Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [27]
17 November
In a theatrical pub on Broadway I encounter the playwright Trevor Griffiths. He criticizes me for going on TV book shows such as Melvyn Bragg’s; I criticize him for rewriting The Cherry Orchard from his own point of view to show Mme Ranevskaya not a bourgeois woman, etc. etc. Griffiths to me: ‘Well, what are you doing in the NYPL?’ Me: ‘Rewriting Gibbon from my own point of view to prove he was a devout Christian.’ Well, Harold was pleased as he had felt very indignant about The Cherry Orchard since he reveres Chekhov.
18 November
Went to No Man’s Land. The best performance I have seen. The new Foster, Michael Kitchen, brilliantly attractive and perky, making a great difference to the first act. The Knights had honed their work. We took Michael out to Joe Allen’s with his girlfriend Joanna Lumley of Avengers fame. Highly intelligent as well as pretty.
23 November
Party at the top agent Milton Goldman’s. Leonard Bernstein had a long talk with Tom Courtenay, over my live body, about music. His gestures were terrific and swooping, but the noises he made were more like Indian war cries than Schubert. Tom, very politely: ‘The trouble is, you’re a conductor. I think we express things differently.’ Later I asked Harold whether I would ever meet his parents as, apart from my curiosity, they must feel curiosity. Harold said they would dread something new and strange. I don’t realize till later that he is really the one dreading it because he’s been through it once before.
The Pinters disapproved of the fact that Vivien was not Jewish in 1956, compounded by the fact that Harold by mistake – as he could never explain since it would just have made it worse – got married on Yom Kippur.
24 November
Delightful American manners: two examples. Brendan Gill of the New Yorker came over to our table at the Algonquin where I was having lunch with Ivan Morris. I congratulated him on something or other. Gill, with great courtesy: ‘I could not listen to your charming remarks if I did not mention that I have given The Last Tycoon an excoriatingly bad review.’ Then my purse is stolen, in the twinkling of an eye, in the New York Public Library. Black security guard, 6′5″ at least: ‘It is the custom, Mrs Fraser, in the United States, even if it is not appropriate to the present occasion, to wish you Happy Thanksgiving. So – Happy Thanksgiving.’ And we solemnly shake hands.
25 November – Thanksgiving
Walked across the park to our friends the writer and economic historian Alexander Cockburn and Emma Rothschild at 3 p.m. Huge feast. Then we went for a walk round the reservoir, Alex sporting the black hat of a mugger, also a thick stick of anti-mugger, under a sickle moon. I suppose it was highly dangerous but somehow a Thanksgiving lunch, lasting three hours, had stopped us noticing. ‘This is your water, New Yorkers, keep it clean’ reads a sign on the high fence round the reservoir. Would this really deter a potential suicide? A sense of civic duty at the last moment?
1 December
Finished The Wild Island, as the Scottish mystery is now called. Harold read it. All about my Scottish past, and Hugh’s relations, but not close ones. Meanwhile a visit to the Beinecke Library at Yale (with Emma Rothschild) and the Pierpont Morgan Library has restored my taste for Charles II. Loved reading the King’s saucy notes to his pal Taaffe. Also in the Pierpont Morgan, King Charles’s hand-written, evidently furious declaration that he had never been married to anyone except Catherine of Braganza. Described the thrill to Harold, who says: ‘Yes, that’s how I feel about old cricket scores.’
11 December
Last day in New York and with Harold – for three weeks. During which I’ve got to face the divorce, also Christmas. At my own request I give lunch to three playwrights, Simon, Paddy Chayefsky (who is all I hoped from that wonderful play The Latent Heterosexual) and Harold. Chayefsky never draws breath, but nor does Simon so they are a good foil for each other. Chayefsky: ‘Playwrights like each