-Na show?! He manages to give the reader a sense of what it must have been like to sit in the audience when Merman sang — he even manages to build tension and suspense when describing opening nights, even though we know perfectly well how the story will turn out. It makes for exciting reading.

But it’s wistful reading, too, because, much as we’d like to, we can’t witness those performances. They’re lost to us, and so is the Broadway where Merman sang. She starred in shows by some of the greatest songwriters in history: George Gerswhin (Girl Crazy), Cole Porter (Anything Goes), Irving Berlin (Annie Get Your Gun), each of whom tailored the material to suit her zesty personality and her enormous instrument. “I Got Rhythm,” “Blow, Gabriel, Blow,” “Anything Goes,” “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” all were written for her. The King Lear of women’s roles in musical comedy, Gypsy, was created for her: “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” “Rose’s Turn.” They don’t make ’em like that anymore.

With Jimmy Durante and Bob Hope in Porter’s Red Hot and Blue

For today, as Brian observes, shows are designed so that any big-name star, regardless of personality, can step in for a four-month run. With microphones, a performer doesn’t need a powerhouse voice, and with diminished expectations, in fact, she doesn’t even need to sing: “Melanie Griffith in Chicago? Great!” (And maybe she was, but for reasons that would make no sense to Merman.) Other shows, amusement-park attractions like Phantom of the Opera and The Lion King, don’t require stars at all; the audience goes to see the same show the neighbors saw four years ago, and it doesn’t matter who’s lurking behind those masks.

Brian doesn’t use Merman to clobber contemporary Broadway stars over the head. He doesn’t need to. Besides, it would be cruelly unfair to attack them. Even the current stars with what passes for star-personality these days (Patti LuPone and Bernadette Peters, each of whom has inherited Merman roles; Nathan Lane, who’s inherited Zero Mostel’s) — they’re not stars, not in the sense that Merman was a star. They can’t be. Because as an artistic medium, Merman’s Broadway no longer exists.

She rubs a lot of people the wrong way — still, twenty-four years after her death. She was big, brassy, elbows out, smart-alecky. Like a lot of New Yorkers, like New York itself. In her way she was as iconic a representative of her town as the Statue of Liberty. The city used to celebrate people like her. Broadway was only one temple to the cult of feistiness and drive, to individuality and outsize talents. The whole town used to be that way, or so we like to think.

Who could ask for anything more?

Brian Kellow and I, and people like us, used to sit in our living rooms thousands of miles from Manhattan, and play original cast albums until we learned every note of every song. We bought into an image of New York, a place where the pavements were alive with dancing, where hearts and voices soared higher than skyscrapers, where sex and sass and smarts were prized and rewarded. New York was where you’d be welcome no matter how weird you were. Anything was possible there, we knew. Maybe it was an idealized image, but it was a good one, something to for the city to aspire to. While the rest of us clung to the hope of it as a means of escape.

We worked our asses off to get to the Emerald City, and when we got there, it turned out to be Kansas after all, or close enough, and closer every day. Brian concludes his biography with a little meditation on the city’s changing character — its increasing lack of character, its resemblance to every other place. Merman wouldn’t recognize it, and it wouldn’t know what to do with her. The Little Merman, maybe, but Merman in The Little Mermaid? I don’t think so.

There’s a broken heart for every light on Broadway, the saying goes, and one of those lights is mine.

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Blythe Danner

At any given moment, each culture, each generation, has its idea of the Actress, usually centered on one woman who for a broad slice of the public imagination represents the art as a whole. Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse, Anna Magnani, and Simone Signoret were such, in Europe; nowadays, America looks to Meryl Streep. But when I studied theater, for me and for many of my friends, the Actress was Blythe Danner.

That may be surprising to people outside the Northeast, or to those who know her primarily as Will’s mother on Will & Grace, because Danner did so little film and television work in her prime. She focused on Broadway and Williamstown, the better to bring up her children. When her daughter, Gwyneth Paltrow, tearfully thanked her mom on Oscar night in 1999, it was only right: Blythe Danner might have received such a prize, or several, if she hadn’t made career choices that — as she surely understood at the time — would rule out the possibility.

“Acting is choices,” Jim Barnhill used to tell his students at Brown, and we understood him to mean the kind of moment-to-moment choices in a performance: how do I inflect my voice? How do I pick up a glass of water? Once I’ve picked it up, do I drink or not? But acting is other kinds of choices, too. Blythe Danner taught me that.

She’s tall, still slender, with a husky voice that no longer projects very well from the stage, but she possesses a tremendous range. She’s equally skilled at comedy and tragedy, and she even sings a bit: no Barbra Streisand, mind you, and sometimes uncertain of pitch, but she’s expressive and fearless, and she does her homework. I’ve seen her rehearsing the music of Kurt Weill (she briefly took over from the late Martha Schlamme in collaborating with Alvin Epstein), and I can testify to her seriousness and industry.



After the rehearsal, I told her that I wasn’t surprised to hear her sing well, that I remembered fondly her account of “He Plays the Violin,” Martha Jefferson’s number in the film of 1776. She scoffed. “Oh, that old thing, it was only one song, and I had a soundstage and lots of retakes — this is a challenge.” And she changed the subject, wanting to know how well I spoke German, and whether I could help her with some of the lyrics that her own studies of German couldn’t unlock. (She spent a semester in Germany, when she was a student at Bard, she told me, but mostly what she could remember of the language was “Du bist duff” — “You’re an idiot.”)

It wasn’t merely a socially acceptable modesty, I think, that prompted her reaction. In between 1776 and Alvin Epstein’s cabaret, she’d had severe vocal difficulties, and it was for a while uncertain whether she could continue to act onstage, much less sing again. The Epstein cabaret was more than a challenge, it was a test, the outcome of which was far from certain, and it required considerable courage from her to attempt it. In recalling the earlier performance, I may have provided a painful reminder of a time before she worried about her voice.

I’ve met her now a few times, usually in the company of Madeline Gilford, who knows everybody. But my first meeting with her set the pattern for all the rest: Blythe Danner is grace personified onstage, and the grace keeps going when she gets offstage, too.

Following a performance of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, Kevin Pask and I went backstage to get her autograph. By this time, the early 1980s, she knew how to handle college-boy stage-door johnnies. She signed our programs and made sure that one of her costars, Roy Scheider, signed them, too, and she chatted with us for several minutes as if we were deeply fascinating, while her husband, the late producer Bruce Paltrow, stood by indulgently.

She made me feel as if I were a theater icon myself, an archetypal Ivy Leaguer infatuated with an actress, like some character out of a Fitzgerald short story, taller and handsomer and worthier than I was. Nobody else ever made me feel that way.

Most of what I know of her, I know not from shaking her hand but from watching her performances. Because Broadway is so far from the suburbs of Dallas, I missed much of her best work; some of her least distinguished stuff turned up at the movies (Futureworld) and television (a sitcom based on Adam’s Rib — which, dear reader, I didn’t know at the time to be a classic film starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy). Yet her charm remained intact no matter what her surroundings, and there was almost always some bit of business that revealed her art. And a couple of her television projects — an episode of M*A*S*H; F. Scott Fitzgerald and ‘The Last of the Belles’, in which she played Zelda Fitzgerald; A Guilty Conscience, a murder mystery opposite Anthony Hopkins — were trifles, yet among the best things anybody did in the 1970s and 1980s.

Sometimes her better projects for the stage made it to television, too. I have vivid memories of her Nina in Chekhov’s The Seagull (pictured above), wild-eyed and heartbroken in her final scene. I now realize she was, technically, too old to play the part, but every time I’ve seen or read the play since, hers is the standard I go by, hers the face I picture.

When I got to New York, I made it a point to see her onstage whenever I could. Seldom did I walk away feeling she’d done everything she could with a part, whether it was perfect for her (her Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing proved too arch) or not (Follies really requires an actress with more musicianship). Each time, I felt I was watching an interpretation that was still evolving — and that seemed right to me, because acting is a living art. Danner’s work grows and develops; it doesn’t sit still.

Because she has specialized in classic repertory (much as an opera singer does), she’s been at a disadvantage: we already know these plays, we have a preconception of the role and a preconception of what she’ll do with it. And (again like an opera singer) her interpretation is dependent on a number of factors, many of them outside her control; sometimes you see a performance and want to see it again, in other circumstances, because you know it will change, usually for the better. The difference between Susan Graham’s work in Iphigénie en Tauride in Paris and in San Francisco was the difference between night and noon. How much poorer I’d be if I’d seen one but not the other.

As Phyllis, in Sondheim’s Follies

From the minute I read A Streetcar Named Desire, I thought of Blythe Danner as Blanche DuBois. Her fragile beauty, her natural nobility, her intelligence, her suggestions of a startlingly earthy sexuality beneath a surface of serenity: all these things promised a magnificent, possibly definitive portrayal of one of theater’s most complex heroines. When at last it was announced that she’d perform the play in New York, at Circle in the Square, I was ecstatic, and in performance she lived up to almost all my expectations.

But Streetcar isn’t a one-woman show, and a great Blanche requires a great Stanley to play off of. Somebody had the idea that Aidan Quinn, then at the height of his popularity, would be ideally cast in the part. But Quinn is best at brooding, inarticulately poetic types, and physically he’s fit yet far from imposing. Danner’s vital, nuanced, witty Blanche mopped up the floor with him. Not a lot of drama there — or anyway, not the drama that Williams wrote. It was an historic opportunity missed, and because Danner didn’t return to the part, the way Susan Graham returned to Iphigénie, I’ll always wonder what might have been.

This experience is illustrative, I think, of what I mean when I say “Actress.” You follow her career. You look forward to her interpretation of challenging roles. You study the choices she makes. You learn something each time you see her: about the role, about the play, about theater, about art, about her and about yourself.

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France, to Rhyme with Romance

The Happy Couple

The best show in town these days is President Nicolas Sarkozy’s love life. Considering the behavior of other presidents around the world, the French are lucky. But they seem uncertain how to respond. They have no practice at this sort of thing.

Traditionally, French presidents hold themselves aloof from almost every conventional human activity. They do this in imitation, conscious or not, of French kings, but their presidential role model is especially Napoléon III, who was briefly president before seizing power in a coup d’état in 1851; he was crowned emperor shortly thereafter. Charles de Gaulle behaved much the same way, but in reverse, with a kind of coup d’état in 1958 that resulted in his being elected president — with the power of an emperor. (And that’s how the Fifth Republic was born.) De Gaulle’s job, he said, was to present to the world “a certain idea of France.”

Already Sarkozy has been more actively engaged in public affairs than his predecessors cared to be. He doesn’t merely present “a certain idea,” he presents comprehensive legislative packages. He hogs the limelight, making announcements and proposing policies and antagonizing opponents and generally seizing the duties that might be expected to fall to his ministers. He exercises in places where other people might see him, and his exercise of choice is jogging. In all of this, the French see a pernicious American influence.

Napoléon III: Role model
(And nobody ever called him “Napo l’Américain”)

Sarkozy’s love life may not be Love American Style, but it lacks a certain Gallic discretion. When he divorced his second wife, Cécilia, this fall, Sarkozy refused to talk to the press about it — storming out of an interview with 60 Minutes, for example. This satisfied a lot of French people, although some didn’t understand why the Sarkozys didn’t simply stay married, miserably, while carrying on affairs, discreetly, on the side. Which is the way French rulers have always done it.

Theirs had been a strange relationship to begin with. Nicolas cruised Cécilia when, as mayor of Neuilly, he officiated at her wedding to another man. (Apparently, character plays no part in voters’ decision-making in this country. No one seems to have asked: “This is how the guy wields executive power?” And the French elected him anyway.) Cécilia had left Sarkozy about a year before the elections, returning to his side as he sought the presidency primarily because, one assumed, she wanted to be first lady. Her presence and frequent absences on the campaign trail last spring were closely watched. When election day came, she didn’t bother to vote, or to show up for his acceptance speech. She waited until the rentrée, the end of summer vacation, and divorced him. Hitherto press-shy herself, she granted interviews to glossy magazines to explain herself, but Nicolas kept his counsel.

In December, the bachelor Nicolas decided he liked the press well enough to tip off reporters that he was going on a date. To Disneyland. This was such a combination of “people press” and crass American commercialized culture that French people were stunned. And the object of Nicolas’ affections? A pop singer. More respectable newspapers, such as the left-wing Libération, debated whether to report the story at all.

(To be fair, Libération would be much happier if they never had to mention Sarkozy.)

Now Sarkozy is touting his behavior as a good thing. He wouldn’t want to skulk around the way François Mitterrand did, keeping a mistress and fathering a child. (Are these the only options?) He has indicated that he’ll marry, probably soon.

The future First Lady of France

Sarkozy’s lady love, Carla Bruni is pretty and interesting, which also plays against type for French first ladies (Danielle Mitterrand excepted). Daughter of a wealthy Italian family, she’s been a top model, and she writes her own lyrics; her sister, Valeria, is an accomplished film actress and director. But Carla gets around. She’s had affairs with everyone from Mick Jagger to Yannick Noah. It is almost as if, back in the 1970s, Jimmy Carter had announced he was going to divorce Rosalyn and marry Carly Simon.

The Chiracs: Not quite the same effect

In a broad sense, the Sarkozy-Bruni affair shows that France is moving forward into the 21st century: nothing about what’s going on could be mistaken for a reenactment of the life of Napoléon III, or even that of Sarkozy’s predecessor, Jacques Chirac. So it’s a kind of reform that Sarkozy is promoting, albeit not one of those he promised during the presidential campaign. A lot of French people are resisting this reform, as they resist any kind of reform. But thus far, nobody has gone on strike to protest it.

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You Say You Want a Resolution

We light up our resolutions on New Year’s Eve as if they were sparklers. In their sputtering fires we write large with light against the nighttime sky. But the words don’t last, and we’re left with a truly disgusting-looking burnt-out stick of wire that stings to the touch.

Well you know, we all wanna change the world, but this is a lousy way to go about it.

Last year, my resolution was single and, I thought, apt: 2007 was going to be the Year of the Big Idea. It may yet turn out to be. Some time around spring I got an idea for a project that still seems promising. But it’s 2008 already, the Big Idea of 2007 is still only a project, and I find myself on the market for new resolutions.

I thought I’d be crafty this year, by resolving to do things at which I’d proven successful in the past. As no less an authority named Aristotle once said, “Anything that has been done must be considered possible and indeed probable.” Furthermore, hoping to avoid catastrophe, I focused on physical improvements, rather than confronting my bad character. This was a timely resolution, since the entire nation of France has resolved to give up smoking, at least in public. In similar fashion, therefore, I resolved to get back into shape, in every way. And then I caught a cold. Far from going to the gym, I can’t even bring myself to get a haircut.

I learned that it is no good resolving to follow a low-fat, mostly vegetarian diet when you made an enormous pot of boeuf bourgignon on December 30 and you are (here the bad character pops up) too cheap to throw out the leftovers, which are sufficient to feed a family of four for at least a couple more days.

I also have learned that you can’t dodge your character, in this business of making resolutions, and that is at once the most valuable, lasting, and depressing lesson. In this sense, our resolutions are not sparklers but cigarettes: we light them, we get a little rush, and then we get a foul butt and a filthy ashtray, and the prospect of lingering painful illness. For of course I tell myself that if I were possessed of a character more staunch, I would have kept all my resolutions for at least a few weeks. I have proven myself wrong, and I am stuck with myself.

I would like to resolve to make no more resolutions, but I know I would not keep it. For life keeps giving us opportunities to make more resolutions! Every time I fly home from a vacation, or even a business trip, I sit on the plane and make out ambitious lists of projects and goals that I fully intend to accomplish. And then jetlag sets in.

I better free my mind instead.

No — that’s another resolution. Dammit.

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The Iowa Way

We got trouble right here.

There’s a lovely song in Meredith Willson’s The Music Man that sums up the state of Iowa:

Oh, there’s nothing halfway
About the Iowa way
To treat you,
When we treat you —
Which we may not do at all.…
And we’re so by-God stubborn
We could stand touchin’ noses
For a week at a time
And never see eye-to-eye.

During my CBS years, around Caucus time, I couldn’t shake that song out of my head. (The feeling grew stronger the year we broadcast from the law library — just like Marion Paroo’s! — of the state capitol in Des Moines.) Yet it often struck me that it wasn’t the Iowans themselves but the candidates who were stubborn. Most of these folks aren’t remotely qualified to hold the highest office in the land; few are personally qualified to hold a lighted match. I mean, seriously. Who wants to buy a used war from any of this year’s contenders?

Most of the candidates have no chance of winning, and they know it, but they believe that by raising their profiles a little, they may wind up with any number of sweetheart deals, from PACs to book contracts to think-tank jobs. They’re not wrong. Running for office is good for your career. It looks great on a résumé.

On a more altruistic level, several of the candidates are pretty obviously running not for the White House but for somebody else’s Cabinet. They’ll take a running-mate’s slot on the ticket, if they can get it, but they’d be perfectly happy as Secretary of Agriculture. After spending months in Iowa, they know a lot about farming, and they’d hate to see that knowledge go to waste. A few candidates are running in order to set up the basis of an organization for another run in four years. And others are simply in love with the sound of their own voices.

And so the candidates persist — stubbornly — giving countless speeches, glad-handing and greeting and debating (and debating and debating), listening very carefully to the concerns of everyday Iowans and promptly forgetting them the day after the vote.

The Think System: If you think you’re a viable candidate, you are.
(But ya gotta know the territory.)

And the Iowans put up with this. Indeed, they seem to enjoy it. They enjoy being first, anyway. And they enjoy being taken seriously, for a few months every four years. Whether they take the candidates seriously is another matter, since it often seems a kind of game to the Iowans, to see what ridiculous positions they can pressure the candidates into taking. Some of the things that have been said these past weeks are stupefying and in any reasonable world would and will prove fatal to a national candidacy. You hear a Republican or Democrat say something, and you think, “Surely he doesn’t believe that.” Well, no, he doesn’t, actually, but he believes that Iowans believe it.

The Iowans are ruining a number of good candidates, and exacerbating some very bad candidates, and they are enjoying the game. It’s not only in being first that Iowans have an unfair advantage over other American voters. It’s in getting to jerk the politicians around. Most of us would like to do that, but by the time the candidates get to our neighborhoods, they’ve grown more cautious. They watch their words. They’ve been burned already. By Iowans.

There are liabilities to Iowa’s precedence, including all the political advertising, which has been especially persistent this year. For many Iowans, it will be a relief to turn on the television or radio and hear ads for toilet paper and laxative again. But the newspapers and broadcasting companies make enough money in the weeks running up to the caucuses to remain in business for another three years. Seriously, when you look at all the trouble that local papers are in, nationwide, even ones as powerful as the Los Angeles Times and the Miami Herald, there’s no other explanation for the relative health and prosperity of the Des Moines Register.

But Meredith Willson wasn’t wrong about the Iowans — he was one, and so is my father, and yes, they are stubborn. Their stubbornness reveals itself in the intricate rules (different for each party and inscrutable in any case) and the low turnout for the caucuses. After all the months of fuss, they don’t even bother to show up and vote! Some analysts are predicting a record turnout, but consider that anything more than 20 percent of registered voters in either party would leave all records in the dust. In most Southern states, this would be considered a terrible breach of manners, the equivalent of letting a man take you to dinner and not even giving him a goodnight kiss, but for the Iowans, it is perfectly natural and acceptable. It’s “the way we treat you, when we treat you, which we may not do at all.”

Sometime tonight, the Iowans will or will not go to their little meetings and express their preferences. The press will attach intense drama to these proceedings, but for the most part the results will either a) make no difference at all, no matter how shocking, or b) merely confirm what’s been obvious since the race began, and oblige the lower-tier candidates to start to drop out. “You can just about picture the Christmas card next December,” Bob Schieffer once mused about a losing candidate as we sat huddling somewhere between broadcasts. “‘We had a busy fall, as Dad ran for President; and in March, Bobby was named captain of the tennis team. Wonderful vacation in Mexico for Spring Break.’”

And by then, of course, New Hampshire will long since have made up our minds for us.

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Auld Lang Sinus

Nature’s most perfect food, Champagne
(Does not prevent colds)

I ring in the New Year with a thudding cold that came over me sometime around breakfast. The good news is that it doesn’t seem to be a) a sinus infection or b) related to the monster influenza that Bernard developed more than a week ago. He continues to languish, though his chills and fever mostly subsided over the weekend. I was concerned that he’d contaminate his mother and all the denizens of the nursing home in Royan, but somehow I never quite got around to worrying that I’d be contaminated, too. And I wasn’t.

It is a good time to sit home and do damned little. My New Year’s celebration was solitary and uncommonly quiet: I ate a lavish meal of leftovers, prepared by my own fair hand, watched a movie (Kirikou et la Sorcière) on DVD, drank a little champagne, and went earlyish to bed with E.F. Benson’s indelible Mapp and Lucia. None of the usual round of phone calls and e-mails, year-end wrap-ups and then roaring, staggering parties. I’d only be a wet blanket. Or more precisely a wet handkerchief. Ewwww.

I have never liked New Year’s anyway. The use of the holiday escapes me, most years: it is arbitrary, even for a holiday, and besides, who needs an excuse to drink champagne? Moreover, since I make so many mistakes and have so many regrets, I’m proof that one can look back on the past and forward to the future non-stop, without making a special day for it. The exception was the moment when 2001 turned to 2002. I was at Bob Miller and Jeff Bravo’s apartment, overlooking New York Harbor, with a spectacular view of what was no longer there. As the annus horribilis slipped away, I turned to Feldstein and said, “It’s over!” It was as if a curse had been lifted. Now we could all get on with being happy again.

Divina: Geraldine McEwan as Benson’s Lucia

Here is my New Year’s menu:

Apéritif: Roasted pecans from my godmother (an annual tradition), plus
A little bit of smoked salmon on unpointed toast

Main course: Leftover boeuf bourgignon I made on Sunday, plus
Broccoli

Followed by: Arugula salad, cheese plate

Dessert: a slice of the fig tart I made in Royan

And that is enough. Here’s wishing all of us at least a couple of the things we want in 2008.

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