Lucking Out - James Wolcott [117]
Since they stopped paying me to watch television, I don’t do it much any more: M.A.S.H., maybe, and Lou Grant on Monday nights; The Rockford Files on Fridays. (I would like to think James Garner is modern man. I used to like to think Dirk Bogarde was modern man. Modern man is probably Captain Kangaroo. On the other hand, why is everybody always kissing Yasir Arafat? “… and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red reek of rapine in his fur, with merciless bright eyes scraped in the earth, listened, scraped up the earth, listened, scraped and scraped,” said James Joyce in Ulysses.) The Pope, of course, got me out of bed. But ordinarily I am upstairs listening to Joni Mitchell and reading Kierkegaard.
Idiosyncratic as Leonard’s allusion-clustered prose was, his Private Lives column exemplified the Times’s thrust into lifestyle, service, and trend-spotting features under the managing editor, A. M. Rosenthal, who gleefully pirated Clay Felker’s carbonated formula for New York magazine and brought out the Weekend Edition, which begat the Sports, Home, Science, and Living sections. Like Allen, Leonard in Private Lives had a specimen-pinning eye and a psychoanalyst’s ear for the overthunk vanities of sophisticated brunchers tangling up their nerves on the soundstages of their overarching self-importance. Meanwhile, the spires of Manhattan stood by like obelisks, unmoved by such dramas, having witnessed millions of cast changes before.
But Woody’s Manhattan was more than just a study of some private lives in the imperial city, a matte exhibition of love and confusion from the vantage point of Table 8 at Elaine’s, his personal table. (It is at Elaine’s where, against the Altmanesque rustle and bustle of egos, we first meet the Amazon nymphet Tracy, played by Mariel Hemingway, who, when asked the aboriginal New York question, “And what do you do?” answers with guileless aplomb: “I go to high school.”) Visually, the movie joins the social and the spatial dimensions of the city together in tense embrace. For real estate was about to become everyone’s demanding mistress. Compared with the tiny, rattletrap apartments of Annie Hall, the interiors of Manhattan look like shadow boxes, shipping containers for larger ambitions. By 1979, affluence has found room to stretch its bony arms, freeing more breathing space for the psychological fidgets and romantic quandaries of Woody’s ensemble. The fading hippie-boho spirit poured into the Modigliani string-bean figure of Shelley Duvall in Annie Hall (she was the Rolling Stone baby journalist who found a concert featuring a robed, garlanded guru “transplendent”) is nowhere to be found in Manhattan, everyone being too busy beavering away at their careers. “In Annie Hall, Diane Keaton sings from time to time, at a place like Reno Sweeney’s,” wrote Joan Didion in a disdainful notice of Manhattan in the New York Review of Books. “In Manhattan she is a magazine writer, and we actually see her typing once, on a novelization, and talking on the telephone to ‘Harvey,’ who, given the counterfeit ‘insider’ shine to the dialogue, we are meant to understand is Harvey Shapiro, the editor of The New York Times Book Review.” Actually, it’s so inside it’s pitch-dark, but let it go. The keenest perception Didion has concerns that famous list of things worth living for that Woody confides to his tape recorder, a roll call of redeeming greatness for the mediocre crapitude of existence that includes Groucho Marx, Willie Mays, Louis Armstrong’s “Potato Head Blues,” and Flaubert