San Francisco Notebook

20 December 2008

Barry Humphries opens his San Francisco notebook

I am in San Francisco where I began an American theatrical adventure ten years ago. It is a beautiful and stylish town but it is impossible to enjoy a stroll in the city centre without being pestered by beggars. Not seldom hostile, these pungent tatterdemalions seem to be accepted by the locals as though they existed, like the cable cars, Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge, in order to lend their city its special identity, as did the flower children of the Sixties.

During the big sales last week, the walk from Saks to Neimen Markus was like struggling through a crowd scene in Les Misérables. Marie Antoinette populated her park with faux milk maids, shepherds and picturesque peasants, and a whimsical 18th-century grandee — was it Beckford? — liked to decorate his estate with peasants, banditti and beggars who would slip into their habiliments before dawn, and take up their assigned positions in grottos and follies. Perhaps the beggars of San Francisco are really actors employed by the city to enliven its pavements, or perhaps they are former hedge-fund managers and stockmarket brokers, America’s nouveaux pauvres. I recall a rhyme from my childhood which always produced a frisson of fear:

As the nicely dressed Christmas shoppers and well-heeled townsfolk steer themselves past mendicant claws and rattling cups, turning unseeing eyes on scrawled placards bearing words like ‘Hungry’ and ‘War Victim’, they must feel a faint premonitory chill; a fleeting vision of the future.

At a Thanksgiving dinner here the other night a woman on my left, whose name may have been Shirlee-Anne, told me how much she adored a French singer called Edith Pilaf. She may have been a close relation of a woman I know who called the Greek singer Nana Moussaka and the New Zealand diva Piri Piri Te Kanawa, or the lady I heard in a London restaurant ordering, rather loudly and confidently, a caftan of wine. During the meal, which featured delicious dishes incorporating pumpkin in various disguises, I became fascinated by Shirlee-Anne. She wore a strange knitted A-line smock of fawn and grey wool which descended in scallops to the middle of her sturdy calves, giving her the appearance of a dusty lampshade from which no light would ever be diffused. She also wore a thin omniscient smile and when she learnt that my wife had attended a birthday party for Prince Charles she asked ‘Is his mother still alive?’ ‘Don’t you think that if the Queen of England had died you might have noticed?’ snapped my normally polite wife. ‘I know a few of you Californians can be rather insular but surely the Coronation of King Charles III would have come to your notice?’ Shirlee-Anne’s little smile intensified. ‘This is California,’ she said. ‘We’re not all interested in the British royal family.’ Choking on a turkey breast, I realised that I slightly enjoyed the surge of rage and adrenalin which Shirlee-Anne had engendered. Later, my friend, the sapient Amy Tan, also a Thanksgiving guest, told me ‘every holiday dinner and all weddings and funerals need the presence of some irritating person or drunken uncle to unify the other guests, and provide fodder for us writers’.

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