As I approach a worrying age (don’t ask!) where everyone — as in this morning’s obituary page of the New York Times — is younger than me, a terrible thing has happened. An American fan has told me that she went to Madame Tussauds in London recently, with the intention of being photographed next to the effigy of Dame Edna, only to find that Edna wasn’t there any more. This information depressed me even more than the recent Washington inauguration of the blinking frog. When my client Dame Edna was first installed at Madame Tussauds about a quarter of a century ago, I was keen to know who had been melted down to create her, and I think they told me that it was partly a 1970s pop group called The Y-Fronts, and most of Mandy Rice-Davies. The thought of being melted down in one’s own lifetime is a horrible thought and I began morbidly to wonder whom Edna had become. Graham Norton perhaps, and the leftover bits reconstituted as Paris Hilton — as Pallas Athene once sprang from the brow of Zeus. It is agreeable to wax but desolating to wane, so it was with great relief that I discovered this morning that Edna has not been dissolved or cannibalised but sent on a long sabbatical to Madame Tussauds in Amsterdam, where she is more popular, more plausible, and even richer than Queen Beatrix.
From the windows of my flat in New York I have a wonderful view over Central Park, and this week I have been able to watch the installation of Christo’s ‘gates’. On my daily walks in the park, I have observed the ominous beginnings of this vast, costly and garish installation. Bright orange plastic architraves have been erected already over once-secluded paths, from which skimpy ‘safety’ orange curtains of fabric now flap and dangle. The press is obligingly but inaccurately calling them ‘saffron’, which I suppose makes them sound more like art. The bookshops have for some time been selling a hefty coffee-table book illustrating the project in every detail, with photographs of Central Park scribbled over by Christo with superimposed images of these scaffolds and their tangerine loincloths, which also remind one of cheap motel curtains, falling far short of the sill. Christo is in fact two people, a rather ropey husband-and-wife team, who have in the past beguiled governments and municipalities into allowing them to wrap up large objects and entire buildings, as if wrapping up things was their invention. In fact, Man Ray wrapped up a sewing-machine in the 1920s as a surrealist joke, but in the modern world of conceptual art and the cant that surrounds it, particularly in America, no one cares if anything has been done better or more wittily before. The rip-off is never acknowledged, or if it is, the critics call it a ‘meditation’ on Man Ray or Malevich or whoever. Serious collectors of ‘conceptual’ art, ever susceptible to modish hokum, pay large sums for limited editions and doodled-over photographs of Christo’s grandiose projects, and big crowds are converging upon Central Park (a lot of French, of course) to gawp at the Emperor’s New $20 million Installation, which from my casement looks oddly puny.
Is there something about the Spectator Diary that brings out the curmudgeon in one? My last two entries have a fogeyish whiff, probably due to lack of sleep. The apartments next door and subjacent to my bedroom are being renovated. This means that I hear two lots of workmen arrive at 8.30 a.m. and, after loud and jocular conversations in what Mr Bush would call ‘Hispanic’, they begin their drilling and jack-hammering. The noise is worst at 3 p.m., when I like to have a siesta, so I have had to drag my bedding into the laundry, as far away from the cacophony as possible, where I doze restlessly, lulled by the warm susurration of the spin-dryer, which my housekeeper invariably tunes to the ‘eternal’ cycle. With my British Airways slumber shades damply clamped to my eyes and the reek of detergent in my nostrils, I fall prey to a voluptuous self-pity, wondering if my public would ever guess how their favourite Broadway star spends his post-prandial hours.
Eavesdropping at lunch at the Lotos Club, I overheard three art historians talking about the Rubens drawings at the Met. The word ‘periodicity’ cropped up twice (two times in American lingo). Periodicity?! Of course, worse jargon accretes to old Christo, and especially to the dreadful doodles of Cy Twombly (a box of Black Magic for the best anagram). ‘Numinous’ is an oft-used epithet to describe the indescribable, and Twombly’s attempts — my mother used to say of my paintings ‘That’s a nice attempt, Barry!’ — have been much acclaimed for their numinosity. I long for more vulgar, more Australian art jargon, ‘shithouse’ for example. The other day I went to a theatre forum where a couple of American dramaturgs discussed the work of a wonderful English actor and friend of mine, who also happens to be a raving poofdah. It was wonderful to watch these two clever people discussing his work and being puzzled as to why he was so terrific in some roles, like Iago, and less than convincing in roles requiring a display of heterosexual passion. Not only could they not say out loud ‘it’s because he bites the pillow’, but political correctness has gone so deep that they can’t even think it any more.
The Virginian novelist and essayist Tom Wolfe told me at dinner last night that Benny Hill is one of his favourite comedians. He may, if I recall, have actually said that Benny was his second favourite comedian. I agreed with him, though I bet he’d love Little Britain as well, which is screamingly funny. English people, especially sophisticated ones, are usually horrified by Benny Hill’s popularity in America, which they sometimes use as evidence that Americans have no real sense of humour. Tom asked if I’d known Benny, which I hadn’t, alas, but I’d heard he had lived an austere life and really was an intensely private person. This phrase doesn’t carry much weight in America, because everyone in show business here, when they are not being vulnerable, makes this claim for themselves, notably Barbra Streisand. She was once described as ‘intensely private’. Vulnerable, austere, private, ascetic, whatever these amiable mountebanks may be, I bet none of them sleeps in the laundry.
© Barry Humphries, all rights reserved.