LETTER FROM LONDON: 3/13/25

LONELINESS, OLIVER!, A STOMACH BUG, FAMILIAL LOVE, AND AN AMERICAN DIVA,

1.

The photo above is one I took of my lone seat in this corner of the upper reaches of the Sadler’s Wells theatre last Friday night. I was there to see the Scottish Ballet. The program was both a bit too twee for me in its first act - choreographer Cayetano Soto’s Schachmatt - and in its second more ritualized than danced - choreographer and composer Dickson Mbi’s Twice-Born. The latter seemed indeed from the vantage point of this seat high above it all to be a blueprint for ritual more than anything Balanchine could have conjured; it was primitive, matriarchal, even magnificently female, ideas about fertility formed into some sort of narrative about rebirth. “Ballet is woman,” Balanchine famously said so it was certainly influenced by him in that way if not choreographically. Soto’s cutesy piece seemed to be infused by the ghost of another great 20th century choreographer, Bob Fosse, a spectral presence that had gone cold turkey alas from the sensual cynicism that oozed from him and his mannered movements like the smoke from his cigarettes that dangled from his lips like Gwen Verdon’s limbs, serpentine yet angling for some new 8-count angle, could dangle from her toward that slow-burn slope of her own bit of butt.

Seeing this lone seat as I climbed back up the stairs after heading down to use the toilet before the evening began, I realized that I have ritualized my solitary existence into the blueprint of something I have labeled a pilgrimage. I both thrilled at the positioning of this seat when I first saw it - no sharing of a row or worrying about my coughing or the sound of my breathing next to other audience members, a kind of culture vulture claustrophobia that can descend upon me if I’m not at least in an aisle seat - and yet I also felt a sudden sadness that I had felt that initial thrill.

“Don’t you ever get lonely?” I am often asked about my life as a solitary pilgrim now traveling the world.

“Yes,” I say. “But then I realize my romantic partner is my life.”

Because there is a kind of romance to this life I now both lead and follow, a partnering without a partner. At times it takes a balletic balance to pull it off and other times I stumble a bit, don’t get the steps quite right. But dance on I do as I shuffle-ball-change along always angling for that next new angle. The swing. The tramp. The trudge.

2.

On Monday, sitting in a cafe off Piccadilly Circus and writing those paragraphs above, I was still feeling a bit off and typed in the words “lonely in London” in my search engine to see what would come up in an attempt to contextualize it and not feel it. The first suggestion in the queue that came up was the novel The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon which was written in 1956, the year I was born, an intersection that made me stop to take a deeper dive into the book about a character named Galahad and the writer named Sam I had never known before. Selvon was from Trinidad and of Indian and Scottish descent and wrote this book that now seems to be in the British canon in a kind of creolized nation language of the Caribbean - the swing, the tramp, the trudge of it - its syllables serpentine and looking for some newer angles in the Anglicized search for self.

Later in the day I walked into the Waterstones in Covent Garden looking to buy a paperback copy of James by Percival Everett and saw the Selvon book the moment I walked in. Maybe it was looking for me.

“Piccadilly Circus …,” wrote Selvon in his novel. “Always, from the first time he went there to see Eros and the lights, that circus have a magnet for him, that circus represent life, that circus is the beginning and the ending of the world. Every time he go there, he have the same feeling like when he see it the first night, drink coca-cola, any time is guinness time, bovril and the fireworks, a million flashing lights, gay laughter, the wide doors of theatres, the huge posters, everready batteries, rich people going into tall hotels, people going to the theatre, people sitting and standing and walking and talking and laughing and buses and cars and Galahad Esquire, in all this, standing there in the big city, in London. Oh Lord …”

“Oh Lord …” I whispered after having turned to that passage standing in a bookstore in Covent Garden, in London, in the big city. I felt less alone as it was all put in context. A sweep of words can do that. Sweep me too off my feet. Take my arm. Escort me away from the self toward other selves, most often those of others, but even, at times, of my own, waiting to be of service with their less lonely ease within me that lands at laughter and the mooring where more life awaits but alas never yet romantic love, an actual dance partner that lets me lead or follow depending on our needs without our ever having to resort to being needy.

3.

On Tuesday I came down with a stomach bug. Not fun, but it’s part of being on a pilgrimage I’ve intermittently discovered. Maybe my having felt off for a couple of days was the bug bearing down on me and not the feeling of loneliness I’ve learned to bear. Sitting in yet another cafe trying to get this column written, I just couldn’t focus - the stomach bug was a kind of brain bug too - and I went back home to Kilburn from the West End to take a nap. I slept for three hours. Food is not my friend right now so this week’s RECIPES & REVIEWS will have to wait until next week.

As I was heading home, I even closed my eyes for most of the tube ride. When I opened them these faces of Trump and Putin were staring back at me from that day’s Metro newspaper. Maybe that is why I’ve felt so off and lonely as well, the incessant news of chaos and cruelty coming at me from America all stewed in a roux of revenge and bigotry. It is hard to describe how discombobulated and disgusted by America people over here are. And rightly so. America has become within a few short weeks a pariah nation to the rest of the world. Purposefully ugly. I know that Trump won with less than 50% of the vote but there is a kind of relief I feel at not having to be in a country surrounded by people who voted for him or wondering about each new person I meet there if he or she is a fascist in the new Trump order. I don’t, moreover, post on Facebook anymore except to link to this column so I don’t write about politics as much as I once did there while I too stew in it all in a kind of stupor of existential sadness most of the time. But I’ve come to look on Facebook as a self-imposed internment camp for those who can rail at each other about what it going on within the barbed wire strung up by Zuckerberg, the owner of Meta/MAGA, as I refer to it, which is used to endorse Trump’s fascist regime monetarily and now with its corporate policies. But I did have a sense of community there for so many years and it did offer me a place to let off the steam that now seems to envelope me. I wish I could compartmentalize Zuckerberg’s being a collaborator and the feeling of being a de facto one myself by remaining on that platform, but I can’t. I know I am an outlier about this since almost everyone I know who used Facebook remains on the site. So I compartmentalize my lack of community instead that I once had there, a new kind of loneliness to add to my collection of lonelinesses.

After my nap, I bucked up and took some Imodium and headed to see my London acquaintance, Marisha Wallace, in concert at the Adelphi where she had been one of the stars of Waitress for a lot of its run after her two-year stint as Effie in Dreamgirls. Her Olivier Award nominations were for Ado Annie in Oklahoma! and for Miss Adelaide in Guys & Dolls. Marisha grew up on a hog farm in the middle of North Carolina before making her way via NYC to London where she has become the town’s reigning West End diva and where she is now starring as Sally Bowles in Cabaret. She took a night off from that role to play that diva role she plays so well even though she is finally more down-home than diva. I adore her. And she’s also just received her British citizenship and will soon ceremoniously accept it. She’s British by luck but Southern by the grace of God. Her encore was a rollicking “Proud Mary” that had us all on our feet. But below is how she closed her first act with Effie’s big number from Dreamgirls. My last LETTER FROM LONDON was a conversation with her. I went alone to her show but it made me feel less lonely. When I got home, I finally longed, however, to be even more lonely since the stomach bug accompanied me to bed.

4.

“There is a whole genre of literature that centers on the orphaned,” I once told Daniel Radcliffe when I was interviewing him for The Daily Beast back in 2009. We were having tea at the Algonquin Hotel in New York during his Broadway run in the role of Alan Strang in Equus, a part I had played around the country when I was his age and an actor. “Your first role at nine was David Copperfield,” I said. “There’s Oliver Twist. Jane Eyre. Faulkner’s Light in August. Almost every superhero. What’s your theory as to why the genre is so enduring since Harry Potter is now perhaps the most famous orphan in all of literature?”

“I suppose it’s because we love the underdog,” said Daniel. “I saw James Carville talking on television and he said a fantastic thing. It was during the last days of John McCain’s campaign. I got hooked on political coverage during the campaign. I love that Joe Scarborough chap. Do you watch Morning Joe? I quite like him. What is it he says? ‘American by luck. Southern by the grace of God.’ That’s great phrase-making.

“But back to Carville and orphans,” he continued. “He said that McCain should come out as the underdog. He said Americans love an underdog, but they hate a loser. And for an orphan, from the earliest, most basic, most primitive part of your life, things have gone against you. Everything we know about how people work and are successful, in the conventional sense, starts with family. So the notion is for that to be taken out of the picture one has to work doubly hard to achieve things. It is odd that almost every role I’ve played has been a kid who comes from a screwed-up family background because I have had such the opposite of that.”

On Wednesday night, I met a former boyfriend of mine, Peter Staley - my longest, most serious relationship - for dinner at one of my favorite London restaurants, Randall & Aubin, and then attended a performance of the musical Oliver! down the block at the Gielgud Theatre. That’s Peter and I above in front of photo of two of the young actors playing Oliver and the Artful Dodger. I was nervous about picking out the restaurant because Peter can be a bit of a restaurant snob but he loved it, and even ate a lot of what was on my plate, too, since my stomach bug was still making itself known and I was being careful about my food intake before taking in a West End musical.

Seeing Peter certainly made me feel less lonely - as did making him laugh which can still fill me with such warmth and wonder as did reminiscing about our late friend Larry Kramer who had been our matchmaker and talking about our very different lives now. I’ll always love him. Seeing him and seeing Oliver! with him reminded me of the importance of family love and loyalty - his being here in London right now is an example of that - and reminded me too of that bit of conversation I had with Daniel 16 years ago about orphans and what it means to be one in the wider world. I am an orphan. I write “am” because one never “was” one. You remain one your whole life really. I think my existential loneliness stems from that. At eight years old, I realized I was alone in the world. I have lived in that realization ever since. “Please, sir, take me home,” Oliver says to his grandfather toward the end of the musical and the lump in my throat at hearing that talented little boy playing the role say that line with such simple longing dislodged into more than a few tears - which surprised me since everything else in this Matthew Bourne production is so oversold and loud and busy and unfelt. But I am glad I saw it and grateful for Peter’s generosity because I was his guest. It’s a hot ticket here in London. And probably will be for the next few years.

Here’s a bit of the second part of its joyously long curtain call:

5.

Back on Monday, I was strolling through the National Portrait Gallery and texted my brother a couple of the drawings I saw of Picasso biographer and my former Vanity Fair colleague, John Richardson, as well as poet W.H. Auden because sharing art is how I express my love for him, my fellow orphan who is not only an OB/GYN but also an artist himself of some renown.

The above drawing, “Study of John,” is by Jenny Saville. “During the sittings, Richardson and Saville discussed the underpinnings of drawing in Picasso and Willem de Kooning’s work, as well as Saville’s practice,” the information next to the drawing states, and also alerts us, the viewers, of Saville’s upcoming exhibition, “The Anatomy of Painting” at the National Portrait Gallery from June 20 - September 7 later this year. “Richardson said, ‘this mastery of drawing - something that few contemporary artists bother with - enables you to juggle multiple layers of conceptual meaning.’ Characteristic of Saville’s drawing process, this dynamic portrait reveals multiple limbs and ghosts of drawings, showing how the sitting evolved over time.”

In 1985, inside the issue of Vanity Fair on which the Reagans, photographed by Harry Benson and profiled by William F. Buckley, Jr., danced about in a partnership headlined THE REAGAN STOMP which made you wonder who was leading and following whom and which caused quite a stir when President Reagan’s version of conservatism - its swing, its tramp, its trudge overtaking the country during another era when the media fawned over power no matter its policies and doctrines - was as frightening as the American radical right managed to be before becoming a full-blown version of 21st century fascism, John was photographed by Annie Leibovitz and “Spotlighted” by another of our colleagues there, Dominick Dunne. The “Spotlight” was titled ART SMART and subtitled “Titan of Taste.” This is some of what Nick wrote: “To arrive at a party and see John Richardson there is to know that you are at the right place at the right time. The loudest laughter and the deepest conversation are invariably in that corner of the room where he has settled in and is holding forth. He knows who's who, what's what, who's doing it, who's not. He can provide the instant biography that sums up an entire life, or make the telling comment that captures—sometimes wickedly, always accurately—a social situation, all the time watching, with a Proustian eye, the drama of New York life. (When asked what a certain socially ambitious couple did in bed, he rapidly replied, ‘They make guest lists.’) But to characterize Richardson merely as a society wit is to miss half the point of him. In the ordered disorder of his Upper East Side duplex, with its faded chintz sofas and shawl-draped lamps and a few superb paintings, the English-born Richardson works tirelessly at his writing …”

The drawing, “Young Auden,” is by Guillermo Martin Bermejo. The information next to it at the National Portrait Gallery states: “This is a posthumous drawing. The Spanish artist draws on paper rescued from discarded books. Through his nostalgic pencil drawings, the artist enters into a creative dialogue with some of the key figures in 20th century Western literature and art. He explains: ‘I use drawing as a means of speaking to them, as if it were a kind of secret language. In doing so I become the translator of an intimate lost world full of beauty, poetry, and silence.’”

This portrait is based on Auden at 20 years old. Bermejo was inspired to create it by these lines from Auden’s 1937 poem, “Lullaby”: “Time and fevers burn away/Individual beauty from/Thoughtful children, and the grave/Proves the child ephemeral …”

I landed on this Auden line myself this week as I was living my life and writing this column: “Human ‘nature’ is a nature continually in quest of itself, obliged at every moment to transcend what it was a moment before.”

6.

When I was at Waterstones the other day in Convent Garden, I also took down a copy of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. I flipped through it. I stopped at this passage which rather captured my moments in the last few days that have begun my latest London march through March toward yet another birthday at the end of it:

“One feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June.”

7.

Auden: “The world needs a wash and a week's rest.”

8.

My stomach bug abides.

9.

But so do I, transcending what I was each moment before.

10.

In my daily prayer, I always pause and take one deep inhalation. “May this breath be a new beginning,” I whisper to whomever hears such whispers.

11.

Onward …