So it looks as though I am going to be going to New York again. My mother, who left Manhattan to be with my father over half a century ago, still feels the pull of the place and has decided that she had better go there one more time while she still can. And the reason I can afford to go there is because she’s paying for my ticket. Well, you don’t turn down a free trip to New York, do you? Not even with your mother. Who, in my case, will be keeping a beady eye on the number of brandy-and-sodas I drink as part of my copyrighted anti-jet-lag system on the way there and back.
She has friends there, although sadly Cousin Lee, who mesmerised me when I was a child not because he was obviously gay but because he shaved with lather and a blade, died in 2009. Going to see him was the true, classy New York experience: a place in the mid-50s, east side, a luxurious apartment with a kitchen the size of a tea-chest (in which, however, he could cook sumptuous meals); trips to Chinatown and the best Jewish delis in town.
My mother, who used to appear on Broadway, still has New York in her blood and she would always watch the latest New Yorkbased TV shows – Rhoda, Kojak – so she could see how her city was getting on. “The best Kojak episodes are the ones with drugs in them,” she once confided in me and she was right – nothing else provided such a frisson, and a scene where the bald, lollipop sucking Telly Savalas shows his nephew a tenement stuffed with shivering junkies has probably done more than anything else to keep me off the skag for life.
The condition – New Yorkitis – is hereditary. I showed the kids The Odd Couple with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon the other weekend and despite there being no spies, spaceships or elves in it, just a lot of talk, they loved it. And what talk. The film may be a thinly disguised version of a play with a low proportion of exterior shots, but it is as muggy with the atmosphere of the place as an un-air-conditioned summer’s day there. The natural heat of the place is, in its way, a character; think also of Rear Window. I first went to the city as a child, around the same time The Odd Couple was made, and to me that is how New York is meant to look: the cabs are that shape, policemen’s caps are pointy around the circumference, like Officer Dibble’s in Top Cat, and the men wear natty pork-pie hats. It’s as archaic an image as that of a London wracked with pea-soupers but any deviation from it I am capable of blanking utterly. There are enough satisfactory relics.
That said, I tend to enjoy the full contemporary experience when I go to the City That Never Sleeps, which means I am more John Self in Money than the loquacious nebbish of a Woody Allen story. And after the last time, which ended up in a miserable, hopeless search round the Diamond District for a stolen gold watch, I was more than half glad that financial considerations would prevent me from making the trip there ever again. I need to be kept on a leash while I’m there. It starts with oysters at Grand Central and ends up trying to give the correct description to a policeman in Times Square at four o’clock in the morning.
I wonder whether the problem is that London isn’t really anything, but New York really is New York. When T S Eliot called London the Unreal City, he was on to something. London is simply too sprawling for us to see it – we’re out of scale with it, or in the wrong dimension.
I’ve lived here for about 98 per cent of my life and feel my grasp of the place actually slipping as I get older. Whereas New York’s quiddity and immensity peers down at you the whole time. The place is an intramuscular injection of hard-core, uncut cityness which, after London’s methadone, comes as quite a jolt and can cause some people to overdose. And you don’t have to be a big, brash city to have this effect on the Londoner: pretty much anywhere else can do it.
Meanwhile, I flick through the pages of my stiff new US passport. Compared with its predecessor, this is a document so stuffed with patriotic bling that it makes you want to cringe. Each page has either an eagle or a cowboy or a steam train or a sailing ship or a Statue of Liberty and an inspiring quote to go with it. It’s funny. Every time I think to myself that this is the time I will cast off my wimpy Englishness and move to the US, something happens to make me go “oh, deary me. Tut tut.”
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