Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions (14 page)

Visually, though, one got some of the point of it - or some of the point of Mick. This well-put-together, vitamin-packed unit of a human being does not really dance any more: it's simply that his head, his shoulders, his pelvis, both his arms, both his legs, both his huge feet and both his buttocks are wriggling, at great speed, independently, all the time. When at one point Mick abruptly fell over, for instance, you couldn't tell whether or not he had meant to; it didn't particularly matter, but you couldn't tell. And when he swung out on a cable over the adoring stalls, I wondered how he could contain his galvanic twitching long enough to stay attached to the rope. No question: Mick is, without a doubt, one of our least sedentary millionaires.

Such energy communicates itself, even to a half-engaged audience. 'My head is really scrambled,' a nearby fan sobbed after
Midnight Rambler.
'Want some Kit-Kat?' droned another lugubriously to his girlfriend after the same song. But the more vehemently eager-to-be-pleased sections of the audience, having set their hearts on losing their heads, now began to behave as if they actually had. Jumping up and down was the favourite form this activity took, and soon everyone near me was doing it, despite the vicious denunciations from further behind.
'Are you feeling
good?' Mick demanded. 'ARE YOU FEELING GOOD?' No, not at all, I thought, deciding to leave, And having staggered through the forsaken halls into the Earls Court Road, I was obscurely relieved to find that the world hadn't gone mad in my absence. Perhaps I'm too old for this sort of thing now — too old to buy fruitless discomfort at £1 an hour. I shouldn't have gone. I'm never going again.

New Statesman, 1976

PHANTOM OF THE OPERA: THE REPUBLICANS IN 1988

The Republican Convention is history now, and history didn't look too good down in New Orleans, sapped and battered by eight years of Ronald Reagan. Before I develop that thought, though, I feel it's high time I said a few words about my family. I have a wife and two little boys. Over here to cover the Convention, I happened to miss them very much. Why, just before I left, my three-year-old gazed up at me with those big blue eyes of his and said I was the best daddy in the whole world. My wife and I love our boys. And they love us. Okay?

On closing night it looked like a day-care centre up there on the podium, with the three junior Quayles and Bush's great troupe of grandchildren. They all romped and cuddled among the balloons and spangled confetti. (And what do balloons remind you of? How tall are the people you know who like balloons?) Candidates can't keep their hands off the little ones when they're in public, perhaps because it's the only time they ever see them. The Quayles' first task the next morning, I heard, was to hire someone to mind the kids for three months. This childish spectacle at the Superdome provided a new twist on a familiar image: here were politicians kissing their own babies.

Earlier that evening I was in the Media Lounge eating complimentary popcorn and watching the TV monitor. One half of the screen was occupied by a white-haired lady wearing four tiers of pearls and an expression of wry indulgence: the other half showed schoolchildren in slow motion, raising their hands to teacher.

A journalist came up behind me and said, 'What's this?'

'It's an ad for Barbara Bush.'

'Jesus Christ, what's going
on
around here?'

Where has he been? Reagan's is a style-setting administration, and there has been trickle-down. Nowadays, when Chris Evert gets a regular boyfriend, the first thing she does is make an ad about it. On
The Dating Game
the dude will report that his new friend is 'open' and 'communicative' - 'and I admire those skills'. Who is the role model of the nascent media-coaching industry? Forces are working on the American self. Thirty-five-year-olds have spent half their adult lives in the Reagan Era. This has gone on long enough.

'George Bush,' Barbara confided to the camera, and to the cameramen and lighting men and sound men and media consultants who were crouched around her at the time, was 'as strong, decent, and caring as America herself. She had loved 'this extraordinarily special man', she went on, 'from the moment I laid eyes on him'. Early in the election year the Vice-President had decided that the time was right to tell the public about the death of his first daughter. Now here was Barbara with her side of it, revealing how George's strength ('He held me in his arms') had eventually sustained her. It all seemed to shore up the claim of the Texas delegation which hailed George Bush as 'the best father in America'.

Of course, you feel a bit of a brute going on about all this stuff. But journalists
are
brutalised by modern Conventions - by these four-day ads for the Party. 'This isn't a very interesting Convention so far. It is so well run that there aren't even any lost kids.' That was John Steinbeck in 1956. Dressed in eye-hurting orange blazers, Uncle Sam suits, and baseball outfits, the pink elephants of the GOP talk about shopping and eating and how the Giants did against the Dodgers. At this corporate outing there was no danger of any politics coming your way, though there was always the possibility of scandal. In fact the media was in for a nice surprise: it would soon be propitiated by the blood of J. Danforth Quayle. But until that story broke — and Quayle broke with it — we took our cue from the piety on display and lapsed into a mood of ghoulish cynicism.

First you inspect the concourse leading to the burger-shaped Super dome and all the conventional Convention junk, with its air of commercial passion and improvisational verve. GO Pork Rinds — They're Republickin' Good. A blizzard of T-shirts and badges and bumper stickers. Don't Du-Ca-Ca on the USA. At one table someone is hawking Oliver North videos. Across the way are life-size cutouts of Reagan and Bush, and beyond them, an outsize mannequin of Reagan as Rambo (or 'Ronbo', as the British tabloids have it): the seventy-seven-year-old sex object is stripped to the waist, a cartridge belt athwart his slabbed chest, and with a giant weapon in his fists. Ronbo is eight feet tall. The slogans and buzz-phrases cruelly harp on the stature gap. Beware of Greeks Wearing Lifts. His Only Platform Is Down in His Shoes. Where oh where is the Democrat with Reagan's inches, his Grecian hair, his Mitchum chest?

Next, one was obliged to traipse around the fringe meetings in a wistful search for repulsive policies. Although I was sad to have missed Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum reception, which featured Robert Bork and Jeane Kirkpatrick ('It was great,' said one journalist, 'Jeane was nuts.'), I reposed considerable hope in Pat Robertson, the one-time TV pastor and tithe mogul. Might Pat talk about Armageddon and Rapture? Might he denounce credit cards for harbouring the Mark of the Beast? Might he heal my jet lag?

At the hotel a phalanx of news-parched media was pressing at the doors of the Robertson reception. No entry until 6:00, said one of Pat's people, because 'everybody in there has waited a year and a half' to hobnob with the great man.
'Please
don't turn this into a press conference.' The media was as good as its word. There was no press conference. Instead, Robertson was instantly engulfed by a squirming centipede of mikes and camera tackle; he emerged fifteen minutes later, with an almost audible pop, and was dragged off through a side door by his bodyguard. Still newsless, the newspeople took a few disgusted sips of French cider and trooped off to the Superdome to cover Ronnie Night.

I lingered among the believers, with their fine hair, their thick skins, and their low blink-rates. Many of the women were still shivering from the post-Pat frisson. Their man hadn't won, but they had the feeling that the GOP was gathering him — and them — into its bosom. Clearly Pat hadn't told them what he must know to be the case: that he's finished. The next night, true, he would get his prime-time speech (largely ignored by the cameras) and would thrill the faithful, and the media, with his talk of 'disease carriers' who place the healthy 'at great risk'. But Pat's had it: his valedictory press conference was an ill-attended freak show. He'll just have to go back to his old job, serving God with his miracle-service TV spot and stiffing the fuddled and elderly out of their rent cheques and disability allowances.

Pat Robertson at a national convention, equipped with delegates, certainly remains a terrible sight. He is a charlatan of Chaucerian dimensions. To Bush, if not to Reagan, the evangelicals were probably never much more than a useful joke, to be kept happy with promises that can't possibly get past the Senate (like the guff about recriminalising abortion). Anyway, the video vicarage is now in tatters. Yet another institution in Reagan's dream city comes crashing to the ground - and the National Security Council, and Wall Street, and the Attorney General's office, and the Pentagon. Is it over?

Ronnie Night. First the motorcade and its enthralling expression of personal power: half a six-lane city boulevard sealed off and lined with blinkers and excited cops. Four motorbikes in formation, sirens idling, then six more, then two police cars, then four limousines, then four staff cars (two containing security men, two containing Nancy's helpers and dressers). As soon as the backwash has settled, the cops unplug the bursting sidestreets, and the normal gridlock resumes. No wonder the President looks so young and cheerful: eight years without any traffic.

The time to study Reagan was before he mounted the stage — when he and Nancy took their preliminary seats in the lower gallery. During the imperial entrance, the Reagan face had been divided laterally, the eyes expressing mock alarm, the mouth unqualified gamesomeness. As he settled, a mound of cameras sticklebricked itself into being a few inches from his nose. Reagan jovially waved a hand at the teetering media, as if to say, 'Will you look at all these guys?' Then his smile instantly vanished as he fell into an imitation of a serious man listening to a serious speech. Was it imagination, or did I detect, beneath his mask, the dull throb of astonishment that such modest abilities (plus a few gut instincts) had ushered in, not just a Governorship, not just a Presidency, but an American Era? Apart from that, he looks, he looks . . .

What
does
he look like? He looks like a gorgeous old opera-phantom shot full of novocaine.
Esquire's
caricaturist Steve Brodner is a longtime student of the Reagan face: 'Ten years ago the face told you a lot about the man. Now that's all gone.' The furtive overlay above the eyes and the wattled dissolution of the jaw have been replaced by clarity and definition. It used to be said that by a certain age a man had the face that he deserved. Nowadays, he has the face he can afford — or the face his handlers decide to go with. One of Dickens's hypocrites has a facial paralysis that gives him a profile of noble immobility; this is the side he presents to his clients, while the hidden half snickers and gloats. With the modern American politician, we must imagine the face
beneath
the face, smarting and flickering with the impostures, the compromises, and the fathomless boredom of public life. Erected by surgeon and makeup man, the face is now the picture window to the soul.

Maureen was there, but Reagan hasn't got any children, or grandchildren, that he can plausibly wheel out and love up. So he goes another way: he loves up Nancy. Reagan has never made any secret of his thralldom to Nancy's talents. With his hints of turbulent nights behind the clipped hedges of Brookline, Dukakis has evidently taken yet another arrow from Reagan's quiver: husbandly romancing has voter appeal. Bush is obviously in a corner on this one with Barbara, who will make TV ads but draws the line at dyeing her hair. Besides, as Bush says with a kind of shrug, it's been forty-three years.

This Convention project of loving up Nancy had begun at a lunch in her honour, where Reagan asked, 'What can you say about someone who gives your life meaning? You can say that you love that person, and treasure her.' On Ronnie Night, Tom Selleck was Reagan's surrogate on the stage; he spoke of cancer surgery, the war against drugs, and that day when 'an assassin nearly took away what she loved most in this life'. After Nancy's little address, we got the ad for Ronnie. You know the one: a fifteen-minute collage of newsclips, Bud and Marlboro commercials, and exquisitely lit home movies. So. An actor, then an actress, then an ad; and then another actor - Reagan, with the Speech.

All morning the hall had rung with the words of ardent glozers and fiery mediocrities, chosen for their sex or their skin colour or their extremes of youth and age. Punctuated by the tinny clunk of the gavel, the cliches of the peanut-faced orators laboured towards you at the speed of sound, chased by the PA echo . . . Reagan got up there, and, after one blooper ('Facts are stupid things' - the crowd winced so fondly, so protectively!), a few jokes, several boasts, and a lot of statistics, shared with his countrymen the gift of the trust in a dream of a vision whose brilliant light in a shining moment showed a sweet day of extra love for a special person between the great oceans. 'Here,' he exhaustedly concluded, 'it's a sunrise every day.'

That last revelation can't have been news even in Middle America, which seems to have been in flames all summer. With the Drought, with 50 per cent of all counties declared disaster areas, with the unbreathable city air (not to mention the thirty-foot scum line on the beaches of the North-East), Americans knew all about 'our sunlit new day'. No need to tell
them
'to keep alive the fire'. Reagan's speech was an apotheosis of a kind: the rhetoric of arcadian green, polluted by reality. Nobody liked it much, even on the floor. Yet the momentum of expectation was so far entrained that the performance somehow passed off as a triumph. This
had
to be the night of rich catharsis, when Reagan's image began its slow wipe, leaving Bush to hurl his first grapple hook across the stature gap.

At lunchtime on the second day the lead local news story was about Convention-related traffic jams. In uniform desperation the media was turning its gaze on the city itself, and duly noting the inevitable contrast between Republicans and New Orleans.