It was a real index of the standing of Sir Christopher Meyer, the outgoing British ambassador, that the pleased and porcine face of Karl Rove could be seen at a valedictory dinner at the embassy that British foreign secretary Jack Straw hosted. Since the Iraq crisis deepened, Washington’s VIPs are all on lockdown. Condi, Rummy and Powell never go out anymore. By 10 p.m. Bush himself is tucked up in bed, allegedly sleeping like a baby. Powell’s joke among friends is that he sleeps like a baby, too — he wakes up every two hours screaming.
Contrary to what Europeans imagine, especially if they saw the jingoistic mania at the Super Bowl, the angst in New York and Washington is as strong as anything overseas. But unlike in Europe there is a huge desire here to want to go to war, which is weirdly different from a desire to go to war itself. We listen dutifully to the many excellent reasons to feel scared and vengeful toward Saddam, but the desire for a war is like a movie that fades even before you’ve reached the parking lot. It’s a syndrome best thought of as the Gung-Ho Disconnect.
The syndrome was everywhere apparent at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York when Paul Wolfowitz came to make the case for regime change. There was an eager sense among the wonks and big shots at this brainy networking salon that Wolfowitz’s address would be the one that finally reeled in their doubts. But his address was more of the same puzzlingly amorphous certainty.
Of course, there are plenty of superficial reasons why Americans want to want to go to war. The cable TV news community because the alternative is yet more months of seeing ratings tank from opining on stasis. Wall Street because business is stagnant with caution and anxiety (the money guys see no one in the White House or the Treasury they can relate to like Clinton’s savvy financial guru Robert Rubin). Hollywood because all this not quite going to war is like bad sex — tense and boring, and not worth living through unless there is a big climax at the end. Magazine editors because they are sick of asking themselves whether a cover of Cameron Diaz with legs akimbo is “appropriate” when war looms (they run the cover anyhow). Main Street wants to want war because the thought that our leaders might be making a catastrophic blunder is simply too painful.
But beyond these sectional self-interests there is a deeper unease. Americans long to have their moral energies roused, really roused, and give their hearts to sacrifice. Franklin Roosevelt did it with his pledge to the Four Freedoms, JFK with his “ask what you can do for your country” inaugural.
But Bush just can’t get there. In his State of the Union pep rally a smirk of privilege hangs in the air even as he goes for maximum gravitas. He eye-sweeps the House chamber with stirring talk of freeing the Iraqis at last from torture and tyranny, which is great — except that we know what he and his pals in the Cabinet really think about bleeding heart nation-building. This dissonance, I suspect, is the source of our lingering Gung-Ho Disconnect.
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The reissued DVD of “Lawrence of Arabia” is moving faster than a camel on amphetamines at my local Blockbuster. New Yorkers are not just looking for epic entertainment. They’re looking for ways to blame the Brits and the French for creating the mess that became Iraq in the first place. The movie after all is an essay on hubris, the eventual impotence of a great power as it tries, for whatever motive, to carry out social engineering in tribal societies. And it wraps all this into Omar Sharif’s burnoose. The press officer at Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment, who reissued the DVD, was anxious to reject this riskily topical interpretation. “Most American viewers,” he told me firmly, “don’t associate Arabia with Iraq.”
Maybe. But surely there’s some satisfaction to be found in the great showdown scene when Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) tells Gen. Allenby (Jack Hawkins) that he wants out, and that it’s “personal.”
“Personal? You’re a serving officer in the field! Personal? Are you mad? I’m making you a part of my BIG PUSH on Damascus!” thunders Allenby.
“I don’t want to be part of your BIG PUSH!” yells Lawrence.
Some of us know how he feels.
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The Anglo-American relationship is special? Special as in Special Olympics perhaps. The cultural confusion that arises from seeming to share a common language will never go away.
In my first few months in America I was always feeling vaguely slighted by what I thought was the condescending use of the word “quite,” as in “I thought your last issue was quite good.” In England if we say something is quite good we mean not great, not outstanding, just unmemorably OK. The nuance is a little more enthusiastic when you insert an “a” before the good, as in “quite a good piece in the Times today.” Which is about as intense as anyone is willing to get in England anyway. But in the U.S. “quite” is a superlative, not a qualifier, an emphatic “very.” “That movie is quite good!” makes you rush to buy a ticket.
Even after living here for 18 years I got into a real muddle with the builder this week in the reconstruction of our guest bathroom. When I was discussing the placement of the lavatory he thought I meant the handbasin. Apparently the unfamiliar term “lavatory” conjures up only washing facilities in the U.S. (The word comes of course from “laver” — the French causing trouble as usual.) When I pointed out that in the current design “the lavatory” was so boxed in no one could ever sit astride it he looked startled. “Is that,” he asked, “something your guests like to do?”
In the media ocean of New York a lot of whales have been beached or harpooned lately. At AOL Time Warner, CNN, MCA Records, Sony Music and Random House, the big fish have all been flayed and filleted. It’s the most impressive haul since last summer when Vivendi’s Jean-Marie Messier, Bertelsmann’s Thomas Middelhoff and AOL’s Robert Pittman got the hook, and it may not be over yet.
Most of the latest batch have been happy to go, even when pushed. The secret back story of American business in the last two years, even before 9/11 and the corporate scandals, is how heartily all the big boys in the executive suites have hated their lives. Being a player, it seems, turned out to be too much work. The great Viagra days of the ’90s — buying another player’s company over a round of golf as yours was about to detumesce — are history. What’s required now isn’t Big Deals, it’s Process. The headache of sweaty, detail-clogged, discussion-laden days and hours trying to make unwieldy behemoths jammed together in a blaze of publicity actually work. And if corporate largesse has already made you rich, who needs the aggravation?
That’s why Elba is crowded with exiled Napoleons these days, and that’s why most of them think it’s a vacation paradise.
This is the interesting paradigm of 2003. Everyone who has a top job is envious of the ones who don’t. The big bucks, even where they haven’t evaporated, are not worth the pain of crawling home every night with a head splitting from bottom-line hysteria, vengeful shareholders, treacherous accountants, whining employees and all the stressed-out hours sitting with the corporate “public affairs specialist” spinning, spinning, spinning the circling vultures of the press.
The psychology behind the timing of all the recent turmoil is pretty obvious. When CEOs go off for the year-end break, an orgy of self-pity sets in. They “rediscover” family life, which means that their spouse has finally got into their face for a concentrated period of time and yelled that they aren’t going to take it anymore. Plus, there is nothing like slowly riding up a mountain in a chairlift at Aspen or floating on a large boat in the Bahamas to make a big executive feel the harsh unfairness of his plight the other 50 weeks of the year.
This phenomenon is as true of the CEOs who don’t quit. When my husband went to Men’s Week at the top California spa a few years ago he was struck by how many CEOs being pummeled on the massage slab were ruminating about whom they were going to fire when they got back. “I gotta get rid of the son of a bitch who’s supposed to be running my company. Jesus, he even calls me here.”
It’s rather pleasing to think that in the course of making working life unbearable for everyone else with their mad, unwieldy mergers, top executives have also made it unbearable for themselves.
AOL’s ousted chairman Steve Case was asked if he wouldn’t be bored sitting around on his 28,000-acre pineapple farm in Hawaii with no job rather than running a communications empire. He replied, “Hawaii doesn’t sound that bad to me.” You bet. The new aristocracy are the Severance Kings, wrapped in their payoffs and free at last.
I have to admit that in my new life without a magazine to run, I feel a teensy bit of this luxury myself. I’ve been discovering how seductive it is to own your own life rather than rent it.
One small perk of my new existence, for instance, is not having to go to Hollywood for the Golden Globe Awards. I used to go every year to host a party and troll for movie star covers.
I am told that once upon a time the Golden Globes, sponsored by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, used to be a slightly corrupt and cockeyed little fiesta where Sophia Loren could make a risqui joke from the stage without giving Middle America a heart attack. Now the presence of TV cameras has turned a hokey Hollywood affair into a pre-Oscar trash-fest almost entirely hijacked by commerce. There are so many sponsors and freebies it’s like spending the evening trapped in a gift bag with two press agents and a hairdresser, unable to get to the bathroom.
Attendance at the show requires climbing into a preposterous designer dress and a lot of rocks borrowed from Cartier at 3 o’clock in the afternoon (to fool East Coast viewers in another time zone into thinking it’s a glittering evening). You are then squeezed into a table with a morosely silent nominee and his entourage (How pissed was Leo, by the way?) in intense overlit heat with a plate of asparagus and chicken congealing before you. It stays uneaten for three hours A) because it’s teatime not dinnertime and B) because nobody looks good on TV shoveling food in their mouth. The cameras also demand for some reason that there is a bottle of champagne but no water. “I don’t know about you,” Hugh Grant commented to me one year, “but underneath this tux I am sweating like a wolf.”
Waiting for valet parking to surface, you then stand in line with the stars of a thousand TV sitcoms you have never watched and wait for very small talents to climb into very big cars.
There has to be a better way and there is. I have never felt more a member of the media elite than I did last Sunday — watching the Globes on TV in my own home with a bowl of soup and the all-knowing commentary of my 12-year-old daughter.
Roy Jenkins’ death at the age of 82 took me to Oxfordshire last week for his funeral. In London, he had been a friend of my husband, Harold Evans, for 30 years. When Harry was president of Random House in New York he was delighted to publish Roy in America and we used to see him whenever he hit town, which was often. I became immensely fond of him myself.
Roy was the last of a species, the great statesman, who was also the urbane man of letters and bon vivant. He was altogether a civilizing force. As home secretary, he ended the “ghastly apparatus of the gallows,” removed flogging as a criminal penalty, abolished the absurdity of official censorship of the live theater, decriminalized homosexual conduct and humanized the laws on abortion. On top of that he wrote 18 excellent books of biography and history. The day he suddenly died his last book, “Churchill,” was No. 1 on the paperback list in England.
Roy adored New York. It revved up his prodigious social energy. He always stayed at the Knickerbocker Club on Fifth Avenue, where he considered the bacon superior to anything in England. He swam like a shiny, bespectacled porpoise through the New York social scene. In a world of teleprompters and speechwriters, his brand of lapidary wit — aided only by a few tiny scrawls on the back of the menu card — is a vanished art form. He blew everyone away at John Kenneth Galbraith’s 80th birthday party in 1988, an occasion not short on eloquence from his American peers. His closest New York buddy was the Camelot historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., whom he had known for 50 years. Whenever they were round the same table it was a dazzling tour d’horizon of presidential and prime-ministerial foibles. He and his wife, Jennifer, would race between dinners at the Schlesinger’s (last time with Bill and Hillary Clinton), lunches with Irwin Ross (whose book on Truman Roy deemed with his usual scrupulousness “far better than my own”), parties hosted for him by the Grande Dame Jane Wrightsman, or at one of the Tree-houses, as he liked to call the residences of saloniste Marietta Tree (until her death in 1993). Alluring, public, spirited Democrats like Marietta and that other creamy vintage rose Leslie Bonham Carter (the daughter no less of Condé Nast and aunt of Helena), were very much Roy’s “type.”
The last time I saw him was in May in his official capacity as chancellor of Oxford University. We both were due to speak at the 50th-anniversary celebrations at my old college, St Anne’s. The day before the dinner I joined one of the Jenkins’ regular weekend lunch parties at their East Hendred cottage.
This was always Roy’s best setting, with no whiff of lord chancellor grandeur. It was like turning up for a tutorial at a professor’s house and finding in the small garden a convivial little band of living legends, mixed with younger critics, historians and novelists he collected, and the invariable visiting American enjoying a pre-lunch martini.
On this occasion the conversation veered between genial geopolitics with Robert McNamara to deliciously vinegary gossip with Winston Churchill’s daughter, Mary Soames. At lunch, Lady Soames recounted how some grand mutual friend had behaved at the British Embassy in Paris in the ’70s when the waiter emptied a gravy boat down her back. “She really, really took it well,” said Mary. “She just withdrew and changed into another splendid dress.”
“Spilt gravy is always an excellent character test,” said Roy, rubbing his hands and looking around the table with that richly amused gleam. “I am glad to hear she came shining through.”
Now on this quintessentially English winter day, bone cold and damp, Roy is getting his last send-off in the small village church of St. Augustine in East Hendred. It’s always a shock to see the aloneness of a closed coffin laden with flowers before the mourners arrive, especially when the occupant was so formidably gregarious. When Dame Jennifer arrives with the family, a touchingly normal-looking flock of two middle-aged sons, a daughter and grandchildren who included one gawky teenage boy, she looks transcendentally beautiful with her good bones and far-seeing, wise blue eyes. Unlike the wives and widows in the pews behind who wear those round mink hats from the social pages of Harper’s Bazaar in the ’60s, she is bareheaded and preternaturally calm. This was a marriage that held out like a granite Norman tower against the slingshots of politics, power and female charm. Jennifer is as strikingly unadorned as the service. “To Roy,” reads the message with her flowers, “My only love, 62 years and 5 months.”
Twenty minutes before the start of the service Tony Blair unobtrusively slips in by himself — with no handlers, aides or cellphones in sight — and sits down in a middle pew. This is surprising because there will be a big formal memorial service soon in London and the prime minister will almost certainly be recruited to speak. He is joined a few minutes later by his wife, Cherie, who arrives under her own steam looking like a cute undergraduate in her scuffed boots and curly hair.
Afterward at the low-key reception at the village hall where hot soup and sausages are served, the Blairs linger for nearly an hour chatting to the family and friends as if they had all the time in the world. I drop my bag on the floor and disconcertingly the prime minister stoops down and picks it up with swift courtesy.
Blair in recent months has been roundly mocked for being “presidential,” but from an American perspective this scene in an Oxfordshire village hall is inconceivable. If I had been talking to the president of the United States and dropped my bag on the floor, I would have been wrestled to the ground by a posse of 7-foot Secret Service agents and (being a foreigner) either deported or shipped to Guantánamo. More inconceivable still is the notion that our current president would have a strong connection — political, personal or (needless to say) intellectual — with a person like Roy Jenkins to begin with. Either way I can’t imagine the handlers allowing him to waste so much time hanging out with what Washington sometimes refers to as “usedters” (as in used to be governor of the Bank of England, used to be chief statistician) unless it was election year and a campaign stop.
“It was beautiful, wasn’t it?” said Leslie Bonham Carter wistfully as we milled around in the melancholy cold. “But I felt there was something missing.”
What was missing, of course, were a few remarks from Roy, droll and self-deprecating, with one surprising joke that he had jotted down on the back of the Order of Service.
