The Great American Saloon Series/Newport Landings
Mysak, Joe
average, and two-thirds of the new jobs have been with the city or state governments. Governor Mario Cuomo may soon have a $350 million tax surplus, and the Municipal Assistance Corporation (Big...
...New Yorkers are more than willing to give up free enterprise and let the government run everything in exchange—once again—for the promise of a better livelihood...
...You've got to be prepared, the Foreign Office chap tells her, "to give up everything...
...Johnson observation that all histories are narratives of misery...
...The Kremlin bosses permit the marriage and invite Elaine to Mother Russia...
...Very depressing...
...The quaint, historical, and picturesque town is devoted to two things: sailing and drinking...
...We cut to a seedy working-class neighbor-hood of Liverpool, where young Elaine (Alexandra Pigg) and Tbresa (Margi Clarke) decide to forget their troubles and get happy for an evening...
...Such is the hazard of sitting in a rather too-bright bar and watching what one writer called "the pretty and privileged leading perfect lives...
...Beatles...
...The worst thing that happens when you have problems is to feel sorry for yourself...
...There are less innocent and rewarding ways to spend time...
...All of us have been stealing from the government all this time and we still haven't gotten to the bottom...
...She at-tends a party, but the crude English lads there want only one thing from her...
...And it's got more than its share of dubious plot developments...
...The mixture is irresistible...
...Governor Mario Cuomo may soon have a $350 million tax surplus, and the Municipal Assistance Corporation (Big MAC), which oversees New York City's finances, has just turned over $1.6 billion in revenues to the city government...
...sweet, stolid Elaine is unemployed, a victim of Britain's crumbling economy...
...Elaine becomes a local celebrity...
...and Mrs...
...We have made many landings, amphibious and otherwise, in Newport since then, for the attractions of the place are numerous...
...As for corruption, well, that's just the price you pay for being saved from private enterprise and an unregulated market...
...This is a signal to proceed to dinner, starting with the chowder and clams casino, then on through the beef "torpedoes" (as one of our party has dubbed them), and finishing up with the leaden chocolate mousse, which settles the stomach into a molten mass...
...You can avoid Mr...
...The Garden State is much maligned, but I had to agree that they were not Newporters...
...Well, step aside and let the big dogs drink," we bellowed, and had at the supply of Rolling Rock...
...They meet, they dance, they wander the grimy streets and neck, they gaze up at the stars and deliver some astoundingly corny dialogue...
...But the story doesn't really get underway till our young ladies hit a flashy dance club...
...No one gives up his civil and cultural rights—God forbid...
...In New York the unwritten contract works slightly differently...
...The four end up at a hotel...
...Though they can't afford it, the girls take a taxi downtown, sharing a joint with the driver...
...Tbresa and the bearlike Sergei (Alfred Molina), who speaks no English and whom Tbresa calls "Eye-gor," have a lusty time of it...
...Of course, all the really tony places were jammed, and the barnlike Dockside was the only bar that would have us, ruffians from Boston here "for the races," which, it turned out, had been cancelled...
...And since 1983, when the nefarious Australians made off with the America's Cup, the emphasis has been on the latter...
...Successful drinkers, like professional skiers, know that adequate preparation of the base is all, and the Black Pearl has never disappointed...
...Which is more than can be said for the pair of well-heeled gents who, in the first pub the girls step into, crudely offer to rent them for the night...
...one of them exclaims...
...New Yorkers are pathological about their civil liberties...
...Tbresa takes revenge for this insult by lifting the bigger one's wallet—thus proving herself a proud, clever, and gutsy foot soldier in the British class war (not to mention providing the motivation for a brief chase scene...
...Of course, I recognized them as Some-body's Parents, in this case a distinct form of grotesque, but one that I could not view without a modicum of sentiment...
...By the time the next evening rolls around—and the men have to rejoin their ship and head back out to sea—Elaine and Peter have cornily declared their mutual ardor...
...For the drinking man, nothing can beat the massive pints of Bass Ale on tap at The Ark, located on Thames Street and arguably the top spot in Newport...
...Elaine: "When, Peter, when...
...Would a British girl really have so much trouble trying to get into the Soviet Union to marry a sailor...
...It may not be without peril, but as Theodore Roosevelt once said, "All men who feel any power of joy in battle know what it is like when the wolf rises in the heart...
...Screenwriter Frank Clarke doesn't miss a cliche...
...it has many different climates, "not like here...
...Peter, for his part, is surprised by Elaine's unemployment...
...Hungarian writer Ferenc Koszeg noted recently that the people of his country have essentially entered into an unwritten compact with the government in which they agree to give up cultural and social rights in exchange for the promise of a higher standard of living...
...They all keep yammering at her that if she goes to Russia she'll be sacrificing her freedom...
...There Elaine and Peter (played by the pallid Peter Firth), one of those two Soviet sailors, lock eyes across a crowded room and fall in love...
...The Ark has everything you need: loud and tedious sailors and their even worse wives, deadly sailing films on the bar's televisions, those big glass buckets of Bass, or Coor's, or the ubiquitous Budweiser, very fair bar chow (perfect for those on the high-sodium diet), and bar stools built for big dogs out for the long drive...
...The bar on the ground floor is presided over by the diminutive "Five-O," a man of infinite and inscrutable wisdom, and a Rutger Hauer lookalike, both of whom whip up extremely tasty Bloody Marys...
...But everybody in town (except Teresa) is against the marriage: her classic foul-mouthed English working-class movie witch of a mother, her horrible Commie-hating friends, a grotesquely cruel reporter who harasses her about being a Red, and an improbably slimy Foreign Office chap who tries to convince her that Peter already has a wife...
...Not all of it, Peter informs them...
...Peter: "I'll always love you, you know...
...THE GREAT AMERICAN SALOON SERIES...
...and the bar-tenders in resort areas rarely if ever say, "Good luck, men...
...Of course...
...Peter: "We will be together again...
...And another old salt recalled, "One waterfront bar had a band with three saxophones in it, and you've never felt the sap rise until you've sucked down fifteen Molsons while listening to dueling saxes, watching drunk underage girls get that feral look in their eyes, and inhaling the Atlantic all the while...
...During the weeks after Peter's departure Elaine tries to forget him...
...If you do insist on getting out before nightfall, say, after lunch, trudge up to the New-port Book Store on Bellevue Avenue, where a recent tour turned up a September 1963 Esquire, a first edition of William Shirer's Berlin Diary, and a first paperback edition of Ladislas Farago's Patton, the lot liberated for under seven dollars...
...mrt~ a .14 ' 'ma ii ~ II III' ~ iii I1 uu=11rm ; WunJ y ' b N1v1ac~ }c~~12R~:~ l~i III...
...If you really want to look correct—and another of Newport's great advantages is its informality—forget the brooding map...
...the other replies, demonstrating, apparently, that young Soviet sailors are like young people everywhere...
...They must be busing them in from New Jersey," the arbiter said...
...The angels congregate to The Candy Store, and are attentive to all tales, ranging from "I'm working on my municipal bond novel, Yield to Maturity," to "I'm first mate on the Mary Deare...
...In fact, as Anatoly Shcharansky recently noted, socialist populations often "feel self-respect only by belonging to a big system...
...It is also chock-a-block with a few genuine and many fraudulent sailors, all of whose bar Joe Mysak is assistant managing editor of the Daily Bond Buyer...
...Teresa's original plan is to stiff him, but she ends up paying the fare (plus tip) because "he's one of us...
...And they have a conversation whose purpose is patently to suggest that the girls' negative image of Soviet life is wholly the result of ignorance and insidious Western propaganda...
...chat, which is loud, windy, and full of spinnakers, tacking, money, and lies, could send even a placid hippo into a rage...
...To be sure, it is the land of the $2.50 beer...
...Would the Liverpool papers carry it on the front page, if at all...
...Well do I remember the first trip there, "for the races," which consisted of peering off a dock to the horizon for five minutes vainly searching for signs of life, and then adjourning for six hours to the friendly Dockside Saloon on Thames Street, now unfortunately closed for renovation...
...Newport, as I say, is a town of many attractions...
...The Candy Store is full of sweets...
...she realizes that all she wants is to escape from this dismal, loveless corner of the world and marry Peter...
...The politicians have been stealing all these years and they still haven't gotten to the bottom...
...For all the message-mongering, of course, Letter to Brezhnev is really nothing more than an old-fashioned fourth-rate love story with a twist—girl meets Red, girl loses Red, girl wins Red...
...With justthe right timing, you can bring down the bar with the famed quotation, "Hi Curt Gowdy, this is everybody," a three-run homer in any saloon, and well worth the $1.75 you paid for this magazine...
...The Ark will do very nicely indeed, although it has been known to send more than one of the troops into bouts of melancholy, fit only for consideration of the Rusty Staub statement, "When people have a rough time, whoreally gives a damn...
...In New York the joke seems to be, "We must be the richest city in the world...
...Then again, perhaps only the fare served aboard the Bounty would disappoint me...
...When they ask about Soviet food shortages, Peter explains patientlythat there are no shortages...
...Elaine, who's on the dole, replies that "it works that way here too...
...When her letters to the proper authorities don't result in permission to do so, she does what we are apparently meant to see as a gutsy thing: she pens an obsequious plea to the late Uncle Leonid...
...ibresa holds down a dismal factory job stuffing chickens...
...The main show is right next door: The Candy Store, which includes a restaurant, a couple of bars, including one overlooking the harbor, and a basement disco...
...Her reply: "I haven't got anything to give up...
...Liver-pool...
...Right...
...emu s~~.~ NEWPORT LANDINGS by Joe Mysak When we die, if we are good, we will go to Newport...
...And do they have troubles: sexy, streetwise Bruce Bawer, a regular contributor to the New Criterion, is The American Spectator's movie critic...
...36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1986...
...But it is also the land of cool ocean breezes, several genuinely comfortable saloons fitted out in under-stated nautical style, and thousands of blonde angels...
...Directed by Chris Bernard, it's packed with not only verbal but visual cliches: a newspaper headline spinning into focus, lovers gazing up at a phony-looking skyful of stars...
...The Dockside was doing a perversely conspicuous business in the Australian Foster's Lager, thick as yeast and served in oil cans, but we were all good Yanks and did not bite, oblivious to more than a century of allegedly unsportsmanlike conduct by the New York Yacht Club...
...When Peter, for example, announces that he's from a warm, sunny resort town on the Black Sea, the girls protest: Isn't Russia cold...
...There is a joke in Russia which says, "We must be liv-ing in the richest country in the world...
...When night falls, the Smart Set heads over to the Black Pearl on Bannister's Wharf for dinner, stopping at the bar for pre-game cocktails and anexplanation from the bartender with bristling red moustaches of why he, a 34-year-old man, remains at work in a resort area, when logic might dictate that he move on...
...Elaine, you see, is savvy enough to recognize this "freedom" jazz for what it is: a dastardly fiction designed to keep nice English girls and nice Soviet boys from getting to know and trust and love each other...
...But property rights are a different matter...
...D THE TALKIES : LUV STORIES At the beginning of Letter to Brezhnev two young Soviet sailors stand expectantly at the railing of a ship entering port, like Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly in On the 7bwn...
...All you do is bore everybody around you," and the Dr...
...Yet the state has managed only a 1 percent tax reduction in the top brackets, and New York City is trying to raise taxes...
...he observes that in the Soviet Union, if you don't work, you don't eat...
...if there are long lines at the stores, it's because the men in charge of distribution are idiots...
...Such depression, however, is worn like a hat, and may be doffed at will—and is...
...But it seems to me that we've been getting more and more around here like that," observed the eminent Scoliard, social consultant and Rhode Island investment banker, gesturing toward two bumptious Golden Agers proceeding like ships of state across the street, he a vision in Haband and Sam Snead golf hat, she packed into the classic turquoise pantsuit and silver shoes...
...by Bruce Bawer The missive does the trick...
...America if you eschew the tours of The Breakers, the rococo Vanderbilt beach house, and Hammersmith Farm, where THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1986 35 Jackie and JFK spent time...
...but Elaine and her bright, sensitive Peter (who seems to understand the Liverpudlian brogue much better than I do) spend the night jawing about life and stuff...
...you can't go wrong with some-thing in khaki or kelly green...
Vol. 19 • September 1986 • No. 9
