Cat People

by Michael Korda

  “But one Wednesday lunchtime last September, just as Libby and I were sitting down in the kitchen, Juan’s wife, Dolores, who takes care of the house, called out my name and Mumsie’s from the front door. Lauren, who worked for us in the barn, stood on the porch with Mumsie’s body wrapped in her sweater, a stranger standing behind her. ‘She ran out across the road, right in front of his truck, there was nothing he could do, it wasn’t his fault,’ she said. ‘Not Mumsie, not Mumsie,’ I kept saying. ‘What am I going to tell Michael? She was his favorite. Not Mumsie. She never went across the road, not in ten years. Go away, go away from here,’ I shouted at the man. ‘Go away.’

  “I carried her around the house wrapped in the sweater, to all the places she had known over the last ten years, stroked her coarse fur, and put my face against her side. ‘She still has the same wonderful smell,’ I said to Libby, who was following me around, rubbing my back each time I started crying. ‘This hasn’t happened, it hasn’t happened.’

  “But it had. And Toby dug a grave for her next to Missouri and Mr. McT. There is no marker, no headstone. There are none for any of our animals. There is no need.

  “I carry them with me everywhere, they are in my heart.”

  From time to time, Margaret misses Mr. McT too, or Jake, or Queenie, or Chutney, or poor old Irving, who was the first to put his paw in the house, not to speak of those who really just passed through briefly, Bigfoot, for instance, or the unfortunate Mrs. Bumble, and says how much nicer it was when Jake was beside her in bed, or when Chutney would sit on her lap while she drank her tea, but there it is—we have five lady cats, one of them a kind of feline Blanche Dubois figure, all sharing a big house, plus two more outside.

  That might seem a lot of cats to some people, but of course to many other cat people it’s hardly even a drop in the bucket.

  9. La Chatte Transatlantique

  It helps to have friends who are as crazy on the subject of cats as oneself (or crazier), and this is, very fortunately, easy enough to achieve. Complete strangers, of course, are very often even crazier. How else to explain the fact that a company called Genetic Savings & Clone, in Sausalito, California, will clone your cat for fifty thousand dollars, and is said to have a long waiting list of customers?

  Well, of course, no doubt it does make a kind of sense in southern California, land of The Loved One and Whispering Glades, and of the chimpanzee funeral at the beginning of Sunset Boulevard. After all, people who are prepared to pay thousands of dollars for the stylish funeral of a beloved pet are surely getting a better deal by spending money to clone one—if you truly love little Tuffy, why not simply have him or her replicated, if necessary over and over again? Eternal life for pets, more or less, if you can afford it—anybody who has ever read After Many a Summer Dies the Swan can only wish that Aldous Huxley were still alive to write about it, but he died, poor man, when cloning was still the stuff of science fiction, particularly since hardly any English man of letters and science, except perhaps for H. G. Wells, would have been more eager to be cloned, given the opportunity.

  For those for whom cloning is a little too pricey, there are painters who specialize in doing oil paintings of cats, so you will always have a portrait of your cat to remember it by, as well as sculptors who can replicate your cat in bronze or marble. There is, in fact, a very talented cat portraitist who lives and paints not twenty minutes from us, but so far we have not taken any of our cats to her studio, though Thom von Buelow did buy us a life-size bronze cat in which to keep Queenie’s ashes, which sits just below the birdfeeder, without, apparently, frightening off the birds, though it’s more a generic cat, really, than an actual attempt to reproduce Queenie. It has a bushier tail than she did, and two front legs; still, it was a lovely, if expensive, thought.

  We try to keep in communication with friends who have adopted one of the local strays over the years—Michael’s retired assistant Rebecca, our friend Dick Olpe, Theresa Horner (who got one of Mumsie’s pure white kittens). There’s a whole group of people out there with cats they were persuaded to adopt, or simply fell in love with at first sight while visiting us. Then there are friends whose obsession with cats more than equals our own.

  For example, there’s Leila Livingston, a neighbor of Margaret’s from way back when Margaret and Burt first moved into their Central Park West apartment, B. I. (“Before Irving”), or more years ago than any of us would care to count at this point, frankly. Leila was then hardly more than a child, and appeared, waiflike but determined, feet planted permanently, even then, in the third position, to protest the fact that some plumbing problem in Margaret’s bathroom had led to a raging flood downstairs. Only in New York City, perhaps, can this kind of encounter lead to a long friendship, but anyway it did.

  Leila, as it turned out, would become a ballet dancer, fluent in French, a brilliant cook, and a certified cat lover. When Michael came to meet her many years later, her command of French awed him, as did her fund of literary cat anecdotes, such as the one about Mallarmé’s cat,* whose name was Blanche, and who liked to sit in the window of the great French symbolist poet’s apartment, looking out at the street. One cold, miserable winter night, a bedraggled, starving alley cat looks up to see Blanche, plump, warm, and fluffy, sitting at the window. The alley cat creeps closer and says, “Comrade cat, how can you live in luxury as a pet when your brothers and sisters are out in the street starving?” Blanche frowns. “Have no fear, comrade,” she replies. “I’m only pretending to be Mallarmé’s cat.”

  This is the kind of animal story that not only captures a certain feline view of the world—How many of us, after all, suspect that our cats are only pretending to be domesticated pets for so long as it suits them?—but also the typically French bourgeois attitude toward what used to be called “the class struggle,” in which a degree of more or less feigned sympathy for the suffering of the lower classes, despite one’s own comfort, is supposed hopefully to serve as protection against proletarian reprisals in the event of revolution. Without an understanding of this social mechanism—the need to shout from time to time, “But I’ve always been on your side!”—which goes back to the mid-eighteenth century, much of French politics remains baffling and incomprehensible to Anglo-Saxons.

  England too proliferates in talking pets with a social message (though not the same one, needless to say): “I am his highness’s dog at Kew, pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?,” a clear statement of class-conscious snobbery, was actually engraved on the gold collar of the Prince of Wales’s dog (not Charles, but George III’s eldest son, who went on to become Prince Regent, then George IV).

  Then too, though the English think of themselves as great animal lovers (and indeed are generally assumed in the rest of the world to be loony on the subject of cruelty to animals, assaulting Arab donkey owners and Italian drivers of horse-drawn carriages and abusers of animals everywhere), hardly anywhere in England is the French love of pets equaled—or would it, indeed, be allowed. Nobody in France thinks anything of bringing a dog into a restaurant—elderly ladies carry their little dogs into elegant restaurants and cradle them in their laps, feeding them choice tidbits, while bearded gentlemen wearing berets, with napkins tucked firmly under their chins, still sit at café tables with their dogs seated in the opposite chair waiting for a treat. In England—let alone hygiene-conscious America—none of this would be tolerated for a moment. As for cats, every concierge, and sometimes, it seems, every grocery, boucherie, and fish shop in France, has a resident cat, mostly cross, overfed, and spoiled. Louis XV, when he made his first formal appearance before the court at Versailles as a boy-king, carried his favorite cat in his arms, and was much admired for doing so. The king retained a lifelong fondness for cats, and a good many of them appear in the paintings of his mistresses. In general, the French live on more intimate terms with their pets than the English do, much of the intimacy of course centering, as you would expect, around food, and are astonished and outraged to discover that the En
glish, of all people, consider them cruel to animals.

  To say that Leila was sophisticated would be putting it mildly. Indeed she succeeded at the remarkable feat of being witty in two languages (most people find it difficult enough to be witty in one) and of being completely au fait with two cultures. Eventually her ballet career came to an untimely end due to an injury (though one look at the way she stands, even at the stove, would reveal her ballet training), and she went off to Paris to attend cooking school, taking her sixteen-year-old cat Cleopatra with her—it never occurred to her for a moment, as a matter of fact, to leave the cat behind.

  Cleopatra had been rescued by Leila’s mother from the courtyard of their building, along with a sister, which they named Medea Odille, who went insane, biting and hissing, and proved too resistant to becoming a pet. Cleopatra, on the contrary, adapted quickly to petdom, although she shared the apartment with two parakeets, and liked to sit on their cage, glaring in through the bars and terrifying them into motionless, frozen silence for hours at a time. She also shared the apartment with a French poodle named Antonio, and an orange cat called Mephisto, for many years. Timid, except when it came to parakeets, Cleopatra never ran out into the hall when the door was opened, and vanished at the sight of a stranger, so it could hardly have been expected that she would be a successful traveler. However, when Leila went to Paris, Cleopatra nerved herself up for the voyage, and crossed the Atlantic like a veteran.

  Even in those days, before the big security flap, international airlines were ambivalent on the subject of pets, though in principle most carriers allowed one animal per cabin, but Leila simply boarded the plane, shoved Cleopatra’s case under the seat in front, and sat the cat on her lap across the Atlantic, having prepared her for the journey with a quarter of a five-milligram Valium.

  “On planes she would spend most of the flight asleep on my lap, even though she was meant to be in her kitty bag under the seat. Being a cat, no matter how long the flight, she would never go to the bathroom, even though I always took some kitty litter with me, and an improvised cat box. At intervals I would go with her to the toilet, put the litter in the box, then put her in the box, but she would just sit in the box and look at me as if I were a crazy person.”

  The stewardesses were charmed, which is unlikely to happen these days, when they carry plastic handcuffs and rolls of duct tape in their kit to deal with “difficult” passengers. Cleopatra had had her shots, as stipulated by the French Embassy (along with proof of health and proof of ownership, the latter not easy to provide for a rescued stray cat), but the French douanes waved away her documents—“Une chatte, c’est une chatte, quoi?”—the French have never been difficult on the subject of bringing animals into France, or out of it, unlike the United Kingdom, which imposes a six-month quarantine on animals. This caused innumerable problems at the very highest level of government when the Duke and Duchess of Windsor proposed to return to England from Madrid with their pugs during the Second World War, and obliged Elizabeth Taylor to live on a yacht, on the Thames, to spare her dogs from being quarantined.

  Cleopatra settled down easily into life in Paris, a city whose affection for cats is best represented by the novelist Colette, who adored hers. Referred to by one and all as “Minou!,” a kind of generic French affectionate name for cats, much as we tend to call cats whose names we don’t know “Kitty,” she had the run of Leila’s apartment building, from the concierge’s lodge to the studio of the Japanese artist who lived downstairs, and would wander out onto the balcony occasionally for a look at Paris street life. Although there is such a thing as French cat food, cats in France mostly eat delicious scraps from their owner’s plates, the French being at the same time thrifty and unable to believe that any creature would prefer food out of a can to something that has been tastefully cooked in an interesting sauce.

  In Cleopatra’s case, since Leila was learning cooking, she dined off things like poached wild-caught salmon, and developed as a result a fairly sophisticated Parisian palate for quenelles, kidneys cooked in rich sauces, pâtés, etc.—she developed, in short, a fairly sophisticated taste in food as Leila’s cooking skills, already considerable, improved.

  There are those who believe that rich food, particularly dishes with a lot of cream or butter, are bad for cats, but needless to say, this view is not held in France, and doesn’t seem to be held at all by cats. Most cats adore rich food when it’s offered to them—after all, ils ne sont pas si bêtes—and while it’s probably not any better for them than for us, since they don’t smoke or drink, and don’t live long enough to have to worry about cholesterol, it probably can’t do them much harm. Our own cats, though not exposed to French haute cuisine (except when Leila comes for a visit) have, on occasion, eaten cheesecake, key lime pie, chili, a variety of Chinese dishes (when Michael was attending the Chinese cooking course at the Culinary Institute of America), roast pork, moussaka, and shepherd’s pie. They don’t seem to like things with a lot of tomatoes in them, however, or pasta of any kind. Mumsie was especially fond of butter, which she liked in a good-size blob on a plate, but would eat off a finger, or out of the butter crock if you happened to forget to put the lid back on. She would take margarine, if it was offered, but with slightly less enthusiasm. They definitely prefer cream to milk, and whole milk to 1 percent low-fat milk, but then who doesn’t? Mumsie used to rather enjoy a Zabar’s raisin-bran muffin as a breakfast treat, in the days when Michael still brought food up from the city, and quite enjoyed a spoonful of scrambled eggs, if anybody was having them. Very fortunately, on the rare occasions when they have been offered a few grains of caviar, after a birthday celebration, they have turned their noses up at it. Too salty? Too fishy? Who knows?

  If Leila came to stay more often they would probably develop more sophisticated palates, but by and large most cats are willing to try good cooking if it’s offered to them, which is more than you can say about a lot of people. Of course the amount of faith you can put in the taste buds of an animal that can also enjoy shreds of raw mouse or swallow a large insect whole with every sign of pleasure is questionable.

  In any event, Cleopatra thrived on French cooking, and like most Americans who settle down in Paris, soon became plus française que les français. During the winter months she developed bright orange patches on her fur, from sitting too close to the gas heater and singeing herself. She came to understand French, since when Leila was away she was sent to stay with a friend who knew no English. The friend would sigh with relief every time Leila returned to pick Cleopatra up, since she lived in fear each day she was away that the cat would die, as she was so old. But Cleopatra never did. She seemed to enjoy being carried through the streets of Paris, absorbing the noise and the strange smells, so very different from those of New York, morphing into une vraie chatte française, so much so that Leila worried about how she would adapt when she returned home after five years—a long time in a cat’s life, even one so old as Cleopatra.

  But her return was uneventful, and she settled easily into a new routine, commuting between New York City and Connecticut, where the conductors were considerably less cat-friendly than the flight attendants on Air France. Cleopatra would sit on Leila’s lap sleeping or looking at the scenery, and seemed to have a sixth sense of when the conductor was coming, at which point she would pop back into her bag and sit quietly, hardly even breathing.

  In 1982, she traveled cross-country by air to Los Angeles, where she survived only three weeks before dying. “Who can blame her?” as Leila says—she was thousands of miles farther away from Paris, and Los Angeles just didn’t seem to her a civilized city after Paris, a feeling that has been shared by a lot of other visitors, not all of them cats.

  Well, it’s hard, when you’ve grown used to looking at the rooftops of Paris through the window, and eating amusing little dishes flavored with garlic and shallots, and hearing French spoken, to end up in a small house in Los Angeles and two meals a day from the shelves of the local supermarket, a
nd poor Cleo, who was by this time twenty-six, a fabulous age for a cat, simply gave up and said adieu to it all.

  It used to be said that when good Americans die, they go to Paris, so perhaps it’s true for cats as well, and Cleo’s spirit roams the boulevards of Paris.

  At any rate, one would like to hope so.

  * Also quoted in a slightly different form in “Anecdotal Evidence,” by Eliot Weinberger, Conjunctions, 2003, and attributed by him to André Malraux, war-hero, novelist, art historian, and minister of arts and culture under de Gaulle.

  10. Cat-harsis: The Cat Life

  One of the huge, astonishing, and unexpected publishing successes of the late 1950s was a tiny, square, paperback book that sold for a dollar called The French Cat, by Siné, a French newspaper cartoonist, who used words including the letters “c-a-t,” together with lively drawings, to present both charming art about cats and a challenging word game. Of course, in the original he used the word “c-h-a-t” to build on, as in “entre-chat” (with a cat drawn as a ballet dancer)—il était français, quoi?—but as subsequently adapted into English by Simon and Schuster, it produced words like “cat-astrophe,” or “Cat-alina,” or “cat-erpillar,” or “cat-sup” (well, you get the idea—if not, see Chapter 10). Everybody in the editorial department of Simon and Schuster sat around thinking of words that contained the letters “c-a-t” for weeks, to the exclusion of much other useful business. As a result, Siné, who was a well-known figure in France, became (very briefly) famous overnight in the United States, and hundreds of thousands of The French Cat were bought, and no doubt still sit unnoticed today on many a bookshelf, largely forgotten, or hidden, since the book’s modest size tends to make it invisible, rather like a small cat hiding behind the books, appropriately enough.