Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [26]
22 October
Well, I wouldn’t have believed it! One moment Harold was nudging me to look at the lights as we entered W. 45th Street: ‘Claire Bloom in The Innocents. Directed by Harold Pinter.’ ‘You may not see it again,’ he said jokingly, referring to the kind of speedy Broadway closing for which this town is notorious and which Simon Gray, for example, experienced with an earlier play. And now it seems it has happened. Will happen. And I never even noticed! Thought the reviews were really rather good, and the play, of course, marvellous.
28 October
Wonderful news. Harold has heard that he has got his liver back to normal after six weeks of not drinking. And what a six weeks: the New York failure, the nightmare of the first night. All drinkless.
4 November
Delighted that Jimmy Carter won the election. I like anyone who comes from nowhere, i.e. Cromwell (admittedly he is not much like Cromwell). I cannot see that his attention to God is any worse than other people’s concentration on making money.
10 November
George Weidenfeld’s party which has been designated Longford Reconciliation Night. I am standing chatting when Dada comes up pettishly and says: ‘Where is Harold? I want to shake his hand.’ Harold is in the Gents, but when Dada is determined on A Good Deed, there is no putting him off. Eventually poor Harold is winkled out of the Gents. His hand is solemnly shaken. Dada goes away, satisfied. Harold is then really happy at having a long talk with Mummy about poetry.
13 November
Suddenly wrote a jape in the hairdresser’s called No Man’s Homecoming in which all Harold’s characters from various plays got together and started chatting. Harold loves it and wants to circulate it to ‘those interested in his work’.
15 November
Back in New York at the Carlyle in 11B. Yellow freesias from charming maître d’hotel Mr Goldenberg, Dom Pérignon from Peter Sharp the owner. ‘Welcome back,’ say the lift man and even the telephone operator.
We loved staying at the Carlyle and did so for many years until the pound began to sag against the dollar and Harold said: ‘Have you noticed we’re the only people staying here who are not millionaires?’ So we took ourselves off downtown to the Wyndham. But I treasure memories of our Carlyle life and still have a tiny dish with a butterfly on it which mysteriously fluttered into my luggage to remind me of those halcyon days.
15 November, cont.
Ghastly night at the charity première of The Last Tycoon which Sam Spiegel insisted Harold attend. Unbelievably an anarchist group in the balcony attempted to laugh this subtle and romantic film off the screen! I kept going to sleep (jet lag) while this evil laughter rose and fell. Kazan the director did not attend but almost equally upset at hearing about it afterwards in the Carlyle Bar.
16 November
Beginning of my life in the New York Public Library. Young man at the information desk seemed to find my feeble enquiries ‘a pleasure’. (Very different from London.) Then I was ensconced like a princess in the Wertheim Study, financed by the great Barbara Tuchman in memory of her father because she twice had her purse stolen in the library. ‘Barbara Tuchman could afford it,’ said the official. ‘But she felt not everyone could.’ I admire the great historian B.T. more than ever.
So began a very happy time in our lives. I thought of Donne and his bridal poem: ‘O my America! My new-found-land’. In this case, America really was our newfoundland. Although we had both visited the US many times in our previous lives, we had never quite enjoyed before this feeling of freedom and novelty, which I suppose came from the fact that neither families (or previous lives) had travelled with us. Harold was rehearsing Tom Courtenay in Otherwise Engaged. I would walk all the way downtown to the library. The weather was sparkling: New York in autumn. Everyone we saw in the evenings seemed interesting, hard-working, women and men. We had our own domesticity at the hotel, ordering in from the delicatessen on Madison Avenue in a way which