Song of Bernadette?

And for an encore, “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?”

Hot on the heels of a new album by Carla Bruni, the pop singer and first lady of France, Bernadette Chirac today announced that she, too, is releasing an album. The wife of former French President Jacques Chirac revealed the details in an exclusive, English-language interview with this blogger.

“I am someone who is very, very musical,” the former first lady said, “and since many years people have said to me, ‘Bernadette, you sing so beautiful! Why do you not cut the record album?’ Now it is, the time to show the world that of which I am capable.”

The result, Les Pièces Jaunes (Small Change), is certain to surprise even those who have followed Mme Chirac, who has thus far never shown any hint of a performing career, though she served many years as wife to the mayor of Paris, the minister of agriculture, the minister of the interior, the prime minister, and the leaders of two conservative political parties, the Union for a Popular Movement and the Rally for the Republic. (“I guess you could say I am a man-eater!” Mme Chirac giggles. “I have a — how you say — penchant for the powerful men.”)

We have been privileged to hear excerpts from the album, including covers of Serge Gainsbourg’s “Je t’aime / Moi non plus” and Kelis’ “Milkshake.”

Yet most attention is likely to focus on the songs Mme Chirac penned herself, including “O, mon beau sac à main” (Oh, my beautiful handbag), “La Bagatelle à 14 millions par jour” (A trifle for 14 million francs a day), “T’as pas l’air un peu juif?” (Don’t you look a little bit Jewish?), and “Il fait doux aux banlieues de Paris” (It’s a nice day in the strife-torn suburbs of Paris).

“The rap, it comes very natural to me,” Mme Chirac explained. “When you have the rage of the underprivileged existence, as I have, growing up the second-class citizen in my own country, with only one particule to her name — the words, they just explode.”

The former Bernadette Chodron de Courcel denies that her singing career owes any debt of inspiration to Carla Bruni. “Au contraire,” she insists. “It was Susan Graham who inspires me. When I see her in the Warlikowski staging of Gluck’s the Iphigenia in Tauride, and I see that she is dressed exactly like me, I say, ‘Well, I could do that.’ And now I do!”

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Keep Saving The Mount!

This spring, I wrote in a state of anxiety about the campaign to save The Mount, the home of the American author Edith Wharton, in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. Although the Edith Wharton Restoration, the organization that maintains the house and garden and opens them to the public each summer, has been granted a six-month extension, the danger of foreclosure remains high. Only a little less than a third has been raised of the $3 million needed by October 31. Some of the money raised is, yes, mine. If I, an unemployed artist, can make a donation, so can you. Please click on this link to learn more and to make a contribution.

There. Now don’t you feel better?

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Un véritable Woodstock

The citizens of Beynes love music, but they do not often demonstrate that love. The village stores up its affection, then unleashes it in isolated bursts. Of course it’s dangerous to bottle up one’s passion, but we scoff at the risk. This afternoon, the annual summer music festival, Les Fêtes Beynoises, began. For the rest of the weekend, we will prove how very, very much we love music. No matter who gets hurt.

Each June, the town erects two soundstages in the moat around our celebrated Pile of Rocks (which, local historians insist, is the ruin of a fifteenth-century château formerly owned by Diane de Poitiers). A third, smaller soundstage is erected nearby, behind the Barbacane, the town’s library and theater. Once all three soundstages are up, the amps plugged in and the lights turned on, the music begins.

Simultaneously.

Like most public events in Beynes, the Fêtes take place in the Bourg, the old part of town, where I live, on the green floodplain that borders the little River Mauldre. Only the garden wall separates my home from the Fêtes, and since the weather is warmish, I’ve got the windows open. It’s tempting therefore to give you a running account of the musical performances, which can be heard as loud and clearly as if I had turned on the radio in this very room.

Or, more precisely, three radios. To different stations: jazz fusion, hard rock, harder rock, punk rock, reggae, rappers, from any of the many bands playing this weekend. There’s also a smartly uniformed choir running around the Barbacane; they may be performing indoors tonight, though I’d personally welcome them to any of the three outdoor stages, or to my living room, if only they’d promise to sing on pitch.

Indeed, whatever criteria are used to select the bands, a good ear and a pleasing voice don’t seem to be high on the list, though intelligible English is an absolute requirement. Why my neighbors would care about diction in a language few of them speak, I don’t know. But this is what has become of the world’s cultures: now, anybody who can pronounce the word “baby” is a potential rock star.

The rappers are permitted to speak French, though I can’t make out much of it. Something about “Death to America.” I don’t know. The crowd seems to like it.

This will go on late into the evening, to the accompaniment of firecrackers, and it will begin again tomorrow afternoon. I shouldn’t complain. The music could be louder, I suppose, and it’s only for a couple of days. As Feldstein reminds me, this is a picnic compared with the Festa del Giglio I had to endure for two weeks every July in Williamsburg. Even the worst band is preferable to the racket the Parisians are making, tearing up every sidewalk around my apartment this week: I fled to the countryside on Wednesday for the peace and quiet.

But I confess I’ll be glad when my neighbors bottle up their musical passion once more.

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Tim Russert

Perhaps the only thing about Tim Russert’s death more shocking than its suddenness is the chorus of tributes being sung by one and all. The newspapers are full of hagiography, and so, I gather, is American television at the moment. Even networks other than his own have devoted to their competitor the kind of air time ordinarily reserved for the deaths of heads of state, and the Tim Russert they depict is a paragon, whose like we shall not soon see again.

This generous, uncritical coverage is courteous and quite possibly based in truth. My meetings with Russert never went farther than a handshake, and so for testimonials to his kindness, his professionalism, and his exuberance, you must turn to his former colleagues; for assessments of his influence, look to the critics who are reaching for superlatives, and listen to the teary statements now being released by every politician in America. The most powerful men and women in the country want to stay on Russert’s good side, even in death, and that says something.

But something is missing from all the portraits I’ve seen of Russert, to such a degree that I don’t quite recognize him this morning. And so it falls to me to tell you something of what he was like as a competitor.

Russert came to journalism from politics, and although he may have been born with his competitive streak, he surely broadened and refined it while campaigning. When he arrived in television, he understood that competition among newsrooms was also a race, that in this environment ratings were the same as votes, and that the fight for them could not ever stop. So fight he did. And he was a bare-knuckled, gut-kicking, pipe-wielding street brawler.

Long before Karl Rove got credit for it, Russert perfected the “permanent campaign mode,” and his specialty was spin. Not least because they admired his work on Meet the Press, Russert had the ear of the journalists who report on television. They liked him. They watched his show faithfully, and they enjoyed talking to him. That gave him the opportunity to drop hints, to skew interpretations, to leak or to plant stories, to badmouth the other networks. And this he did, avidly. It got to be that we at CBS News could recognize even blind quotes in an article, because Russert’s language was distinctive. And his themes were persistent: if he saw a vulnerability in a competitor, he’d keep hammering at it for years.

Network anchors were (and may still be) wary of each other. You never knew when the corporate suits were going to replace you with the guy who was bringing in better ratings on another channel. There was always somebody younger, and usually somebody smarter, bearing down on you, even inside your own team. You couldn’t let down your guard. You had to keep looking over your shoulder — even, perhaps especially, when you were in the lead, as Russert was.

And yet most of the big boys used to put on a pretty good show of getting along. Dan Rather and Peter Jennings even got downright friendly during the 1990s, thanks to their publicists, who were themselves friends and who threw the two men together, again and again. Though Dan and Peter probably never forgot their rivalry for a second, they enjoyed each other’s company. That was rare, and yet it wasn’t uncommon for other network stars to drop each other congratulatory notes after a good broadcast, to attend each other’s book parties, to praise each other in print, and to make polite conversation whenever they ran into each other. But so far as I ever knew, Russert wasn’t playing that game. He held a low opinion of other newsrooms, and of the people in them. He didn’t try to hide the fact.

His loyalty to his own team explains in part the reactions from the folks at NBC News to his untimely passing. They make him sound like a great guy, and I’m sorry I never worked with him. But as for his competitive streak — his determination to do anything at all to make his opponents look bad — let’s just say I’m glad I worked with Bob Schieffer instead.

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Stiller & Meara

At the memorial service for Madeline Gilford a few days ago, I made a resolution: I want to die before Stiller and Meara do. So do you. You want these people to speak at your memorial.

Like approximately 80 percent of people in show business today, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara got an early and important break from Madeline. That was more than 40 years ago, and by now their repartee is so polished that their loving recollections of Madeline had the crowd at Sardi’s in stitches. She dithers, he blusters; she needles, he nags. There’s a great deal of recognizable psychology in their routines, and in their personae you see other couples you know, perhaps even the couple you’re in. They’ve watched and listened to the human dynamic in quadrophonic stereo for many years. They’ve done their homework, although you’re certain they haven’t done it at home: it’s by observing others, and not by portraying themselves, that they’ve found their material.

How do I know this? Well, they’re still together, aren’t they?

It can’t be said that I know Stiller and Meara personally, although as an Upper West Sider I saw them around often enough, as one sees any of one’s neighbors. And that’s telling. They don’t behave like celebrities, even though most of our neighborhood encounters coincided with the period of Jerry Stiller’s greatest fame, the years when he played George’s father on Seinfeld. To run into them on the street, one might think they were schoolteachers, or accountants, or insurance executives, and the fact that they cut loose with the random funny remark seems a function less of their being comedians than of their being New Yorkers.

Take for example the time I ran into them at Filene’s Basement. George Pataki was still Governor of New York, and the Stillers and I were taking advantage of one of his periodic waivings of the state sales tax. None of us really understood the thinking behind this — something about stimulating the economy in the aftermath of 9/11 — and while we waited for a cashier, Anne Meara and I talked for a few minutes about all the other, more urgent problems in the state, that couldn’t be addressed by shopping but might be addressed by taxation.

Our strongly held political opinions didn’t prevent us from buying low-priced socks, but there you have it.

So if you run into them at the corner deli, don’t quote his lines from Seinfeld or rhapsodize over her contributions to Archie Bunker’s Place and Rhoda. Don’t fawn, flatter, or ask for autographs. Just ask whether the pastrami is any good today.

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Notes from Underground

New Yorkers are famous the world over for (no way to put this more politely) refusing to take bullshit from anyone. We are a tough people, hardened by years of living next to, under and on top of one another, and even the most genteel Manhattan society matron can and will cuss like a Brooklyn longshoreman when the advertised item is not in stock, when another New Yorker has the effrontery to seize the taxicab she was hailing, or when she’s cut off while crossing the street (“I’m walkin’ here, asshole!”). We put up with too much in life already, and you, poor outlander, could not survive a single day in our shoes. We will not tolerate any further disrespect, inconvenience, or discomfort.

That, at least, is the reputation. We are proud of it. Not content to let others spread our fame, we are first to brag of it. O, woe! Woe to ye who come to New York with hearts full of guff, attitude, lip, disrespect, malarkey, garbage, baloney, bunkum, sass or crap! We do not take any of it. We will have none of it. And, by the way, we don’t make change.

In my heart, I am still a New Yorker. But I cannot uphold this preposterous fiction any longer. Contrary to our reputation, New Yorkers take plenty of bullshit. We take it slavishly, masochistically, without complaining. We take the worst of it — the most unendurable construct known to the mind of man. We take it without complaining. We take it forth, and we take it back. And we take it every day.

It is our subway.

I forget just how bad the New York City subway system is, until I return to it. I am hard-pressed to understand how I survived it for 21 years. Surely it was not always this bad. And by “bad,” I mean: noisy, dank, murky, malodorous, crowded, sticky, malfunctioning, and dangerous. It is in bad repair at all times, and it is famously prone to inexplicable delays. Even if explanations were offered, you could not understand them, because they would be pronounced by a conductor who speaks no known language, over a public-address system that garbles the voice and cannot be heard over the ambient din.

That the subway remains the best way to get around town is a cruel accident of fate, and a reminder of just how bad things are above ground.

Take as an example the case of the station at Columbus Circle. When I moved to France, nearly four years ago, a major reconstruction was underway. It has not been completed. To describe the process is to exhaust one’s supply of literary references: the circles of Dante’s Hell, the diabolic ritual of Goethe’s Walpurgisnacht, the tortures of Torquemada cannot do justice to the Columbus Circle station. The platforms were torn up, in an exercise requiring that almost every light bulb be removed; welding machines went into operation that smelled even worse than the pervasive aroma of human excrement. You could not breathe there. You did not want to. Passengers awaiting trains were shoved and squeezed onto narrow shelves, and then channeled into even narrower corridors toward exits that are, for the most part, blocked off. You told yourself to be patient, that eventually the work would be finished — hell, even the remodeling of the 72nd Street station was finished, eventually.

And yet, to my astonishment, the Columbus Circle station is still under construction. I could find no indication that the project was any nearer to completion, although its scope has expanded, and now the platforms for the 1 train are as badly torn up as those for the A, B, C, and D trains.

I’d have taken a picture to show you, but these days anyone taking a photograph in the subway is automatically presumed to be a terrorist.

And let us not talk about the “service changes” that used to be justified as urgent and temporary (often in response to the damages incurred during the 9/11 attack), but are now a regular fact of life. They mean that the train you want will not be running on the track where you expect it, will not stop at the station where you need it, and will be running at intervals much longer than you can afford. In short, on weekends it is impossible to get from one place to another.

New Yorkers may grouse from time to time about the subway, yet they do not ever take action, the way people would do in any other city on earth. In France, entire governments have been toppled with less provocation, and yet New Yorkers do not march on the offices of the Metropolitan Transit Authority to demand better service and improved conditions.

Of course, one reason the Paris Métro is nicer than the New York subway is that the Parisians close down the Métro between 1:00 and 5:00 in the morning, the better to clean, repair, and maintain cars, tracks, and stations. No such option is possible in New York, because New Yorkers work and play at all hours and require 24-hour service. Paris is not “the city that never sleeps,” and it does not pretend to be. But Parisian Métro cars run quietly, and Métro stations are brighter, more spacious, and better designed, with separate corridors for passengers going toward the platform and passengers going toward the exit. (In New York, passengers must constantly waltz or fight, rumba or rumble, with passengers going another direction.)

Even in the United States, it’s easy to find better subway service. Andy Weems used to act out the differences between the New York subway (in which the dialogue was unprintable) and the gorgeous Washington Metro (“Is this seat taken?” “Are you through with the sports section?”) — even Boston’s “T” is more efficient and attractive.

And yet New Yorkers slog on, taking the worst kind of bullshit, without any demand, nor even any hope of change.

UPDATE: The intrepid Feldstein sends the above photo of a New York subway station. Of course no trip to the subway could be complete without spotting a few dozen rats, and Feldstein found the ones scurrying there along the wall to be a particularly worthwhile subject for his camera.

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Digested Contents

Reflections upon discovering back issues of Reader’s Digest in my parents’ home in Texas.

The ‘Hang In There!’ Kitten:

The True Story behind One of America’s Most Beloved Inspirational Posters …………………43

Special Diet Report:
Are You Eating Enough Rutabaga? …………………55

Predestined Pleasure: Sex Tips from Presbyterians
Now You Can Have Multiple Catechisms …………………69

Save Money by Recycling This Magazine! …………………76

What Is Rock and Roll, Actually, and What Can Be Done About It? …………………83

Humor in Cuneiform: Our Best Archaeology Jokes Ever! …………………87

‘I Still Love That Bob’:
A Heartwarming Personal Memoir by Ann B. Davis, TV’s ‘Schultzie’ ……………89

Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Laughter?
‘My Husband Died Laughing,’ Warns One Harvard Medical Professor, ‘And So Could You!’…………………………124

The Timeless Wit and Eternal Wisdom of John Foster Dulles…………141

McLean Stevenson: Hollywood’s Favorite Family Man…………………143

Could Excess Dryer Lint Be Shortening Your Love Life?…………………151

Reese Witherspoon Is Much Younger Than Anyone You Will Ever Know Personally!…………………158

America’s Top 100 Baked Goods…………………160

Bonnie Franklin’s Unforgettable Night of Torment …………………170

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