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Saturday 30 August 2008

The lives of others

Taki lives the High Life

I never knew what his name was, or what his father did for a living, and I guess I will never know, but I somehow felt sad that it was all over. Last week, during a short heat wave, a maid came in to hoover. She had a broad Slavic face and was middle-aged. It was the weekend and most people had left for the Hamptons. The maid carefully took off her clothes, folded them neatly in a corner, and proceeded to clean the room in her bra and panties. It was a very funny, New York scene. The flags are still up but the blonde’s picture is long gone. The room is quiet and dark. The end of an era.

The great New York writer E.B. White said that the city will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy. Very true. When I would occasionally play hooky from school after a sporting meet and go into Times Square, it had not as yet evolved into a gauntlet of drug-dealers and porn parlours that it became until Giuliani. There were cheap movie houses lining 42nd Street, where for 25 cents one could escape from the boredom of school and regulations. That was privacy and then some. Today, midtown is a lonely place, clean and safe, Disneyised, a bustling suburban shopping mall full of megastores, the same stuff Americans can find anywhere in the United States. If you gave 25 cents to a beggar — the price I paid when young to dream happy dreams — he’d most likely throw it back at you. A mediagenic, illuminated blur of people, cars, lights and moving electric surfaces do not inspire dreams or a feeling of belonging. Advertising carnivals can be very lonely places.

The Upper East Side, of course, has remained unchanged. Some old-timers mention the fact that eight blocks away from where I live Rudolph Valentino lay in state, the trouble being that no one under 60 would know who Valentino was. (No, not the dress designer, someone even more famous...) Old dad used to call the great silent screen star Rudolph Vaselino, but always added that the greasy one danced the tango like no other. For those of us raised on movies of the 1930s and 1940s, Central Park West’s beautiful beaux-arts and art-deco apartment towers were the backdrop to our vision of urban glamour. Every time I walk by on my daily constitutional round the park, I look at those buildings and I think I can hear witty badinage, the music of Cole Porter and faintly see Fred Astaire in his white tie and tails. New York is nothing like Paris or London, and certainly it’s not El Lay. Driving up a deserted Park Avenue last Saturday night, the place looked the loftiest of cities. Manhattan has expanded skyward because it had nowhere else to go. As the lights begin to go out in the pre-dawn dark I think of these past 60-odd years I’ve lived in this place, and all the changes that have taken place. The widening distance between the urban poor and the grossly rich, the diminishment of charm and tone in the city caused by violent immigrants, even the little boy whom I watched grow up from my kitchen window. I wish him well.

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