CHAPTER 5
Joyce — Gladys Nine
‘Have a nice day’
Nicole, desk clerk at Hertz
In case anyone else is thinking of doing it — tracking down eleven women in the United States and meeting up with them is not easy. Besides which, life still has to go on and bills have to be paid. Richard and I returned to the UK where our small cowboy film had some degree of success. Ever the bold entrepreneur, Richard had used it as a calling card to get us some paying work. As he is the organiser and I merely smile at the camera, he was now busy with our growing broadcast business. I had, however, begun a journey which was too tempting not to continue, but I was nervous to travel alone. Enter Paul, my very English next door neighbour. Paul is a nice young person with a remarkably good dress sense for a straight man. He is single and, despite heading for middle age, he has never been to America. It was perfect. I wanted to carry on searching and he wanted to see locations from movies and TV shows.
Chronologically, the next Gladys should have been Ginger, Gladys Four, who I thought lived in Ohio or California. I hadn’t made any contact with her at all and I was beginning to think it was possible I might never find several of the Gladyses. Paul wanted to go to New York, so I decided to track down the women geographically instead. Having started in my home town I would gradually spread the circle outwards until I had found them all. So far, I had met two out of the twelve who were living the lives of their mothers, a mile from where we grew up. Perhaps I would find them all within a tiny radius. Proof, possibly, that feminism may not have been the triumph women in the sixties hoped for.
A couple of months after my first trip, Paul and I went to rent a car at Westchester County airport in New York. I had tried to rent a car from a local firm but they only rented to ‘American citizens’, which seemed a little short-sighted. As far as I can see most American citizens have their own car. Ron told me to rent from Hertz. ‘I always rent from Hertz when I am on business.’
Corporate loyalty is the watchword of today. Every time I buy my groceries some bored clerk asks me if I have a loyalty card. I don’t. I am not loyal to anywhere but the moment always embarrasses me. I look down at my collection of essentials and mutter, not the truth — that I don’t have one — but that I have ‘forgotten it’. I am too mortified to reveal that I have been disloyally bringing home the bacon from elsewhere. I am foolish, of course. If I were loyal and had a card to prove it then I could gain all sorts of benefits. I use my American Express card a great deal and once managed to gather enough points to get a free case of wine. It was marvellous and had only cost me £30,000 worth of other goods. It is all part of the globalisation of the world. To the British, I think, it is still a very American concept that customer service is conducted with a sanitised and rehearsed script. Everyone is busy wishing me ‘a good day’ but I’m pretty sure no one actually believes it.
So I went to Hertz for Ron’s sake. I was being loyal to Ron who was being loyal to Hertz but Nicole, who worked and may indeed still work at the Hertz desk at Westchester County airport, didn’t know that. She didn’t know that I represented a good corporate customer. I seem to remember that it is Avis who claim to ‘Try Harder’. At any rate it wasn’t Nicole. In between spending what could only be an inordinate number of hours perfecting the pearl polish on her nails, Nicole had also taken the time to learn a great deal of ‘Hertz Speak’. I knew her name was Nicole partly because she told me, ‘Hi, my name is Nicole. How can I help you today?’
But mainly because it was printed on a large name tag above her left breast. Nicole gave me the whole spiel about my ‘vehicle requirements’, the ‘options to buy a full gas tank now’ and the ‘insurance limitations’ which I needed to ‘initial’ for. She did all this without once looking at me. At various points I tried to interrupt but she had learned her sales monologue and I was frankly an irritation. Paul said nothing. He is a perfect English gentleman and knows that these corporate moments do not require interaction from the customer. I think I fall somewhere between the American ability to be demanding and the English inclination towards reticence. I try to get what I want but do it with superb manners. Still I could not get the unstoppable Nicole’s attention. By now she was on the downward pass of her rollercoaster of rhetoric. Finally, I said rather loudly, ‘Nicole, I am trying to speak to you.’
Nicole was not bright. She looked rather shocked that I knew her name.
‘Hello, Nicole,’ I said, looking at something other than the top of her head for the first time. I was trying to develop, at the very least, a short-term relationship with my new friend.
‘My name is Sandi and the thing is, Nicole, I hire cars all over the world, all the time.’ This, I felt, was both friendly and a bit of a corporate carrot for her. I thought it was good to start by appearing to be a potential gold card member. A woman who, if satisfied, could help keep Nicole’s entire fleet on the road.
‘And when I hire a car the person renting it out tells me how much it will be and then when I bring the car back it is always exactly double that. So what I was hoping, Nicole, is that you could tell me exactly how much it will be before I leave to save me the shock when I return.’
Nicole looked at me and then looked back down at her computer keyboard. ‘There is the basic rental and then you get unlimited mileage and with the full gas tank—’
‘Sales tax,’ I said. ‘There’s always sales tax and state tax and federal tax and, I really want to know everything, Nicole.’
This concept of divulging the actual cost of something was new and took some time. I made her write it down. It was indeed double the figure we had both first thought of. I smiled. Nicole banged some keys down on the desk. She hoped that I would ‘have a nice day’ but she did not smile. I should have known then that we were not about to get the best car in her keep.
Paul and I were left to wander out into the car lot on our own. There we found I had rented the oldest white Ford Escort still in the Hertz fleet. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I could just hear Nicole laughing from her desk. Paul, bless him, never said a word but we both knew it was my fault. Like almost every American car, the Escort was an automatic but only in the sense that it changed gear at random and with no particular pattern. I jerked and juddered out of the car park and named the car Betty in a pathetic attempt to feel better about the whole thing.
I took Paul to my old haunts. It was the second time I had done that for an Englishman and I was beginning to feel like a tour guide. We stopped at the Larchmont Tavern for a beer. I didn’t even know the tavern was there when I was a kid but clearly it has been around for some time. Although it was only the afternoon, regulars were sitting at the bar, nursing a drink and watching the TV. Rita doesn’t like Larchmont because people double park.
‘They think they are so rich they can park wherever they like,’ she said the last time she and I drove through. From one neighbouring town to another there is clearly a huge social split. I remember not going to New Rochelle with my mother because it was where the lower class lived. So much for the classless society.
I asked the bartender about routes out to Long Island, our next destination. He said it was a very difficult journey and some distance. Rita and Ron had been anxious about us going to the airport alone. They had said it was ‘at least’ an hour away, which turned out to be twenty minutes. So far everyone we had spoken to displayed terrible anxiety about going anywhere, about how ghastly the traffic would be, how long it would all take and how strange everything would be when we got there. The next journey we were facing was supposed to be a nightmare in every respect.
Long Island is not an island at all but you would need to be God or a spaceman to know that, for it feels like an island. In fact, it is a narrow strip of land, about twenty miles south of New York City, which plunges out into the exposure of the wind and waves of the Atlantic Ocean. We were in search of Joyce, Gladys Nine. Joyce had been the production manager on The Skin of Our Teeth. I only know this
because I looked it up in the yearbook. Exactly what Joyce did on the show I have no idea, which typifies the attitude of actors to anyone who hasn’t got lines to say. She was there, she did something, the play went on, I remembered my lines and didn’t fall over the furniture. Joyce was another of the Italian Catholics in our gang with the same lustrous dark hair as Rita, which suggested a life soaked in olive oil. We had not been close at school and the last time I had seen her had been a dozen years before.
As a teenager Joyce had lived with her parents down near the railroad tracks in a house that shook as the commuters trundled past. Some time in 1990 I visited her in a small apartment where the trains too appeared to pass through the living room. She was married to an Irish-American accountant and they had recently had a second son, David. He was perhaps a year old when I met him. He was cute the way babies are but Joyce never let go of him for a minute. He just sat on her hip, whatever she was doing, his head lolling against her shoulder. I was anxious.
Joyce went to get Rita and me a drink.
‘The baby doesn’t seem right.’
‘Sssh,’ said Rita.
‘He doesn’t hold his head up. Shouldn’t he hold his head up a little? He doesn’t look around.’
Rita changed the subject. We didn’t talk about it. Joyce was sweet and welcoming. We never mentioned the baby’s head. Well, you don’t.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s matter… So we beat our boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
I wanted to go to Long Island for lots of reasons not the least of which was to see Joyce but also because the island has a long history in American literature. It was in Asharoken that Antoine de Saint-Exupéry penned The Little Prince. It was in Northport that Jack Kerouac, that great traveller of American ways and byways, was legendary in his disgraceful and drunken behaviour at Gunther’s Bar and it was in Great Neck that F Scott Fitzgerald started work on The Great Gatsby.
The drive out to Long Island was a burden for poor Betty but a surprising pleasure for Paul and me. It was unexpectedly pretty. Many lovely tree-lined streets in among the overdeveloped bits. Ron had advised us to look out for Leonard’s on Northern Boulevard. This, he said, is the monolith where Jewish people go if they want to have ‘an affair’. I thought he was talking about secretly sleeping with your dentist but as it happens a Jewish affair involves hundreds of relatives and many kosher knishes and knibbles.
Betty, not being a limousine, looked out of place in the parking lot. Leonard’s is the Mecca of Empire Ballroom styling. Even through the windows the chandeliers appeared to have cornered the market in crystal. Paul and I wandered in to see if we could get a brochure. I think we screamed ‘gentile’ the minute we set foot in the place. Many men were busy with many ladders, hanging things from many cornices. A large man with a ten o’clock shadow at nine in the morning appeared in the foyer wearing a tuxedo. It is a difficult look to carry off at that hour.
‘Vat you vant?’ he enquired with a welcome apparently scratched out not all that long ago on some Russian steppe.
‘We were wondering if we could look around?’ I said brightly, trying to endear myself to the Eastern-bloc bouncer. I glanced at Paul to see if he could get away with pretending to be a highly successful orthodontist for five minutes. Our new friend, however, didn’t even have Nicole of Hertz’s way with corporate charm.
‘Is clawsed,’ he barked, positioning his huge frame so we couldn’t even see the ladders. We never got to admire Leonard’s. For reasons I can’t recall, I went to the Mamaroneck senior high school prom with Stephen Benjamin in 1972. He was a nice Jewish boy. Just think, if I had stuck it out and married him, we might by now be having an affair at Leonard’s in Great Neck for one of our little Benjamins. Funny how life works out. And if we had really wanted to push the boat out we could even have drunk Long Island wine.
As far as archaeologists can confirm there has been winemaking in France (that’s France, Europe) since 600 BC. I don’t think that’s true for a moment. I think people have been getting out of their heads since there were first people. They have, however, been making wine on Long Island since 1975.1 consider myself to be a bit of an amateur wine buff and, oddly, despite there being over twenty wineries on the small strip, Long Island vintages are not something that have ever crossed my palate before. I glanced over the offerings in a small leaflet about the local produce. Apparently the wines win medals but I have to confess to being a snob when faced with things like Bedell Cellars of Long Island, whose red table wine has a picture of a pick-up truck on the label.
Still, I was determined to see the vineyards. Ron and Rita had both assured me that these were ‘at least’ two hours away at the far end of the island and that there was no way I was ever going to get there in the time I had set aside. En route, Paul and I looked at a map and realised we were going to pass one with no trouble at all. I was beginning to suspect a general fear among Americans of travelling anywhere other than round the corner.
The Old Brookvale Chardonnay Vineyard is situated in some of the lushest and richest countryside I have ever driven through. Set against a glorious backdrop of mature trees, the vineyard could easily be sitting on some French hillside. Old Brookvale (‘Highlight’, so they say, the 1996 Chardonnay) consists of fifty-five acres of grape harvest. The locals will tell you that is about one acre for every room in the manor house. Sadly, the place is closed to the public but apparently one of the earlier owners was Margaret Emerson. Her father invented Bromo Seltzer, the ultimate hangover cure, which seems appropriate. I like it when life has a certain symmetry.
Ironically, the place is neighboured by the rich, richer and fantastically rich. Vast houses rattling with people who can afford to bring in wine from France one bottle at a time on a private jet. This is a land of serious money where one family home had a par three golf hole on the front lawn. These people do not need to pop next door for a drop of the homemade brew.
There is, and always has been, a strong link between the demon drink and the writer. If people remember F. Scott Fitzgerald it is as a symbol of the jazz age, of excess and of alcohol. It is an image which suggests he tossed off a novel while mixing a Tom Collins. The truth is he took his writing seriously and spent hours shaping his work through many drafts. His recurring theme was the ideal of aspiration. The belief in upward mobility which seems in many ways to define the American character. The rags to riches story that my family had so spectacularly failed to fulfil. There is nothing left to see of Fitzgerald’s time on Long Island. He died drunk and in debt in Hollywood. My heroine, Dorothy Parker, died drunk and in debt in New York. I wouldn’t want to put myself in the same league but if it happens to me could someone please note that I saw it coming?
I don’t know if the American poet Walt Whitman was a drinker but I guess he probably was. Lush or not, he was a native Long Islander. The ‘Good Gray Poet’ is now considered by many as America’s greatest verse smith. His birthplace on the island is not easy to find, lying as it does in West Hills opposite a meat market and between a Rite Aid pharmacy and a petrol station. Pictures that I have seen of him with his long grey beard make him look like Father Christmas’s slightly less successful older brother. Sadly, The Visitors Interpretive Center and Library was closed when we got there, so we didn’t get a chance to see the 130 portraits of the uncamera-shy poet or the desk where he wrote much of his work. All we could see was the carving above the door which read:
Stay with me one day and a night
and I will show you the origins of all poems.
This struck me as incredibly arrogant until I realised what a devil for the flesh old Whitman had been. His seminal work, Leaves of Grass, was considered obscene when it was first published. One of the first people he sent it to, the poet John Greenleaf Whittier, threw the collection on the fire. This is not the reaction
any writer wants to his work and makes me glad of the modern predilection for central heating. But, from what little I know of that opus, it contains quite a heady mixture of lust, sex, sweat, beauty and death. Taken in that context, ‘Stay me with one day and a night and I will show you the origins of all poems’ strikes me less as an arrogant piece of poet speak and more as a classic line from any boy trying to have sex.
A yellow schoolbus-load of kids was dutifully trooping round the Whitman gardens. I wondered what the teachers would tell the children about him. Certainly that he lived and worked during the American Civil War when he served as a nurse to the wounded.
Certainly that in his time he befriended presidents and became a literary figure for the nation. But would they mention how he suffered for his work? How he lost his job at the Bureau of Indian Affairs because of his ‘vulgar’ verse? That he refused to dilute his work which spoke of his love for other men, his homosexual passions and his long-term ‘special friend’ Peter Doyle? The website for the birthplace is not exactly clear. It talks of his being ‘depressed and moribund’ and ‘roaming the streets of New York by day, searching for companions among streetcar drivers and ferryboat pilots, and spending his nights in a seedy Bohemian café’, but there is no mention of what he sought from these drivers and pilots. The gay community claim him as their own but the curator of the birthplace gives a strong sense that he was just looking for a nice chat or a game of whist. I would have liked to have talked to him. To have shared the burden as well as the joys of being gay and a writer.
Gladys Reunited Page 9
