Wry Martinis (42 page)

I was lucky, in an age in which houses seem to be getting smaller and smaller, to have grown up around some of the big ones. I think it’s because I had the run of such places when I was very young that I still tend to look on stately manses with affection but something less than awe. Thus I found myself in an immense, nineteenth-century former Rothschild
hôtel
in Paris a few years ago, tossing a Frisbee in the state dining room—a modest Louis XV affair full of
boiserie
and crystal, slightly less large than a basketball court. To me such houses have purposes their builders might not have foreseen: outside ledges to crawl along while horrified nannies threatened from fifty feet below; marble floors for bicycle riding and roller skating; laundry chutes for physics experiments with medicine balls.

When I finally read
Brideshead Revisited
I found myself on familiar ground: the ache for a vanished house in which one’s happiest days were spent. I wonder if psychologists have got around to classifying a Brideshead Syndrome, or does that fall too squarely into the problems-of-the-idle-rich category?

But like many relics of grander days, great houses are subject to peculiar ravishings. The Georgian-style house my mother grew up in, on a beautiful estate in Vancouver, British Columbia, was sold after my grandfather’s death in 1965. Some years later, I found myself in a movie theater watching Ann-Margret and Jack Nicholson in
Carnal Knowledge
rutting away in the same gardens where I used to play with my Teddy Bear. Not long afterward the new owner sold Shannon, as it was called, to developers. The house was carved up into apartments, and where
there had been lavender beds, roses, riots of sunflowers and cypress stands you will now find one hundred and ninety condominium units.

We buried my father’s mother not long ago, next to grandfather, by the hickory tree in the Quaker cemetery, in South Carolina. Camden was not yet in its spring glory, when the dogwood and azalea explode in white and pink. I remember it was always around then that I would come down from the north, sometimes calling her from on the road to announce my impending arrival with a carload of disreputable-looking college friends. “Oh, darling,” Mimi would always say, however inwardly alarmed at the prospect of our invasion, “how long can you stay?” Soon the car would turn up the white gravel driveway that slopes up over the terraced hill, tires crunching past pines and magnolia toward the house, its balcony purple and drowsy with great boughs of wisteria. The day of the funeral we drove there for one last look. The new owner had kindly called to give his permission, but we drove through furtively, like trespassers.

My grandfather had bought the house in the thirties after a turbulent career in revolutionary Mexico. It was forlorn then, sitting atop a blasted hill bitterly fought over during the wars of independence and secession. The house, Kamschatka, meaning “far off and lonely place,” had been named after the Russian province. When it was built in the 1850s, the house stood a full two miles from town, a long way by carriage. Legend has it that the slaves buried the silver to keep the Yankee soldiers from getting it, and that it is still there somewhere. Mary Chesnut, author of the famous Civil War diary, lived there. Her husband, James, had built the house for her so that she could entertain on a grander scale, and though we don’t know exactly what it looked like at the time of its building, even in its pristine state it could not have been as beautiful as my grandfather would make it almost a century later. What imagination he had. Even Tara, post-Sherman, looked grander than Kamschatka when he and Mimi first saw it.

How odd to find such vision in a man who had grown up the son of a Texas sheriff in the 1880s. He brought in over a half-dozen Italian landscapers and transformed the parched barren hill into a paradise of flowers and greenery, and added brick walls, patios, walkways and arbors, Palladian cottages and stables.

He loved water and built fountains—not nearly as grandiose as Brideshead’s, but more southern and languorous. You could hear the
one out front from the bedrooms; its splash gave a sense of the most profound tranquillity. One night my cousin Billy caught an enormous catfish down at the pond and brought it back in a bucket and put it in the fountain with the goldfish. The trauma of it all must have given the poor thing an appetite. The next morning there were no flashes of orange in the weedy murk, only a fat, digesting, bewhiskered catfish.

There was a ghost. (I know, I know, but hear me out.) Several times he woke up people who until then quite definitely did not believe in ghosts. He was said to be a cavalry officer who had promised to return from the war. Unable to keep his promise in life, here he was, keeping it in death. One night one of the guests was awakened by the sound of boots and spurs clumping up and down the hall. He came out of the bedroom and stared into the darkness. Then he looked up and suddenly there was the ghost, standing at the head of the stairs, his uniformed figure silhouetted in the moonlight. It never occurred to anyone that they should be afraid of him.

I remember the big, candlelit dinners when I was very young and allowed to stay up: Ella and Jeff bringing in great silver salvers of freshly shot roast squab and quail, the room perfumed with magnolia blossoms, forsythia, hibiscus and oleander.

On the wall in the dining room was the one valuable painting in the house, a dark oil of Andrew Jackson. If you looked closely, you could see the scar on his chin from when he was a boy and a British soldier had struck him for refusing to polish his boots. You had to really look for it, since Old Hickory had a lined face. But my grandmother liked that scar—it appealed to her innate American pride. So we’d keep on looking, poring over the great South Carolinian’s face until she found it—there! “I think that’s just a wrinkle, Mimi.” “Oh. You know, darling, I think you’re right.”

I hope the condominium units will never come to Kamschatka. I could handle it if they made a movie there, even one with nude frolics in the fountain with Billy’s catfish; but condos would probably drive even the ghost away. Meantime, I hear the new owner has filled it with children and noise, which is how it should be for great houses that live on after their builders have gone.

—
Architectural Digest
, 1985

I sensed there was something wrong right after the opening of Sunday night’s
The Beatles Anthology: Part One
when the announcer’s voice boomed that the evening was being brought to us by something called Pepcid AC. The AC stands for Acid Controller. You take Pepcid in anticipation of getting indigestion. The other two main sponsors of our collective walk down Penny Lane were a credit card designed by Ringo, and Ford Taurus wagon.

The next two hours contained forty-seven-odd commercials, not counting promos for the local TV news team that’s On Our Side. One ad for every two-and-a-half minutes of Beatles nostalgia, a hard day’s night indeed, considering that the only thing we learned that we didn’t already know was that Ringo was miserably hung-over when they shot his solo scene in the movie of that name, walking along the canal kicking bits of debris and muttering to himself angstfully. Ringo’s commentary made it clear that he was describing one of the immortal moments in modern cinema. (Ten bucks to any aging boomer who actually makes it all the way through
A Hard Day’s Night.) On Wednesday in Part Two, George reveals that he had turista during the beach scene in
Help!

Grateful as I was for Ringo’s now-it-can-be-told revelations—I already knew that the Beatles started in Liverpool, did gigs in Hamburg, and came to America in 1964 and went on the Ed Sullivan Show—the fact is his new credit card is much more interesting.

About halfway through I found I had stopped paying attention to the Anthology, despite the breathless alerts that an original Beatles song, “Free as a Bird,” was upcoming: “Stay tuned for the world premiere of the new Beatles song.” Instead I was fixating on the commercials. It was
the ads that fascinated, for they showed us what boomers truly care about most—ourselves.

Twenty-five years ago, when the Beatles broke up, the only acid my generation cared about came in windowpane, blotter, or Orange Sunshine. Now we have this yuppie Prufrock leaning over his wife’s shoulder as she prepares lasagna with spicy sausages, fretting that this will bring on esophageal Hiroshima. But he can rest easy—she has bought him acid controller. He can eat all the spicy sausages he wants! Now on to the day Paul and John first met…

What more is there to be said of Ringo’s credit card? For the past twenty-five years one has followed dear Ringo’s career, uttering, “Ringo, Pingo, Ringo,” then, “Say it ain’t so,” and finally, “
Duude
.” And yet you still can’t bring yourself to dislike him. He is what he always was—Ringo. Even the name was never quite on the level. He has become the Kato Kaelin of the Beatles. Where will he turn up next? In the Hawaiian sunshine, on a real estate infomercial? On the 900-number Psychic Hotline?
I felt this vibration in me head and I knew we were gonna be really big
. Stay tuned.

“We’re in our fifties now,” said the woman in the Ikea ad to her couch potato husband. “That hurts,” he replied, following up with a snappy rejoinder about the sound of one hand clapping. Zen and the art of Some Assembly Required?

Then there was Fran Dresher, nasal sex kitten of the ’90s, jimmying her thighs into Hanes’s Smooth Illusions. “It’s like liposuction without the sur-ge-ry.” Followed immediately by low-fat Tostitos Chips.
Bet you can’t eat just the whole bag
. Doubtless the next Beatles Anthology will be entirely brought to us by Olestra, the new fat substitute recently okayed by the FDA.

For aching boomers there was Tylenol Flu.
What? They’re giving your hospitalized father Advil? But don’t you know it’s got ibuprofen! Get him out of there, man, now!
Message (as Bush’s speech texts used to say): You have a cold and your parents are croaking. I was surprised not to see any Jacoby and Meyers law offices ads: Are you quite sure that Dad has made out his will?

Kodak was a major presence. The Grim Reaper is upon us! The memories must be preserved!
And this time we’ve figured out how to keep them from turning green after a few decades
. Notice how all those pictures of
you when you were a Cub Scout now make you look like something from
The X Files?

Cars had barely been equipped with seat belts when the Beatles were playing Shea Stadium. Now we must have not only dual air bags in our Volvos, but also side-impact air bags. Yes, I agree, I must have them too, even if this means karmically aligning myself with crash-test dummies. If James Dean’s silver Porsche had been equipped with air bags, he’d now be alive and endorsing nicotine patches.

“Tonight,” said the announcer between news of Ringo’s appearance tomorrow on
Good Morning America
and Ford Taurus “Making the Dream Come True”—what are we talking about here? a station wagon—in tones denoting The Second Coming, “you’re just minutes away from when the Beatles reunite.” Best of all, the Anthology is “coming to stores December 1. You haven’t heard everything yet!”

There was more? Mercedes, Xerox, Pizza Hut, “Home of the Stuffed Crust,” Arizona Jeans, “More attitude than latitude” (whatever that means), Motorola Pagers “You jumped fast enough to make Pavlov proud!”

Finally the great moment had arrived, after—literally—a countdown. 0:59 … 0:58 … 0:57 … Then there they were, sitting around a table, George, Ringo, Paul. Paul said, “We didn’t see how to do a reunion without John, but then we figured out a way.” He winked, and “Free as a Bird”—available December 1!—began. It was good to hear John’s voice again, but as the music played, you wondered how it all was playing with the man who wrote, “The way things are going, they’re going to crucify me.” Was he turning revolutions number nine? Had he reached, in anticipation, for the Pepcid AC?

—
The Washington Post
, 1995

A quarter-century or so ago, I saw a rather earnest movie done in the form of a documentary and narrated by a fictional scientist who has been drummed out of the scientific community for tiresomely asserting that insects are taking over the world. It wasn’t just that the little buggers would outlast anything humans threw at them and dance on our graves. No, no, this entomological Cassandra begged us to understand, in the sort of language we now get courtesy of Mark from Michigan—
it is all part of the plan
.