by Anne Summers
‘I thought you were supposed to be a political writer,’ he’d said, indicating that I had no idea what I was talking about.
He was right. The Chairman of the Federal Reserve had agreed to this interview as a favour to Bob Hawke. As a parting gift to me the Australian Prime Minister had written letters of introduction to Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger, Secretary of State George Schultz and White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan, as well as Volcker. All but Regan had agreed to be interviewed, and although I was never able to pin down a time with Schultz, both Weinberger and Volcker made time to talk to me. Both interviews enhanced my journalistic reputation because Australian reporters usually did not have access to these top-ranking officials. I was extraordinarily lucky to have this kind of leg-up in my very early days as a correspondent in the US. The interview with Volcker was off-the-record. I could not quote him directly, although I could write with authority what he thought about the deregulation of the economy, mounting third world debt and other current economic issues. I was grateful to Volcker for his kindly tolerance, but embarrassed by my ignorance. By then I was able to write my way out of anything, so I produced a three-part series that passed muster, but while I did try to improve my understanding of ‘the story’, my heart was not in it. I made an effort to cultivate the bankers who made money out of Australia, but I could never think of what to ask them. I went to a briefing at Bain & Co on Australian capital markets. I learned that if I had some money, I could probably make some more. But I found the subject dull and I could not think of interesting or creative ways to write about it. Towards the end of my first year I’d attended the New York Financial Writers’ dinner, and soon afterwards a two-day seminar on debt at the Waldorf Astoria. It was another of those occasions where most people’s eyes glazed over when they heard my opening line, ‘Hi, I’m from the Australian Financial Review, it’s like the Wall Street Journal …’ No one cared. It wasn’t simply that I was female, although the finance world was astonishingly masculine in makeup and ethos. Janine Perrett, who was in New York for the Australian newspaper, was totally at ease with business and finance stories. We’d often go for drinks together but we would mostly talk about politics, a subject I felt far more at home with, or gossip about other expatriates. When it came to the capital markets, I simply felt out of place.
I was much more comfortable doing political stories, even an assignment as daunting as my interview with the US Secretary of Defence in early June 1986, a few weeks before I sat down with Volcker. Caspar Weinberger had got the nickname ‘Cap the Knife’ while serving in the Office of Management and Budget in Washington during the Nixon years, where he engaged in savage cost-cutting, including slashing the Defence budget. He had actually killed the B–1 bomber project, a move that enraged the Pentagon and which Nixon eventually reversed. Now, as Reagan’s Defence Secretary, he had presided over the largest military buildup in peacetime. He achieved a 51 per cent increase in real terms of the Defence budget to an astronomical $US293 billion, earning him the accusation that he was ‘a draft dodger in the war against the deficit’. He justified this about-face by saying he had been horrified to learn the extent of the Soviet Union’s arms buildup. He was not to know, of course, that within a mere three years of our interview the Soviet Union would cease to exist.
Weinberger was an interesting and cultured man, seemingly at odds with the ‘cowboy’ image of the rest of the Reagan administration. He was a renowned Anglophile, and he was devoted to art and literature; he went to concerts. He brought art into his office, including a bronze bust of General MacArthur and another of an infantryman, a daily reminder of the human cost of what he was undertaking. One of his first acts had been to remove the formal portrait of James V. Forrestal, the first Secretary of Defence, which hung behind his desk. Forrestal had committed suicide in 1949 while on the job, by jumping from a tower of the Bethesda Naval Hospital where he had been admitted for depression. Weinberger replaced the portrait with a 400-year-old Titian he borrowed from Washington’s National Gallery of Art. It was a large rectangular picture, using rich red, brown and cream colours, showing Cardinal Marco investing the Abbot of Carrara, with his benefice standing by. ‘I found him much more agreeable and soothing to the soul,’ Weinberger wrote later in his memoir, In the Arena: A memoir of the 20th Century. The Titian ‘resided’ in his office for the whole seven years he was Defence Secretary.
Weinberger’s term had not been without controversy. He was accused of being bewitched by the Pentagon and presiding over excessive waste in procurement. At the time of our interview, he had recently been publicly humiliated by President Reagan, who’d excluded him from a high-level meeting with Secretary-General Gorbachev, and then leaked Weinberger’s letter of complaint. And Congress had just passed the Gramm-Rudman amendment, requiring a zero deficit within five years. To achieve this would require brutal budget cuts with at least half of these coming from Defence; his big spending days seemed about to end. But on the day we met, nothing in his demeanour indicated that Caspar Weinberger had anything better to do than spend an hour giving his first-ever interview to an Australian newspaper. I’d been led along what seemed like miles of Pentagon corridors to his office where the Secretary was waiting for me. We sat at a small round conference table, just the two of us, and he gave me his undivided attention. He was remarkably across all details of the Australian alliance, scarcely referring to the thin briefing folder that lay in front of him, and he carefully ensured that he gave me a few items, about Star Wars, about Japan and about the US bases in Australia, that at the time were newsworthy. It was quite a coup for me, and the paper gave it massive coverage, including running a full transcript of the interview. And this time, I did not have to cover-up any gaffes.
After the formal interview was over, I found the nerve to ask him if I could look at the Titian. Weinberger led me over to his desk. Behind it was a huge desktop panel of lights and switches. It resembled the flight deck of a modern jetliner, except that it was two or three times as large.
‘That’s Western Europe,’ he told me.
He was pointing to an area of the panel where several green and orange lights were illuminated. He did not elaborate, but I later learned that this was a massive secure telephone system that enabled him to speak to those under his command anywhere in the world as well as to his political colleagues in Washington. Beside it was the red phone that only the President used. On the wall above the panel was the painting. How appropriate to the politics of the Potomac. The Cardinal, epitomising the power of his era, at that time exercised by the Catholic Church, keeping watch over the man in charge of the most powerful military force in the world.
I lived at 253 West 73rd Street in The Level Club, built in 1927 as a Masonic hotel. The lavish façade of the building was designed to replicate King Solomon’s Temple, and the huge foyer was decorated with Masonic symbols.2 It had been converted to condominium apartments just two years earlier, so I was lucky to be in a marvellous neo-Romanesque building that nevertheless had modern bathrooms and kitchens. I’d rejected the Fairfax apartment as being too small and dingy, overlooking a light well. I wanted to be able to look out my window and see New York, I’d told Suich. I’d scanned newspaper advertisements and, luckily for me, not having done any kind of research on the area, I had stumbled on the perfect place. It was just two blocks to Riverside Park and the Hudson River, and three blocks in the other direction to Central Park. Scarcely a Sunday passed when I did not join the multitudes who descended on the park to walk, sunbake, roller-skate, bike, jog, picnic, read or otherwise chill-out in the designated quiet zones or, in the rest of the sprawling park where noise was as natural as the greenery, engaged in the endless forms of exhibitionism that New Yorkers called relaxation.
Food shopping was something else. I had never experienced such choice when it came to food, nor the theatre that was part of the service. At Zabar’s, the legendary Jewish delicatessen on Broadway at 80th street, you joined the crush of shoppers f
or cured meats and fish and whether you ordered one ounce or five pounds, you were shouted at just the same by the men skillfully running their knives across sides of salmon or ladling out dollops of Sevruga. I once stood next to a woman wearing a sable coat who asked for a pound of Beluga as casually as I’d ordered my small container of whitefish salad. She was jostled just like the rest of us as she gave over her hundreds of dollars before the precious purchase was handed to her over the high glass counter. ‘Next!’ yelled the man who had served her.
Just around the corner from my apartment, on Broadway at 74th Street, was Fairway, with its distinctive blue and black striped awning, one of the best food markets in the city. You could get day-old Israeli tomatoes or corn torn from the earth on Long Island that very morning; if you waited long enough on the Bread Line you had dozens of types of what today is called artisan bread to choose from. And there were cheese and meats and anything else you might feel like. Out the front were the big boxes of slightly less fancy fruit and vegetables. As you paid, you had to tell the young Hispanic women who ran the registers, Inside or Outside. Even inside, the prices were bargain basement compared with what I had paid in Canberra for a far inferior range and quality. There were some things, such as fresh salmon, you simply could not get in Australia. Nor the way New Yorkers were constantly demonstrating their brashness, their humour and their sheer chutzpah. Every encounter became a drama. No issue was too tiny to attract belligerence and over-the-top aggression. At times it was confronting and exhausting. No one gave an inch and nobody gave a damn and people would fight over the smallest thing. I was in the line at Fairway one day when the register clerk asked a woman with a large shopping basket of goods where she had got the apple she was munching.
‘Inside, or outside?’
‘I didn’t get this apple here,’ the woman replied. ‘I brought it in with me’.
The clerk did not believe her, people in the line did not believe her. The murmurs began.
‘Give it a rest, lady.’
‘Just pay for the fucking apple.’
But, no, she was not going to give it up.
‘I’ve got the receipt,’ she said. ‘It’s in my car’.
And off she went, leaving the ever-lengthening line yelling in protest.
She returned triumphantly a few minutes later with a tiny piece of paper she claimed was the receipt. She did not pay for the apple. That’s chutzpah.
The Ansonia, one of the most remarkable buildings in New York, was right next door to The Level Club. Built at the turn of the twentieth century, it opened as a hotel in 1904. Eighteen stories high, built of pale-grey stone, the Ansonia is arguably the most extravagant beaux-arts building in New York. Unlike the usual early twentieth century New York grand buildings with their straight lines, and stepped levels, the Ansonia was all curves and carvings, gargoyles and cast-iron filigree. It was, without doubt, one of the most amazing buildings in a city that was not shy about its architectural largesse. Its lavish exterior was part of the architectural tour of New York buildings given by the Sam Waterston character in Woody Allen’s 1986 film Hannah and her Sisters and in 1992, while I was still living next-door, Single White Female starring Jennifer Jason Leigh and Bridget Fonda was filmed inside. The building became very run-down in the mid-twentieth century, but rents were cheap because they were controlled or stabilised so artists and musicians, who liked that Lincoln Centre was just a few blocks to the south, took apartments there. The great soprano Teresa Stratas lived there. I’d heard her sing Liu in Turandot at the Met and I’d seen her in the street. Igor Stravinsky and the tenor Enrico Caruso are supposed to have lived there, as well as other luminaries such as Babe Ruth, Theodore Dreiser, Jack Dempsey and, more recently but before she became a mega-celebrity, Angelina Jolie.
Soon after I moved into The Level Club, I went into the Ansonia and approached the rather large man who was presiding over the lobby. The place was well past its glory days by the mid-1980s, but the grandeur of the building could never be diminished. I looked up in awe at the vaulted ceilings and the elaborate pillars. I said to the concierge that I had seen the sign outside for the baths.
‘Were they open to non-residents,’ I asked? I’d been hoping I could keep up my swimming in New York.
The man gave me a long look, as if to say, ‘You serious, lady?’ He took in my straight face and then, rolling his head back, he laughed and laughed. His face was a moist roll of merriment; he dabbed at himself with a handkerchief and heaved his shoulders as another round of laughter overtook him. I stood there politely, waiting for him to tell me what inexcusable crime of etiquette I had committed.
‘Those baths, lady,’ he told me, still gasping with laughter, ‘Those baths. They ain’t here anymore, but if they were, you sure wouldn’t want to be going to them.’
And off he went again, into another private paroxysm of mirth.
I soon discovered my mistake.
The Ansonia had been home to the now-fabled Continental Baths, the most famous gay bathhouse in New York, which had opened in the basement in 1968. For seven years the Continental Baths was the place to go for hip New Yorkers. And not just for gay men, although it was the first place in New York where they could congregate openly, white towels around their waists, to seek out sex. But the likes of Mick Jagger and Liza Minnelli went as well. It was, apparently, quite a place. As well as the actual baths, there was a health clinic (where patrons could be tested for STDs), a library, a juice bar, a barber shop, a souvenir shop, a café and a gym. But the biggest drawcard, apart from the sex, was the live entertainment. The Continental Baths attracted the biggest names in town: Cab Calloway, Sarah Vaughan, the Andrews Sisters, Lesley Gore and, perhaps not surprisingly, Peter Allen. It was a place that made careers, too. Bette Midler got her start here, with Barry Manilow tickling the ivories as she sang, as did Patti LaBelle. In 1977, two years after the Continental Baths closed, Studio 54 would become the new haven of the fashionable. And, as the disco era took hold, the music definitely took a turn for the worse.
Almost every block in New York had a good story and as I embraced my new city with fervour I wanted to learn as much as I could, to learn its history as well as savour the present. I had never lived anywhere like it. For instance, St Marks Place, the three blocks of East 8th street that run from Astor Place to Tompkins Square, was still a relatively poor block with cold-water tenements and shops that, apart from the very cool St Mark’s bookshop that had been a fixture since 1977, ranged from bodegas to head shops to tatty tourist kiosks but it had, even by New York standards, a pretty amazing pedigree. James Fenimore Cooper had lived there in the 1840s; in 1917 Leon Trotsky had moved into No. 77 and written for the Novy Mir, a Russian-language communist newspaper which was edited by Russian anarchist Nikolai Bukharin who lived across the street in No. 80. A few years earlier, Russian anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman started the progressive Modern School at No. 6. When that closed, it was replaced by a Russian public bath and in 1979 became the world’s largest gay bathhouse. In the 1950s, when the area started to become known as the East Village, it was a renowned hangout of the Beats, with Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg regulars at Gem Spa, a little bar on the corner of Second Avenue that sold newspapers and is renowned for its egg-cream, a peculiarly New York drink of milk, seltzer water and chocolate syrup. In Just Kids, Patti Smith recounts Robert Mapplethorpe buying her an egg-cream at the Gem Spa. Five Spot, at No. 2, was a jazz haunt in the early 1960s where musicians like Thelonius Monk, Charlie Mingus and Charlie Parker all played, and early feminist writer Shulamith Firestone, author of The Dialectic of Sex, lived at No. 11. And while St Marks Place has been home to an eclectic range of musicians, political types and social rebels—from Andy Warhol who opened his Electric Circus there in 1967 to Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin of the Yippies movement and Lenny Bruce the comedian—by far the most famous resident was the English poet W.H. Auden who lived at No. 77, for twenty years from 1952 to 1973. It was
far from salubrious; for instance, it had no toilet, forcing Auden to use the facilities at the Holiday Cocktail Lounge at No. 75. It was a place that he frequented in any case, as he did like a martini. David Hay, one of my oldest friends, who had made documentary films in Australia and studied at the UCLA Film School in the early 1970s, moved to New York in 1979 and while he contemplated how to jump-start his screenwriting career, took up freelance journalism. He moved into No. 77 in 1983, and for three years lived in Trotsky’s old apartment. He was there the day the commemorative plaque for Auden was attached to the front wall of the Holiday. Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood were there, David told me, ‘I remember looking out my window and seeing them down on the sidewalk.’
My reverie with New York lasted for less than two months. To my horror I discovered that, once again, I was pregnant. It was, I realised, the result of a one-night stand with a visiting Australian with whom I would never dally again, and whom I could never tell. I knew I had no choice about what to do, although it was going to be a challenge to get myself an abortion in New York City—and probably very expensive—but the hormones had already started to kick-in, and I found myself emotionally connecting to what was happening inside me. But, I told myself, there was no way I could have a baby. It might just have been possible the last time I’d been pregnant, in 1979 when I was working in the Press Gallery. Life in Canberra was a lot simpler and support services were on hand, but I’d rejected that choice. I had put myself and my new job first. Had I chosen differently then, today I’d be the single mother of a six-year-old, and no way would I have this job in New York. Now I was 41 and this was probably my last chance, so I had to think very hard about whether I wanted this child. I’ve never been very clucky or defined myself solely, or even at all, by my ability to bear a child, so I could be a lot more dispassionate than would have been possible for some women. Looking back through my diary I realised that I had probably got pregnant around the time of Simone de Beauvoir’s death on 14 April 1986: ‘A very sad day for women,’ I’d written. ‘Her contribution to the explosion of our consciousness was extensive and profound.’ De Beauvoir herself never had an abortion, although she famously signed a petition of French women ‘confessing’ to having broken this law, but she did not hesitate to do whatever it took to put her work first and I would do the same. I wanted to stay in New York and to further hone my craft. I had the biggest assignment of my life in just a few weeks. I could not begin to imagine dealing with morning sickness while I interviewed the US Defence Secretary. I was a writer, I told myself, not a mother. Some women could be both, but not me. I found a gynaecologist on Park Avenue, a wonderfully sympathetic man, a recent immigrant from South Africa, who told me that in my situation—single, newly arrived in America, with a big job—I would be crazy to even consider having the child. I found his words consolingly reinforcing. I had not confided my situation to anyone, preferring to guide myself unaided through this decision. I knew I was doing what was right for me, but that did not mean that I was not sad—and angry. A week later, after the termination, I walked out through the waiting room, which was full of expectant couples. I wondered if they realised that the doctor who was to deliver their babies also did abortions—and would they care? It was behind me now, but I could not overcome my feelings of bitterness and resentment. Men never had to make these decisions. They simply walked away from the bed, usually oblivious to the chaos they had left behind. The man I refused to call ‘the father’ (I did not think that merely depositing sperm entitled someone to a title that implies effort and commitment) probably occasionally looked back on our night together with a secret little smile. As for me, I treated myself, maxing out my credit card buying three pairs of Bruno Magli stilettos. I had made my choice; it was done. For a time at least, I would be fabulously frivolous. That was my way of asserting that I was back in control of my life. I felt, in the words of the Joni Mitchell song, unfettered and alive.
