A Milestone

Let it be noted that on this day the first of my godchildren and first of my namesakes is turning 18. The other kids are following his example with unseemly haste. Soon, everyone I know will be grown up.

Will is a perfectly charming fellow, and I’m immensely pleased with the way he’s turned out. After careful deliberation, I have recorded my thoughts and impressions on the occasion of his majority, in a rigorously structured three-paragraph essay; I hope you’ll indulge a proud godfather by reading further.


Paragraph 1:
AAAAAAEEEEEAAARRRGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

Paragraph 2:
EEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAOOUUUGGGHHH!!!!!

Paragraph 3:
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

That about sums it up. Thank you for reading. And happy birthday, Will.

With love, Uncle Bill

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Strange Bedfellows

The new first lady of France: All rise.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy got married yesterday to the singer and songwriter Carla Bruni. This inspired me to look up some of her many famous ex-lovers, and courtesy of Wikipedia, I can drop a few names: Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, Kevin Costner, Donald Trump, Yannick Noah, the actor Vincent Pérez, and the former prime minister Laurent Fabius. She’s got eclectic tastes; they call her “Maneater,” but her diet is extraordinarily well balanced. However, it’s not my purpose to gossip, because there are very serious policy questions at hand.

The first question: She always identified herself as a left-winger. Will she now start to vote for her right-wing husband? (One can’t take it for granted. In the last, closely contested election, Sarko’s then-wife Cécilia didn’t vote at all.)

The most urgent policy question is this: Now that she’s first lady, will radio stations be obliged to stop playing her songs? I suspect the answer is oui, at least during electoral campaigns, and I base this on the gorgeous example of Béatrice Schoenberg.

Béatrice, the ex-wife of the composer of Broadway’s Les Misérables, is married to Jean-Louis Borloo, who was employment minister under Jacques Chirac and who is now in Sarkozy’s cabinet, saddled with a title that is too long to record here. Something to do with the environment. Or something. Even when I look at the title, I don’t really know what it means. But he’s not a bad fellow. And I have a huge, sloppy, embarrassing crush on his wife.

La Belle Béatrice: When she delivered the news, you paid attention.

Until recently, Béatrice was the weekend anchor on the evening news on France 2, a state-owned (but politically neutral) television network. During the run-up to the presidential elections last spring, left-wing critics jumped all over Béatrice, insisting that even if she was objective (and only a few tried, unconvincingly, to prove that she wasn’t), Caesar’s wife, or Borloo’s, must be above suspicion. She was shunted off to a little science program, and Americans with long memories will remember that’s precisely the vehicle CBS used to get rid of Walter Cronkite, after he left the evening news.

So, come the next campaign, I fully expect to hear authoritative left-wingers insisting that Carla’s songs are full of coded messages exhorting listeners to vote for Sarko. The French are very good at that sort of thing: theirs is, after all, the culture that gave rise to Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and to Deleuze and Guattari. It will be no challenge whatever to deconstruct, and then to denounce, the politics of Carla’s music.

Yet there will be a double standard of sexism at work, because not even the most rabid Sarko-hater would try to ban the songs of Johnny Hallyday (who is at once France’s most beloved star and Sarkozy’s biggest fan). Even to suggest such a thing would be political — and quite possibly literal — suicide.

Johnny: The most/only powerful man in France

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Curiosities

That’s Punxsutawney Philippe to you, buster.

A great deal has been going on in the world that intrigues me lately, and for which I have no explanations.

Groundhog Day dawned with a crunchy frost covering the garden at Beynes, yet by early afternoon the azure skies over the surrounding hillsides were bespangled with hang gliders, and the temperature was warm enough to permit caps and heavy jackets to slough off. It’s a gorgeous day. My question is whether this means spring will arrive sooner than later. And my next question is: How do the French predict the weather when they have no groundhogs?

Trust! (Except when inconvenient)

Back in Washington on Monday night, during his State of the Union address, President Bush repeatedly exhorted his listeners “to trust the American people.” I found this fascinating. Is he talking about the same American people who, by whomping majorities, believe he’s led the country in the wrong direction, is bungling the economy, and ought to get our troops out of a war they believe to be misguided at best?

Granted, he probably thought nobody was listening to him.

Next question: Are we sure he stopped drinking?

Now that John Edwards has dropped out of the race to replace Bush, Ralph Nader is talking about running again. On account of how he has the best interest of the country at heart, and all. Speaking of Groundhog Day, haven’t I seen this movie already? Yet I remember it as being funnier.

Ask not what you can do for your country.
In fact, just shut up.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey appeared before Congress, too, where he showed off his Alberto Gonzales imitations. Though he was a bit too authoritative (he still speaks in complete sentences), Mukasey is new to the job, and I’m sure he’ll get the hang of it. In the main points, he excelled: he refused to answer questions or to give opinions, he irritated the senators, and he insisted that the President is not necessarily obliged to obey the law. Perhaps emboldened by this performance, Bush promptly issued one of his famous signing statements, to explain that he didn’t intend to obey a recently passed defense appropriation bill. Because obviously the Constitution didn’t mean what it said about giving Congress control of the nation’s purse strings — what it meant to say is that appropriations are the President’s prerogative. Obviously.

The curiosity here: How much are we paying these guys? And is it too late to hire a temp?

My point, and I do have one:
Justice is blind. And also dumb.

There was one incident this week about which I have no curiosity whatsoever — and that’s in the interest of self-preservation.

The cellar at the house in Beynes hadn’t been cleaned out for three decades or more, but on Tuesday Bernard and I tried to sort through some of the detritus. We found a doll’s baby carriage that probably belonged to Bernard’s mother; we found coal scuttles and a laundry vat; we found three disused lawn mowers, one of which had no motor; we found tin cans, a suitcase, chairs that crumbled at a touch, a bidet, a Franklin stove, and a water heater from the 1930s. We found straw, too, covering the dirt floor and practically begging for mice to take up residence, and so I began to clear it out. And there I found a most unusual object.

It was pale grey and longish and flat. At first I thought it was some sort of plaster saint, in low-relief, worn down by the passing of time. Not to my artistic taste, and not what one ordinarily finds in the home of Free Thinkers, yet the sort of thing one finds in country homes all over France. Then I noticed the tail. And the teeth.

You’ll be glad to know I didn’t take a picture.

For the object was not kitschy but kitty. My conjecture is that a cat strayed into the cellar, and started poking about the straw, when something fell on him. Now he was mummified. An offering, perhaps, to the Egyptian cat-god, Bastet.

I do not construe this as a curiosity, however. Because that’s how cats get killed. Even in France.

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Blasts from the Past

Stratas as Tchaikovsky’s Tatyana

The modern opera singer faces realities that her predecessors never contemplated. The mezzo Maria Malibran died before the age of sound recordings: although written descriptions of her voice survive, and she is still held up as a model of her art, we don’t know what she really sounded like, and we have only a few paintings and sketches to show what she looked like.

Today, however, the singer must contend with the likelihood that, decades after a performance, future generations will stumble across a DVD or YouTube clip and be struck, perhaps for the first time, by her. “What an amazing voice!” they’ll cry. And “She’s so beautiful!” And “Where did she get that hairdo?”

These thoughts are provoked by my discovery of a couple of performances by Teresa Stratas from the 1970s: a DVD of Franz Lehár’s operetta Der Zarewitsch, and a YouTube clip of the Letter Scene from Tschaikovsky’s Yevgeni Onegin, in German. Watch the clip, and you’ll see what I mean.

When we were preparing the program bios for Rags, Teresa mentioned that, by her count, she’d made 17 opera films. We tried to list them, but we couldn’t come up with more than ten titles: the rest, she said, were made when she was young, and she’d been trying (with some success) to forget them ever since. Too bad for her. It’s now clear that, sooner or later, like it or not, they’ll turn up.

The Onegin excerpt reveals Teresa in the kind of dramatic role with which I associate her most strongly, projecting youthful vulnerability and mounting passion with vivid singing: I can’t wait to see the whole film. Or rather, I continue to wait to see the whole film, as I’ve waited ever since Teresa first mentioned it.

George Solti’s recording of the opera was my high-school graduation present from my godmother, Ann Coleman, and it inspired my brief, ill-starred studies of the Russian language. Fed to the teeth with being called Guillaume, Wilhelm and Guglielmo in language class, I announced on the first day that “Menya zavut Yevgeni Onegin” (they call me Eugene Onegin), and Yevgeni I was from that day forward. I identified with all the opera’s characters, though. And I translated a verse of Lensky’s aria for the dedication of my first novel — to Teresa, as it happens.

The Zarewitsch is a horse of another color, and not only because it shows Teresa in a complete work. Like Onegin, it’s set in Russia, more realistically than one might expect from the composer of The Merry Widow. Teresa plays Sonia, a former serf who’s now a cabaret star, specializing in saber-dancing. Disguising herself as a boy (as seen here) to ingratiate herself with the misogynistic son of the Tsar, she winds up falling in love with him. When she finally takes off her cap, she’s got a very groovy hairstyle that may be the same wig she wore in Onegin.

Much of the singing part lies very, very high, and since the audio quality on the DVD is superior to that on the old Philips album of the soundtrack, it’s fun to hear Teresa sail so high. But the film is perhaps more important as a document of the ways Teresa encouraged, toyed with, and ultimately shattered her image as a kind of operatic sex kitten.

She was young, pretty and petite, and whenever people weren’t calling her “Baby Callas” (a name with which neither she nor Callas herself was entirely comfortable), they were giving her cuddly parts in crossover showcases like this one. They also asked her to pose for cheeky, cheesecaky pictures, which occasionally resurface. One of her other Lehár vehicles, Giuditta, featured her in a mod hairdo and an orange pantsuit, riding a motorcycle: va-vroom. Regrettably, I’ve only seen a still photo, and never heard her sing the big number, “Meine Lippen, sie küssen so heiss,” nor any of the role. (Written for Jarmila Novotná, another great beauty.) But that picture alone is worth at least a thousand musical notes.

Throughout Zarewitsch, you get glimpses of the Teresa that lay simmering, even then, beneath the pretty surface. Surely the socioeconomic drama appealed to her — a peasant in love with a prince — and in her always-haunting eyes, you can see a bitterly impoverished background at which the script only hints. The filmmakers sneaked around certain challenges: her dancing, sword-fighting, and German dialogue are all performed by other women.

Within a few years, Teresa would portray Strauss’ Salome on German television (pictured at right), and Berg’s Lulu onstage in Paris and New York: sex kittens as man-eating tigresses. “Why didn’t you look at me?” Salome demands of John the Baptist, whom she has just had beheaded, in a scene that required Teresa to throw the director out of the studio and to take charge, directing herself. It’s almost as if she’s wreaking vengeance on all of us, producers and audiences alike, who underestimated her or misjudged her art — or her sexual appeal.

From that point on, even when she returned to pretty-girl or glamour parts she’d sung in her youth (Mimì, Nedda, Violetta), her beauty served a new purpose. She lost weight, and her tiny body seemed more fragile than ever, unable to defend herself against the forces that oppressed her. But she gave each victim a voice.

Her portrayals of consumptive heroines were so convincing (not least because Teresa contracted tuberculosis when she was a child) that one British critic announced in a book — a book — that she had died of the disease. For real. Neither the English nor the American edition corrected his mistake.

As Mimì, at the Met: She only pretends to die here, folks.

She seemed a pretty lively corpse to me: she had just tried to strangle me for some reason or other. (There was — and is — always some reason. She is an eminently reasonable person.) We talked about the book, and I wondered whether some response might be required. “Write him a letter,” I said, “like Mark Twain: ‘Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.’” But Teresa preferred to let the poor guy figure it out for himself; she wasn’t going to rub his nose in it.

Nearing seventy now, she is still darned lively, and though she isn’t singing anymore, one can still hear her. Her YouTube clips multiply; a lot of her work is turning up on DVD. One of these days, I’m going to see every opera movie she made. I expect that in her performances she will always bring me new ways to understand the truth. But I doubt if anybody could ever make me understand some of those hairstyles.

An earlier incarnation of Mimì

[A footnote (or hairnote): Teresa once told me that her 1960s bouffants were created by sticking a ball of tissue paper on her head, and sweeping the hair up around the ball. Who knew? Add some hairpins and a great deal of hairspray: now you can do it yourself. The tiara is optional.]

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The Awful Spanish Language

Earlier this month, I returned to Barcelona, where, long after the demise of the Inquisition and the Caudillo, I ran smack against one of the enduring afflictions of the Iberian peninsula. The people there speak Spanish. This would be no problem to anyone if they confined the practice to the privacy of their homes, and did not subject tourists to it. But no, they are unreasonable and indiscriminate. They will speak Spanish to anyone. It is a compulsion with them.

And so I have discovered something innately pernicious and unfair about the Spanish language: I do not speak it. All over the world, millions of other people speak it perfectly, without ever having studied it any more than I have. Tiny children can speak it, at hair-raising speed and more or less grammatically. They were born into it, as I — a native Texan — was born into a Spanish-speaking culture. Then I spent two decades in another, New York City. I never studied Spanish. It seems unjust that I should have to.

After all, I have been requesting food and drink in Spanish since I was a boy, not from any desire to show off but from a desire not to starve. Español de cocina — kitchen Spanish — is a useful language with a long tradition of excellence, and it is accessible to most gringos, and more or less intelligible. Yet whenever I attempt to speak in a Spanish-speaking country, be it Spain or Cuba or the Dominican Republic, I pose an immediate threat to the safety of myself and of everyone within earshot.

And Spain is the worst. I am quite certain that no Spaniard, arriving in Nebraska, would be unable to find anyone at all with whom he could speak Spanish. Yet in Madrid, there is no one who speaks anything else. You might think that on the Talgo train from Paris, or someone at the information desk at Chamartín Station, the train’s terminus, there’d be someone who spoke French; you might think that at the painfully chic Thyssen-Bornemisza art museum, there’d be someone who spoke English. Or French. Or German. Or Italian. But you would be, as the gringos say, el wrong-o.

In unimportant matters, I have no problems with the language. My ability to read and comprehend lengthy disquisitions in Spanish museums, from guided tours to the texts that explain individual paintings, is staggering. I can even understand what Fidel Castro says about foreign policy, when I can stay awake. But none of this will ever get me fed.

Foreign travel makes children of us all: we cannot communicate like grownups. The simplest and most necessary activities become difficult, even perilous. We cannot proceed without assistance; we rely on kindly adults to take pity, and not to take our purses.

Spanish cuisine features several of my favorite delicacies, readily available (to Spanish speakers) in tapas bars. Vinegary boquerones, fillets of anchovy; jamón Serrano, tangy slices of aged ham, sliced in front of you from the leg of an ill-fated pig; pan tomate, thick slices of bread rubbed with olive oil, garlic, and tomato; pulpos, little octopi; morcilla, a blood sausage that doesn’t resemble the French boudin noir at all; and albóndigas, little meatballs. At other restaurants, there’s sure to be paella valenciana, which is no longer available in Valencia, because they have sent such great quantities of it everywhere else in Spain. Please note that I know the names for all of these things. I can even spell them, after a fashion.


And yet when required to do so, I can’t speak. My tongue becomes a Gordian knot. With a large, cast-iron weight attached at one end. I halt and freeze, I stammer and babble. In the desire to communicate, I panic and grab at any foreign word that comes to mind. In Madrid, anything other than Spanish proved useless: even my attempts at Italian were considered cute but worthless, as if I were a dog who’d learned to walk on its hind legs and then decided to run for president. Resorting to even more remote foreign languages proved altogether counterproductive. If you say in Russian, “Mne nado” (I need), you won’t get what you need. You’ll get nada.

Even when I did come up with the right Spanish words at the right time, and managed an approximation of the Madrileño accent, I seldom got what I asked for. No matter what I asked for, I received a dish of mushrooms. The word for this is champiñones. I know this. It is not what I said. It is nothing like what I said. But it’s what I got — and what I got charged for.

It got to the point that I didn’t dare enter into a tapas bar. The press of customers at the bar meant that I’d have to shout to be heard — and heaven forbid that someone might answer me.

One night in Madrid, unable to survive longer without eating, I found a working-class bar in a deserted, darkened street. The padrón didn’t understand me, and I didn’t understand him. But he and his wife gave me something to eat, and a glass of wine. Whether they did so from instinct or from charity, I can’t say. Certainly the other customers were disheveled and not terribly clean, puffing away on tarry black cigarettes and staring wordlessly at the television. But they were amiable, and they made room for me at the bar. They were watching the end of a soccer match.

With difficulty, I listened to the play-by-play, which permitted me to establish, with reasonable certainty, that the match was about two different groups of men, from different towns, who were engaged in a dispute over a ball.

The conclusion of the match provoked some furious spitting on the floor and what I presumed to be cursing, although they might have been reciting romantic poetry from the Golden Age, for all I know. After this, they turned to a Jackie Chan movie.

The movie was dubbed into Spanish, but there was hardly any dialogue, and you need only watch to appreciate Chan’s balletic stunts, worthy of Buster Keaton, his idol (and mine). Soon enough, we were all laughing together, united without language. I finished my meal, but I stayed to the end of the movie. Seldom have I had a better time.

Barcelona is a more sophisticated place. After decades of brutal suppression under Franco, who wanted to turn Catalonia, Spain’s only industrialized region, into a primitive backwater, the Barcelonans are determined to prove, once and for all, that their city is a world capital. Great numbers of them speak English and French, they are patient with foreigners’ attempts to speak Spanish, and they politely overlook anyone’s misguided attempts to speak Catalan.

I threw myself at their mercy. I prefaced every conversation with this phrase: “Lo siento mucho, pero hablo muy mal español.” I had discovered that in Madrid the phrase earned me lots of indulgent smiles, and perhaps best of all, it can be said with a Tex-Mex accent. The Barcelonans liked hearing it, too.

By the third day, several Barcelonans surpassed the limits of ordinary hospitality and insisted that I spoke Spanish very well. Obviously these people were todos locos, and I was lucky to get away from them.

But the mushrooms were delicious.

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Carol Channing

In a mellow mood

The great stars of the heyday of Broadway musical comedy were not merely talented, they were dangerous. As Peter Pan, Mary Martin persuaded thousands of children that they could fly. Some died trying, and NBC had to take the televised version of her show off the air. Remember that, the next time somebody poo-poos the art form.

But by the time I got to New York, the heyday was well past its sunset. With the exception of Angela Lansbury in Sweeney Todd, I missed out on the whole phenomenon. Mary Martin was still performing onstage, but in a straight play, Legends, that never came to New York. Ethel Merman died about five minutes after I arrived in the city; Julie Andrews and Barbra Streisand were in self-imposed exile in Hollywood. But Carol Channing was still around, co-starring with Martin in Legends and perpetually touring in her biggest hit, Hello, Dolly. Not entirely by accident, I managed never to see that show. Word was that the production was pretty tired by the 1990s, and Channing later depicted it as something like spousal abuse, a job that was forced on her by her late husband, Charles Lowe. As many a critic observed, “Dolly will never go away again” began to sound like a threat. I kept my distance.

I’ve seen plenty of great performances in musical comedy, from Bernadette Peters to Donna Murphy, from Betty Buckley to Christine Ebersole; I’ve heard Barbara Cook and Elaine Stritch in concert; I was johnny-on-the-spot when Julie Andrews returned to Broadway in the Sondheim revue, Putting It Together. Superlatives are too poor to describe their work. But it’s not the same, I am certain, as experiencing the raw power of those old-time Broadway stars the first time around, in their natural habitat.

I did get to meet Carol Channing once, in a most unlikely setting.

A day or so before the Democratic Convention in New York, in 1992, Bill Clinton spoke at an event at the Four Seasons restaurant. The dining tables had been cleared away to make room for extra chairs, in long rows packed with party luminaries and press, including all three network anchors. And over in a corner was Carol Channing.

All of us little network lackeys were abuzz: Carol Channing! We’d grown up watching her on TV, and we adored her. There was not a great deal of difference between her and a cartoon or a Muppet, at least to the undiscerning eye of a child, and her otherworldly voice and eccentric behavior were one definition of pure fun. And there she was! We tried not to stare. Suddenly Bill Clinton and Bernard Shaw and Pamela Harriman were a lot less compelling.

At the end of the afternoon, the event broke up, and the machers cast aside their chairs pell-mell in order to congregate in little shmoozing gangs. Miss Channing was already delicate, shall we say, and was having a hard time picking her way among the chairs as she made her exit. I leapt forward to clear a path for her.

“Why, thaaaank you,” she said, in that astonishing voice.

“I know why you’re here,” I said.

“Oh, dew you?”

“It’s because you’re just a little girl from Little Rock,” I said, quoting a number from her first hit show, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

Her immense eyes began to twinkle. “Why, yay-ess!” she crowed.

In truth, there was no mystery to her presence. She’s an immensely intelligent woman (as a student at Bennington College, she specialized in medieval literature) who’s interested in almost everything, so why not politics, too? Her special brand of high-energy zaniness may even be an extension of her innate curiosity. It’s as if she wants to find out about everything, to go everywhere, to try anything, all at once.

The only art form ever devised that could contain that kind of passionate personality was the Broadway musical comedy. I’m sorry I missed out on it, yet I’m proud that I didn’t settle for its somnambulent reawakenings and mechanical refabrications (viz. not only Channing’s 5,000th Dolly but Yul Brynner’s King and Rex Harrison’s Higgins). And I’m grateful that I got to meet one of its most distinctive practitioners anyway.

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Brokeheart

God damn it.

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