A number of sports personalities, sports-related personalities, and newsmen and newswomen from the papers and television, the mayor of New York City, the governor of New York State, Cardinal Cooke, and almost two hundred people who just happened to be passing by gathered the other day in the mall at Madison Square Garden to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Madison Square Garden (there were three Madison Square Gardens before the present one, the first two really on Madison Square, and the third up at Fiftieth and Eighth) and to unveil a bronze statue of the goddess Diana, a duplicate of a statue of the goddess Diana which used to stand on top of the second Madison Square Garden.
Jack Dempsey was there, seated in a chair.
Dave Maloney, Phil Esposito, and Mike McEwen (the Rangers hockey stars) were there, and they stood behind Jack Dempsey, with their arms folded across their chests.
Joe Frazier was there, and he stood next to Jack Dempsey, with his hands folded across his chest.
A man wearing a toupee that made him look exactly like George Steinbrenner was there.
Jackie Stone, the television-news reporter, was there. After the taping of her report, she worried out loud about the angle at which her nose had been shot.
Howard Cosell, acting as master of ceremonies, was there.
Some of the people who were there made elaborate speeches. Some of the people who were there applauded the end of the elaborate speeches.
One man, whose name we didn’t catch, named, in his elaborate speech, some boxing event as the most electric moment in the history of Madison Square Garden. Cardinal Cooke, in his elaborate speech, said that Madison Square Garden and St. Patrick’s Cathedral were both a hundred years old this year. Howard Cosell began his elaborate speech, “I think you know the nature of the circumstances under which we are gathered here.”
After that, Mayor Koch, Governor Carey, and a number of the other guests, grabbing the ends of two pieces of gold cord, unveiled the statue. The goddess Diana stood stark naked on tiptoe with a drawn bow.
—June 18, 1979
Miss Jamaica
We met the current Miss Jamaica (“Joan McDonald, twenty-three years old, dance instructor at Wolmer’s Girls’ School, in Kingston; ardent supporter of dance and the cultural arts; has an interest in foreign languages; has two brothers and two sisters”) at a cocktail party the other day. Miss Jamaica, like most beauty queens, seemed vivid and buoyant. Her nails were very long, and they were painted with a red lustre polish. She wore a beige shirtwaist dress with buttons down the front, but the dress was buttoned only to halfway down the skirt. She wore brown shoes with very high heels. When Miss Jamaica laughed—and she laughed a lot—she bent over and snapped her fingers. Also, when Miss Jamaica laughed we saw that she had big, white, almost perfect teeth.
At the cocktail party with Miss Jamaica and her guests were newsmen carrying small Japanese cassette recorders with huge microphones. They asked Miss Jamaica questions about the political aspects of being Miss Jamaica. This annoyed Miss Jamaica slightly, and she made some little sounds (sucking air in through the mouth with teeth clenched).
Miss Jamaica asked her chaperon for a cigarette. Then she said, “I was chosen from a field of twenty contestants in Kingston. I won the best-personality and best-photogenic categories. I am a member of the Jamaica School of Dance. I am a lover of the cultural and performing arts. When I was a child, I was very athtetic—more athletic than anything else. I was pushed into—nicely pushed into—this contest. I was in my dance class one evening when one of the coordinators begged me, actually begged me, to enter the contest. I decided I had nothing to lose by entering. Right? Aha. As a matter of fact, I do think that anyone who feels she has the potential to be a beauty queen should try—without being pushed, like me. Not that I didn’t have any confidence, but I didn’t see myself as being a beauty queen.”
“What is your favorite color, Miss Jamaica?”
“Color? I don’t have a favorite color as such, but I do find that pastels look very good on me.”
“What foods do you like to eat?”
“I like to eat a little bit of everything. As you can see, I don’t have to watch my weight. I eat everything in the book.”
“What are some of the places that being Miss Jamaica has taken you?”
“I have been to Germany. I was in the Miss World contest. I didn’t place, but I understand I was very well liked. In London, I danced in bare feet just outside the House of Commons. This is my first visit here. New York is too crowded and fast-moving. Today, I had lunch at the World Trade Center. I got to see a view of Manhattan. I didn’t like it. It’s too ugly. Where are the mountains?”
—July 2, 1979
Hair
NEWS AND PHOTO TIP:
When: Tuesday, June 26—10:30 A.M.
Where: The Plaza Hotel (59th and Fifth Ave.) Barber Shop, Mezzanine.
Why: Actor John Schuck (of TV’s McMillan and Wife), who has a head of hair many men would die for, will have it all shaved off to play the shiny-domed Daddy Warbucks in the SRO Broadway hit Annie for three weeks (starting July 3) while the role’s originator, Reid Shelton, enjoys a well-deserved vacation. Garren of the Plaza will do the shaving, and Shelton himself will be there to offer Schuck, who will be making his Broadway stage début, advice on the care of the Warbucks dome.
A woman said to John Schuck, “John, a lot of my bald friends would like to have your head of hair, and here you are shaving it off.”
A man who was not bald said to John Schuck, “John, could you honestly say that bald men have more fun?”
John Schuck said, “Baldness brings a bit of authority. I think.”
A man with a camera said to Reid Shelton, who was wearing a white suit, “That’s a great suit, but isn’t it hard to keep clean?”
Reid Shelton said, “I bought it for publicity. I was doing The Merv Griffin Show and I needed something with a little flash to it. But they are very hard to find—white suits.”
John Schuck looked at the photographers jostling each other to get photographs of him and said, “The Normandy landings were nothing compared to this.”
John Schuck’s wife, Susan Bay-Schuck, who was standing nearby, looked at her husband’s head, now half shaved, and grimaced. Then she reached out and touched it and said, “It feels pretty.”
John Schuck said, “Why do I feel a draft?”
Reid Shelton said, “Oh, I’m glad John could come in. I need a vacation. I have been doing this for twenty-six months with only one time sick.”
John Schuck felt his head, now completely shaved, and said, “It’s the surface of the moon.”
A man said, “Boy, I have seen better heads on cabbage,” and everybody laughed.
Mrs. Schuck said, “Honey, it’s not funny-looking at all.”
Reid Shelton said, “Use a Norelco, I’ve told him. Use a Norelco.”
Mrs. Schuck picked up some of her husband’s hair from the floor and put it in a small brown envelope. She said, “If you get lonely, honey, you can open this and look inside.”
—July 9, 1979
Thirty Years Ago
A young woman we know writes:
Thirty years ago, Russia got the bomb; the Polaroid Land Camera was introduced, and sold for $89.75; the Methodist Church in the United States and Cuba had eight million six hundred and fifty-one thousand and sixty-two members; Tyrone Power married Linda Christian the day his divorce from a French film actress came through; Mickey Rooney married Martha Vickers the day his divorce from Betty Jane Rase came through; Lucille Ball remarried Desi Arnaz; Lady Astor said women should make the world safe for men; a survey found women in London too tired for social life; Dr. Benjamin Pasamanik was given the Lester N. Hofheimer Research Award (fifteen hundred dollars) for a study showing that Negroes had the same mental capacity as whites; Bill W., co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, told some psychiatrists that he had stopped drinking after accepting God; one of the five copies of the Gettysburg Address in Abraham Lincoln’s own handwriting
was sold to a Cuban at an auction for $54,000; Emperor Hirohito of Japan wrote a book about sea slugs, An Illustrated Study of Opisthobranchiata in Sagami Bay; a Gallup Poll found that the funniest American comedians were Bob Hope, Milton Berle, Jack Benny, Red Skelton, and Fibber McGee and Molly; the lost city of Peshawarun, Afghanistan, once used as a garrison by soldiers of Alexander the Great, was found; a broken plaster statuette of St. Anne, mother of the Virgin Mary, wept when Shirley Anne Martin, eleven years old, kissed it; Princess Margaret Rose of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was appointed head of the Girl Guides Sea Rangers; the Detroit Symphony cancelled its season because its musicians wouldn’t take a cut in pay; Ruth Williams, an ex-stenographer from London, joined her new husband, Seretse Khama, Chief-designate of Bechuanaland’s Samwangwato tribe; George Bernard Shaw said, “It is useless to go on ignoring the patent fact that Stalin is obviously the ablest statesman in Europe”; I was born.
That I was born thirty years ago doesn’t seem to matter to anyone except my mother, my father, their families, and their friends. When I say to someone, “Thirty years ago, I was born,” I can almost hear this running through their minds: “Yes. Yes. So you were born.”
—July 23, 1979
Noon
Where was everybody at noon on Monday, the tenth of September? At noon on Monday, the tenth of September:
We were at home, reading The Little Sister, by Raymond Chandler.
Don Clay, an interior designer, was sitting on a No. 3 Seventh Avenue subway train on his way to Wall Street. He had noticed, he later told us, that it was a beautiful day.
On the other hand, Edward Koch, the Mayor of New York City, was holding a meeting in his office. The subject under discussion was crime and public transportation. (The next day, the News carried a headline that read, “GARELIK FIRED AS TA COP BOSS.”)
Moreover, Liz Smith, popular gossip columnist for the News, sat in her apartment—twenty-six floors up, with a spectacular view of the East River—finishing the next day’s column. It was due at the paper at one o’clock, and the first paragraph read, “‘Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then,’ said Katharine Hepburn.”
Enid Hunter, proprietress of Enid’s, an antique-clothing store on Spring Street, stood in the doorway of her bedroom and looked around. “Today,” she said to herself, “I will clean up and redecorate. I will hang some new pictures here and I will change around the chairs there. Today—that’s what I will do today.”
Brooke Norman accompanied her mother, Marsha Norman, to the hardware store to buy some tulip bulbs and to pick up some photographs of Brooke wearing her new one-shoulder bathing suit. She heard her mother say that she would try to force the tulips—red and yellow ones—to bloom indoors by Christmas. Then she accompanied her mother around the corner to the bank to deposit the church receipts from Sunday’s service. Brooke Norman is almost two years old.
The attendant at the parking lot at Spring and Hudson Streets sat calmly in his shed. He looked out the window and waved to a woman passing, who did not wave back. A number of large trucks rolled by. Across the street, men went in and out of a topless bar that had a sign reading “Private. Members Only.”
Vince Aletti, an A. & R. man for R.F.C./Wamer Brothers Records, walked into the Strand Book Store. He went downstairs and stood in the section where they keep new books that are bought from book reviewers for a small fraction of the list price and offered to the general public at half the list price. Vince Aletti looked at the new half-priced books in stock. He looked at them for a long time, and then he said to himself, “The last thing in the world I need is another new book.” He then walked out of the Strand Book Store. (Later, he couldn’t remember if the sun had been shining or not.)
On the other hand, again, Reid Boates, the publicity manager for Doubleday & Company, was at a private luncheon in the company’s private dining room. The private luncheon was held in honor of a woman who is writing a book about Ruth St. Denis. (Later, Reid Boates said “Let me see” when he was asked by a friend to give an account of the luncheon.)
A man walked into an auto-parts store and asked the salesman for a positive crankcase vent valve for his car and instructions for installing it. (Later, the salesman remembered that the customer had said he was taking a long trip and had heard that a positive crankcase vent valve would help with gas mileage.)
A young woman was lying on the shag-carpeted floor of a house on Canal Street. As she lay there, she closed her eyes and listened to an old song by Rick Nelson called “That’s All She Wrote.” When the record came to an end, the young woman got up and placed the needle back on the record so that she could hear the song over again. Then, opening her eyes before getting up the next time, she saw a large dark-gray mouse hopping and running only about three feet away from her. The mouse hopped because his little feet kept getting caught in the shag carpet. The young woman screamed loudly once; she screamed loudly again; she screamed loudly a third time. She later told us that no one, absolutely no one, heard her.
—September 24, 1979
Notes and Comment
A young woman we know writes:
This morning, I was listening to the radio—I mean, I was ironing my shirt and the radio was on—and the disc jockey said that the Beatles were getting back together, that they were going to give a benefit concert for some important cause or other, and how great that would be. He said, “Can you imagine the Beatles back and playing together?” I imagined that, and while I was at it I imagined a number of other things. I imagined that I was in love with the man who discovered the principle of hydrogen bonding and that he was in love with me, too, and that it was all almost wonderful; I imagined that my favorite color was red and that my favorite words were “vivid,” “astonishing,” “enigmatic,” “ennui,” and “ululating”; I imagined that even though I hadn’t died I was in Heaven; I imagined that all the people I didn’t like were gathered up in one big barrel and rolled down from a high mountain into a deep, deep part of the sea; I imagined that all the books on my shelf had long legs and wore flesh-colored panty hose and that their long legs in the flesh-colored panty hose dangled from the bookshelf; I imagined that the trains in the subway had all the comforts of a private DC-9; I imagined that I had the most beautiful face in the whole world and that some men would faint after they got a good, close look at it; I imagined that I had different-colored underwear for every day of the year; I imagined that it was a real pleasure to be with me, because I was so much fun and always knew the right thing to say when the right thing needed to be said; I imagined that I knew by heart all the poems of William Wordsworth; I imagined that it rained only at night, starting just before I fell asleep, so that the sound of the rain would lull me to sleep, and that it stopped raining just before I woke up every morning; I imagined that I could run my tongue across the windowpane and not pick up, perhaps, some deadly germ; I imagined that all the people in the world were colored and that they all liked it a whole lot, because they could wear outlandishly styled clothes in outlandish colors and not feel ridiculous; and then I again imagined the Beatles back and playing together. None of it did a thing for me.
—November 19, 1979
Mayor
One day recently, at about half past twelve, some people with disparate professional interests gathered at the site of the first City Hall in New York City, on Pearl Street—now a vacant lot—and waited for Mayor Koch, the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commissioner, and an archeologist to say a few words about archeology, Old New York, immigrants, the Dutch, the city today, archeologists, the original shoreline of Manhattan, archeological digs in Jerusalem, archaeological roots in old Greece, and other things along those lines. The people were there at the request of the Landmarks Preservation Commissioner, a large man with large, very white teeth, which anyone could see when he smiled, and he smiled a lot. The Mayor was late, and these people whom the Landmarks Preservation Commiss
ioner had invited to hear him, the archeologist, and the Mayor speak wandered around almost aimlessly when they weren’t signing a piece of paper that said if they fell down and hurt themselves they wouldn’t sue anybody. Then the Mayor arrived, and suddenly all these people, with their disparate professional interests, and maybe even disparate personal interests, found a common ground: all attention was now focussed on the Mayor. He walked over to the Landmarks Preservation Commissioner and the archeologist and greeted them. Then, while the Landmarks Preservation Commissioner and the archeologist made their speeches, the Mayor stuck his hands deep in his trouser pockets, glanced up and down, knit his eyebrows, made creases in his forehead, unmade the creases in his forehead, turned to look at what the people behind him were doing, looked up at the blue sky, looked down at his shiny black shoes, rubbed the area above his left cheek and just underneath his lower eyelid with the tip of his left index finger, put his left hand back in his left trouser pocket, pursed his lips, unpursed his lips, rocked his head from side to side, turned again to look at what the men behind him were doing, squinted his eyes, unsquinted his eyes, pressed his lips tightly together, then stretched them out in a Cheshire-cat smile, looked up at some pigeons flying by, took his left hand out of his left trouser pocket again, and rocked his head from side to side again. Later, we asked the Mayor what was going through his mind during the time the Landmarks Preservation Commissioner and the archaeologist were making their speeches. Without missing a beat, the Mayor said, “I was thinking how proud I am to be the one-hundred-and-fifth Mayor of the City of New York.”
—November 19, 1979
Talk Stories Page 11
