The Receptionist (13 page)

When Miss Gilliatt was living with Mike Nichols, he was directing
Catch-22,
and the review fell during Miss Gilliatt’s six-month stint. Susan Lardner was asked to review it, presumably to avoid any conflict of interest yet keep the Gilliatt-Kael boundaries in place. Miss Gilliatt later lived with the
New York Times
movie critic Vincent Canby. It was widely believed that Mr. Canby was gay, so when Miss Gilliatt wrote the screenplay for the film
Sunday, Bloody Sunday,
a delicate web of crosscurrents accompanied Miss Kael’s review into print.
Th
e movie was about the plight of a woman who bonds with her boyfriend’s gay lover when he jilts them both. Miss Kael wrote that seeing the film was “like reading a novel that was very far from my life and my temperament,” which might have boded an unfriendly response. Yet she found that it cohered, and wrote, “Yes, there’s something there, there’s truth in it.”

Miss Kael worked briefly as a consultant to Warren Beatty. When Beatty’s film
Reds
opened in 1981, it may well have been Miss Gilliatt’s job to review it. However, she had been removed from the job by that time, the consequence of an unfortunate similarity between some paragraphs of her Graham Greene profile and one that had appeared in
Th
e Nation
a couple of months before. So Miss Kael reviewed
Reds
herself, conflict of interest be damned, and Miss Gilliatt stuck to fiction, at Mr. Shawn’s request. Yes, a dicey situation all around, and I couldn’t figure out how they worked it so as never to be in the ladies’ room at the same time.

I deemed it part of my job to “make nice” with everyone. Miss Kael and I had a jolly time sharing a table and some stiff manhattans at her first anniversary party. When Penelope’s nanny Christine had dental appointments and couldn’t look after Penelope’s six-going-on-seven-year-old daughter, Nolan—her daughter with the playwright of
Look Back in Anger,
John Osborne—Nolie sat at my desk and spent many an afternoon with me. She was very independent and didn’t require much in the way of attention, but I suppose it was those afternoons that led to my attending her seventh birthday party. It was held in the spacious digs Penelope had at that time on Central Park West.
Th
e adults present sipped Black Velvets (a combination of Guinness and champagne), and they were a starry bunch—Maggie Smith, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green, among others. Woody Allen sat with the children on the floor in front of the screen when we all watched a thirty-three-millimeter cut of
Young Frankenstein.
Long before the days of the flat-screen or the DVD.

But Nolan Osborne was only one of a number of eighteenth-floor offspring in whose lives I played a part. Perhaps it was the distance in miles from my own family that led to my closeness with the children of my “charges” at
Th
e New Yorker.
Alice Trillin thought it would be good for her daughters, Sarah and Abigail, to experience some of the domestic rites surrounding Christmas among Christians, so she arranged to bring them up to my apartment (I was living on Eighty-Fifth Street in Yorkville at the time) to roll out, decorate, and bake ginger cookies with me. We used my grandma’s recipe and put on white icing and red-and-green sprinkles. Sarah did the trees, Abigail the Santas, and I finished up with the stars. We did the same thing the next Easter with eggs and dye, using wax crayons to print our names on the eggs we decorated. I knew, to a greater or lesser extent, the children of a number of eighteenth-floor writers: Dwight’s sons, Nicholas and Michael Macdonald; Richard Rovere’s daughter, Ann; and of course my pals the Kahn boys. I also knew Bernard Taper’s sons, Mark and Philip, quite well and went up to the Rudolf Steiner School to watch them in a puppet show they wrote, costumed, and directed.

One of the things I appreciated most about the receptionist job was the way it expanded to allow me to try on a half dozen or so alternate lives.
Th
ere is something special about the responsibilities that rest with a house sitter, I discovered. No one, not the best friends of the writers involved, not even the nosy dinner guest taking an illicit peak into the medicine cabinet, ever gets a more inside view of the writers’ lives than the person given their keys while they are away. Certainly whenever I was that person my house-sitting duties became a sacred trust. In return, I felt that, along with the new closeness I felt to the owners, it gave me a privilege few people ever have—to slip into the artifacts of another kind of life and try it on for size.

Th
anks to Tony and Margot Bailey, I know what it is like to live in a historic landmark on the corner of Royal Hill in London’s Greenwich postal zone SE10, only a stone’s throw from the Greenwich Pier, where the
Cutty Sark
was on display in dry dock and where the Royal Naval Hospital and the Royal Observatory flank the bottom and top of a majestic sweep of lovely English lawn. In the Bailey home I was getting a peep into a gracious living style from Georgian times, translated into a cozier, domestic scale. I loved the peach-colored two-story entrance hall and the little studio off to one side, where Margot kept her paints, her huge potted moose plant, a good few of her paintings, and her favorite P. G. Wodehouse Penguins. I loved taking the Bailey springer spaniel, Daisy, out for her exercise twice a day in Greenwich Park, loved watching Daisy’s ears sail out perpendicular to her brown-and-white body as she topped the park’s green benches and bounded over beds of roses and impatiens, rushing to answer my call and to snuffle up the dog biscuit
(
pace
Mrs. Parker) that was her treat for being such a good girl.
Th
e Bailey cat, a neutered ginger male, was suitably imperious and aloof, and the final member of the menagerie, Rocket, was a tortoise with its name in white on its venerable back. Rocket lived under the rhododendron in the back garden and came out for cucumber, lettuce, and other greens daily around five.

Th
e Bailey kitchen was a delight, too, one wall bearing a large amber reproduction of the Bayeux Tapestry, and the opposite wall, open cupboards full of blue-and-white export china, with the wall above the windows a bright, definite red. Upstairs in the large, light master bedroom, I admired the little Rembrandt sketch in brown pen and ink. (Tony began his interest in artist biographies writing pieces about Rembrandt for
Th
e New Yorker
and turned them into two books. He went on to write about other artists, finally producing books on Vermeer, Turner, and Constable, with Velázquez soon to come.)

An exploration of the Bailey linen cupboard, which
occupied a prominent large-doored spot opposite the upstairs bath, was an education in itself in how much work it must be to run a household with a husband and three daughters. Noting the occasional darned spot in the all-white towels, I admired Margot’s Yorkshire frugality as she kept the same ones going year after year. She chose good quality to begin with, rough cotton terry, scratchy but pure. No noncotton threads need apply.

It was nice, going around Greenwich, from the shops on the high street, to the greengrocer, to the bakery across the road, until the clerks knew me to speak to and pass the time of day. Nice, too, to frequent the neighboring pub for the occasional cheese-and-pickle sandwich in the garden in the rear. It was almost like living an English life of the kind so well drawn in the Christie, Marsh, and Sayers mysteries I often went to sleep with. By the same token, the six weeks I’d spent living in rooms at Exeter College, Oxford, dining in Hall, and having coffee in the Common Room had given me a glimpse of English university life. I owed that glimpse not to a house-sit but to a course I took in English linguistic history the summer of 1966—the summer of the county ball.

My Italian adventure came the year I spent from November through April in Cortona, Tuscany. I was house-sitting a restored fifteenth-century farmhouse for the writer Ann Cornelisen, a wonderful gig I was put on to by my Talk of the Town chum Jane Boutwell. Built of local stone, it nestled up against the tower of a grand edifice known simply as the Palazzone. My Christmas cards that year had the best return address ever, and I loved feeling my way into the life, modern and medieval, still to be sensed among the stones of the interior stairway, the walk-in fireplace, and the giant white porcelain bathtub. Hand-painted crockery, homegrown wine and olive oil, free-range eggs and chickens were all laid on. I luxuriated in having the house cleaned and my clothes and cooking done for me by a
contadina
of leathery skin and a near-toothless but beaming smile.
Th
ose Cortona days were magic. I was sorry I couldn’t share them with every one of the people I loved.

In New York, while still going to the office daily, I several times moved my stuff to Calvin and Alice Trillin’s house on Grove Street to keep it safely lived in while the family was away. At work, Bud’s office was messy, even to the point of decrepitude. Bud (as Calvin Trillin was known around the office) covered an old studio couch in brown corduroy and then covered that in hundreds of regional and community newspapers he collected as he gathered stories for his Letters from America series. But at home, where Alice (whom he called “the conscience of Grove Street”) was also the decorator, all was a symphony of tasteful, unpretentious comfort with American colonial touches.
Th
ere I found that Alice and the girls were in evidence all around me just as they appeared in Bud’s references to them in his food pieces, later gathered in books like
Alice, Let’s Eat
and
American Fried.
I’d been to the
American Fried
book party held in the Central Park Zoo, and there were amazing things to eat, all deep fried and spread out on checkered tablecloths within roaring distance of the zoo cats. Back on Grove Street, the Trillin freezer held a full cache of wondrous bagels, which meant I didn’t have to go out on Sunday mornings in the rain.

Jane Kramer has written about fabulous
Th
anksgiving dinners she has served in distant places around the world and in her West Side digs in Manhattan. I know the New York digs firsthand from a summer when I house-sat and dog-sat for the family dog. Romeo was a large Normandy sheepdog called a Bouvier des Flandres, who spoke only French. My own French improved that summer, at least in the imperative mode. As I worked on “Assieds-toi, Romeo!” (sit), “Romeo, arrête!” (stay), and “Viens ici, Romeo!” (come here), I got acquainted with a New York subculture of dog walkers on the dog runs of the park.

Much later, Jane’s fond recall of the idiosyncrasies of her two-oven stove—frequently on the blink—brought back memories of my own timid tryouts of some simple summer meals in the best-equipped kitchen I’d ever seen.
Th
ink Julia Child plus Mario Batali. Jane was living part of the year in Paris, and accustomed to French cuisine, she’d brought back duplicates of every piece of equipment she’d need for those dishes in America, then did the same with the pots and utensils from the summer house in Todi. All that, and my needs seldom stretched beyond a pot for pasta and a pair of salad tongs.

Back on eighteen, the coffee and tea and cocoa on offer at a hot plate in the hall was run by me not as a concession but as my home kitchen. I spent hours one Christmas agonizing over which coffee mugs I could afford to buy to present to my favorites, five denizens of the floor—all men.
Th
ere was the senior editor William Knapp; the staff writers Bernard Taper, Jack Kahn, and Kevin Wallace; and the art department’s caption editor, the comic novelist Peter De Vries.

Bill Knapp, a great wearer of suits, had the look of one of those bankers who Jack had suggested in his memoir could reasonably be expected to turn in at the yacht club on West Forty-Fourth. He probably should have worked out more, and his high color was not a sign of ruddy good health. I think it was those hours he spent giving sensitive editorial strokes to Bob Shaplen’s Letters from Southeast Asia.
Th
e copy came in close to deadline; again and again, Bill missed his train to Greens Farms Road in Westport to stay and get it ready for print. I let him buy me a lunch or a drink from time to time because I knew it gave him pleasure to flirt with me in an uptight
wasp
way and I was too weak to deny him, and myself, that boost.

Bernard Taper, whose profile subjects included Balanchine and Pablo Casals, flirted more outrageously—he was, after all, a handsome fellow, the son of a well-connected California family, and his Jewish mother, like many a Jewish mother before her, had raised her son to believe he was a king. A nice king, but with royal prerogatives. I was not so inclined to accept those invitations because Tape, as we called him, had a wife named Phyllis who was my chum. As the not-as-handsome spouse—her best feature was a glowing smile—Phyllis seemed both brainy and vulnerable, and I sensed that Tape was the center of her emotional life.
Th
at may have been true of Peggy Knapp up in Westport as well, but she was a whiskey-voiced woman with plenty of confident swagger and I didn’t feel as protective of her.

Jack Kahn was one of the few people in the office who called Mr. Shawn “Bill.”
Th
ey went way back together, to the days when Shawn edited Jack’s dispatches from Europe during World War II.

After Harold Ross died and Shawn became editor in chief, a formality descended over his editorship that made it extremely difficult for even six-footers like Bob Shaplen to be anything but deferential in their dealings with him. Jack knew it pissed off his mates down on eighteen when he stopped in their doorways to announce casually that he was on his way up to nineteen to “see Bill.” So he did it every time.
Th
is gave him a gleeful kind of boyish pleasure, but I think it also cost him. Some resentment came his way because of it, and his reputation took some rather cruel and easy hits when he sold a three-part piece on Coca-Cola, and then went on to sell three-parters on corn, wheat, and ultimately the foodstuffs of the world.
Th
e other boys were not amused.