Atlantic High (10 page)

We were all sprawled about in the one-room suite, on chairs, beds, a couch, the floor, including Captain Jouning and the two girls, Judy Harman and Diane Bowlus, cook and stewardess, and David Murphy, the first mate, and two movie men. At the end of an hour not only the wine but the bonhomie flowed freely, and the tasters provided dithyrambic pronouncements on the virtues or vices of the wine freshly poured into a plastic glass, of which there were at this point about 300 in the room. Van gradually felt it necessary to contribute an appropriate facial expression to characterize the wine he had just tasted, and in one case merely smelled, reacting in such mephitic disgust that I thought he might take the next plane out to the offending vineyard in France to beat up the owner. I told him the story, which he much enjoyed, about the fury with which Toscanini read in the papers one morning in Milan, midway through rehearsing what he had understood would be the world premiere of
Der Rosenkavalier
, that the opera had been performed the evening before in Vienna. Without notifying a soul or picking up so much as a briefcase, he hailed a taxi to the station, traveled to Vienna, then took a taxi to the house of Richard Strauss, rang the bell and, finding himself face to face with Strauss, exclaimed in reverent tones, “As a musician, I take my hat off to you.” Toscanini removed his hat. “As a human being,” Toscanini’s eyes spat out the fury, “I put it on ten times!” And ten times Toscanini removed and emphatically put on his hat; turning, then, back to the taxi, and to Milan to resume rehearsals. Van thought it was a funny story, but said he couldn’t think of any reason to take his hat off as a gesture of respect to this particular vintner, and Dick said maybe the vintner should be respected for the sheer audacity of getting his grape juice all the way to the Virgin Islands without being arrested. Dick noted in his journal, “Van refused to rate one Chablis, spurning it with the comment, ‘This horse definitely had diabetes!’” We were in a fine mood, but agreed that of the twenty wines only four were suitable for mass purchase, and Dick and I agreed to do some more scouting about the next morning for a wider selection, which we would taste at 5
P.M
. the next day aboard the
Sealestial
(“At what time will we meet aboard the
Sealestial
tomorrow to resume our wine tasting, Tony?”); and we adjourned, my companions and I going off to a fancy restaurant for dinner as guests of Dick, going (some of us) early to bed, waking in time to resume our chores.

The following day we set out. I had all along scheduled a 3
P.M.
take-off and there were reasons for this beyond the obvious one that there are always things left over to do in the morning, so it is better to plan to leave after noon. Along the way, during the preceding months, I had decided to attempt a documentary. Ever since, years ago, I saw the surfing film
The Endless Summer
, I have wished that something of the sort might be done for ocean cruising.
The Endless Summer
had one irreplaceable quality, and another which could conceivably be imitated. The first was the advantage of showing the viewer what it is like to visit the surfing beaches of the world. Each is in its way different. The beaches in Oahu are visibly different from those in southwestern Australia. But the oceans of the world, after you have left land, although they are capable of greater volatility than anything in biology, greater even than the caterpillar-turned-butterfly, are indistinguishable as to location, so that a scene of a sailboat between the Azores and Gibraltar would,
ceteris paribus
, be identical with a scene of a sailboat in Block Island Sound or between Tasmania and New Zealand. Problem number one.

The second quality of
The Endless Summer
is the breathless excitement of the narrator, whose name, if I ever knew it, I have forgotten. He had a kind of husky, romantic, understated exuberance that made the viewer—in my case someone indifferent to surfing—suddenly care intensely about the sport, appreciate it hugely. But in surfing, the virtuosity is most obviously that. Virtuosity in a successful cruise comprises the interaction of a few dozen elements, none of which is in itself photogenic or discretely romantic.

Still, I thought it worth attempting. My first, naïve notion was that Christopher Little should also take movies. I learned, rather abruptly, that I might as well have suggested to Isaac Stern that he also play the French horn. Photographers do one thing, cinematographers do something else, and the generic statement that both after all use film is as helpful as observing that ballet dancers and joggers both use their legs. That wasn’t all. Apparently no cinematographer worth hiring will travel to the bathroom without a sound engineer. This is not, I learned quickly, an affectation. You cannot do first-rate cinematography while also worrying about the infinitely complicated business of getting first-rate sound. And without that, no exhibitor will show anything not shot by Zapruder.

So Christopher Little brought to my house in Stamford for lunch a youngish cinematographer of vast experience who had won all kinds of prizes and had a chestful of credits, and we talked—or, more properly, I listened—for three hours. It was heady stuff. He talked blithely of spending one hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand dollars. He would certainly need one assistant but would prefer two. He had visions of midnight filming during which I and someone else—“maybe Gore Vidal, somebody really interesting, somebody you disagree with”—would discuss Immanuel Kant, or Joe McCarthy. It would be absolutely smashing, but
absolutely
the best documentary ever. Eventually he left, and I called Christopher into my quiet little music room so that we could decompress for a little while, and I thought long and deep on the subject and said that we should indeed attempt a documentary, but that it must be restricted to the first of the four legs of the passage. No point in ruining the entire trip for the sake of a documentary, even a great one. The man who came to lunch was not interested in the proffered terms, so I wrote out (to whom it may concern) a memo and, at his urging, sent it to Walter Cronkite, with whom I share a friendship focused to a considerable extent on our common thralldom to the sea:

And so it was that when we did leave St. Thomas, we left St. Thomas not once, but three times. Mark Dichter, as sound engineer, headed the team of which the other member was cinematographer David Watts. Both in their late thirties, tall, patient, experienced, models of tact throughout the six days we spent together, two of them turbulent. But however resolute their deference to our own preferences and requirements, they had a job to do; and that job required a comprehensive, cinematographic documentary of our leave-taking. This meant that the camera would be on board the first time we pulled out and ashore the second time, shooting us from a distance of about fifty feet. Tony, in his journal, described the technique: “…a wheelchair from the hotel and David perched crosswise in the chair with the camera on his knees. Mark pushed him down the dock like a proud father with his first son. That was the ‘dolly shot.’” The camera sees the boat pull out of the slip, make a left turn into the channel (and into the wind), head for the midship section of a huge passenger ship lying to along the main wharf, raise the mainsail and then turn right, heading out to sea.

The
third
time, Mark and David—and Christopher Little—were aboard what in the trade they call a “chase boat,” by which is meant a vessel hired to pursue the photographed object, permitting this to be done from different angles and from varying distances. We had the genoa hoisted by the time we were headed to the mouth of the harbor, and then quickly the mizzen sail; and we jibed to head west. We had in any event an hour’s westerly sail before we could round St. Thomas and head up toward Bermuda, on a course of ooo° (due north). That was the hour of photographers needed, and to oblige them we did a little exhibitionistic ballet, raising and lowering the sails, coming about, jibing, raising the spinnaker. Curiously, we managed to do all this without feeling in the least foolish. This was in part because for the first time the home team was actually working this particular boat. Danny, the spryest young sailor afloat, tore forword and aft, helping to run the large genoa through the narrow section between the head-stay and the forestay, secured on deck for contingent use. There was the usual confusion—the crossed lines, the bad leads, the missing winch handles—but there was plenty of gusto, and at no moment were we ever made to feel, by Captain Jouning and his thoroughly professional first mate David, who knew the vessel as one knows one’s old sports car, by word or deed that we were in any way maladroit. In due course the chase boat signaled that it had had enough, and I hove the
Sealestial
to (i.e., brought it into a state as motionless as possible, given a wind that is blowing and sails that are hoisted) while the photographers shakily boarded, with all their fancy equipment—an extensive operation, but satisfying because of the unquenchable enthusiasm of Christopher, Mark, and David, all of whom averred that
never in the history of photography!
had more beautiful pictures been taken of a more beautiful boat, more beautifully maneuvered, in more beautiful circumstances, human and natural. I thought their epithalamium on plighting their troth to
Sealestial
an auspicious moment to decree the beginning of the cocktail hour, the more so since I especially needed cheer, Captain Jouning having told me that he had not succeeded in making our brand-new Brookes and Gatehouse digital speedometer work, though he had been slaving over it for almost two hours now.

Some people like a functioning speedometer on a sailboat, some like one but are philosophical without it. I am a mad dog without one. Just as some people need tobacco, or sex, or alcohol, or
National Review
, I need a speedometer—so much so that at personal expense I ordered a fancy one to replace the plaything
Sealestial
had been getting along with. I ordered a beautiful machine that would record not only your exact speed to one one hundredth of a knot, but would also keep track of distance traveled, eliminating the necessity of the cumbersome taffrail log, that antique (but durable) device that measures distance traveled by trailing, at about 75 feet behind the stern, a propeller-like device that transmits its shimmy onto a mechanical register astern, via a line that twirls in exact synchronization with the blades. The residual problems being that the propeller device, while authoritative as regards the umbilical line, occasionally attracts sharks, which devour it (at fifty dollars per propeller, one hopes it is their last meal); and regularly attracts ocean dross—seaweed and like stuff—that binds the propeller, whose irregular movements then constipate the register, causing great pain to the dead-reckoning navigator. That my beautiful new speedometer, after all this planning, would not work was a blow that required deep reserves of manly courage to absorb.