The Receptionist (8 page)

Somehow, Muriel got going on Africa—not Rhodesia, site of her unhappy marriage, but South Africa and South Africans. She became so heated about it that Penelope asked, with a laugh, “What other nationalities are there, I wonder, we can banish wholesale?” It seemed that Australians, too, aroused Muriel’s ire. “I never met one who wasn’t vulgar in the extreme—look at Germaine [Greer], for example, although I quite like her. I have to send word ahead if I’m going to see her to ask them to get her to please leave out the four-letter words if I’m to stay in the room with her.” She looked at us fiercely: “And she
just
manages to do it.”
Th
e Italians were all right, she said, because Italians “always allow for a court of appeal.”

We had drinks, Irish whiskey and water for me, red wine for Muriel, and gin and tonic for Penelope. Muriel gave me a little present wrapped in stiff, brownish-maroon paper. Inside was a pottery dish, heart shaped, with a blue-and-white figure of a bird on a heart-shaped branch. “It was just a little something I saw in an antiques shop in Arezzo that I thought you might like,” said Muriel.

“I love it,” I said. And I did.

Th
ere were to be just two other guests, I was told. An English architect and collector of art named Frederick Fuchs (Freddie) and his friend, a young Italian named Dario, arrived bearing huge pots of pink geraniums. After a tour of the house, we gathered around a table set up in Penelope’s bedroom and feasted on a four-course dinner: guinea fowl served with good local Chianti, followed by Christmas pudding and champagne.

Art was, naturally, a recurrent topic. Freddie was soon telling us how the Japanese—“the big buyers nowadays”—were making it possible for collectors like him to own works by Italian masters; it seemed the masters were experiencing a depressed market because the Japanese didn’t care for religious subjects. What was being bought, said Freddie, were “these scribbles by Twombly,” an action painter of the fifties; they were going for hundreds of thousands.
Th
is brought up other action painters; Arshile Gorky was mentioned. Freddie wondered if anybody had seen the nasty crack Gorky’s daughter Maro had made about Muriel in a piece on the artists of the Chianti valley for
Harper’s & Queen,
the October issue, he thought it was.

“What nasty crack?” asked Muriel, sharply on the alert. “What did she say about me?” But Freddie was mum. Only later, when I was in the sitting room and the others were in the kitchen preparing the coffee and Muriel was upstairs, did Penelope succeed in getting it out of Freddie that the nasty crack consisted of Maro Gorky’s referring to Muriel as “that old crone in the red wig.” At the dinner table, however, it was already clear that Muriel was furious: “She’s never met me; I can’t think what she can have to say about me.” Penelope said, “She’d better watch out. Muriel may sue.”

Earlier in the evening, Italy had been spared, but after the reference to Maro’s “nasty crack,” Muriel burst out, “I shall leave Tuscany; I will, if rude things are going to be said about me. I’ll get right out.”

Freddie tried to downplay what he now saw had been an indiscretion, and Dario denounced Maro as a hateful woman who was only being nasty because she couldn’t stand it that she owed every little scrap of importance she could claim in the world to the fact that she had a famous father. But Muriel was not sidetracked. She went upstairs to her office to telephone Maro Gorky in an effort to confront her on the spot.

When Muriel came down into the kitchen, Penelope matter-of-factly reported what Freddie had been reluctant to say, that the crack was a reference to Muriel as “that old crone in a red wig,” to which Muriel cried, “I’ve never owned a wig. And I don’t dye my hair red. What does she know about it anyway? She’s never even met me!”

Once again, Freddie said he was sorry he’d ever brought it up.

We finally settled in the sitting room with coffee, and the conversation turned to other things. Still Muriel was glum. At one point she asked, quite out of the blue, if Maro had children, and being told she had “a boy and a girl,” such a strange look came over her face that I feared for their well-being. I remembered that earlier, when Penelope, having opened the bottle, was just preparing to pour us all champagne, Muriel had said to the room at large, “Never pour with your left hand—it was the hand the Borgias used.
Th
ey’d open the hinged ring they wore on the third finger of that hand, then turn the poison it contained into the vessel as they poured.” She demonstrated neatly with a hinged ring of her own, and wound up, “So you must never pour left-handed.”

I could easily imagine that had Maro Gorky been in the room at this moment, Muriel might have offered her a glass of champagne and poured it for her with her left hand.

It was just as well that Maro Gorky was not reachable that night. Freddie had not got his facts right.
Th
ere was a nasty crack in
Harper’s & Queen,
and it did occur in an article about Maro Gorky’s rude luncheons and dinners for the English colony in the Chianti valley. But the author of the crack is described as a recently arrived man, a “high-pitched screamer” who was nowhere near as talented as Muriel, and the color of the wig was “orange.”

At eleven the party broke up, all of us leaving together, Muriel and Penelope to see me home to Cortona, Freddie and Dario to repair to Freddie’s house in Florence.

Th
e traffic was heavy at first, then devolved to almost none when the driving became hazardous because of the fog. Both Penelope and Muriel insisted they didn’t mind the lateness of the hour or the more than ninety miles of driving involved in getting me home and themselves back. I was originally to have stayed over, but they’d thought better of this plan, saying it was the scarcity of done-up rooms that posed a problem of where to put me.
Th
is was confirmed by the tour I’d been given as I arrived. I’d seen a small, peach-colored room that was Muriel’s, and seen the studio couch/daybed in the library, where I was told Penelope slept. I’d even watched television in the one and dined in the other. But full of the aura of rather poisonous gossip Freddie had brought to the dinner table, and fed by a sense of disappointment, I allowed myself to wonder whether the real reason had been their reluctance to let me see that they shared a bed.

I began to let my imagination ride along with me on the trip back to Cortona. I imagined as more truth than exaggeration Muriel’s humorous references to how Penny ordered her around, forcing her into slave labor in the olive grove attached to the church grounds each picking season. She also claimed she had been press-ganged into the work of redecorating the chapel, an area Penelope used as her studio. I found more evidence—of Penelope’s devotion if not of her dominatrix tendencies—in the portrait she’d done of Muriel and wouldn’t give her. On Muriel’s side, I considered her preference for female company dating back to Miss Kay’s class at James Gillespie’s High School in Edinburgh (the model for Miss Brodie and her “set”).
Th
en there were her difficulties with men: a husband who went off his rocker, and two lovers who delivered her literary stabs in the back. An Irish landlady of hers once observed, “You’re a bad picker,” and Muriel could only respond, “How true!” Add to this her predilection for women’s clubs (chiefly one called the Helena, renamed the May of Teck in
Th
e Girls of Slender Means
). And hadn’t she also had a female flatmate for years in Rhodesia?

Unsurprisingly, there had been plenty of gossip about Muriel and Penelope’s relationship.

Against these hints of full-blown passion between the two women were Muriel’s repeated denials in print. “We’re not lesbians, you know,” she’d said in answering some impertinent interviewer. On another occasion she had described the relationship between her and Penelope as “old-fashioned friendship.” Finally, I came to the conclusion that it was of no importance to anyone but them and none of my business.
Snap out of it,
I said to myself,
and pay attention so you can help with the driving.

Penelope was being very offhand about the fog, though as an expert driver she was clearly concerned about it. At this point we could scarcely see the line in the center of the road. Suddenly she began to hum, rather loudly, a tune I recognized. Soon Muriel and I were humming, then lustily singing along. “By yon bonnie banks and by yon bonnie braes,” we warbled.

I got out at my house a little before midnight. Watching the lights of the Alfa Romeo swing down the drive, I imagined first Penelope, then Muriel, breaking into song as they wound down to the valley floor, where the fog would envelop them once more.

But I am not satisfied to have this be the last glimpse I give of Muriel Spark. While this 1989 Christmas encounter in Tuscany brought out more of her sharper side, the luncheon we had together in Arezzo in 2004 made me aware once more of what a great soul she was. So lightly easy in her charity, in her generous treatment of me, her solicitude about my life and its twists and turns, as she became aware of them, in our infrequent exchanges of letters.

Th
e last time we met she had to make a great effort to come all the way to Arezzo to accommodate a reunion with me on my brief sojourn in the area. By then she had turned eighty-four, and over the intervening years she had suffered hip and eye surgeries and a quantity of serious illnesses and flare-ups. But there she was, on a bright hot day in June, motoring with Penelope several tens of miles to treat me to lunch in the Hotel Minerva, where we were the only guests in the chandeliered grandeur of a great fancy dining room.

As if to justify all the expense—the waiting staff and the attentions of the maître d’, the gilded trolleys of delicacies trotted out for her to select from—Muriel stood ready to, and did, order a great many more dishes and a great deal more vino, both
rosso
and
bianco,
than we could possibly eat or drink. Her condition rendered her able to partake only sparingly of any of it. Yet there she was, cheerfully inquiring after my welfare, my hopes, and my projects, and giving an enthusiastic account of her recent turn as a writer in residence at a private school somewhere, I thought she said, near the French-Swiss border. I felt certain she had taken the post not because she needed the money—though she always liked to add to her stash—but because she saw its potential as material for her work. Sure enough, her last novel,
Th
e Finishing School,
takes place in just such a setting.

When we went to the car to part, she was ready with a warm embrace, a smile for the camera, and many expressions of affection. It was a fitting last memory that I am grateful for having gone to some trouble myself in order to achieve.

Soon after my return to America, the word came that Muriel could not give me her response to my latest book because her sight had now entirely failed her. And then, on April 13, 2006, her life was over.

Penelope informed me that a memorial was being arranged in London for the following April. I asked my old friends from the Sussex Lifeboat Ball, Peter and Winifred Wroe, to attend in my stead.
Th
ey described it as a wonderful concert in Wigmore Hall, well attended, consisting of beautiful music, exquisitely played, with not a somber note sounded.

Penelope wrote her appreciation for my attendance by proxy and said she had not yet been able to discipline herself to cheerfulness in a life without Muriel, describing herself as “like a child dragged kicking and screaming from the party, longing for more chocolate cake.”

So there, in the Arezzo parking lot, fresh from pressing upon me a huge great slice of chocolate cake, is where I leave her. Good-bye, Muriel, and
grazie mille.

R
OUGH
P
ASSAGE
T0
HROUGH
THE
N
EW
Y
ORKER
A
RT
D
EPARTMENT

J
ACK KAHN WAS MISTAKEN
when he said I’d never risen from my post as receptionist of the eighteenth floor. In April 1959, when I had been at
Th
e New Yorker
for a year and a half, I was thrilled to be promoted to work as an assistant in the art department on twenty. As it turned out, I stayed there a mere six months, but the job had personal repercussions for me that nearly cost me my life.

Mailing out rejected cartoons in their own self-addressed stamped envelopes (SASEs) was one of my main tasks in my new position. I also assisted the director, James Geraghty, and his right-hand man, Don Hull. Don was responsible for a fast run-through of the unsolicited submissions, culling out the one in a million that might be bought. He liked to tell the story of the day, soon after he started in 1954, when the office was to undergo its first repainting ever, a new coat of the same noncommittal gray. In preparation for this event, the regulation steel desks were pulled into the center of the room awaiting a painter’s drop cloth. Out tumbled thousands of eight-by-ten sheets of manila sketch paper of the kind most rough drawings were done on.
Th
ey had been wedged into the perhaps three-and-a-half-inch gap between the desks and the walls, and they had been there for at least three years. Don speculated that they dated from the period in the early fifties when the twenty-three-year-old Truman Capote had spun his wheels in the art department as he waited for fame to come knocking at his door. Instead of going through the tedious process he’d been hired for, Truman had evidently been destroying the envelopes and dumping their contents behind whichever desk he was using at the time. For weeks and months, Don Hull had been left to placate the wailing, indignant callers whose drawings—forever separated from their SASEs—had been doomed to a nonresponse.

I could not help feeling a pang of sympathy as well as admiration for the ever-thwarted hopefuls whose work I was responsible for shuffling in and out of the slush pile. I tried to give them a week or two at least of hoping against hope before I dropped their efforts into return mail.

Almost as poignant for me was the knowledge that some measure of disappointment awaited the fifteen or twenty
New Yorker
artists who came in weekly to learn the fate of their last week’s submissions. Art director James Geraghty, editor William Shawn, and layout chief Carmine Peppe met every Monday and went over the roughs (preliminary sketches) supplied by the regular contributors. It would be their thumbs-up or -down that would set the mood, merry or glum, among the Tuesday lunchers with Geraghty or the Wednesday lunchers with Geraghty’s surrogate, Frank Modell, a cartoonist himself.

A year or so ago,
Th
e New York Times
ran a feature in its Sunday City section on the Tuesday lunches ritually engaged in by the
New Yorker
cartoonists.
Th
e names and faces were different and the restaurant was different, but the sense of crisis underlying the superficially casual air at the lunch table was the same—the undercurrent of nervous energy as each ego put itself on the line to amuse, or fail to amuse. Each career fluttered in the uptick of a sale or the downtick of a rejection or, more commonly, a mix of the two.

All just the same.

Small wonder that they were, in the main, a restive
bunch. Short on self-confidence, long on nervous laughter.

Th
e atmosphere in the anteroom of Mr. Geraghty’s office on Tuesdays matched the descriptions Woody Allen, Carl Reiner, and others have given of the gag writer’s room at NBC when preparing for Sid Caesar’s
Caesar’s Hour,
a sixty-minute show produced weekly in the 1950s before a live audience. It was the atmosphere reflected in the 1982 film about those comedy shows,
My Favorite Year,
with Peter O’Toole.
Th
e recent NBC drama
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,
too, attempted to capture the seriously funny panic reactions induced while providing amusement on demand—giddiness, nausea, head banging, and crying jags being about the usual range.
Th
ere is a lot of throwing up involved in comedy, it seems.

After seeing a favored few artists in private audience each Tuesday, Jim G. would come striding out of his office, ready to pretend that he and all those he’d left cooling their heels in the anteroom would enjoy the forthcoming lunch in a spirit of undiluted bonhomie. Helen Hokinson being dead and Roz Chast yet to come onboard, all of those attending were men, and most were hefting the considerable burdens of a house and a family in Connecticut. Trying to be funny with bill collectors in the wings often placed superhuman demands upon the human psyche.

Up close as I was for those six months in the art department, I never quite got over the sense that I was among the walking wounded. I came to understand that the various remedies of drink, nicotine, and other pain-deadening drugs were being consumed by these artists more in a medicinal than a Rabelaisian spirit.
Th
eir doctors, if not they, were convinced that they needed the dosages administered simply to hold these delicate plants together. Tremors of limbs born of too much—or too little—alcohol; slouches; and vacant stares should the plant be over- (or under-) medicated were, I learned, pretty much the norm. One way or another, the
New Yorker
artists all bore witness to the strain on the human body that creative types undergo. No matter how hard I laughed, how much I admired, how I sympathized, I could never forget or ignore the pain. Maybe it was just a variation on the pain of Everyman, but in my eyes it gave those funny men a heroic patina that intensified the moments I spent in their company.

Of course, I now see that this excess of fellow feeling for the artists was exactly what scuttled my chances of making a go of it there. My predecessor, a woman I shall call Brenda, who had been Jim Geraghty’s most successful assistant in the past, set the mold. British wit, a hint of military spit and polish, razor-tongued ripostes, and pull-up-your-socks dismissals were that slender lady’s hallmark. She thought nothing of going to bed with the boss, bullying him for money to buy a new winter coat, or bandying insults and wisecracks with the boys while turning a deaf ear to their pleas for second looks at this week’s roughs.

Th
e previous winter, Brenda had gone skiing in Gstaad with a married banker, also a Brit. Discovering that she preferred the banker and the skiing in Gstaad to the care and feeding of
New Yorker
cartoonists, she wired that come April she would no longer be at her desk. And so I was brought in to fill the job. But where Brenda was hard, I was soft; where she was ruthless, I was wimpy; where she was what Jim Geraghty wanted, I was unquestionably not. So when, after six months, I had the poor judgment to take my first vacation—a month’s grand tour of Europe—I was ambushed. I came back to find a beaming Mr. Geraghty asking if I did not think it “super” that Brenda had changed her mind about joining the jet set. She was reclaiming her old post, while I was to be sent back down to the eighteenth floor where I’d come from.
Th
is proved to be nothing more than a well-intentioned ruse. Brenda soon decamped for Portillo, and another girl was quietly brought in.

Th
at I didn’t see this coming shows how little I understood about the workings of power on any level. Oh, I knew that Mr. Geraghty and I were not warming to each other (he remained Mr. Geraghty throughout our association), but I certainly had no clue that that was the whole ball game. While failing miserably to win the favor of my boss, I was made something of a pet by the artists. Frank Modell, a noted ladies’ man, took me to lunch at Del Pezzo’s and seemed content to be the affable cheerleader of my love life. Warren Miller and William Steig, on a postprandial stroll through the Village, were tickled to learn that my pals and I at the University of Minnesota used to serve drinks on Steig napkins captioned “People are no damned good.” Anatol Kovarsky, a cover artist, spent a chummy evening with me in Washington Square taking in a chamber concert, and Arthur Getz hired me to sit for him for some paintings he was doing for a gallery show. I later turned up on one of his covers. I was the girl with her hair up and her topknot surrounded by fake pearls in the box office of a movie theater—which delighted my pop, for we used to own and operate a movie house.

Mr. Getz was wonderful during those posing sessions. Very
patient and professional, he insisted that I use his box-seat ticket for
Giselle,
being danced by the Royal Ballet at the Met the very day of our last sit. He was going to stay on at his studio and finish the picture we had begun together. When the end came, he alone of all the artists wrote me a note saying he was sorry things had not turned out better for me.

Little did Arthur Getz or Geraghty or any of them know just how badly they had turned out. It was not until much later in my tenure at
Th
e New Yorker
that a bright summer intern from Smith College brought me face-to-face with a chapter in my history over which I had drawn a veil.
Th
e period I had chosen to forget was 1959–1960, round about the time I was sent back in dudgeon from the art department to my receptionist’s chair.
Th
e Smithie, Ivy Eberhart by name, who covered for me on my lunch hours, adopted me as a kind of mentor. One afternoon, in 1972, she hovered at my desk, clearly wishing to ask me something. “Do you by any chance know a cartoonist named Evan Simm? Because he has been asking me out and I think I have made a foolish mistake in saying yes on several occasions.”
Th
us, innocently, did Ivy become the cracker of my memory vault. I think all I said to her at the time was something like, “Yes, I do know him, and my advice to you is to have as little as possible to do with him. He’s bad news.”

Th
e bearer of this “bad news” rubric, whom I am calling Evan Simm, was still a young man at the time I first knew him, and one of the lucky few to make it into the Wednesday art meetings. Evan lived the life of a man on a tightrope, dependent from week to week on the all-important meeting. Would one of his roughs be chosen for a finished cartoon? Would he be given an “idea,” at least? Some of the artists on drawing accounts who were better draftsmen than hatchers of jokes would be given ideas to finish that had come in over the transom, the freelance gag writers getting fifty dollars per idea used.
Th
ere were a few artists in the top tier—Charles Addams and Peter Arno, for example—who were regularly given “Addams” or “Arno” ideas to finish. In Charles Addams’s case, they would feature Gothic mansions or graveyards; in Peter Arno’s, leather banquettes at the Copa with sugar daddies and showgirls in the foreground. Such settings and the humor that went with them were by this time so associated in the public mind with these men that freelancers often cooked up ideas especially for them.

Most regulars, however, did their own ideas the majority of the time. (It called for a combination of talents rather like those of a composer-lyricist, and it was the rarities, like Cole Porter and Irving Berlin, who managed to be equally prolific at both.) Artists who, like Evan, never stopped trying to be both gag writer and draftsman continued to struggle more or less unsuccessfully to get OKs for their roughs, with their own captions attached, if captions were called for. Such artists were acknowledged to have mastered distinctive drawing styles, producing drawings on a regular basis that “looked right” in the magazine, but they often came to the art gatherings with chips on their shoulders, feeling like second stringers who never got to the plate often enough. Evan was one of these.

At twenty-eight, he was one of the youngest of the Wednesday regulars. He was a midwesterner who had come east for college. His father held a wartime post in Washington, DC, and Evan, so as not to disrupt his schooling, remained for the duration at home with his mother in Elgin, Illinois. Perhaps because of this, Evan had conceived a yearning for the tonier East. In any case, he got his BA in art at Cornell. Every young man had two years of military service to perform in those years, and Evan chose to do his as an enlistee in the army, where, at his request, he was posted to Japan.

For an artist, this was a good fit, a rare instance of the army getting the right man in the right place at the right time. Whenever Evan was not drawing for
Stars and Stripes
—in other words, whenever he was free to leave the base—he spent his time living like a native in a rice-paper house with a Japanese girlfriend. He was quickly absorbed into Japanese life, learning a bit of the language and, as much as a Westerner could, embracing the Japanese sensibility. He loved the food, the beer, the sake, the chopsticks, the shoji screens, the art of bonsai, the game of Go, the novels of Kobo Abe, the films of Akira Kurosawa, the sculptures of Isamu Noguchi. When his hitch was up, he elected to stay on, getting a job as a draftsman in the publicity office of an international company.
Th
ere, he met a young Austrian woman, Marta, who shared his enthusiasm for all things Japanese.

Th
e boyhood and adolescence Evan had gone through in Elgin had in many ways sapped his confidence. He was unathletic. He had a kind of awkward, shambling gait. His looks were unprepossessing. His skin was clear, and although his hair was a pleasant honey color in summer and light brown in winter, it lay limp and straight and flopped onto his brow. Nevertheless, he let it grow out of its military buzz cut as soon as he was discharged. He dressed in kimono-like coats when in Japan and continued to dress in soft cotton materials when he went west. He had a wardrobe filled with clean, soft, attractive, and comfortable casual clothes—white button-down shirts or blue cotton work shirts, worn with pressed chinos and deerskin boots. So his skin, hair, and clothes were not the problem.
Th
e problem was his face.