I’d rather be a lamppost in New York …

I have been reading Jan Morris’ masterly Manhattan ’45, a spellbinding evocation of the city (in 1945) where I spent a large part of my professional life, and for which I have an enduring affection. “Gentleman Jim” Walker, mayor of New York 1926-1932 once quipped, Morris tells us, that he’d rather be a lamppost in New York than mayor of Chicago. That’s rather harsh on another great American city, but it speaks to a municipal pride that is very much New York’s. Gentleman Jim’s lax standards of probity were exposed by New York’s preeminent  mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, who was capable of his own bon mots, such as “When I make a mistake it’s a beaut”.

 

Fiorello La Guardia

Morris’ book is full of fascinating insights and facts that bring to life the New York of 75 years ago. One that caught my eye was the fact that, when the Waldorf Astoria was built, a siding from a railway line to Grand Central Station was laid so that the ultimate wealthy guest could arrive in his own train, disembark beneath the hotel and be escorted to his suite.

 

In 1996 I met, in a Macdonald’s just off the campus of Idaho State University Pocatello, a gentleman named Wendell (probably a Mormon, since many locals were) who mistook me for a lawyer because I was wearing my trademark suit and tie, which made me stand out on campus. Wendell had started work in 1952 driving trucks full of cheese from northern Utah to New York City, this a journey of some 2,200 miles before the days of Interstate Highways. Wendell would have seen, probably with disapproving Mormon eyes, but perhaps with amazement, the great city on the Hudson, which was so different from the small towns of Utah and Idaho. My own first encounter with New York would have to wait until 1974, when little did I dream that I would spend a large part of my working life in the Big Apple. Morris’ wonderful book has brought flooding back many memories that give a flavour of the New York in which I worked for so many years. I hope they will not bore you.

 

My memories can be conveniently categorized by the names of three hotels where I spent the majority of my nights in the city: in the first phase, The Algonquin, on West 44^th Street (late 1970s/1980s), then the Doral Tuscany on West 34^th (late 1980s/1990s), and finally the Kitano on Park Avenue (late 1990s-2016).

 

The Algonquin Hotel

The Algonquin’s attractions lay not in its rather small rooms, nor in the dreadful food that its restaurant was capable of serving, but in its literary past. It was here that the Algonquin Round Table of writers and wits would gather, from 1919 onwards. Those present might include Dorothy Parker, a critic and poet famous for her sharp wit; Irving Berlin, composer and lyricist; George Kaufman, a playwright and director, who wrote musicals for the Marx Brothers; Harpo Marx; or the actress Tallulah Bankhead. This literary past made the hotel popular with visiting publishers.

 

Waiting to meet someone in the lobby, one might spot a prominent politician such as Ed Koch, Mayor of the city 1975-1989, a TV or movie star, or perhaps in November 1980 yours truly escorting Harold Macmillan to an interview. The Algonquin was also famous for its bar, a small, and oak-wood-panelled space decorated with framed James Thurber cartoons. After a day’s work one could sit at the bar and, in traditional style, discuss the issues of the day or one’s personal troubles with a barman who would lend a sympathetic ear. He would frequently be the stereotypical writer waiting for a publisher to take his first novel. Alas, the bar no longer exists. When the resident owner of the Algonquin sold the hotel, its new Japanese owners decided that the bar would make a nice office.

 

The Algonquin was in one of those frontier areas that made New York so distinctive. A few steps to the west was the Avenue of the Americas, so named by Mayor LaGuardia, but sill identified by its original and more helpful name, 6^th Avenue. A left and a right take you to 42^nd Street and Times Square, now sanitized, but in the 70s and 80s a dingy area of peep shows (“beautiful girls in private booths”), cinemas converted to, at best, strip joints, but more often “live sex shows”. All this was next door to the Port Authority Bus Terminal where passengers would arrive from all over the USA to be welcomed by the seediest side of New York.

 

When my parents-in-law visited us in 1981 Jan’s father said he wanted to visit New York because he was secretary of the United Nations Association in Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire, and wished to tour the UN building on the East River. He was a Quaker and lived in modest style, so his budget, $50 a night,  for hotel rooms was quite a challenge for a man who was introducing a newly acquired mother-in-law to the city. I decided I had better check candidate hotels out in person. One, between the Algonquin and Times Square, had seedy-looking characters sitting on its doorstep and a reception desk protected by bullet-proof-glass. This was certainly not mother-in-law friendly. Fortunately, the Royalton, across the street from the Algonquin, just about retained a sufficient air of faded gentility that it required no protection against bullets. The hotel has since been renovated with a design by Philippe Starck and is now far beyond my father-in-law’s price range, and would have been far too flashy for his tastes.

 

Times Square too has been cleaned up by Mayor Giuliani who found a crafty legal ruse and abolished all the peep shows and sex joints. He passed a zoning ordinance that prohibited a business in which at least 40% of floor area was devoted to “adult use” from operating within 500 feet of a day care centre, school, or house of worship. In crowded Manhattan, this left very few places, if any, where an adult business could operate. 

 

The Harvard Club

The Irish were a significant immigrant group in New York, and a few doors east of the Algonquin was an Irish bar. I stopped here occasionally, but not in 1981 when the portraits of IRA hunger strikers appeared in the windows. I decided that my accent would make me unwelcome. A little further East was the Harvard Club, founded in 1865, its building designed by the celebrated New York architect Charles F. McKim in 1892. New York is club land. Yale’s club founded in 1897, was once at 30 West 44^th where the University of Pennsylvania now has its much younger equivalent (the Penn Club). Yale’s is now housed in a Neoclassical building on Vanderbilt Avenue, adjacent to Grand Central Station. Princeton’s club is a block south of Harvard and Penn, on West 43^rd. Princeton’s is the oldest of the Ivy League clubs, founded in 1866, but only at its present location since 1963.

 

In the same block of West 43^rd stands the Palazzo style building, designed by McKim, Meade and White, of the Century Association, which describes itself as a club for “over two thousand authors, artists, and amateurs of letters and fine arts.” This is New York’s publishers’ club. I first entered its hallowed halls in November 1980 for a celebratory dinner hosted by Tom McCormack, the President of Macmillan’s New York subsidiary St Martin’s Press (named after the old Macmillan HQ in St Martin’s Lane in London), to celebrate the publication the next day of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. The guest of honour was Harold Macmillan. Over dinner Macmillan asked a question that would determine how I would spend more than a decade of my life, from 1985-1996. Pleased that the success of The New Grove was guaranteed, Macmillan asked “Want next?”. Somebody suggested “A dictionary of art”, which I would publish in 36 volumes in 1996, after Macmillan’s death, and after spending quite a few millions of his family’s dollars.

 

The Century Association building

One of the quirks of the Century Club is that pens, pencils and paper are not allowed in the dining room. Lunch and dinner are for stimulating conversation, not business. Mobile phones are not allowed in the club for the same reason. I was once stopped on my way to lunch because my glasses case was mistaken for a phone. The club is an active acquirer of art, mostly paintings. My colleague Peter Warner, President of Thames & Hudson Inc, with whom I worked for a number of years, was a member of the club’s art committee.

 

The University Club is on the corner of West 54^th Street and 5^th Avenue, across the street from the Museum of Modern Art. The glory of this club is its library room, as I discovered when my friend Milan Hughston, the librarian of MOMA, invited me to lunch there. By tradition, the MOMA librarian becomes an honorary member of the Club and, in return, sits on the library committee. I don’t know how many clubs there are in New York, but it surely is the most clubby of all the large American cities. It may even outnumber London’s clubs.

 

Most New York clubs were founded as all male institutions. The Harvard Club, for instance, condescendingly added a Ladies’ Entrance in 1940, which allowed members’ wives and alumni of Radcliffe College, a women’s college affiliated to Harvard, access to separate quarters in the club. Women were not admitted as real members until 1973. Many clubs still retain, despite admitting women, the aura, rules and dress codes of a gentleman’s club.

 

New York’s clubs represent a certain sense of propriety, tinged with aristocratic pretensions, that is characteristic of aspects of high society in New York. In the 1990s the social lives of the wives of wealthy businessmen created a very New York phenomenon. At a book event I met the design director of Tiffany, the jeweller. He was an elegant, urbane and accomplished man with whom conversation was a pleasure. These traits, combined with being gay, defined the walker. The next day my companion of the previous evening was mentioned in an article about the phenomenon as one of New Yorker’s most esteemed walkers. You see, those high society ladies had a busy social calendar but their husbands were too busy making money to escort them. This problem created the demand for a companion who could charm the lady, impress her guests, but could never generate a whiff of scandal because he was known to be gay. Hence the walker. The club and the walker are but two examples of the politer end of New York society, but this is a city with many rough edges to offset the wealthy and refined.

 

The closure of its intimate bar drove me out of the Algonquin and I settled on the Doral Tuscany as my New York home. The Doral had large rooms and an Irish bell boy (who of course was no boy) called Jimmy who ensured that guests received a cheery welcome as he took care of their bags. One day as my taxi turned onto Lexington Avenue to reach 34^th Street, to my astonishment a uniformed man shot across the avenue in the face of on-rushing traffic. As I watched the man dragged a dishevelled character out of the doorway of a building and exclaimed “I’ve told you before not to piss in my doorway”. Here was one of New York’s rough edges.

 

If you work for long enough in New York you begin to wonder how a city that teeters on the edge of chaos manages to function and create. Over breakfast one morning I read in the New York Times that the city had finally linked its taxi license records to its driving license records, only to discover that many licensed cab drivers did not have a driving license. As I settled into a taxi to take me to my first appointment I mentioned this to the driver. “Do you have a driver’s license?” I asked. “Yes, of course”, he replied, “we share it. We’re all called Mohammed.”

 

Madison Square Park. Our office was to the left. Bottom right is the Flatiron Building, an early skyscraper

My office at the time was on Madison Square Park, on East 26^th Street between 5^th and Madison Avenues. The Park was itself another of the city’s rough edges, a haunt of dubious characters and drug dealers, not a nice place to be at night. We employed a number of telephone sales people, many of them out of work actors, who abound in New York. The tellesellers were themselves emblematic of New York’s rough edges. New York’s finest arrived at our office one day looking for a teleseller who had got into a fight on the subway and was charged with assault. Our star (female) salesperson was an eccentric obsessive, who would only work if supplied with green ballpoint pens. One Saturday she was alone in the office. The air conditioning was faulty and emitted a loud noise that disturbed a recording session in a studio on the floor above. A young man was sent down to request that the unit be turned off. He knocked on the door. Alarmed, our sales person seized a large knife in the mail room, flung the door open and promised the young man he was be mutilated if he did not walk ahead of her to be delivered to the doorman on the ground floor.

 

The H W Wilson building (left) with the lighthouse on the roof

New York, of course, had neighbourhoods where the edges became so rough that they are best avoided. One such is the neighbourhood of the Bronx close to Yankee baseball stadium. One of the great tourist attractions of New York is the Circle Line, a boat that sails round Manhattan with a commentary to point out notable and historic buildings. Shortly after the boat leaves the East River and sails up the Harlem River a large brick building on the waterfront stands out for having on its roof a small lighthouse. This is the building of the H W Wilson publishing company, founded in 1898. The original Mr Wilson believed in education as a means to bring the light of learning into the lives of the people. Hence the lighthouse. My New York colleague, Janice Kuta, had mentioned to me the possibility of a partnership with H W Wilson. She insisted that she would not risk walking from the subway station to the Wilson office, so we took a car service. Alas, the driver got hopelessly lost, so in the end we had to get out in the middle of the Bronx and walk – nervously –  to the lighthouse. Our host, Michael, assured us that our nerves were not without justification. For a number of years the light atop the building had to be switched off because it was used for target practice. One day the staff had arrived for work to find a dead body on the doorstep. At the end of every visit Michael insisted on walking me to the subway station at the baseball stadium. He was a gentle, civilized soul, so I have no idea what he would have done if we had encountered a gunman, but his was a kind gesture.

 

Yankee Stadium and the Bronx behind

A city that combines the exclusivity of high society with poverty and living on the brink of chaos, ought not to function at all, but for all its contradictions New York functions, even in the teeth of crime, floods, and terrorist attacks. The city is held together by a host of deeply-embedded practices. One salesman had made a sale worth several thousand dollars to a library in the City. A new regulation required that the library could buy only from an approved vendor. Until a lengthy form had been filled in and our trusted status approved by a committee the sale could not be concluded. One question was whether our company did any business in (Apartheid-era) South Africa. Our ultimate owner, Macmillan, most certainly did do business there, but we were incorporated in Delaware and had never made a sale anywhere in Africa. The application was scheduled for a meeting, but the committee failed to meet its quorum more than once. The frustrated salesman, hungry for his commission had to learn patience with the way the city was managed. Official New York is most certainly bureaucracy.

 

Unions are powerful in many sectors of the city, despite its being the capital of free enterprise where, as my lawyer told me, employees are hired at will and can be fired because the boss does not like the colour of their tie. For example, I have often exhibited my books at trade shows in the New York Hilton. I once travelled with a display made of metal poles and plastic  panels. I learned to put it up in 15 minutes at most. In New York, this operation required two union carpenters hired for a minimum of an hour. My two union carpenters duly appeared, took the display out of its case and scratched their heads wondering how to assemble it. I offered to fix it while they watched. This would take less time and they would still be paid. Not allowed. I offered to give them instructions. Not allowed: supervising a union carpenter is a union job. So, I watched my friendly carpenters wrestle with my display, eventually with success. At which point I was free finally to head for the bar.

 

Another inescapable New York institution is the tip. It is not unusual, even in superior kinds of restaurants, for a waiter/ress to approach a table at which a diner has not yet finished eating, to announce that her/his shift is about to end and present the bill. This ensures the server gets the tip, not the person on the next shift. I was once waiting for a taxi at the entrance of the Hotel Pennsylvania. The Westminster Dog Show in Madison Square Garden had just finished and most of my fellow guests in the queue were Westminster exhibitors with their pooches. I had made sure that I tipped not only the bell boy who brought my bags to the street, but the doorman who hailed taxis and ushered guests into their cabs. One (no doubt out of town) dog show lady had not tipped the doorman. She looked puzzled as guests in the queue behind her were showed to their taxi while she waited, unable to attract the attention of the doorman who was all powerful when it came to transport.

 

A colleague once invited me to join him at a dinner with an author couple at their favourite upper East Side restaurant. When we arrived my friend was dismayed to be made to wait because the restaurant had given our reserved table to other guests. Eventually we were seated. Another guest that evening, by the way was Rod Stewart, accompanied by a glamorous blonde lady. I suspect that Rod’s role that evening was not that of the urbane and very safe walker. He may also have been in need of an eye examination, since the waiter asked if he could borrow our table’s candles, for Rod who was having difficulty reading the menu in the subdued lighting. When we had finished dinner, the authors and I went ahead to the street to hail a taxi while my friend paid the (sizeable) bill. At my call of “Taxi”,  a yellow cab stopped a short distance up the street. We strolled over and got in, asking the driver to wait for our friend. At the sound of loud voices we looked back to see my colleague running at speed from the restaurant pursued by two or three angry-looking waiters. He leaped into the taxi and slammed the door. As we moved off a waiter threw at the taxi a handful of small change – the derisory tip my friend had left in protest at our wait for a table.

 

I left the Doral because it closed to be renovated and converted into a W hotel, far too trendy for my tastes. Also, poor Jimmy died of Lou Gehrig’s disease, a neurone disorder named after a famous baseball player for the New York Yankees (Stephen Hawking also suffered from it). I had been traveling to Japan to set up arrangements for sales of The Dictionary of Art, and had acquired a taste for Japanese food and attentive service. Around the corner on Park Avenue was a new Japanese-owned hotel, the Kitano, so I moved there.

 

Hotel Kitano lobby. The sculpture, Dog, is by Fernando Botero

My work on The Dictionary of Art involved meeting a lot of people in the art world – in universities, museums, galleries, auction houses, and, of course, artists themselves. New York is the capital of the USA’s art world. It is also the home of a majority of the nation’s musical organizations, and host to a great number of top flight higher education institutions of all kinds (universities that teach and research all the disciplines, specialist art or design schools, music conservatories, seminaries etc.). The city also has world-class libraries, of which the granddaddy is the New York Public research library, a great Neoclassical structure, on 5^th Avenue between 42nd and 43^rd streets.

 

New York Public Library, 5th Avenue and 42nd Street, Rose Main Reading Room

New York has the great luck to be the place where some of the nation’s great fortunes were made and continue to be made. Even the robber barons, who made their fortunes in rough and tough industries (railways, steel and the like), and whose conduct was rough and tough, not to say corrupt, liked to put their money into the best when it came to ensuring that their names lived on. And the best often meant Culture with a capital C. For example, Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919) made his money in steel and railways. At the time, old master paintings, European sculpture and decorative arts were available at prices that were very affordable for a man of Frick’s wealth. His collection is now housed in the mansion that Frick built late in his life at 5^th Avenue and 70^th Street. Next to the house is the Frick Art Reference Library, an important research centre. The Frick was a favourite way to while away an hour or so between appointments. I was once looking at a Gainsborough portrait of Richard Paul Jodrell. Two ladies standing next to me misread the label to mean that Gainsborough was the subject of the portrait. Their opinion of the portrait: “Gee. That Gainsborough was an ugly guy.”

 

Thomas Gainsborough, Richard Paul Jodrell, c.1774

New York’s art museum world is extraordinarily diverse. The Metropolitan Museum is the largest and grandest (it also has a wonderful research library), although the Brooklyn Museum across the East River gives the Met a good run for its money. For medieval European art take a bus to the very northern tip of Manhattan for The Cloisters. For modern art there is MOMA. For changing exhibitions in a Frank Lloyd Wright building it’s the Guggenheim. If old master prints and drawings and antiquarian books are your bag, the genteel, quiet and uncrowded Pierpont Morgan Library ( Wall Street banker contemporary of Frick) is the place. If Velázquez, Goya or paintings of colonial Mexico enthuse you then go to the Hispanic Society of America Museum and Library, founded by the son of one of the great railroad builders of the 19^th century. If you want to introduce yourself to the big and not-so-big names of colonial and 19^th century American art the New York Historical Society Museum and Library, founded 1804 is New York’s oldest museum (opened 70 years before the Met). And so on and on.

 

The Cloisters, 1938, looking north. To the left is the Hudson River and the New Jersey Palisades. John D Rockefeller, who donated the land to the Met, bought the Palisades (now a state park) so that no buildings should spoil the view from the Cloisters

When Jackson Pollock and his fellow Abstract Expressionists, was splashing paint around, New York was the art capital of the world. It is still home to some very major artists. My last employer, Thames & Hudson, paid me to meet and talk to some of them. I first met Audrey Flack when she was looking for a publisher for her memoirs. Audrey is a feminist pioneer of Photorealism, perhaps best known for her painting Marilyn, a tribute to Marilyn Monroe. She once almost achieved the distinction of making the largest statue ever made by a  female artist, of Catherine of Braganza, commissioned in the 1990s by the Borough of Queens, which is named after Queen Catherine. She would have stood as tall as a nine-storey building, but when it emerged that she had become wealthy from the transatlantic slave trade, the commission was cancelled (a Black Lives Matter statue controversy avant Black Lives Matter). My friend Chris Contillo and I once met Audrey at her Chelsea dealer’s gallery to see a show of her work before it opened.  Audrey loves to talk, so invited us to join her for a Chinese takeaway on the roof of the building (rather to the annoyance of her dealer who was paying for lunch). Audrey was born in 1931, but age has not hindered her making art, nor performing with her History of Art band (she plays the banjo).

 

Audrey Flack, Marilyn, oil on acrylic on canvas, 1977

I once interviewed Spencer Tunick, famous for his nude photos of massed ranks of naked people in various locations. Spencer explained that he started out photographing individual nude people on the streets of New York. He learned the importance of explaining to New York’s finest that he was not up to no good taking photos of a naked person in public. Demand grew, so he took group photos on the street. He told me that his Caracas photo required 1,000 soldiers to guard the nudes and their clothing. Spencer ended the interview by describing his dinner party package. He joins a dinner party in a person’s home. After desert the guests strip off and Spencer takes their photograph. Jan told me quite firmly that we were not going to ask Spencer to one of our dinner parties.

 

New York, of course, equals money and in the art world money talks big time. The city is the capital of the American auction house and art gallery business. Sotheby’s and Christies are headquartered there as are most of the fanciest dealers. One of the big events of the year is the Armory Show, held for many years at the 69^th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue. For a few years The Dictionary of Art was a sponsor of the show. We displayed our 36 volumes at the entrance to the fair. My colleague Karin Agosta had the pleasure of chatting with Harrison Ford and shaking his hand! I recall standing in one dealer’s space looking at a large Goya portrait of a Spanish lady, dressed all in black. As I admired the painting, I heard the dealer’s conversation with a possible buyer. “How much is the Goya?” “A million dollars.” “No, for a million bucks I’ll have something I like.” That’s a very New York conversation.

 

Sarge's Monster sandwich

New York is surely the biggest eating out city in the Americas. Diners and restaurants abound. Sarge’s Deli on 3^rd Avenue is open 24 hours. If you’ve been out very late and have an appetite, Sarge’s is the place to go for “THE MONSTER: “Home to New York’s biggest sandwich. Served on thick sliced rye bread, with corned beef, pastrami, roast beef, fresh turkey, salami, sliced tomato, lettuce, cole slaw & Russian dressin [sic]”. TAKE THE CHALLENGE …….49.95. Sandwich and T-shirt ……. 63.95.”

 

If power dining is your thing, and you like fish, the place to go is Le Bernardin, on West 51^st Street, where the basic tasting menu with wine pairing is a mere $293. The Chef’s Tasting is a touch more: $373. I have dined there twice. The first occasion involved the sales person who marched the young man to the doorman at knife point. She had sold so many book that my boss instructed me to take her to the restaurant of her choice, no matter the cost. She chose Le Bernardin and asked me to invite two colleagues. I no longer recall the size of the bill (plus tip of course), but I do remember that the biggest restaurant bill I ever saw was at Nobu New York. I had a dinner date with a friend with whom I had a book deal and his wife. Before dinner we had to call in to The Tribeca Screening Room (owned by Robert De Niro). Cathy is a film maker and a friend of a famous  movie star whose new film was being screened to friends and family. As we left for dinner the star suggested that we join her, her husband and daughter at Nobu. As we took our seats, Muhammad Ali was eating dinner behind us, assisted by two carers (he had severe Parkinson’s disease). Before we had ordered, the daughter became unhappy and left with her father, so I found myself the companion of a very famous person by chance. Dinner was quite delicious. We so enjoyed a course of soft shell crab that we ordered seconds. Before we finished dinner, the movie star left to join her husband and daughter. When the bill came, I realized that the famous diner who had invited me had left me to share the bill with my friends. We split if 50/50. With tip it came to $1,000 each.

 

The Tavern on the Green, Crystal Room

On the subject of extravagant New York dining, I was once invited to lunch by a delinquent author. She was determined to give me a real New York experience. She chose a traditional steak house, but not just any steak house. This was the restaurant where a mafia boss had only recently been gunned down. She was at pains to show me the very spot. However, the extravagance was not my steak lunch. I later spotted my host in the social pages of The New York Times. She had hired the entire Tavern on the Green in Central Park for her dog’s birthday and his doggy friends. The Tavern on the Green was built in 1934 by the great New York city planner Robert Moses, on the site of an 1880s sheep fold capable of holding 700 sheep. My author’s dog must have had an awful lot of friends.

 

Dinner for a retiring publisher at Patsy's February 2016

My last dining experience in New York, my retirement dinner with colleagues from W W Norton and Thames & Hudson, was at Patsy’s, a family-owned Italian restaurant on West 5^th Street, founded in 1944 by Pasquale “Patsy” Scognamillo. Patsy’s boast is that since then it has had only three chefs. The restaurant’s web site tells us that it was made famous by Frank Sinatra, but it adds a long list of famous diners: movie stars (Al Pacino), opera singers (Placido Domingo), authors (Alec Baldwin), designers (Calvin Klein), politicians (John F Kennedy Jr). Patsy’s serves an excellent martini and homely Italian dishes: spaghetti and meatballs, stuffed calamari (my retirement dish: $38), stuffed veal chop. The wine list is extremely simple: House (red, white, sparkling , rosé) or one special. And it costs nothing like Le Bernardin or Nobu.

 

New York is the publishing capital of the English-speaking world. This is a city with a literary ecosystem, which perhaps only London could aspire to match. A few years before I retired, a colleague invited me to a party at a grand apartment on Lexington Avenue. Will Balliett’s father was the jazz critic for the New Yorker. The party was very much a New Yorker affair to mark the publication of a book. Present were novelists and non-fiction writers. I met a man who was working on a photographic history of trees. There were two young men working as journalists for the Huffington Post while they tried to make it as novelists. There were professors of English from universities, one of whom spoke about the book being marked that evening. Will’s wife teaches theatre and entertained us with a selection of Broadway songs, accompanied by two young musicians, one a student of musical theatre from Iceland. All in a large wood-panelled room about the size of the ground floor of my house. The wine and conversation flowed freely and urbanely.

 

And speaking of Broadway, New York is also theatre land, full of out-of-work actors waiting on tables, or teleselling for me people like me. One of our telesellers sent me an invitation to her one-woman show in a space that normally hosted pilates or yoga classes. She had been adopted at birth and the comedy musical was the tale of her search for her birth mother. It cannot be easy to make en entertaining show about the impenetrable bureaucratic impediments that hinder the  search for one’s parents, but this was a funny, deeply moving performance. She explained that her adoptive parents (hard-drinking, hard-cursing Jews in Oklahoma) had no interest in singing and dancing which had been her passion since childhood. This puzzled her, so she set out to find her roots. The show seemed to end in failure: all efforts to find her parents had failed. We all felt profound sympathy as she began her last number. Then a member of the audience stood up to join in the song – and joined her daughter on stage. Her birth mother, it turned out had been looking for her and had found her just as she had abandoned her search. Her mother was a Jewish singer-dancer and her father a Mexican immigrant. So our teleseller's passion for performance was genetic. We applauded with great gusto.

 

New York, then, is a city of cabs, cocktails, clubs, carousing, clip joints, culture, creativity, catch-phrases, commuters, crime, cops, corruption, contradictions, commerce, cupidity, cash-talks capitalism, cosa nostra, chaos. It’s cocky but irrepressible and indomitable. When the 9/11 attacks happened, my office was in a building on Park Avenue South. Around the corner was another 69^th Regiment Armory where people went to search for missing family members. In desperation they pasted the front of the building with photos – hundreds of them – of missing loved ones. For a time we had to allow colleagues who found the photos too upsetting to walk past to take time off work. But they and the city recovered. So it did too from the floods in 2012. New York is quite a place. Read Jan Morris book and you will find out why.