Foreign Correspondence (27 page)

For the best part of a decade Nell’s life had been like a continuous pajama party. But instead of the relatively staid hour of 1:30
A.M.
, she rarely got to bed before five. “I’d wake up at five the next afternoon without seeing daylight,” she said. Defying the short half-life of most New York clubs, Nell’s had remained hot for years. She said it had been a relief when the celebrity tide finally ebbed. “The drinking, smoky rooms, very high heels, up till dawn … I was never really a party person, and the club was like a party every night.”

I looked at her over the froth of my cappuccino and wondered why she was saying such a thing. If this woman wasn’t a party person, who was? Perhaps she was adopting Australian camouflage, coloring herself marsupial gray. It’s one thing to be queen of the night in New York, but Australians know a tumbril is always waiting.

As the club’s pressures eased, she finally had some energy for other interests. She enrolled in art class (“I’d always be the last one there—hung over, wearing sunglasses”) and met a fresh-faced blond sculptor named Eamon Roche, who had become her partner in life and work. Together they were about to open a Vietnamese restaurant. Although the space was still a building site,
Vogue
’s editor Anna Wintour had visited the curing concrete and dangling wires the day before—“wearing about $20,000 worth of clothes”—looking for a hot venue for a party
for a celebrity “so big she can’t say who it is.” Nell wasn’t sure the restaurant would be ready, but that was part of the allure: “Everyone in this town always wants to be first.” A
Vogue
function would be an ideal opening, for Wintour would bring the models, and a sprinkling of models made a room look right to the rest of fashionable Manhattan.

It wasn’t the career Nell had imagined for herself in those long-ago Sydney letters. But when the time came to launch herself as an actress, she’d found that she didn’t have the temperament to sit through drizzly London winters, patiently auditioning for small parts. Instead of capitalizing on her high profile after the release of
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
, she’d run off to Norfolk with a romantic poacher—“a bit of a D. H. Lawrence fantasy, I’m afraid—all my clothes were stained with blood from hiding his dead pheasants in my pockets.” When she did turn up for a rare audition, “It was, ‘Take me as I am or not at all.’ Just because my hair was Schiaparelli pink and I had a broad Australian accent didn’t mean I couldn’t play Jane Eyre.”

The staid world of London theater hadn’t seen it that way, and her acting career stalled. It had only just begun to revive. In 1994 she made her first stage appearance in almost a decade, playing a fading actress in a farce,
You Should Be So Lucky
, written by one of New York’s most famous drag queens, Charles Busch. The role won her a New York Critics Circle nomination. Choice film cameos followed. But her biggest part remained The Fabulous Nell, hostess to the famous.

I wondered if she’d seen a lot of appalling behavior at the club. “
NOT ENOUGH
appalling behavior!” she roared. “I saw a lot more outrageousness when I was living with the poacher in Norfolk than I have here. There, you’d go to a dinner party and the thing would get
ENTIRELY
disorderly and the host would end up in bed with his best friend’s wife. Here, famous people are all drinking P
ERRIER
and worrying about what everyone thinks of them.”

It was time to visit the new restaurant to see how work was progressing. Nell looked around for our waitress. She was seated at a nearby table, tucking into a muffin. “She’s having
BREAKFAST
!” Nell gasped. It wouldn’t happen at any of her establishments.

We grabbed a cab for the ride to West Houston. As we pulled away from the curb, Nell leaned forward and tapped the driver on a crisply pin-striped shoulder. “Can I just comment,” she said, “on how wonderfully you’re dressed?”

Stuck in traffic in the gray, treeless streets of downtown, we talked wistfully of Sydney. She said she’d had a perfect childhood. “We were so free, ranging around all those huge backyards.” She compared it to the constrained, scheduled, indoor lives of her friends’ children in Manhattan. “We adored our parents, but we never saw them except at mealtimes. Here, the kids and their parents are never out of each other’s sight.”

I wondered aloud whether our generation really did mark the end of the era when people thought they had to go away to prove themselves. There had been such an inevitability to it, like a tribal initiation. Sometimes you looked forward to leaving, sometimes you dreaded it, but whatever you felt, you knew the departure date would eventually come.

It came for me in early September 1982. It was Australian spring, the time of year when the jasmine is in full bloom, filling the soft air with fragrance. As the taxi carried me over the Harbor Bridge, sunlight sparkled off the water as if some profligate billionaire had scattered armloads of crushed diamonds.

At the airport, the Qantas flight attendant called my seat-row number for boarding just as the piped Musak in the gate lounge turned from some unrecognizable bubble-gum tune to “New York, New York.” It seemed like an omen: “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere …”

That song wasn’t written just for twenty-six-year-olds from
faraway Sydney. My father had wanted to make it in New York: among his oldest letters, I’d found one from a New York agent, replying with cautious encouragement to his query about whether he should come East. “You have the voice, and the looks,” she wrote. “But you’ll also need luck.…”

In the end, luck wasn’t with him. In late 1936 he set off with the Jay Whidden band for a national tour that was to culminate in a big engagement in Manhattan. They played to raves in cities like Denver and Shreveport. But in San Antonio they were booked into a grand ballroom—the kind the band often played in Los Angeles. The smaller, touring ensemble didn’t have a big enough sound to fill the space. They flopped. Their next engagement in New York City was canceled. The band headed home to California, and then on to Australia. “I never got to see the Statue of Liberty,” my dad often said.

I saw it for him, my second night in New York, from the railing of a ferry boat, standing alongside that other monumental American icon, Walter Cronkite. The boat party was something Columbia Journalism School did every year, to welcome its incoming class. That night, as I stared up at the Brooklyn Bridge and the World Trade Center, I thought I’d never leave.

But my infatuation with New York City burned itself out like a brief affair. By the end of the year I was happy to go anywhere, even Cleveland. And Sydney shimmered in my memory like a glorious mirage.

When I go home to Sydney now, I visit friends who haven’t seen any reason to leave. These days, their books get reviewed in the
New York Times
, their plays are staged in London, their screenplays are bought by Hollywood. One writes from his house on the harbor, and if his kids need to get to basketball practice, he ferries them there in the little speedboat parked at the end of his
yard. And while it’s no longer necessary to become an expatriate in order to find an international audience, the audience at home has become more interested in indigenous things. Talent doesn’t have to be lauded elsewhere before it’s acclaimed.

Nell’s younger sister had become a prize-winning artist without leaving Sydney; just a few years earlier, a stint abroad in Paris or New York might have been required before Australians would have taken her work seriously. Her brother was a solar-energy scientist, doing his research at the University of New South Wales and exporting his expertise to remote Sudanese villages. Her older sister Sally had come home from London just as the Australian movie industry was beginning to flourish. One of her first credits, Animal Handler on
My Brilliant Career
, led to her own brilliant career in film production. One month she’d be in London, working on the Royal Albert Hall scenes in
Shine
, the next she’d be in the Outback, on a shoot with Ralph Fiennes in
Oscar and Lucinda
.

Nell’s siblings lived within a few miles of each other and within walking distance of the beach. Sometimes, when she compared her life with theirs, she wondered if she’d stayed in Manhattan too long. “Do you think I could do this in Sydney?” she asked as the cab crawled through Soho traffic. Sure, I replied. I’d just read somewhere that Sydney had more restaurants per head of population than any city other than San Francisco. But she looked dubious. The Sydney she left, in the early seventies, was still a very small place. And when she went back, she spent her time in rushed visits to childhood friends. Her image of the city seemed colored by that more claustrophobic time.

And yet things kept happening that gave her doubts. Her old school, Abbotsleigh, had asked her to send a brief bio for an anniversary yearbook. She’d toiled over her entry. “I didn’t want to be too … I didn’t want to sound too …”

Too “tall poppy,” perhaps?

“Well, I needn’t have worried, because when I got the book
and read the lives that all my classmates have had, I was the dullest one in there!”

That night, at her club, she flitted from table to table as the room slowly filled. The club was in its tenth year—ancient for a New York night-life venue. And while the limos no longer disgorged roomfuls of celebrities, the place did a steady business as, among other things, the chief downtown redoubt of the city’s stylish young black crowd.

“Over there, I think, was the blow job,” said Nell, pointing an elegant, red-nailed index finger at a corner of the nightclub dance floor where a young woman allegedly performed oral sex on the rap star Tupac Shakur. “How
anyone
saw it I don’t know. It’s wall-to-wall bodies in here.”

Nell no longer presided at the club every night. But she had an affection for the place that was evident as she wandered from floor to floor, plumping pillows on the sofas, adjusting the lighting levels, putting a tilted lampshade straight. She paused in the ladies’ room to show off the “wallpaper”—hundreds of old postcards she shellacked herself back in the days when she and her partners were creating this fantasy of a British gentlemen’s club.

“See how we did the stairs? When the oriental rugs get worn we cut them up and have them made into runners. You see that chandelier? It still gets dusted
every
day.” Like Janine’s tiny village, this place, too, had its routines, the small, unglamorous details that are the foundation of a larger-than-ordinary life.

When Nell reached the dance floor, she strutted and twirled across the polished boards. She wore a clingy leotard and a frothy tulle skirt that showed off the legs the
New York Times
’s drama critic in 1994 called the best “this side of a Folies-Bergère revue.” The twelve-year-old who tap-danced at the breakfast table now had a dance floor of her very own.

I had planned to stay, to see out the night with her. But by midnight I was already tired, and the club had barely begun to come to life. I left her there, being fabulous, and began the journey home to a place where the last lights in town had probably gone out hours ago.

13

Yours, Faithfully

There is no yellow mailbox at the end of my driveway anymore. The mailman doesn’t come to us out here, in this tiny village at the foot of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains.

Instead, every morning, a little before noon, we go to the post office to pick up the mail. It’s a pleasant walk, even when snow dusts the neighbors’ hay bales and sits heavily on the wooded foothills rising to the west. When the weather starts to warm, the old Arabian stallion emerges from the barn opposite my house and rolls in the dirt like a puppy, four feet in the air, turning his silvery coat chocolate brown.

The post office is right in the center of the village, as it has been for more than a hundred years. Inside, there’s a big table for sorting mail and a bench, for sitting. Neighbors linger to exchange gossip or scan the notice board for what’s going on in the village. Usually that’s not too much, which is pretty well how we like it.