The Patch

by John McPhee

  [He was the chairman and C.E.O. of Hollywood’s Walt Disney Company.]

  A PROFESSIONAL WRITER, by definition, is a person clothed in self-denial who each and almost every day will plead with eloquent lamentation that he has a brutal burden on his mind and soul, will summon deep reserves of “discipline” as seriatim antidotes to any domestic chore, and, drawing the long sad face of the pale poet, will rise above his dread of his dreaded working chamber, excuse himself from the idle crowd, go into his writing sanctum, shut the door, shoot the bolt, and in lonely sacrifice turn on the Mets game.

  OVER A LONG SYNTHETIC BRUNCH at 521 West Fifty-seventh Street, Dr. Simpey Kuramoto, a microbiologist and food technologist, remarked that he had just about reached the end of his patience with people who seem to believe that nature cannot be artificially reproduced. “It gets you right here,” he said. “The consumer thinks anything artificial is bad. The consumer says, ‘Don’t monkey with Mother Nature.’ The consumer has been brainwashed. How do you like your soup?”

  In color, texture, body, and flavor, it was not just tomato soup—it was extremely good tomato soup. And yet it was utterly untomatoed, completely artificial.

  Even his daughter had been brainwashed, Dr. Kuramoto went on to say. And that had got him most of all, right there. His daughter had “learned” in school that natural vitamins are better than artificial vitamins. Absurd! All natural edibles are made up of chemicals and all artificial edibles are made up of chemicals. The molecules are the same. In good conscience, any health-food store could go totally artificial if it wanted to. How about that cheese?

  The “cheese” tasted like Parmesan and had the same nubbly appearance. It had never been closer to Parma than West Fifty-seventh Street, and it contained no cheese.

  A synthetic food could actually be an improvement on its natural counterpart, Dr. Kuramoto said. There was, for example, “a great opportunity” for improvement of the lemon. He just could not understand why people went on clinging to the myth of the superiority of nature. If anything, synthetic products were better than natural ones, because natural foods contained, in addition to their basic components, all sorts of little things that should be fed only to laboratory mice. Modern synthetic-food technology, while imitating the flavors of traditional foods with an exactitude not possible until recent times, was also “eliminating the contaminants from the natural product.”

  The company Dr. Kuramoto works for is called International Flavors & Fragrances. It is traded on the big board and tries to keep everything else about its activities if not secret at least discreet, for its principal business is the ghosting of the “inventions” of its clients. When a major soap maker or confectioner or soft-drink bottler or world-class cosmetic house “creates” a new and exotic fragrance or flavor, the odds are good that the new creation was in fact developed in a laboratory on West Fifty-seventh Street. I.F.F. likes to call itself “a hidden supplier.”

  Given appropriate incentive, the company will attempt to reproduce any taste or aroma known on the earth. Once, during a famine in India, a mountain of butter was rushed over from the United States to help save lives, but the Indians were suspicious of the butter’s unfamiliar flavor and would not touch it. I.F.F. was consulted, and its flavor-and-aroma chemists decided to reproduce the taste and scent of Indian ghee, which, in loose definition, is rancid-smelling water-buffalo butter. Soon, artificial essence of ghee was flown to India and sprayed on the American cow butter, ton after ton of which quickly went down the Indian gullet.

  A restaurateur in California once came to I.F.F. with the complaint that his restaurant did not smell particularly enticing, because it lacked, in this age of microwaves, suffusive kitchen aromas. I.F.F. responded with a synthetic scent of baked ham, in aerosol cans, and, complementarily, a spray of chemically fabricated Dutch apple.

  A marine museum in Florida, although situated close to the sea, felt that its interior lacked the inspiring smell of brine, kelp, and decaying porgies that is known as “salt air.” I.F.F. perfumers synthesized the smell and put it into cans labelled “The Ocean.”

  Certain new and fast-growing rices, agronomically miraculous, were in some instances ignored by peoples of Southeast Asia because the taste was different from the taste of their old, slow-growing rice. I.F.F. broke down the flavor of the old rice, analyzed it, synthesized it, and sent the synthetic flavor off to be mixed with the new kind of rice, making its taste acceptable.

  Such feats are assisted by technological devices like the gas-liquid chromatograph and an instrument that determines nuclear-magnetic resonances. Dr. Kuramoto, who is the director of technical support of I.F.F.’s United States Flavor Division, calls these devices, agglomerately, “the machine.” In various combinations, ground-up foods or the smokes and vapors from cooking can be sent through the machine, which “blips out peaks” on a small screen. Each peak represents a pure chemical. Analysis and the art of synthetic combination then begin.

  Naturally, our own brunch—in I.F.F.’s Flavor Conference Room—had begun with synthetic orange juice. Dr. Kuramoto and his staff had been grinding up oranges and running them through the machine in an attempt to create artificially what the makers of frozen concentrates have never so much as approached with their wholly natural components: the taste of fresh orange juice. He was full of cautionary prefaces, to the effect that the juice was still developmental. “We still have things to learn,” he said. “We can’t reproduce—yet—the flavor of a freshly squeezed Valencia. It is frustrating. If we can send a man to the moon and back, my God, we can re-create an orange.” Joan Koesterer, a flavor chemist in a white coat, handed me a cup of orange fluid. I gave it a shake to bring out the nose. Dr. Kuramoto looked expectant. His sleeves were rolled up. He seemed on the verge of getting up and going to feed the machine another Valencia. A Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, he had behind him a long stint at General Mills, where he had helped develop meat “analogues” (ham, chicken, bacon—fabricated from machine-processed soybeans), and now he was going to capture citrus alive or know why not.

  I upended my cup and confessed to Dr. Kuramoto that I had once written fifty thousand words about orange juice as a result of a compulsive orange-juice binge that went on for several months and thousands of miles of questing the subtropics. Nowhere had I tasted anything that came nearly as close to the flavor of freshly squeezed orange juice as the fluid there in his lab. Moments before, it had been a powdered mixture of laboratory chemicals.

  With the soup course, we drank a form of “strawberry yogurt” that was a laboratory try not only to improve the flavor of a natural strawberry but also to invent a thinned (and artificial) yogurt. Together, they might become a novel beverage. It was a little too novel for me. We then had some terrific devilled ham that consisted wholly of textured soy protein, flavored with chemicals. We ate, as well, tuna and hamburgers that had been doubled in volume with I.F.F.-flavored soya, and washed them down with some “Coca-Cola” that might have caused a riot in Atlanta. “You have heard of the ‘secret formula’ of Coca-Cola and how it is kept locked away and is known only to a few people?” Dr. Kuramoto said. “Well, have a drink of this.”

  I drank the “Coke.” It was flavor plagiarism, all right—I couldn’t tell it from the real thing. Dr. Kuramoto said, “That one was not particularly difficult. We could as easily do Pepsi, too.”

  Dessert included a so-so milk chocolate, an excellent artificial-chocolate ice milk, and a clear beverage, brown and carbonated, that had the precise aroma of a richly concocted chocolate malted milk but looked like root beer. It had a fine, accurate chocolate-malt taste and contained neither chocolate nor malt. It was, Dr. Kuramoto explained, I.F.F.’s tilt at the windmill of chocolate soda pop—one of the few fields of potentiality in which chocolate has never caught on.

  I left Dr. Kuramoto and went off to the office of Van Vechten Sayre, the firm’s public-relations expert, who had collected some seventeen artificial fragrances intended to put a finishing
sniff to the day. “What’s that?” he said, spraying baked ham in my face. “And that?”

  “Dutch apple.”

  “That?”

  “The ocean.”

  “That?”

  “Norway spruce, balsam fir.”

  The spruce-balsam smell had been made for the American Museum of Natural History, where—in the Hall of the North American Forests—machines that contain timing devices press down periodically on the valves of aerosol cans full of instant wilderness. Other I.F.F. cans spray hay into the Hall of South Asiatic Mammals, grass into the Hall of Man in Africa, and a scent called South Pacific (a combination of frangipani and ocean air) into the Margaret Mead wing (Hall of Pacific Peoples). Sayre sprayed me with these things, too. I liked the hay and the grass, but South Pacific was overpowering, and would have overpowered Sadie Thompson.

  Sayre brought out a collection of small bottles and a packet of perfumers’ blotters, long and thin, and he dipped a blotter into a bottle, then waved it in the air. Eggnog. Another blotter: Mince pie. Another: Apple.

  Caramel. Tea. Fresh paint. Cedar. Butter pecan. Irish coffee. Each was as distinct as it was synthetic.

  “What’s this?” he said now.

  “Don’t know,” I said. “It smells like an entire floral shop.”

  “It is a floral shop,” he said. “Now try this one. Think carefully. Where are you?”

  I sniffed, and had an instant reaction—a wild, insane thought—and tried to put it aside. For who would want such a thing? Who would think of it, anyway, and how could chemists conceivably get it into a bottle, even if they did think of it? The lichen was there, though, and the moss, the drip, the dank, the chalky scent of the stalagmite, the faint essence of slumbering bear.

  “Cave!” I burst out. “A cave!”

  He handed me the bottle. The label said “Cave.”

  BY THE TIME I met David Brower, in 1969, he was more indoors than out. He was only ten years younger than the twentieth century, and he had spent a large part of his life escaping interior scenes by getting himself up into the Sierra and away from confinements of both the natural and the figurative kind. He was shy, and that spurred him, too, to get away. He came to know the mountain country in such detail that it was said of him that he would know exactly where he was if, magically, a hand were to set him down anywhere at all from Sequoia National Forest to the Feather River. He took up technical climbing, and became the first person to touch thirty-seven Sierran peaks. By his account, he would have liked to choose one and stay there.

  When incursions in various forms threatened his Sierra, though, he had to come down and fight. He fought in rooms, theatres, halls, and chambers, and in a way that Homer would best understand. His voyages through the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth and Earth Island Institute and other loci for defenders of his faith were punctuated with mutiny, fratricide, and triumph. He was feisty, heaven knew. And arrogant, possibly. And relentless, certainly. And above all, effective—for he began his mission when ecology connoted the root-and-shoot relationships of communal plants, and he, as much or more than anyone in the mid-century, expanded its reach and inherent power until it became the environmental movement. Others in time would learn more than he knew and advance the argument in a stabilizing way, but they would always be following him.

  I spent a year with him, going from halls to chambers and from city to city, East and West. Blessedly, it was a year of rivers and redwoods and mountains, too. Among scenes and anecdotes that are now reassembling and crowding the mind, one minor and peripheral moment somehow lingers at the center. We were crossing the Mojave Desert. Not on foot. And after an hour or two of the Mojave, Dave Brower remarked that in the give and take of environmental politics—in the long wrestle with opposing forces lined up on countless vectors—he would be willing, if necessary, in the name of diplomacy and compromise, to surrender the Mojave.

  I asked him if he would enumerate terrains of his choosing that might be put in the same category. His wife—his gyroscope, Anne—sitting beside him seemed to smile. His son Ken, hitherto somnolent in the back seat, sat up, and said, “It’s going to be a short list!”

  It was something shorter than that, for Brower looked around a little more at the Mojave, and changed his mind.

  A LITTLE BOY is going to come to New York someday, disappear, then eventually return to his hometown as a middle-aged man. When his mother says, “Where were you all this time?,” he will tell her: “In the line at the Radio City Music Hall.” He may even introduce her to the girl he met near the end of the queue, courted between Fifth Avenue and Rockefeller Plaza, and married at Sixth and Fiftieth.

  Sometimes three-quarters of a mile long, forming as early as six-thirty A.M., doubling and redoubling upon itself through a maze of sawhorses set up by New York police, the line of people waiting to get into the Music Hall is one of the phenomena of modern show business. Extra long in the tourist summer (seventy per cent out-of-towners), it is something to see in winter as well, knee-deep in slush and ready for Donner Pass. The Music Hall somehow signifies to the rest of the nation the epicenter of Manhattan. Most of the standees agree with the one who said he was there because “everybody down home just knows about it,” and the chap six laps behind him who said, “It’s unavoidable, like the Grand Canyon.”

  When they finally get inside, audiences see a three-hour program—roughly two-thirds movie and one-third stage show—that is anything but just another overpromoted metropolitan swindle. The customers are paying for spectacorn, and the Music Hall is equipped to give it to them. The organ can sound like everything from a Chinese gong to a glockenspiel, and vibrates so profoundly that it probably shows up on seismographs. The fixed lighting system is one of the most advanced in the world, making possible spectacular fireworks and the fondly remembered burning of Nome. Once every three hours, the Alaskan town collapsed onstage in a cold conflagration of light, silk, and air. Fountain displays have slopped more than a hundred and fifty tons of water onto the stage per day. Niagara Falls once poured out of the wings. A full-size train chugged uphill. One show used a helicopter, another a four-engine bomber, and a third shot satellites into the flies. Chariots have been drawn by live horses galloping on treadmills. Ships have been torpedoed and sunk, descending via the huge, tripartite stage elevator. The Christmas show always features a crèche program, and at Easter time the stage turns into a cathedral, and the women of the corps de ballet turn into nuns, forming a vast human cross, holding lilies in their hands.

  WHEN NEIL SIMON was newly married, he and his wife, Joan, moved into an apartment in a brownstone on East Tenth Street in Manhattan. It was four flights up, plus the additional steps of the front stoop. When deliverymen arrived with the furniture, they collapsed on it and sat there for a quarter of an hour with their mouths open and only the whites of their eyes showing. One piece of furniture was a large single bed. In the Simons’ bedroom it reached from wall to wall. To get to the closet, they had to walk over the bed. It might have seemed more sensible to sleep in the living room, but a skylight there had a considerable hole in it, and, in winter, snow frequently came pouring through.

  All this sounds more like the start of a successful theatrical comedy than a successful marriage, but it turned out to be both. The marriage has been running ten years. Neil Simon’s comedy Barefoot in the Park may run that long, too. With Robert Redford as a rough facsimile of himself and Elizabeth Ashley as his spritely wife, the play precisely duplicates the events, rents, and blizzards of the Simons’ golden past, with deliverymen reeling into view like sherpas out of shape, and the young couple fighting the plausible battles of youth:

  He: Let’s discuss it.

  She: Not with you in the room.

  RICHARD HUBER IS THE DEAN of the School of General Studies at Hunter College. He is a leathery tennis competitor, toughest near the finish, calling his opponents “victims.” We play each other at least a dozen times a year. Huber is the author of, among other books, The
American Idea of Success, which comes wrapped in a dust jacket that shows an apple pie in a blue sky. He may write about Norman Vincent Peale and Dale Carnegie, but Huber himself was invented by Stephen Potter, the author of The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship. In the middle of matches, Huber offers you lessons. He is a master of the premature congratulation. Once, after I beat him in the first set, he politely excused himself, went off and took a shower. It was all his after he came back.

  In the great pyramid of tennis players—hundreds of thousands of tennis players—everyone up to the ninety-ninth percentile is a permanent and irreparable hack. Not everyone accepts this as axiomatic, for who in the world has never hit a crisp winning backhand down the line, a Wagnerian forehand beyond return, a drop volley that screws itself into the ground? My friend Jerry Goodman, for example, has made all these shots, and in his subconscious something has been telling him that he should be able to string them together like beads. As “Adam Smith,” he has, after all, written two consecutive best sellers. So why not two consecutive backhands? We have been playing each other for many years, and I have studied the development of his game. He has a quick eye and a fair mind, and he never calls a ball out until, coming toward him, it has crossed the net and begun its descent toward the ground.