Nell's Place
Toynbee, Polly
Nell's Place by Polly Toynbee The word is exclusive. If the street isn't packed with the desperate hordes of the excluded, then a nightclub isn't worth going to. And some of the excluded would...
...She's an extraordinary character—plain, with cropped red hair...
...She could have gotten herself officially naturalized, but she never noticed the change in the immigration laws until she went to India for a vacation and was shocked not to be allowed back in again...
...If you do have more than four, than you get in caterers...
...I have a flat there, my life is there, everything is there, but I can't go back," she says...
...The key to success is crowd control...
...Dressed in rubber An extraordinary phenomenon of New York cafe society is that it is dominated by the British...
...Then there is the guest list of people who have phoned ahead to get the big OK...
...She thought of herself as English, but the immigration authorities said she was Australian...
...The allure of Manhattan has always exerted a strong pull on status-seekers...
...Tawney mocked those who insisted on the freedom to dine at the Ritz, he hadn't considered the more complicated question of dining at The Odeon, Indochine, or Cafe Luxembourg...
...The hordes outside her door lean over the barricades and shout, "But Nell's my friend...
...Downstairs there's pop music and dancing...
...And some of the excluded would rather die than be left outside...
...are sentences uttered at cocktail parties in the same way other people, in other places, wear badges of honor...
...But I couldn't live this way forever...
...In New York nothing is worth having unless it is hard to get...
...I know Nell...
...Awful, isn't it...
...Her approval is the ultimate unattainable...
...Even New York's intelligentsia seem caught up in the game...
...Some people are always kept out there, even if they look all right, because there always have to be people behind the ropes to make the people going in feel good...
...A club like this might last three years or so...
...Upstairs an 87-year-old mortician from Harlem quietly plays jazz...
...And all around are beautiful people, mainly but not exclusively young...
...She was let in...
...on the head with a baseball bat...
...But since social flagellation seems to be the name of the game, she decides it's all good for business...
...She is sharp, funny, sometimes outrageous, and very English...
...They're disposable...
...Native New Yorkers are rarely part of the crowd...
...What's on sale here isn't food, drink, music, or even ambiance...
...Nell is the Queen of New York's night...
...Who's doing your dinner is the big thing r In the middle of pondering the horrors of New York high life, Nell stops to wonder if it's wise to say such things about her craven clients...
...There is no sign outside, only a large black door...
...After living in London for 15 years, she was, much to her surprise, thrown out...
...New York's cafe society is not quite the same as high society, which revolves around benefits— the $1,000-a-plate dinner in aid of the world's anodyne causes like ballet or opera (or the Republicans...
...The trouble is, if she lets in the B & T crowd (the people who drive into Manhattan over the bridges and through the tunnels from Brooklyn, Queens, or worst of all, New Jersey), then none of the high-flyers want to be there...
...They seem quite stoical about this social order and their demeaning, though vital, role in it...
...Scarcity value has to be created in other ways...
...Whatever they open generates lines twice as long and twice as smart as anyone else's...
...These are not teenage groupies hanging around without the price of admission...
...Not here...
...It's alarming...
...The week I was in New York, a 44-year-old man excluded from Rascals, a club on First Avenue, pulled a gun...
...You can't sit four in an apartment...
...He's my best friend...
...Money and success are indivisible in New York...
...Trends change faster in New York than anywhere else: the place to dine, the clothes to wear, the club to dance...
...Their newest venture is Nell's, a nightclub, which Keith owns and runs together with Nell Campbell, the Anglo-Australian actress of The Rocky Horror Picture Show fame...
...It seems that half the fun of going to a top club is proving to your friends that you have the social pull to get in...
...It's not civilized," Nell says, "No one entertains at home in New York...
...It's social cachet...
...We wanted it to be recognized only by the crowd on the ropes," she explained...
...It's incredibly embarrassing," she says...
...She doesn't have to try if she doesn't feel like it...
...I know English people find it really offensive, but it's the accepted way in New York...
...She looks back to England with growing nostalgia...
...On a given night the rejects outside are either too got-up, which is uncool, not dressed in black, or just plain suburban...
...I was reminded of the new filofax I saw in a New York shop...
...Nell is there every night, all night, from ten until five...
...Not to live and work ." Luckily she landed on her feet in New York...
...So how does she decide...
...It's her distaste for the New York success scene that makes her the big winner in the game...
...When everyone has so much money, it no longer counts for much...
...Her club is large...
...Chic Japanese too...
...These are not kids' discos...
...Their approval shows such immense vanity, and oddly enough, a desire for humiliation too...
...She had lived in London since she was 18 and had been a member of Equity...
...Curiously, New York's fast set doesn't find this at all silly...
...They just hang around, hoping...
...Even that isn't a guaranteed entree...
...They have the magic touch...
...It smacks of the smalltown gazette dutifully covering debutante balls at the local country club...
...She's the Queen because she despises them for caring so much...
...Its faded Edwardian splendor, with old gilt mirrors and chandeliers, slightly decrepit overstuffed velvet sofas, old wood paneling, and heavy dark velvet drapes, gives off the air of a boarding house...
...Still, these New York benefits are more democratic than the clubs because they are easier to buy into...
...People are too sensible...
...As if money and success and power wern't enough, they have to prove themselves once more in the lines outside the hottest nightclubs in New York...
...Nell peeps through her spy hole and gives the thumbs up or down to her blackjacketed team of heavies at the door...
...So she left him outside, where, in an altercation with the doorman, he was clubbed Polly Toynbee, a former editor of The Washington Monthly, is a columnist for The Guardian in London...
...She wouldn't beg to get in anywhere...
...Although she's the Queen of Gotham, Nell wrinkles her nose at New York...
...He wasn't...
...Expatriots in their own country, the newcomers have a keener need to show attachment, belonging, knowledge of their whereabouts...
...I was at ------ last night," "Have you seen the exhibit...
...It looks as if it has been there forever, and that, she says, is the trick...
...The New York Times is perhaps the world's most serious newspaper that also gives solemn space to chronicling the goings-on at society functions...
...And there was The Rocky Horror Picture Show...
...You couldn't run a place like this in London, or not quite like this," she says...
...When it came to the crunch, she couldn't bear to pass up the glory of sailing past the crowd and through those magic doors...
...I'm not going to do this forever," Nell says...
...It's referred to as table-power...
...I know a man who went to a favored club with his wife...
...No one cooks, the kitchens are too small...
...Four of the top restaurants and the hottest nightclub are owned by a couple of East End brothers, Keith and Brian McNally...
...And she is now the arbiter of who's in and who's on the ropes in New York City...
...There are some members with little golden keys, but even they cannot always get their guests in if the doorman doesn't rate them...
...English accents are a plus...
...I hate it...
...You know, people are even like that about friends...
...When the historian R.H...
...These are grown men and women...
...She said I could come in...
...Sometimes she's glitzy in a red rubber dress, but the night I was there she looked scrubbed and eccentric in a tacky sixties outfit with a transparent blouse baring her breasts...
...This insecurity pervades every aspect of their life, from their kitchen appliances to their VCRs to their automobiles...
...New York is still quaintly Anglophile...
...And if Nell invites you over to her table—well, that's paradise...
...She just is...
...They stand on the sidewalk behind the red velvet ropes and desperately shout at stonyfaced bouncers: "But I know the manager...
...These activities are their proof of success...
...What's exclusive, after all, if you can't get to see people being excluded...
...The nightclubs are where the stockbrokers, lawyers, hot journalists, television producers, and advertising executives come to "play...
...I like people who look interesting...
...Horrible," she says, even as she arbitrates through her wicked spy hole...
...The doorman shot him dead...
...I look through my peep hole and see how they look...
...But you can't just let the first ones in until it's full...
...It's address pages were spongeable—instant eradication of friends who fall off the success ladder...
...Its "Evening Hours" column covers the doings of the rich and not-so-famous with groveling politeness...
...And if none of the high-flyers are there, even the B & Ts stop coming...
...The big-shot achievers purposely set themselves up for massacre at the whim of doormen...
Vol. 19 • January 1988 • No. 12
