The Undocumented Mark Steyn Read online

  But he wasn’t happy and tried again:

  Scent and smoke and sweat can suddenly combine together and hit the taste buds with an acid shock at three o’clock in the morning.

  Still not quite there. So he rewrote once more, and this time he skewered it precisely:

  The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul-erosion produced by high gambling—a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension—becomes unbearable and the senses awake and revolt from it.

  James Bond suddenly knew that he was tired.

  It was January 15, 1952, and Ian Fleming—a middle-management newspaper man—had sat down in his study at Goldeneye, his home in Jamaica, opened up a brand new typewriter (gold-plated), and begun the first chapter of his first book. Conceived as a bestseller, Casino Royale effortlessly transcended such unworthy aims. Today, its protagonist is up there with Count Dracula and Batman and a handful of other iconic A-listers. Fleming did not anticipate what to me is always the dreariest convention of the celluloid Bond blockbuster—the final twenty minutes in which 007 and the girl run around a hollowed-out mountain or space station or some other supervillain lair shooting extras in BacoFoil catsuits while control panels explode all around them and Bond looks frantically for the big red on/off button that deactivates the nuclear laser targeting London, Washington, Moscow, and/or Winnipeg. But, that oversight aside, it’s remarkable how much of the 007 architecture the novelist had in place so quickly. In Casino Royale, the roulette table shows up on page one, M on page three, Moneypenny on page thirteen, the Double-Os on fourteen, the CIA’s Felix Leiter on thirty-one, the first dry martini, shaken not stirred, on page thirty-two. “Excellent,” pronounces Bond on the matter of the last, “but if you can get a vodka made with grain instead of potatoes, you will find it still better.”

  So five chapters in and Fleming’s invented most of the elements propping up the formula for the next five decades. That’s not to say he was formulaic. Au contraire, that’s the big difference between the Bond books and the Bond films: Fleming eschewed formula. Sometimes he put 007 up against evil megalomaniacs bent on world domination; but he also wrote The Spy Who Loved Me, a tale of small-time hoods told by a young woman (une jolie Québécoise, as it happens) in which Bond doesn’t turn up until halfway through; and From Russia with Love, with its unhurried Bond-free Soviet prologue; and a dozen or so short stories, one of which—“Quantum of Solace”—is little more than a dinner-party anecdote told to Bond by a colonial civil servant. Fleming had such confidence in his character’s adaptability to form it’s a wonder he didn’t put him in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

  By contrast, the films settled into their groove early and were disinclined to depart therefrom. So we’ve had four decades of the pre-credits sequence, the song, the titles with the naked girls morphing into pistols and harpoons, Q saying “Oh, grow up, 007,” the double entendres (“I’m afraid something’s come up”), etc. Whether it’s a smart move to dump it all, as the new Casino Royale does, remains to be seen. But, as with the allegedly stale formula, almost all the “new” gritty, tough Bond comes direct from Fleming.

  Not that he gets much credit either way. In his anthology of espionage fiction, Alan Furst explains that “there were two standards for the selections in The Book of Spies: good writing—we are here in the literary end of the spectrum, thus no James Bond—and the pursuit of authenticity.”

  My, that’s awfully snooty. It’s not clear to me that Fleming is any less “authentic” than, say, John le Carré. Certainly, an organization such as SPECTRE seems more relevant to the present globalized alliances between jihadists, drug cartels, and freelance nuke salesmen than anything in The Russia House. Indeed, to assume the murky moral ambiguity of Cold War wilderness-of-mirrors spy fiction must be “authentic” indicates little more than political bias. There’s no evidence the vast majority of MI6, the CIA, or the KGB saw it like that, and as to the general glumness of pre-swinging London, Fleming’s far more evocative than the “authentic” chaps:

  He thought of the bitter weather in the London streets, the grudging warmth of the hissing gas-fire in his office at Headquarters, the chalked-up menu on the pub he had passed on his last day in London: “Giant Toad and 2 Veg.”

  He stretched luxuriously.

  As for “good writing” at the “literary end,” Furst is on thin ice here with his cringe-makingly clunky sex scenes in which (speaking of literary ends) characters “ride each other’s bottoms through the night,” which makes them sound like Paul Revere fetishists. For all his famously peculiar tastes, Fleming had a careless plausibility in this area: I like his line that “older women are best because they always think they may be doing it for the last time.” Like the best Fleet Streeters of his generation, he was an extremely good writer, at least in the sense that he was all but incapable of writing a bad sentence. Do you know how rare that is in this field? The bestselling author David Baldacci, for example, is all but incapable of writing a good sentence, though it doesn’t seem to make any difference to sales of Absolute Power, etc.

  It’s essential for thriller writers to skewer the details precisely: in Casino Royale, one notes, the wire transfers are effected via the Royal Bank of Canada. But it was never about the numbingly nerd-like annotation of the “pursuit of authenticity.” With his fanatical insistence on ritualized cocktails, and cigarettes (Morland) and breakfast menus (Cooper’s Vintage Oxford Marmalade), Bond prefigured much of today’s brand-name fiction. Consumer name-dropping was a novelty in the drab British Fifties, and, of course, unlike chick lit and Hollywood soft porn, there’s something pleasingly goofy about a fellow who spends so much time getting beaten and tortured by cruel men in the shadows and then gets hung up not only about which caviar and which Bollinger, but which strawberry jam (Tiptree “Little Scarlet”) and which nightshirt (“Bond had always disliked pyjamas and had slept naked” until in Hong Kong he had discovered “a pyjama-coat which came almost down to the knees”). Fleming’s 007 is a paradox: he prizes habit but dreads boredom. As he muses to himself in Casino Royale:

  He found something grisly in the inevitability of the pattern of each affair. The conventional parabola—sentiment, the touch of the hand, the kiss, the passionate kiss, the feel of the body, the climax in bed, then more bed, then less bed, then the boredom, the tears and the final bitterness—was to him shameful and hypocritical. Even more he shunned the mise en scène for each of these acts in the play—the meeting at a party, the restaurant, the taxi, his flat, her flat, then the weekend by the sea, then the flats again, then the furtive alibis and the final angry farewell on some doorstep in the rain.

  That’s beautifully poised: “then more bed, then less bed.” It’s all the better because Bond thinks he means it. Fleming understood the sleight of hand involved in each book—the strange disquisitions on short men or American road signs or the ghastliness of tea that glide you over the not quite convincing plot twist and on to the next magnificent set piece. He kept it up almost to the end, until sickness and boredom ground him down.

  But, as an exercise in sheer style, the Fleming of Casino Royale is hard to beat. It’s not about the plot. Unlike almost any other thriller writer, he can be read over and over and over.

  BOY, MEATS, GIRL

  Until middle age, Mike Ockrent was one of many British directors of his generation eking out a living in fringe theatre and bulking up his bank account with the occasional West End transfer. And then lightning struck: He revived and reshaped a forgotten local musical called Me and My Girl, and one of those rare but wonderful showbizzy things happened. “This would close in its first 20 minutes on Broadway,” Alan Jay Lerner, writer of My Fair Lady, scoffed to me on its London opening. But it didn’t. It transferred to New York, and was a smash—and made Ockrent a player in American theatre. The interview below took place shortly before the opening of his Gershwin revival, Crazy for You. Not only was he a big man on Broadway, but he’d found love there
, too: The choreographer on the show was the prodigiously talented Susan Stroman.

  They married in 1996, and for Ockrent it seemed like one of those musical-comedy endings, in which love and showbiz success, the whole magilla, all come together. And then he was hit by leukemia. He died in 1999, at fifty-three, having just started work on his latest project—a stage version of Mel Brooks’s film The Producers. Instead, his wife and choreographer, Miss Stroman, found herself shepherding Broadway’s biggest turn-of-the-century hit through to opening night, and then to the big screen.

  There have been many times in the years since when I’ve been watching some play or movie, and something Ockrent said to me decades ago pops into my head. He was a very gifted man, and I think this interview conveys something of his enthusiasm—for his work and for America. But he’s also very good here on how even frothy nonsense is better for having some big idea underpinning it. He was an old Labour “luvvie”—a theatrical leftie—but what he has to say about storytelling applies whatever your politics:

  The Independent, March 3, 1993

  IN MIKE OCKRENT’S novel Running Down Broadway, the musical theatre correspondent of The Independent goes to interview the director of a big American musical and throws up over his carpet. Two years later, life imitates art—up to a point: Mike Ockrent is now the director of a big Broadway musical, although, sadly, despite three vindaloos and fourteen pints of lager, I find myself unable to disgorge on his carpet. But, in Ockrent’s home, it’s not only the rugs that remain untainted. The whole apartment looks like the way you dream of doing your pad if you ever make it big in showbiz—except that, if you ever do make it big in showbiz, you’re usually too jaded and cynical to go in for such wholesome memorabilia as Ockrent displays. There’s a large photograph of some black kids breakdancing under the marquee of Me and My Girl (his first New York smash), while yellow cabs and neon billboards and burger joints scream across the background—the sort of sweetly naïve acceptance of the hip-hooray and ballyhoo of Broadway that hard-boiled Great White Way wiseacres would scoff at.

  Something of the same quality colors his novel. As a study of an arts writer on The Independent, it’s uncannily accurate: the musical theatre critic is a total loser, a bedsit deadbeat, a sexual inadequate with suicidal tendencies—“although, unlike you, he lives in Willesden,” adds Ockrent, reassuringly. But, as a portrait of Broadway, it’s slightly quaint—you can sort of tell it was written by an Englishman whose introduction to this world was backstage movies: for example, producers still scream “You schmuck!” at their directors, as opposed to “You c**ksucker!”

  Yet here he is: the toast of New York, the slick superstager of Crazy for You, the show that brought the Gershwins back to Broadway and, according to The New York Times, heralded the exhilarating triumphant re-birth of the American musical. “Frank Rich’s piece was basically, ‘Thank God, it isn’t British.’ But he does another review the next day on WBJR. . . .”

  You mean WQXR?

  “Is it? If it’s not called Melody Radio or BBC2, it’s a mystery to me. But he did mention then, almost apologetically, that I was British.”

  Ockrent had had hits before—Passion Play, Educating Rita—but it was his overhaul of Me and My Girl that first brought him to the attention of the Americans. In the 1930s, it had been a strictly local hit that, like most British musicals of the period, never traveled. Half a century later, Ockrent and Stephen Fry exhumed the piece. At the West End press call, the director overheard a photographer say, “I don’t give this six weeks.” Ockrent bet him a cheeseburger it would run at least seven. It did: seven years (though he’s still owed the burger). “We just did it because we thought it would be fun as a Christmas show at the Leicester Haymarket. . . .” But it played Broadway, Tokyo, is still touring Britain, and made Ockrent the obvious choice when the producer Roger Horchow decided he wanted to revive another Thirties property, the Gershwins’ Girl Crazy.

  In their original forms, these musicals were harmless pieces of fluff for the tired-businessman crowd. Today, they come riddled with subtext. I mention to Ockrent that, a few years ago, when I’d described Me and My Girl as a musical comedy about a Cockney who inherits an earldom, he’d pointed out that, in fact, he’d taken a neo-Brechtian line on the material.

  “That’s right,” he says.

  Er, just remind me: what was the neo-Brechtian line again?” Like most of the audience, I find the Brechtian line less easy to recall than the line about “Aperitif?” “No, thanks, I’ve brought my own.

  “Well, it’s all sorts of notions about class, British imperialism. . . .” He recalls how he’d been very taken by some prince interviewed by Robert Lacey on a TV series about European aristocracy, and how he’d wanted to raise the subject of ancestor worship, which is what gave the prince an advantage over a fellow like himself, who could only trace his family one-and-a-half generations back to somewhere in Mitteleuropa, and how he carefully selected the ancestors of the Cockney earl to represent different stages in imperial history since the twelfth century. . . . “And out of that sprang the number ‘Men of Hareford,’ where the ancestors come out of their paintings and start tapping. . . .”

  But it’s the tapping you remember. . . .

  “Yes, but I think it was Hal—” (Ockrent is one of the few Britons who can plausibly first-name drop Hal Prince, director of Cabaret) “—or maybe it was Steve—” (And Stephen Sondheim, composer of Sweeney Todd) “—who said whenever you’re working on a musical that appears to be light and fluffy, it’s crucial to have a really important thought that underpins the thing. It’s not just Fred meets Sally, Sally loses Fred, then they get together. That isn’t enough today. That’s the big difference between what we’re doing in the Nineties and the way it used to be. We’ve all come out of university. . . .”

  So it’s just to salve your conscience?

  “Well, the people working on it have to get some satisfaction. And, in the end, it isn’t satisfying to whip up a soufflé if you haven’t cooked the venison just before it.”

  In the old non-red-meat days of 1930, Girl Crazy was about a Jewish cabbie who goes west and becomes a mayor, or maybe it was a Jewish mayor who goes west and becomes a cabbie. Venison-wise, what’s Crazy for You about?

  “Well, the venison is about cultural renewal. The soufflé is ‘Let’s put on a show, let’s do up the theatre, and everybody lives happily ever after.’ But the meat of it is that this is a town, Deadrock, that has died; the culture is dead; everybody’s asleep, nobody does anything. Then in comes this guy with enormous energy who wants to be a dancer, who wants to have rhythm, and he enthuses this town with a whole new life: he gives them rhythm, he gives them their culture back.”

  So it’s a metaphor for the state of American showbiz?

  Ockrent looks at me scornfully: I’d mistaken his haunch of venison for a soggy quarter-pounder. “It’s a metaphor for the state the world is in. Look at us here: we’re cutting back on our grants and our subsidies, we never believe culture is important, we never support it, and, if you don’t have a culture, you have no life. . . .”

  So this glossy sappy-happy song’n’dance bonanza is, in fact, an argument for increased state subsidy of the arts?

  “Absolutely. Philip Hedley of the Theatre Royal, Stratford East,1 would be happy with it.”

  As it happens, Crazy for You is the first of Ockrent’s hits not to originate in the subsidized theatre, while his productions for commercial managements have proved considerably less commercial: Look! Look! was a short-lived play about the audience that never found one of its own; Follies was a textbook definition of a succès d’estime—a success that runs out of steam. “Follies said a lot about marriage and hopes dashed, and that’s an important topic. But if it’s something called Follies at the Shaftesbury, you expect to see a traditional follies. If it had been called Middle-Aged Spread. . . .”

  You’d expect Ray Cooney?

  “Okay, Middle-Aged Dread. But the point is you’d
know not to take Gran’ma for an undemanding night out.”

  He doesn’t accept the easy prècis of his career, as a division between splashy hits and more ambitious but less lucrative works. There are, he reckons, just as many important intellectual threads running through Crazy for You. Moreover, his approach to this show is no different from his early productions at the Traverse in Edinburgh, when he was heavily influenced by Peter Stein of Berlin’s Schaubühne Theatre and worried, in his dramaturge C. P. Taylor’s phrase, about “the paucity of modern philosophy.”

  Today, there’s no paucity of philosophy about Ockrent. Indeed, whenever you enquire about a specific lyric or even a throwaway joke, he inevitably expands it into a discussion on geopolitical socioeconomic trends post-Thatcher. In his novel, The Independent’s musical theatre loser-schmucko plans his suicide while listening to Streisand singing Sondheim: “Jesus, I love musicals!” he moans. Ockrent loves ’em, too, but, a physicist by training, he needs to know why.

  “I do love Broadway, it’s consummately professional, it’s enthusiastic. When you cast the chorus here, you say, ‘We’d love you to be in the show,’ and they nod quietly and go, ‘Uh-huh.’ ‘We’re going to start rehearsals on September 21st.’ ‘Uh-huh.’ ‘So we’ll see you then.’ ‘Okay.’ And off they go: all very cool, very English. You do the same thing in America and they go, ‘Wow! Yo!’ There’s no pretending that it doesn’t mean much. On Crazy for You here, we’ve been working on the accents and I’ve been trying to explain that it’s more than the accents: it’s the way sentences are structured, even the body language is different—you come forward to talk. We hate display, we believe children should be seen and not heard—and where’s it got us? It’s got us in the worst recession, we’re a third-rate power. . . .”

  Like the fourteenth chorus of an Ockrent first-act finale, the sheer exuberance is infectious. “So what you’re saying,” I ask, “is that Britain wouldn’t be such a depraved hellhole if we all went around as if we were auditioning for a musical comedy on Broadway?”