Memories of The Great and The Good (4 page)

“D'you want it,” queried Garner, “with the bark on or off?” 

“Off!”

“Captain, you're beat.”

Until he was ninety, Garner attributed his great age to bourbon and water, and then, when he was ninety-nine, to “layin ‘ off bourbon and water. The other night he took a fever, went into a coma, and died, on the verge of his hundredth year. I was about to say there is nobody left who is like him. There is one man. Lyndon Johnson is like him.

I
met him first on a winter's afternoon in what I almost slipped into calling the vestry of his suite at the Plaza Hotel in New York. I pressed the electric button at first timorously, then boldly, then incessantly, and was about to turn away when the door was opened by a pretty young woman, a secretary, or granddaughter, or vestal virgin perhaps, who beckoned me into the hushed gloom behind her through which I expected to see sacramental tapers. Then she nodded and vanished down the corridor.

It is difficult to avoid these liturgical images in introducing him because his reputation, his public pronouncements, his photographs—the majestic head, the marble serenity, the Miltonic collars, the cape of Superman—all conspired to suggest a sort of exiled Buddha, a high priest scuttled from his temple by the barbarians, one of those deposed monarchs so frequently seen around New York who gamely try to convey that a freewheeling democracy is just their speed. The room he sat in was seedy, in a lavish Edwardian way, and no single furnishing—no chair, fabric, window casement, carpet, lintel, or doorknob—appeared to have been invented much later than the June of 1867 in which he was born. He lay stretched out on a sofa, his fine hands folded on his lap, a shawl precisely draped around his shoulders.

He looked like Merlin posing as Whistler's Mother. Indeed, there was always a curiously feminine grace about him, but it was nothing frail or skittish. He looked more like a matriarch of a pioneer family, one of those massive western gentlewomen who shipped the piano from Boston round the Horn, settled in the Sacramento Valley, defied the Argonauts as they set fire to the cattle barns, and, having finally reclaimed their Spanish land grants, came into their own again as the proud upholders of old manners against the derision and ribaldry of the new rich.

In writing about him as a character delineated by Henry James, or sentimentalized by Gertrude Atherton, I hope that I am not so much arranging a suitable atmosphere as conveying a psychological shock. One expected a tyrant, a man constantly caricatured by the press as a bellowing iconoclast. And here was a genial skeptic whose habitual tone was one of pianissimo raillery.

It may be that I knew him too late, when the fire and brimstone were all spent, when whatever lava had been in him in the turbulent days had cooled and hardened in the enormous, firm dewlaps that started at his nostrils and seemed to be tucked away not far above the clavicle. There must be some explanation for the discrepancy between the legend and the man. Perhaps his long decade of neglect in his sixties, when he had to borrow from friends to retrieve a mortgage on his own home, is as good as any.

At any rate, all my apprehension vanished as he threw me, from a seniority of forty-odd years, the flattery of calling me “young man” and asking what was on my mind. It was a project that was to waver and die and come alive again in his eventual appearance on a television program. He dismissed it at once as an absurdity, since it involved a medium only slightly less debased than the movies. I told him that no sponsors would interrupt his sermon, the models he used would be of his own choosing, he could say exactly what he pleased.

He wafted the whole vision aside as a bit of vulgarity for which he would not hold me responsible. Then he slipped, from total and inexplicable free association, into a diatribe against Franklin Roosevelt. In some dim but infuriating way, Roosevelt, it seemed, was responsible for the triumph of the rabble, for the “agony of our cities, for skyscrapers, for the United Nations building (“an anthill for a thousand ants”), for the whole mushroom fashion of what he called “Nuremberg Fascist Modern,” and for the coming destruction of the Edwardian pile we were sitting in (“the only beautiful hotel,” he said bafflingly, “in all of this god-awful New York”). About two hours later, by which time he had murmured most of the slogans from his latest book, he chuckled and said: “Tell me, Alistair boy, did you ever meet an executive, a president of a corporation, a button-pusher, who had a smitch of aesthetic in his makeup?” I said I never had.

“Very well, then, when do you want me to appear and where?”

We blocked out the feature and arranged rehearsals, and went around for weeks in euphoria, which was shattered when he passed down an ultimatum through an emissary: “No rehearsals! Rehearsals freeze the natural flow of the human personality.” This sounds awful in print, but all such sententiae were delivered, either in person or over the phone, in the delicate and warmly modulated voice which had for fifty years seduced wax manufacturers, oil tycoons, bishops, university boards of trustees, and at least one emperor of Japan into commissioning cantilevered Aztec structures most of which were later rescinded, condemned as unsafe, or merely paid for and deplored.

On the day of the show, we asked to pick him up after his midday nap and brought him to the studio well ahead of time. He had evidently forgotten all about the fiat against rehearsals, and stood by a model of his Bartlesville, Oklahoma, building and watched the stage manager chalk in a position for him on the floor. “What is this?” he asked, pointing down at the tiny prison yard he was meant to move in. I recalled to him the actor's famous crack about television (“Someone stuck in an iron lung”) and he smiled and seemed to be pacified again. The director's voice came squawking over the loudspeaker: “Mr. Wright, will you turn and face the model?” He must have thought it was God's commandment, for he raised his head and said to the air the appalling syllable, “No.”

He thereupon sauntered off to get his hat, cane, and cape. I chased him and got him off for a stroll around the dark cavern of the studio that lay beyond the lighted set. It was a tight moment. He needed to be coaxed, but he could spot a fawn at twenty paces, and flattery got you nowhere. We had only an hour to go, but he took my arm and we pattered in circles in the gloom while the director watched the minute hand of the clock. I agreed that television was a catch-as-catch-can business but suggested it was hardest of all on the cameramen, “the real craftsmen.” I mentioned that they could not trust to luck, they had to block their shots and know where the prima donnas intended to move. Five minutes later, he was back on the set, as malleable as an aging cat. The scripted outline was forgotten. We simply sat and talked, and to comatose or apoplectic millions he trotted out such unashamed ad libs as: “The interior decorator is simply an inferior desecrator of the work of an artist”; “we are all victims of the rectangle and the slab, we go on living in boxes of stone and brick, while the modern world is crying to be born in the discovery that concrete and steel can sleep together”; “we should learn from the snail—it has devised a home that is both exquisite and functional.”

After this first bout with the most highly advertised ego of our time I ran into him in various places or was asked to call on him, and I probably presume in saying that my failure to discern any conceit in him but only a harmless vanity, penetrating observation, and always his beautifully cadenced good sense was due to one of those accidents of personal chemistry that seal confidence in an instant and dissolve mountains of fear or antagonism that can never be argued away by two uncongenial people.

The last time I saw him, a year ago, I was to “moderate” a debate in Chicago on the present condition of our cities. The panel consisted of real estate men, a housing commissioner, a young professor of architecture, and Wright. It was sponsored by a steel company that legitimately hoped to popularize “the steel curtain,” which is now the first constituent of most of the skyscrapers going up. Wright outraged his sponsors, and almost broke up the forum, first by professing boredom over the arguments of the buildings and real estate men and consequently walking out to take a nap; and later by indicating a diorama advertising the steel curtain and saying: “These steel frames are just the old log cabin, they are all built from the outside in, first a steel frame, then they bring in the paper hanger, and what have you got?—a box with steel for horizontals instead of lumber.”

Driving back along the Chicago lakefront he had done most to glorify, he ridiculed the glinting skyscrapers and the whizzing automobiles (“rectangles on wheels”), but he could work up no steam or bile. His only genuine sigh was for the universal misuse of steel, “this beautiful material that spins like a spider and produces a tension so perfect that you can balance a monolith on a pinpoint.” I felt that this lament of the city he secretly adored was a little recitation for Buncombe. In his ninetieth year, he could afford to be agreeable to everybody, though he tried valiantly to resist the inclination. After all, it had been forty-eight years since he had pioneered the sweeping horizontals of the first “prairie house” (which would pass creditably anywhere as a distinguished “contemporary” house), fifty-one years since he had built the first air-conditioned building, fifty-four years since the first metal-bound plate-glass door, forty-eight years since the cantilevered floor, poured concrete, and all the other explosive solecisms that are now the grammar of the modern architect.

One imagines him arriving this weekend in Heaven, tapping his malacca cane against the pearly gates to test the strength of the carbonate of lime and greeting Saint Peter with the disarming tranquil gaze and the snowy head held high. He will ask to see the “many mansions I've been hearing about for nearly ninety years,” and will be taken on an obsequious tour only to discover, without surprise and without regret, that there is a distressing reliance on Gothic; that there is nothing so bold as the cantilevered balcony over the waterfall in Bear Run, Pennsylvania; that nothing has been done to dampen with colored glass the enormous glare of the light that never was on land or sea. He will say as he turns away in boredom from his guide: “The principle of floating all these structures on a more or less stable mass of cumulus clouds is no newer than the cushion of mud I put under the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo in 1922, with the express purpose of withstanding (as it did) the wrath of God. I understand He has been sulking ever since.”

[The Nazi invasion of France in the spring of1940 did not ignore Wodehouse's house in the South. To his immense surprise, he was arrested and taken to Silesia, where he was kept as a prisoner of war for eighteen months, unaware of the disasters inflicted on the Lowlands, on beaten France, not least on his countrymen and -women in the Battle of Britain
.

Just as he was due to be released, as a sixty-year-old, he was invited to do some broadcasts to America (not yet in the war) over the Nazi radio in Berlin. A political innocent all his life, and never more so than now, he readily agreed as a way, he said, of repaying his American readers and friends for their books, letters, and general concern for him
.

Today, the broadcast scripts read as lighthearted accounts of prison life in a German rural town at any time in the twentieth century. But read by victims of Nazi saturation bombing they were an outrage and caused a furor in Britain. There was serious discussion in the House of Commons of prosecuting Wodehouse for treason after the war. The uproar eventually died down, but he never again went back to England.]

L
ong Island may fairly be seen as a fish nosing into the North American mainland at Manhattan. At the tail end, a hundred miles east into the Atlantic, there are two fins, widely separated, which enclose the large Peconic Bay. The north fin, called the North Fork, is inhabited by the survivors of original Colonial settlers and by the descendants of early twentieth century immigrant Poles, who are unpretentious, hardworking, pure and good. The south fin, or Shore, is inhabited by the rich, the bad and the beautiful, since the Second World War especially by affluent stock manipulators, television producers, interior decorators, actresses and their preying ten percenters.