The Great American Saloon Series/Harry's of Century City
Bartholomew, Douglas
International concluded that the human rights situation in Albania has if anything grown worse. But with Hoxha dead many Albanians argue that things have to improve under his successor, 59-year-old...
...One of the Brooks Boys protests: "No, we were at the races...
...Concomitant with the fact that this ability is not a salable trade, the prize is a trip for two to Florence, and dinner at Harry's there (no relation...
...But the most pressing problems facing Alia are internal and economic...
...The fear began when she was ten with her father's suicide and continued throughout her life in her relationships with men...
...Harry's is the kind of place you go after you've hit it big at Vegas, driven all morning in a brand new Maserati with a blonde you met the night before...
...I just kept on going...
...Finally, says Bill Moyles, the manager of Harry's, "The more ludicrous, the bet-ter...
...Except that Harry's is still around after thirteen years...
...Her great love of nature and her desire for adventure must have influenced her move to Africa...
...Nothing...
...I can talk about my true feelings to only three people in Tirane...
...It is the story of a woman who, in her own words, wanted "to fascinate and be fascinated," who struggled for a passionate life against her fear of being abandoned...
...but he is charming, and Dinesen is clearly taken by him...
...Many factories now work only two days a week, no electricity—when they don't work, the workers don't get money...
...The military is scarcely less ubiquitous, as scruffy and down-at-heel as the rest of the populace...
...Her dress, covered with iridescent blue, scaly sequins, adds to the marine creature look...
...At Harry's, parking is a big deal in the way that design was a big deal to the Edsel...
...She felt the same abandonment later with Denys Finch Hatton, whose fear of being bored and love of freedom dominated his life...
...Of course people are utterly exhausted with the lack of food, the incredibly high prices...
...A personal helicopter would be most fitting...
...He is in town with his father for the National Truck Stop Association's annual convention...
...It has stood up as well if not better than any of Hemingway's short stories, though not as well known...
...She often suffered from depression, arising from Bror's continual philanderings with different European women, including the wife of a close friend, and her discovery that her husband had given her syphilis...
...Irish coffees up and down the immaculate bar that seats no more than a dozen mostly high-backed people with unobtrusive elbows...
...Bror eventually left her and asked for a divorce...
...At his burial the English community regarded her as his widow...
...I asked her if Alia would change things...
...Nothing like that," she said...
...She plays the aristocrat perfectly, with arrogance, elegance, and charm...
...People don't drive to Harry's, they "arrive"—often in Rolls Royces and Ferraris...
...The rights to that book were bought in 1978 by Anna Cataldi who, after years of struggle, finally managed to get Kurt Luedtke interested in writing the screenplay for one of the great romances of the century.^ 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1986...
...He is bug-eyed, alert, garrulous...
...He chooses Mozart, and in so doing gives the film a touch of refinement and lyricism...
...Then again, the only new slogan he has approved since Hoxha died is `Better Times Are Ahead For Albania.' That slogan, suggesting that things have not been perfect in the past, would have been unthinkable under Hoxha...
...The peasants have been brainwashed for forty years, they don't know any different...
...Humor is second...
...Such things seem stupid to you, but to us they are the grains of hope...
...Bunnies look more real in the magazine than in the flesh...
...If you get intimidated by the freeways, a switch to a bottle of something less potent than the old Bushmill's—a beer, perhaps, or a Levissimo's—will help allay your fears of the labyrinthine journey to home or hotel...
...One wonders whom he thought he was playing and why...
...The towheaded fellow on the barstool on my right is here from Jefferson City, Missouri...
...There's no alternative anymore...
...It was a strong feeling that embraced all ages and both sexes—the discovery of the dark races was to me a magnificent enlargement of all my world...
...In particular there is growing hope that Alia will move to end the country's insane isolationism...
...affection for each other, but their marriage was basically one of convenience: she provided the money, he the title...
...I asked if there had been any strikes, any signs of a Solidarity-type movement that could be felt on every street corner...
...he looks like a cowboy dressed by Ralph Lauren...
...An English aristocrat, old Etonian, soldier, white hunter, and eccentric, Finch Hatton would fly to London from Kenya for a night to see one of Diaghilev's ballets...
...For a worthy Denys one dreams of seeing a Nigel Havers (Chariots of Fire) or a Jeremy Irons or a young Laurence Olivier...
...The night Dinesen finds out about Denys's death, she wants to take her own life...
...She does not, but before the burial she paints her face like a mask, putting kohl under her eyes and white powder on her cheeks...
...Hoxha's picture adorns every available wall-space, his "immortal" thoughts clutter communal noticeboards, his people live in apartment blocks where huge slogans announce "Lavdi Enver" and "Rrofte marxizm-leninizm"--"Glory to Enver" and "Long live Marxism-Leninism...
...Not that the secret police and party elite don't live well...
...How I knew it...
...Then you cruise in for a pop or two at Harry's...
...But this fascinating book and Dinesen's fascinating character were not enough to make a movie, not until Errol Trzelinskv discovered the love story between Dinesen and Denys in a book, Silence Will Speak...
...Taka my advice: Come to Harry's when you're flush, when you're hot, when the steam billows from your wallet...
...If you get hungry, get thee to a table...
...If you get borracco, you can cling to the high front bar, your elbows propped at roughly the level of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's right armpit in mid sky-hook...
...Perhaps he isn't interested in building himself a cult...
...is then sequestered in Harry's for a final judgment day, with the bar closed to the public...
...When the barman sees me scribbling in my notebook, he asks if I'm writing my entry for this year's contest, which is Harry's Bar and American Grill's claim to fame amid a city littered with the stuff: the Eighth International Imitation Hemingway Competition...
...As the ladies in their gowns and the gents in their black ties waited for the sleek vehicles behind me, one of the white-jacketed valets leaped up on my bumper exclaiming, "No taka trucka, no taka trucka...
...Meryl Streep is at her best here...
...Harry's, in fact, is the opposite of the neighborhood saloon...
...The theme of the movie is loss...
...When Freddy came along, you just had to go to New York," he says...
...For example, you see all the slogans praising Hoxha, yet nothing about Alia...
...Or you could fly...
...by Alexandra Schonburg Her affair with Denys gave her recognition, especially after his death in an airplane crash...
...Dinesen had charm, intelligence, and talent...
...at a kindergarten childrentreated us to a song in which they lamented the death of "Comrade Enver" but then comforted themselves with the knowledge that he had "left the party red"—on that phrase, flinging their right arms up in a gesture reminiscent of the Hitler Youth...
...First, the grammar must be flawless...
...If you get conversational, the man behind the bar, a Scotchman who goes by MacMillan, will engage obligingly in a run of banter...
...For background music Pollack strikes a compromise...
...As for the intelligentsia, those who disagree with the state are quickly eliminated...
...on one occasion, a judge was carried out by his colleagues...
...It's atiny step towards realism...
...In the capital, Tirane, milk is on sale for only half an hour each day...
...Let's hope so...
...LOST IN AFRICA Out of Africa, Sydney Pollack's adaptation of Isak Dinesen's memoir of her years in Kenya from 1914 to 1931, begins with Meryl Streep's haunting voice reading the first sentence of Dinesen's book: "I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills...
...Ostensibly, there are three ways one could get to Harry's, which is located in the lower, or swamp, level of the ABC Entertainment Center in a place known as Century City, smack in the middle of Los Angeles...
...She has a tail, but it is not the finny type required of mermaids...
...Or as my source put it when I asked her whether she was happy in today's Albania, "Only the ten politburo members who have a Mercedes and a whore are happy here...
...Woman on the barstool beside me makeslanguid, fishlike movements as if wanting to be seen, i.e., noticed...
...She fell in love with the country and its people immediately: "As for me, from my first weeks in Africa, I had felt a great affection for the natives...
...Each rests a pair of binoculars and folded Playbills on the bar...
...We're on our way to the theatre...
...College professors THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1986 37 sift through the vast bulk of entries, filtering out the lesser efforts and setting aside twenty-five for a closer reading...
...A lissome hostess agrees to punch my parking tag...
...Deadpan and quick, Max says, "So your seats are far away...
...He and Dinesen had a certain attraction and Alexandra Schonburg is a free-lance writer who lives in New York...
...But if you get the urge to rub elbows with a guy who has a snake tattoo on his arm or watch the fifth game of the Douglas Bartholomew is The American Spectator's Chief Saloon Correspondent...
...Walking is one way to get there, though this is not recommended, since it is uncertain if anyone has ever walked (successfully) in L.A...
...The shots of Africa are superb: each of the scenes was first painted in water color by the production designer, Steven Grimes, who also worked on Ryan's Daughter and On Golden Pond...
...Having overheard, others along the bar stare deeply at this affable young hayseed as if hair might suddenly sprout from between his pearly teeth...
...I can only point to a few changes that outsiders wouldn't notice...
...Out of Africa, the book, is a memoir, an anthropologist's notebook, and also one of the finest stories of life in Africa...
...They may taste some carpaccio with mustard and mayonnaise sauce (a delightful dish named for the painter, who used a color similar to that of the rare roast beef it consists of), sample some wine, and pronounce the winner...
...Dinesen was a social climber who wanted the title so much that when she caught syphilis she said: "If it didn't sound so beastly I might say that, the world being as it is, it was worthwhile having syphilis in order to become a Baroness...
...Stravinsky was a particular favorite...
...Most of them are derelict, the site of bonfires for children and useful stopping-off points for drunks who can't make it home...
...The team of Bradbury-Hemingway et al...
...The film does not effectively convey the passing of time, those seventeen years of Dinesen's struggle to keep her coffee plantation going against nature's disasters and her creditors' demands...
...Only old people and those who leave their families behind—but it's something...
...He has put a stop to the bizarre military-bunker construction program launched by Hoxha in the 1960s...
...According to a well-placed source at Radio Tirane, the Albanian state radio, many villagers in remote regions (where foreigners never set foot) are close tostarvation...
...Her husband, Baron Bror von Blixen, convincingly played by Klaus Maria Brandauer, is continuously unfaithful...
...But in the last few months, since Hoxha died, people have been allowed to go to Greece to visit relatives...
...She leaves Africa destitute...
...Each of his water-color scenes has been faithfully adapted by Pollack, giving us a vivid sense of Kenya's beauty...
...What if Alia proves to be just another Hoxha...
...No doubt I did not see the front-line troops, who reputedly receive everything they could wish for, including an 80 percent rise in defense spending since 1982...
...A show-me boy...
...Dinesen came from a rich upper-middle-class Danish family, but loved being ad-dressed as Baroness and suffered greatly from her divorce...
...Ultimately, when she could not meet these demands she lost the farm...
...But with Hoxha dead many Albanians argue that things have to improve under his successor, 59-year-old Ramiz Alia...
...More-over Dinesen's great loneliness, broken only by the brief—albeit passionate and fulfilling—comings and goings of Denys, becomes a burden to the story...
...Despite the official view that the economy is doing well, a recent six-month drought has dealt a devastating blow to a country still largely dependent on agriculture, and where irrigation and machinery remain primitive...
...Each January, Harry's places advertisements in magazines, including the New Yorker, that state, "You must face The White Bull That Is Paper With No Words On It...
...It can't go on like this...
...No Trucka brings my rusty steed and I am off, heading north on a darkling trail of concrete, bound for dusty Bakersfield...
...Each year the ads bring more than 2,000 people out of the prep school woodwork or wherever Hemingway imitators work to show their skill at what Harry's is fond of calling "good bad Hemingway...
...Jeeves, my helicopter pilot, is nowhere in sight, nor is the blonde in the Maserati...
...THE TALKIES...
...He scorned Beethoven as vulgar...
...Bror Blixen was a rather coarse, uneducated man, whose main goal in life was to have a good time...
...Bartender again sees my penmanship in action, asks how my entry is coming...
...Next, a relationship betweena man and a woman is a plus...
...It must have been of enormous comfort at a time of total desolation, for now she realized that she had lost everything she had lived for over the past seventeen years: her lover dead, her husband gone, and her beloved farm lost...
...Everywhere you travel in Albania military defenses sprout like some belligerent fungus—gray concrete domes, dug into the earth, ready to be occupied by troops...
...It is a poor performance...
...While the winning entries, judged so by such literary lunas as Ray Bradbury and Hemingway's son Jack, often evoke a chuckle, they more often border on the cute...
...My arrival Saturday afternoon as I queued up behind a Jaguar, a BMW, and a Mercedes-Benz in my decade-old Chevrolet camper was uneventful until my turn came for valet service...
...Back at the bar, my Edinburgh bar-man tells me he ended up here because of Freddy Laker...
...THE GREAT AMERICAN SALOON SERIES HARRY'S OF CENTURY CITY by Douglas Bartholomew If you get lonely, the Playboy Club is one flight of moving stairs up...
...Some have even sent collective letters begging Alia to help them...
...Or you can get to Harry's by automobile...
...He is unreliable, irresponsible, improvident...
...series while putting down a few ales, don't come to Harry's Bar and American Grill...
...I don't know," she said...
...Two men clad in what look to be Brooks Brothers suits take stools on my left...
...The official wage is 600 Lek a month (about $90), but in villages many work for a quarter of that...
...Redford is miscast...
...Things have got too bad to just go on as before...
...What do the judges look for...
...Meat, flour, cooking oil, coffee, and other staples are severely rationed...
...Truck Stopper appears more than moderately interested when I mention the Playboy Club upstairs...
...In Africa, Dinesen was a foreigner looked down upon by English society...
...Denys is played by Robert Redford, who I imagine thought that if he could pass for a seventeen-year-old baseball player in the The Natural (with, I might add, a lot of back lighting), he could now pass for an English aristocrat...
...Things are desperate for many of them...
...Most folks probably couldn't afford the parking...
...The idea of this movie had been in the minds of many people...
...The personality cult that Hoxha developed for himself remains in full swing...
...It is the mask behind which she will hide until her death...
...How I remember it...
...Transportation is no less backward, as twenty-year old trucks struggle along dirt-track roads, and the railways battle against lack of basic raw materials...
...Invariably, several bottles of Chardonnay are consumed...
...He goes off on endless safaris...
...Either Alia will be Hoxha II or a superman...
...Judith Thurman, in a recent biography of Dinesen, quotes her on jealousy: "It is as if a claw had grabbed your heart, as if you had been shaken and tumbled by a wild animal...
...He loved Nijinsky, Beaudelaire, the Bloomsbury group, modern art and music...
Vol. 19 • February 1986 • No. 2
