The Cabin Read online

  Now, in those days, status was awarded to the least costly article, and, as for provenance, those articles that were stolen ranked highest, followed immediately by those that had been discarded, with those that had been merely borrowed ranking a weak third.

  Objects were capable of being included in the ensemble if they were the result of or made reference to the Struggle for a Better World; and points were given to the more geographically or politically esoteric items.

  I look around my living room today and see that, of course, none of the rules have changed. They stand just as Thorstein Veblen described them a hundred years ago. The wish for comfort and the display of status contend with and inform each other in the decoration of the living place, and I’m still pretending.

  Now, however, I am faking a long-term membership in a different class.

  I live in an old row house in Boston.

  The house is in an area called the South End, specifically in that section called the Eight Streets. These streets are lined with near-identical bow-front brick row houses, built in the 1870s as part of a housing development and intended as single-family residences. The panic of 1873 wounded the real estate market, and the row houses were, in the main, partitioned and rented out by the room.

  My house, the local historical association tells me, is one of the few that were not partitioned. Consequently, it retains most of the architectural detail with which it was adorned a hundred and some years ago. It has beautiful mahogany banisters and intricate newel posts, the stairwell and the rooms on the parlor floor have ornate plaster molding, there are pocket doors with etched glass—the house was built with new mass-construction techniques that enabled the newly bourgeois to suggest to themselves that they were living like the rich.

  I bought the house and thought to enjoy the benefits of restoring it to a Victorian grandeur that it most probably never enjoyed. I recalled the lessons of the sixties, and obtained the services of a decorator, who, in this case, was not a security-lax construction company, but a very talented Englishwoman named Susan Reddick.

  Now, if fashion is an attempt by the middle class to co-opt tragedy, home decor is a claim to history.

  I grew up on the South Side of Chicago, surrounded by sofas wrapped in thick clear plastic. My parents and the parents of all my friends were the children of immigrants, and they started their American dream homes with no artifacts and without a clue, so, naturally, that history to which I laid claim was late-Victorian Arts and Crafts.

  That is the era which I am pretending bore and endorsed me—a time which was genteel yet earthy, Victorian in its respect for the proprieties, yet linked through its respect for craft to the eternal household requirement for utility and the expression of that truth in pottery and textiles. What a crock, eh?

  But that is whom I am pretending to be, a latter-day William Morris, who suggested that a man should be able to compose an epic poem and weave a tapestry at the same time.

  And that is the fantasy which my house probably expresses.

  There are a lot of fabrics woven on a hand loom by a neighbor in Vermont, some nice examples of American art pottery, and rooms painted in various unusual colors, and applied with several arcane techniques of stippling, striation, and what may, or at least should, be called dappling.

  My wife and I are very comfortable here. We spend a lot of time lounging on overstuffed furniture and reading or writing or talking in our own two-person Bloomsbury salon.

  It is, as we would have said in Chicago, a real nice house.

  Seventy-first and Jeffery

  The area from Seventy-first Street north to the park was, in my youth, a Jewish neighborhood.

  My grandmother took me shopping and spoke in what could have been Yiddish, Polish, or Russian to several of the shopkeepers on Seventy-first Street. She even knew one or two of them from the Old Country, which was the town of Hrubieszów, on the Russian-Polish border. We lived on Euclid Avenue in a brick house.

  There was a policeman, or guard, hired by some sort of block or neighborhood association, and his name was Tex. He patrolled the street with two stag-handled revolvers on his belt, one worn butt forward and the other worn butt to the rear. He would stop and chat at length with us kids.

  We spent as much time as possible out in the street. The manhole covers did duty as second base and home plate, or the two end zones, as the season demanded.

  We would stay out far past dark in the summertime chasing one another around the neighborhood in what we called a “bike chase,” which, if memory serves, was some version of the war game the New Yorkers called “ringalevio.”

  We went looking for lost golf balls at the city’s Jackson Park course, four blocks to the north; and would trek in the park all the way over to the lake, where we’d look over at the South Shore Country Club.

  The country club was, our parents told us, restricted, which meant closed to Jews. It was more a mysterious than a disturbing landmark. It held down the southeastern corner of my world.

  Coming back west down Seventy-first Street, we passed the Shoreland Delicatessen, and the next oasis following was J. Leslie Rosenblum, “Every Inch a Drugstore.”

  Rosenblum’s was, to me, a place from a different world. I found the style of the name foreign and distinctly un-Jewish in spite of the surname. The store itself was, if I may, the Apollonian counterbalance to the Ashkenazic Dionysia of the Shoreland. Rosenblum’s was close and somewhat dark and quiet.

  Its claim to my attention was a soda fountain, which smelled of chocolate and various syrups and that indefinable rich coolness coming off the marble, which, I fear, must remain unknown to subsequent generations. My dad took me there for Chicago’s famous chocolate phosphate.

  I would like to conclude the gastronomic tour of South Shore with mention of the Francheezie. That ne plus ultra of comestibles was the product of the Peter Pan restaurant, then situated on the corner of Seventy-first and Jeffery Boulevard, the crossroads of South Shore. The Francheezie was a hot dog split down the middle, filled with cheese, and wrapped in bacon, and, to be round, it was good.

  The other spots of note to my young mind were the two movie theaters, the Hamilton to the east and the Jeffery to the west of Jeffery Boulevard. The latter was a block and a half from my house.

  On Saturdays I’d take my quarter and get over to the movie house. The cartoons started, I believe, at 9 A.M., and there were so many of them. The figure I remember is “100 cartoons.”

  At seven minutes per, I calculate that they would occupy almost twelve hours, and that can’t be right; but I prefer my memory to my reason. In any case, there were sufficient cartoons to keep the kids in the movie theater until past dark on Saturday, and that was where we stayed.

  The Jeffery and the Hamilton both boasted large blue dimly lit domes set into their ceilings, and my young mind would many times try to reason what their use might be. I found them slightly Arabic, and forty years later, can almost recall the fantasies I had gazing at them. I believe one of the domes had stars, and the other did not.

  We had lemonade stands in the summer, and we trick-or-treated in the fall to the smell of the leaves burning in everyone’s yard.

  I remember fistfights at Parkside School, and the smell of blood in my nose as I got beaten up by the friend of a friend, for some remark I’d made for which I think I deserved to get beaten up.

  Years later, I lived up on the North Side.

  I drove a yellow cab out of Unit 13, on Belmont and Halsted, and I got a fare to a deserted area, where I got a knife put to my throat and my receipts stolen.

  The fellow took the money and ran off. I lit a cigarette and sat in the cab for a while, then drove off to look for a cop. I told the cop what had happened, and suggested that if he wanted to pursue the robber, I would come and help him, as the man couldn’t be too far away.

  He nodded and started taking down information. I told him my name, and he asked if I was related to the people who used to live in South Shore; and
it turned out he’d bought our house. We talked about the house for a while, and what it had been like, and how it had changed; and we both agreed that the robber would be long gone.

  I drove off in the cab, and that was my last connection with the old neighborhood.

  Cannes

  Somebody told me this story. It was, he said, the quintessential experience of Cannes. He went the year Paul Schrader brought his film Mishima, and as part of some presentation, an actor on the stage, dressed in a kimono, knelt and went through the motions of ritual suicide. As the audience filed from the auditorium, they were greeted by a double row of eight-foot-high Care Bears passing out candy and leaflets advertising Care Bears Movie II.

  Similarly, in my own story, there I was in the Grand Hôtel du Cap, surely the most beautiful hostelry on earth. We were having a celebratory lunch following the opening of our movie Homicide. Many members of the U.S. press were invited to the hotel by Ed Pressman, one of the film’s producers. Ed stood and made a toast. He pointed out that it was perhaps something more than ironic that we were celebrating the premiere of a movie by Jews and about Jews in the building that had housed the Nazi headquarters for the Riviera during World War II.

  Is this more or less ironic than the Care Bears? After three days in Cannes I cannot tell.

  After a sleepy arrival at the Nice airport, my fiancée, Miss Pidgeon, and I are gradually whisked to the Carlton Hotel, said transport’s progress attenuated by the ministrations of a well-meaning group I could only take to be the festival’s officialdom, who met us at the airport and insisted on our transportation in state, which insistence would have been rather more appreciated if they could have found the car, but there’s a price for everything.

  We got to what probably isn’t referred to as “downtown Cannes” and there was the Carlton, a grand Victorian, foursquare edifice that would have looked right at home in Brighton, save for two things: it was in actual good repair, and it was tarted-out road to roof with billboards advertising films and stars, most of which no one had ever heard of. So in we go. Someone informs me that the thing to have is a suite on the sea side. I ask for a suite on the sea side, and am informed that they have been booked years in advance, and that I should only live so long and prosper as the time in which I am not going to have a suite on the sea side. So we go up to the room and go to sleep, and then it is the next day.

  I decide to break a several-years’-long avoidance of coffee, so I have one cup and then another and then several more, and we go out onto the beach to have a good time.

  I have been informed that bare-breasted women walk the beach at Cannes, their favorite pet a leashed pig. (I tell the story to a Vietnam-veteran friend of mine on my return and he says, “Oh. Those potbellied Asian pigs. We used to shoot ’em for sport. I should have brought them back under my shirt—I hear they fetch a thousand dollars.”) But I saw no pigs. I did see the bare-breasted women, and it all seemed quite civilized to me. Also I saw many people walking dogs. Many had French poodles, which seemed a bit “on the nose,” but what are you going to do?

  I also saw a lot of the kind of off-brand mutts that appear only in dog books and paintings of Italian royalty, and I saw women of a certain age bringing their dogs to work. The dogs ranged in size downward from the small-medium to the ludicrous category. I saw one dog that was of a breed so small that I think the owner explained to me that she had to have two of them, as one was not large enough to hold all the organs. But my French is by no means perfect, and it is possible I misunderstood.

  Dawned the next day, Wednesday, and Miss Pidgeon and I repaired to the beach, I say, there to sit and bask away our jet lag.

  She was garbed in a classic one-piece maillot, and I had on jeans and a T-shirt, hoping to hide the physique I had worked so assiduously to acquire all winter.

  Next to us was a French couple. I engaged them in conversation, and they told me they adored film, that their lucky number was eight, and that they had come down to Cannes when they heard that this was the forty-fourth film festival, said digits being combinable into eight, and here they were.

  He was in the fur and leather business, and he told me that fur had had it, and that he feared that leather wasn’t very far behind. I asked him if this was because of a certain growing sympathy for animals, and he said that a conjunction of that regrettable development and the inscrutable wave motion of fashion had “put paid” to his life’s work, but that he was branching out into fibers, and that I shouldn’t worry.

  “Why is it,” I asked, “that, ici-bas, we give our fullest sympathy to them little rodents out of whom we make the furs, but are not so vehemently inclined toward their bovine brethren from whom we fashion the hides?” And well may you believe that that drained to oblivion the high school French to which I wasn’t even paying attention thirty years ago. In response to my query, he shrugged. He shrugged and I nodded sagely, and no one has ever felt more Continental than I did at that instant. We spent the day on the beach, and lunched at the Terrace Café there, and listened to the peddlers hawking sunglasses and various pornographic materials, and had a fine old time all day.

  Down went the sun. The film producers arrived and we all walked to the Festival Hall to do a sound check on the movie.

  We walked down the Croisette, which I believe is the name of the main beach. The producers bought ice cream cones. Out in the harbor were several billionaires’ yachts. All of us wondered if such people could be happy, and individually decided that they could not, and felt very pleased with ourselves.

  We got to the hall, and after a predictable runaround looking for the right person to accept our credentials, we were admitted. Now, this hall seats around twenty-five hundred people, I think. It is vast. There is no end to it. Each of its dimensions is larger than all the others combined. I am introduced to various officials of the festival, and to the representative of Dolby Sound. I have never understood what the Dolby process does, but I am sure it is something important. The film’s producers tell me that we have to stay only for a few minutes, to make sure that “things” are in order. I nod. The festival functionaries chat among themselves, and the fellow sitting next to me explains that I have a direct line to the projectionist should I want to communicate anything to him. I rack my brain. What, I think, might I conceivably want to say to the projectionist? I am capable of remembering that the film might be out of focus, and there my mind stops. I also cannot remember the French for “focus,” which is, given the damnable unpredictability of their corrupt tongue, most likely “focus.”

  So I sit there holding the phone, while various preparations are made for the screening.

  The producers and the Dolby man have stopped chatting. Evidently un ange passé. I decide to fill the gap. “What’s the throw?” I say. This is the one question I know how to ask about an actual movie theater. The throw is the distance from the projector to the screen, and what it affects, and what throw is desirable, I could not tell you with a gun to my head. So I do not listen too closely to the response, the lights go out, and the film begins.

  There are about ten of us in this hall built for twenty-five hundred. The film is preceded by two rather garish video logos for companies that, I think, coughed up part of the European money to finance the project. The festival functionary asks me if I want the logos in or out. I confer with my producers. They say to leave it in as a mark of respect. So be it.

  The film looks great, but I can’t hear a word of it. There are hurried conversations. It turns out that the stereo recording is on the widest speakers, and that the hall is so big we are getting an echo effect. The sound is then switched onto the middle two speakers, and it sounds a bit better.

  I think the film looks dark. I ask the functionary and he tells me some technical info about how a film has to look darker on a screen that big, because if the projector lamps were turned up higher, something or other would happen. “Well, if that’s the case,” I tell him, “fine.” I’m supposed to watch only a few minutes
of the film. But I have invited my Parisian friends from the beach, and I do not want to disappoint them, so we all stay through the whole film.

  The film is over. I expect the festival people to be weeping copiously or ritually rending their garments or something by way of encouragement; but my hopes, it seems, are too high, and they shake my hand and say they enjoyed the film and wish me well.

  We all walk back along the Croisette. There are many people out walking around and looking in the windows of the very posh shops. Many of the people have dogs.

  The drivers speed viciously. The hotel room has no air-conditioning. These are my reflections as I fall into a jet-lagged sleep. When I awake it has become Thursday, the day of the opening of the festival, which festival will be opened by the screening of my film.

  My schedule for Thursday looked like this: interviews in the morning, then a trip to the Festival Hall for a press conference and a session with photographers, then more interviews, then the official festival opening screening, and then a party given by Jack Lang, the cultural minister of France. A full day.

  I looked forward to doing all of my interviews on the beach, but when I awoke, it was pissing down rain, and so it was going to be interviews in the hotel room.

  I said a prayer that I wouldn’t make a fool of myself during my meetings with the press. I hadn’t done any interviews for the last several years, and felt much better for it.

  When I stopped talking to the press, I began to see the publicity process from an interesting remove—a bit like the fellow who has turned teetotal, and goes to the cocktail party and wonders why everyone is behaving in such an odd fashion and what they find so amusing in one another.

  The publicity process had come to seem to me a good example of jolly mutual exploitation, and not unlike my memories of the climate of sexual promiscuity in the turbulent sixties—something that also seemed a good idea at the time.