High life | 4 June 2015

The last week in Gotham was exceptional fun. I saw a Broadway play, Finding Neverland, compliments of the producer, my NBF Harvey Weinstein.It had me clapping with one hand due to the operation, and standing with the packed theatre for the ovation. Shows how much the critics who panned it know. The audience loved it, as did I. It’s an uplifting, wonderful play about J.M. Barrie and the children. Then there was the blind black guy in Brooklyn who told me, ‘You’re too pale for this neighbourhood.’ Go figure, as they say in that part of town.

I’m always sad to leave the city, especially with the end of spring. I miss its mixture of glitz and grit, of races and colours, of violence and pleasures, of misfits and millionaires. But saddest of all is seeing from up close a culture in decline. Someone called Gotham a vast ornithology, and that it certainly is. Not many writers take it on nowadays, but they sure used to — with elegance and economy, starting with E.B. White and Joseph Mitchell. I suppose political correctness inhibits scribes. It’s a bit like touch boxing: one goes through the moves, but very carefully, so as not to hurt.

In an advice column in the New York Times, a reader asks for guidance concerning household help. The help, apparently, is restricted to using service lifts. (Nothing unusual as far as I’m concerned.) The answer the ‘expert’ gives is PC at its most egregious. It describes the building as ‘white-glove’ — a modern-day Downton Abbey. It calls ‘household help’ a poor choice of words, a euphemism for language used ‘even earlier, like servant’. It suggests that ‘personal assistant’ would be less distasteful.

See what I mean about writers being afraid to take the city on? When one can’t call a spade a spade, one calls him or her — I don’t know — ‘buddy’, ‘Your Grace’? Yet turn on the idiot box and all you see is porn, violence and bad white guys killing minorities.