Joan Didion is the poet of the Great Californian Emptiness. She sings of a land where it is easier to Dial-A-Devotion than to buy a book, where the freeway sniper, feels 'real bad' about picking off a family of five, where kids in High Kindergarten are given LSD and peyote by their parents, where young hustlers get lethally carried away while rolling elderly filmstars, where six-foot-two drag queens shop for fishnet bikinis, where a twenty-six-year-old woman can consign her five-year-old daughter to the centre divider of Interstate 5 (when her fingers were prised loose from the fence twelve hours later, the child pointed out that she had run after the car containing her family for 'a long time').

All of us are excited by what we most deplore - 'especially,' as Miss Didion says in another context, 'if we are writers'. Miss Didion used to be excited by human stupidity and viciousness. Slouching towards Bethlehem (1968), her previous collection of journalism and essays, begins with a piece about a murder in the San Bernadino Valley - Mormon country. On October 7,1964, Lucille Miller took her depressive and generally below-par husband, Cork, out for a moonlight drive in their Volkswagen. After a visit to a nearby supermarket, Mrs Miller stopped the car in the middle of the road, poured a can of petrol over her husband, set fire to him, and then attempted to propel the VW over a four-foot drop. As it happened, the car got stuck on the ledge; Mrs Miller seemed to have a change of heart at this point, and spent the next seventy-five minutes trying to save her husband by poking at him with a stick ('I just thought if I had a stick, I'd push him out'); but by now, anyway, Cork was 'just black'. The trial was surprisingly protracted, considering that the tirelessly hysterical Mrs Miller had a boyfriend and $120,000 coming to her in the event of Cork s accidental death. 'It wasn't a very interesting murder as murders go,' Miss Didion quotes the DA as saying 'laconically', intending a gentle laugh on him. Actually the DA was right. It wasn't a very interesting murder. But it was certainly very stupid and vicious, and Miss Didion used to be excited by that kind of thing.

She isn't any more. No longer can Miss Didion regard the neurotic waywardness and vulgar infamies of California as simply 'good material'. The White Alb.u.m deals with the late Sixties and early Seventies. During these menacing years Miss Didion lived with her husband and daughter in a large house in Hollywood, at the heart of what a friend described as a 'senseless-killing neighborhood'. Across the street, the one-time j.a.panese Consulate had become a group-therapy squat for unrelated adults. Scientologists used to pop by and explain to Miss Didion about E-meters and how to become a Clear. High-minded narcotics dealers would call her on the telephone ('what we're talking about, basically, is applying the Zen philosophy to money and business, dig?'). Pentecostalist Brother Theobald informed her that there were bound to be more earthquakes these days, what with the end of time being just round the corner. One night a baby-sitter remarked that she saw death in Miss Didion's aura; in response, Miss Didion slept downstairs on the sofa, with the windows open. Then it happened - not to Joan Didion, but to Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski, Steven Parent, Rosemary and Leno l.a.b.i.anca, and Sharon Tate: On August 9, 1969, I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law's swimming pool in Beverly Hills when she received a telephone call from a friend who had just heard about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski's house on Cielo Drive. The phone rang many times during the next hour. These early reports were garbled and contradictory. One caller would say hoods, the next would say chains. There were twenty dead, no, twelve, ten, eighteen. Black ma.s.ses were imagined, and bad trips blamed. I remember all of the day's misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: / remember that no one was surprised.

And, at a stroke, the Sixties ended - 'the paranoia was fulfilled'.

Miss Didion reached her own breaking-point almost exactly a year before Charles Manson reached his. Alerted by an attack of nausea and vertigo (and such an attack does not now seem to [her] an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968'), Miss Didion enrolled as a private outpatient of the psychiatric clinic at St John's Hospital in Santa Monica, where she underwent the Rorschach Test, the Thematic Apperception Test, the Sentence Completion Test and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Index. Miss Didion quotes at italicised length from the ensuing psychiatric report: 'a personality in process of deterioration ... regressive, libidinal preoccupations ... fundamentally pessimistic, fatalistic ... feels deeply that all human effort is foredoomed to failure...'. Following a series of periodic visual disturbances, she then submits to three electroencephalograms, two sets of skull and neck X-rays, one five-hour glucose-tolerance test, two electromyelograms, a variety of chemical tests and consultations with two ophthalmologists, one internist and three neurologists. Damage to the central nervous system is diagnosed and given a nasty name by the sinister doctors. 'The startling fact was this,' writes Miss Didion: 'my body was offering a precise physiological equivalent to what had been going on in my mind.' At that moment she had a sharp apprehension 'of what it was like to open the door to a stranger and find that the stranger did indeed have the knife.' Charles Manson had come calling, but under the name of Multiple Sclerosis. 'Lead a simple life,' the neurologist concluded: 'Not that it makes any difference we know about.'

In her relatively self-effacing preface to Slouching towards Bethlehem Miss Didion admitted: 'whatever I write reflects, sometimes gratuitously, how I feel.' Ten years on, the emphasis has changed; you might even say, after 200 pages of these high-profile musings, that whatever Miss Didion feels reflects how she writes. 'Gratuitous' hardly comes into it any more - and this doesn't apply only to the essays specifically addressed to her migraines, marital problems, book-promotion activities, and so on. 'I am talking here about being a child of my time,' begins one essay. 'I had better tell you where I am, and why,' begins another. Having told us where she is and why (Honolulu, to save her marriage), Miss Didion proceeds: 'I tell you this not as aimless revelation but because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who 1 am and where I am and what is on my mind. I want you to understand exactly what you are getting: you are getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest other people. You are getting a woman who ...' And so on. You learn a good deal more about what you are getting.

Only someone fairly a.s.sured about certain of her bearings would presume to address her readers in this (in fact) markedly highhanded style. The style bespeaks celebrity, a concerned and captive following; it is inconceivable, for instance, that any beginner would risk such a take-me-or-leave-me tone. It occurs to you that Miss Didion's reasons for disliking Woody Allen's Manhattan, and for attacking it at length in the New York Review, are perhaps largely defensive in origin. What is objectionable about Manhattan is not that it is knowing, cute, 'in', as Miss Didion claimed. What is objectionable about Manhattan, and Annie Hall, is that Woody Allen is publicly a.n.a.lysing a past love affair, with his past lover, on screen (Woody used to be with Diane, as is well-known; as is also well-known, Diane is now with Warren, or was at the time of writing). Such self-advertis.e.m.e.nt feels cheap and, for all its coy alienations, looks thick-skinned. Miss Didion would dismiss the comparison as footling when compared to the inescapability of her new-found emotional rawness. She feels that she is responding accurately to some extremity in the observed life - in the great and desperate human action she reads about in the newspapers, listens to on the radio, and fragmentarily witnesses. Yet it remains true that writing, unlike living, is artificial, disinterested: it is not just another facet of reality, however clamorous and incorrigible that reality may sometimes feel.

Miss Didion, though, has come out. She stands revealed, in The White Alb.u.m, as a human being who has managed to gouge another book out of herself, rather than as a writer who gets her living done on the side, or between the lines. The result is a volatile, occasionally brilliant, distinctly female contribution to the new New Journalism, diffident and imperious by turns, intimate yet categorical, self-effacingly listless and at the same time often subtly self-serving. She can still find her own perfect pitch for long stretches, and she has an almost embarra.s.singly sharp ear and unblinking eye for the Califor-nian inanity. Seemingly obedient, though, to the verdicts of her psychiatric report, Miss Didion writes about everything with the same doom-conscious yet faintly abstract intensity of interest, whether remarking on the dress sense of one of Manson's henchwomen, or indulging her curious obsession with Californian waterworks. In these pieces, Miss Didion's writing does not 'reflect' her moods so much as dramatise them. 'How she feels' has become, for the time being, how it is.

The effect on her style is everywhere apparent. In the middle of a piece about the design of shopping-centres, Miss Didion abruptly announces: 'If I had a center I would have monkeys, and Chinese restaurants, and Mylar kites and bands of small girls playing tambourine.' That sentence could have been written by Richard Brautigan; it is peculiarly Californian style, a schlepping style. Bouts of wooziness affect the judgment too. After a wearily lucid a.n.a.lysis of the Women's Movement and a precise appraisal of Doris Lessing, Miss Didion moves on to a bizarre hymn to Georgia O'Keeffe, the veteran American painter. Miss Didion makes the mistake, at the outset, of taking along her seven-year-old daughter to see a Chicago retrospective of the painter's work: One of the vast O'Keeffe Sky Above Clouds canva.s.ses floated over the back stairs in the Chicago Art Inst.i.tute that day, dominating what seemed to be several stories of empty light, and my daughter looked at it once, ran to the landing, and kept on looking. 'Who drew it,' she whispered after a while. I told her. 'I need to talk to her,' she said finally.

My daughter was making, that day in Chicago, an entirely unconscious but quite basic a.s.sumption about people and the work they do. She was a.s.suming that the glory she saw in the work reflected a glory in its maker... that every choice one made alone ... betrayed one's character. Style is character.

It is easy to see here how quickly sentimentality proceeds to nonsense. The extent to which style isn't character can be gauged by (for example) reading a literary biography, or by trying to imagine a genuinely fruitful discussion between Georgia O'Keeffe and Miss Didion's seven-year-old daughter: a scene of painful mawkishness springs unavoidably to mind. When the child whispered, 'I need to talk to her,' Miss Didion should have whispered back, 'Quiet, I'm working,' and got on with her job. As it is, Miss Didion gives us a tremulous pep-talk on O'Keeffe's career, fondly stressing the 'crustiness' and 'pepperiness' of 'this hard woman', 'this angelic rattlesnake'. She sums up: In Texas there was only the horizon she craved. In Texas she had her sister Claudia with her for a while, and in the late afternoons they would walk away from town and toward the horizon and watch the evening star come out. 'That evening star fascinated me,' she wrote ' ... My sister had a gun, and as we walked she would throw bottles into the air and shoot them. I had nothing but to walk into nowhere and the wide sunset s.p.a.ce with the star. Ten watercolors were made from that star.' In a way one's interest is compelled as much by the sister Claudia with the gun as by the painter Georgia with the star, but only the painter left us this shining record. Ten watercolors were made from that star.

A tribute to 'hardness', from one tough performer to another, becomes a husky gasp of shared prostration.

'Style is character.' Or, as Miss Didion puts it: Style is character. If style were character, everyone would write as self-revealingly as Miss Didion. Not everyone does. Miss Didion's style relishes emphasis, repet.i.tion, re-emphasis. Her style likes looking at the same things from different angles. Her style likes starting and finishing successive sentences with identical phrases. Take these two little strophes, separated by a hundred-odd pages in the present book: In the years after World War I my mother had put pennies for Grace [Episcopal Cathedral] in her mite box but Grace would never be finished. In the years after World War II I would put pennies for Grace in my mite box but Grace would never be finished.

And: In 1973 the five pillboxes on Makapuu Head had seemed to James Jones exactly as he had left them in 1942. In 1973 the Royal Hawaiian Hotel had seemed to James Jones less formidably rich than he had left it in 1942...

Both pa.s.sages evoke the pa.s.sing of time with the same reflexive cross-hatching. Equally, you know when to ready yourself for some uplift, because each sentence - like the one about Miss Didion's shopping-centre - contains more 'and's than a song by Leonard Cohen: 'I thought about barrack rats and I thought about Prewitt and Maggio and I thought about Army hatred and it seemed to me that night in Honolulu ..." That night in Honolulu, that day in Chicago. It is a style that has become set in its own modulations, proclaiming its individuality by means of a few recurrent quirks and lilts. In other words, it has become mannered.

It could be argued that the same thing happened to Miss Didion's fiction. Run, River (1963) is an exemplarily solid first novel, mildly ambitious in construction and restrained in delivery and scope - contentedly minor, above all. It is set in rural California during and after the Second World War, and examines familial and community power-balances in relaxed, elegant, clicheless prose. Miss Didion's somewhat top-heavy interest in madness and stupefaction - the vanished knack of 'making things matter' - puts in an early appearance here, but it is at least placed against a background where not everything is mad and stupefied. The trouble starts with Play It As It Lays (1970). This is when the Californian emptiness arrives and Miss Didion attempts to evolve a style, or a manner, to answer to it. Here come divorces, breakdowns, suicide bids, spiced-up paragraphs, forty-word chapters, and the sort of italicised wedges of prose that used to be called 'fractured'. The 'bad' characters are movie people who drink and take drugs to excess, sleep with one another a lot, and don't go crazy. The 'good' characters are movie people who drink and take drugs to excess, sleep with one another a lot, and do go crazy. The bad characters are shallow pragmatists. The good characters are (between ourselves) shallow nihilists. We are meant to think that BZ, the ruefully degenerate producer, is acting with perversely heroic decorum when he kills himself with vodka and Seconal at the end of the book ('Don't start faking me now__Take my hand'). And we are meant to think that Marie, the ruefully degenerate actress, is actually trumping BZ in the nihilism stakes by the shrewd expedient of not killing herself. The book closes: I know what 'nothing' means, and keep on playing. Why, BZ would say. Why not, I say.

Her italics.

The area occupied by A Book of Common Prayer (1977) might be called the aftermath of breakdown. Told by one woman about another, the novels catalogue of lost husbands, lost children and lost lucidity - its endless 'revisions and erasures' (erasures: a very Didionian word) - is glimpsed through a mesh of distortion and dislocation. From the outset, the prose tangles with a good deal of counterpoint, elision and italicisation, and gets more hectic as the novel proceeds. Towards the end, such is the indirection on display, Miss Didion seems incapable of starting a new subordinate clause without splintering off into a new paragraph.

In fact she had.

Told Leonard what she was going to do.

She was going to stay.

Not 'stay' precisely.

'Not leave' is more like it.

and I am told, and so she said.

I heard later.

According to her pa.s.sport. It was reported.

Apparently.

are examples. I find this kind of writing as resonant as a pop-gun. The most poetic thing about Miss Didion's prose in this novel is that it doesn't go all the way across the page.

However much she would resist the idea, Miss Didion's talent is primarily discursive in tendency. As is the case with Gore Vidal, the essays are far more interesting than the fiction. The novels get taken up, with the enthusiasm, the unanimity, the relief which American critics and readers often show when they discover a new and distinctly OK writer. Miss Didion is already being called 'major', a judgment that some might think premature, to say the least: but she is far more rewarding than many writers similarly saluted. In particular, the candour of her femaleness is highly arresting and original. She doesn't try for the virile virtues of robustness and infallibility; she tries to find a female way of being serious. Nevertheless, there are hollow places in even her best writing, a thinness, a sense of things missing.

There are two main things that aren't there. The first is a social dimension. At no point in The White Alb.u.m does Miss Didion think about the sort of people she would never normally have cause to come across: the 'cunning Okie' who doesn't actually commit the crime and hit the headlines, the quietly crazy mother who never gets round to leaving her daughter on the centre divider of Interstate 5, the male-prost.i.tute flop who will never have the chance to roll and murder a Ramon Novarro and win a place in Miss Didion's clippings file. Lucille Miller was alive and ill and living in San Bernadino Valley long before she tried to burn her husband to death. Miss Didion sensed this, in Slouching towards Bethlehem, and had the energy to follow it up: but in The White Alb.u.m her imaginative withdrawal seems pretty well complete. It must be easier to get like this in California than anywhere else on earth. Even the black revolutionaries Miss Didion goes to see chat about their Medicare schemes and the royalties on their memoirs. It is interesting, though, that Miss Didion fails to identify a strong element in the 'motives' behind the Manson killings: the revenge of the insignificant on the affluent. What frightened Miss Didion's friends was the idea that wealth and celebrity might be considered sufficient provocation to murder. But Miss Didion never looks at things from this point of view. It is a pity. If you are rich and neurotic it is salutary in all kinds of ways to think hard about people who are poor and neurotic: i.e. people who have more to be neurotic about. If you don't, and especially if you are a writer, then it is not merely therapy you miss out on.

The other main thing that isn't there is any kind of literary s.p.a.ciousness or solidity. Miss Didion has excellent sport with the culturelessness of her fellow Californians. 'As a matter of fact I hear that no man is an island once or twice a week, quite often from people who think they are quoting Ernest Hemingway.' Or again, writing about Hollywood: 'A book or a story is a "property" only until the deal; after that it is "the basic material", as in "I haven't read the basic material on Gatsby."' Miss Didion has read the basic material on Gatsby; she has even read The Last Tyc.o.o.n. But what else has she read, and how recently? A few texts from her Berkeley days like Madame Bovary and Heart of Darkness get a mention. Lionel Trilling gets two. And while holidaying in Colombia she takes the opportunity to quote from One Hundred Years of Solitude ('by the Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez') and Robert Lowell's 'Caracas'. Yet at no point does Miss Didion give a sense of being someone who uses literature as a constant model or ideal, something sh.o.r.ed up against the randomness and babble that is fundamental to her distress. When Miss Didion herself attempts an erudite modulation we tend to get phrases like 'there would ever be world enough and time' or 'the improvement of marriages would not a revolution make' or 'all the ignorant armies jostling in the night' - which might be gems from a creative-writing correspondence course.

'Slouching towards Bethlehem' is, of course, a literary reference itself. As Miss Didion dramatically points out in her preface: 'This book is called Slouching towards Bethlehem because for several years now certain lines from the Yeats poem which appears two pages back have reverberated in my inner ear as if they were surgically implanted there.' The whole of 'The Second Coming' is indeed printed a few pages back, along with a deflationary extract from the sayings of Miss Peggy Lee ('I learned courage from Buddha, Jesus, Lincoln, Einstein, and Gary Grant'). The t.i.tle essay duly begins: 'The centre wasn't holding'. It doesn't seem to have occurred to her with the necessary force that 'The Second Coming' was written half a century ago. The centre hasn't been holding for some time now; actually the centre was never holding, and never will hold. Probably all writers are at some point briefly under the impression that they are in the forefront of disintegration and chaos, that they are among the first to live and work after things fell apart. The continuity such an impression ignores is a literary continuity. It routinely a.s.similates and domesticates more pressing burdens than Miss Didion's particular share of vivid, ephemeral terrors.

London Review of Books 1980

In Hefnerland

1. The Playboy Party

At last, that very special moment. Playmate of the Year Barbara Edwards composed herself at the far end of the astroturfed marquee. The stage she stood on recalled the train motif of her 'pictorial' in the current magazine; the blancmange-coloured dress she wore matched the press-kits that lay on every table. With her make-up scored by tears of pride, Barbara thanked the a.s.sembly for sharing this very special day. 'And now, the man who makes the dreams come true, ladies and gentlemen, Mr Hugh M. Hefner!' Barbara faltered, then added, on the brink of crack-up: 'I love him so much.'

Hef took the stage. For a man who never goes out, who rises at mid-afternoon, who wanders his draped mansion in slippers and robe (whose lifestyle, on paper, resembles nothing so much as a study in terminal depression), Hef looks good - surprisingly, even scandalously so. A little haggard, maybe, a little etiolated, but trim and ferret-fit in blazer and slacks. It was 4.30, so Hef had presumably just rubbed the sleepy dust from his eyes and climbed from the trembling, twirling bed which he so seldom leaves. 'I work in it, play in it, eat and sleep in it,' he has said. What doesn't he do in it? Well, perhaps this is the look you get, when the day's most onerous ch.o.r.e is your twilight visit to the men's room.

'It's a very special day for us,' Hef confirmed - and Barbara was a very special lady. She was also an exception to the recent 'run of blondes': why, the last brunette he'd crowned was Patti McGuire, 'who went on to marry Jimmy Connors'. At this point Barbara seemed suddenly subdued, no doubt by the prospect of going on to marry John McEnroe. 'Without further ado', however, Hef gave Barbara her special gifts, all of them taxable: $ioo,ooo, a new car (not a pink Porsche or a crimson Cadillac but a d.i.n.ky black Jaguar), and the t.i.tle itself: Playboy Playmate of the Year.

The a.s.sembled shower of pressmen, PR operatives, hangers-on and sub-celebrities - Robert Culp and Vince Van Patten were perhaps the most dazzling stars in this pastel galaxy - listened to the speeches, applauded zestlessly, and returned to their lite beers and tea-time vodka-tonics. More animated, in every sense, was the tableful of centrefold also-rans to the left of the podium, who greeted each remark with approving yelps of 'Yeah!' and 'Wha-hoo!' and 'Owl-right'. These are the special girls who languish in semi-residence at Playboy Mansion West, sunbathers, Jacuzzi-fillers, party-prettifiers. Now what is it with these girls? The look aspired to is one of the expensive innocence of pampered maidenhood, frill and tracery in pink and white, flounced frocks for summer lawns. They also have a racehorse quality, cantilevered, genetically tuned or souped-up, the skin monotonously perfect, the hair sculpted and plumed; the body-tone at its brief optimum. Compared to these girls, the ordinary woman (the wife, the secretary, the non-G.o.ddess) looks lived-in or only half-completed, eccentrically and interestingly human.

Now Hef partied - Hef made the scene. Behind him at all times stood his bodyguard, a representative of the balding, gum-chewing, bodyguarding caste. Don't be a bodyguard, if you can possibly help it. You have to stand there all day with your arms folded, frowning watchfully. If you don't look grim and serious, you aren't doing your job. Diversified only by a bit of Pepsi-ferrying to the boss, that's what Hef's bodyguard does all day: look serious, while Hef horses around. A teenage playmate nuzzled Hef's chest and giggled. The bodyguard watched her watchfully.

As the thrash thrashed on, I slipped out of the tent and strolled the grounds. The man-made, bloodheat rockpool, the Jacuzzi-infested grotto, the mini-zoos with their hunched, peanut-addict monkeys, smiling parrots, demonic macaws, the tennis court, the vast satellite receiver, curved like a giantess's bra.s.siere, which enables Hef to watch even more TV than he does already ... Hef would later describe an average day in his life. 'Get up in the early afternoon, have a meeting, there's a regular buffet, a couple of movies, go upstairs around i a.m. with a girlfriend or whoever, make love then, have a meal, watch a movie or two.' Now that's four movies a day we're looking at. In the early Seventies Hef left the 'controlled environment' of his sealed and gardenless mansion in Chicago and moved out to California - itself a kind of controlled environment. Here the sun's controls are turned up all year long, and the girls are bigger, better, blonder, browner. But Hef isn't much of a fresh-air buff, even now ... On the edge of the tropical fishpond stands an ornamental barrel, full of feed. Scatter a handful of the smelly pellets, and the fish - gorgeously sh.e.l.l-coloured - will rush to the bank, scores of them, mouths open, like benign but very greedy piranha. 'G.o.d, that's so gross,' said a pa.s.sing partygoer. It is, too. The fish ma.s.s so tightly that for a moment, a special moment, there is no water beneath you - only squirming suicide. They look netted, beached, like a fisherman's haul.

2. The Playboy Salad

Keyholder turns Bunny Back cards into Bunny for issuance of desired Certificate. (This offer is not valid in conjunction with any other special promotional offer.) - Playboy Club Leaflet To the Playboy Club in Century City, just off the Avenue of the Stars. In the foyer of this desperate establishment you will find a squad of strict-faced, corseted Bunnies, a gift shop featuring various 'celebrity purchases', and a big TV screen showing a big Playmate as she soaps herself in the tub...This is hot footage from the Playboy Channel - yes, a whole channel of the stuff, nine or ten hours a day. Playboy Inc. is changing its act: once a paunchy conglomerate kept afloat by gambling profits, it is now a solid publishing company nursing high hopes for cable TV. Hef believes that this is the way forward as the trend of American leisure increasingly shuns the street and huddles up in the home. Hef ought to know. He is home-smart, having put in thirty years' experience of never going out. In the submarine sanctum of the club itself you will find a Playboy pinball machine (the artwork depicts Hef flanked by two playmates in their nighties), a video game with a handwritten Out of Order notice taped to its screen, some backgammon tables, a wall of framed centrefolds, and an oval bar where two or three swarthy loners sit slumped over their drinks, staring at the waitresses with an air of parched and scornful gloom. The wine gla.s.ses bear the Playboy logo: the little black rabbit-head does such a good imitation or a drowned insect that the young woman in our party shrieked out loud as she raised the gla.s.s to her lips. A 747-load of j.a.panese tourists in modified beachwear filed cautiously past. The manager or greeter, who looked like the rumba-instructor or tango-tutor of a Miami hotel, showed us to our table with a flourish. The Playboy Club, we knew, was LA's premier talent showcase, and tonight's act, we learned, was straight in from Las Vegas. When questioned, the manager proudly agreed that the club did a lot of package-tour business, as well as 'Greyline Tour bus groups. But the bus groups are very minimal tonight.' We gazed over the shining mops of the j.a.panese, and over the coiff, frizz, rug and bald-patch of the bus groups, as tonight's act did its thing: three girls in tutus, singing popular hits. At the incitement of the lead singer, the audience clapped its hands to the beat. The sound they made was as random as weak applause.

Over a Playboy Salad (remarkably similar to a non-Playboy salad, though rather heavy on the Thousand Island), I unwrapped my Playboy gift-pack. A dime-store garter belt for the special person in my life, two Playboy bookmatches, a blizzard of promotional offers, and a sc.r.a.p of paper bearing the tremulous signature of Hugh M. Hefner. According to the new Bunny Pack bonus program, all I had to do was 'enjoy dinner Playboy style' 1,531 times, and I'd win a new VCR. There were other offers: 'Easy-to-take drink prices and complimentary chili every Monday through Friday from four to seven.' Even as I finished my steak, the $1.50 all-you-can-eat brunch was being a.s.sembled on the sideboards.

'Playboy Style...live it!' say the ads for the club in the parent magazine. But Playboy Style, nowadays, is something you'd have to ask your father about. In this den of innocuousness, you see that the Playboy dream has submitted to the heroic consumerism of everyday America: it has been proletarianised, kitsched, disappearing in the direction it came from, back to Chicago, the Fifties, Korea, the furtive world of Dude, Gent, Rogue, Flirt, Sir, Male, Cutie, Eyeful, Giggles, t.i.tter, Modern Sunbathing and Hygiene. Then, suddenly, there was Kinsey, the bikini, talk of the Pill, penicillin and Playboy. In the proud dawn of the Playboy dream, Hef hung out with Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Lenny Bruce and Jack Kerouac. Now it's Sammy Davis Jr, Jimmy Caan, John and Bo Derek, and Tom Jones.

As it fades, the dream must reach down deeper into lumpen America, searching for the bedroom fevers of someone very like Hef in 1953: the son of stalwart Methodist parents, a fried-chicken and pork-chop kind of guy, miserably married, naive, ambitious and repressed, someone who connected s.e.x with upward mobility, someone who knew just how expensive the best things in life could be.

3. The Playboy Playmate

My friends all asked me why I wanted to become a Playmate, and I told them I thought the women of Playboy were the epitome of beauty, cla.s.s, taste and femininity. - Shannon Tweed, ex-Playmate Overworked, it seemed, to the point of inanition or actual brain death, Hef's PR man Don was having problems firming up the Hefner interview and Mansion tour. Where, I wondered, was Hef's famous in-depth back-up? But then I remembered what had happened when Playboy wanted to interview its own Editor-Publisher, six years ago: 'Hef says call back in a year' was the message from the Mansion. 'We have a problem,' droned Don. And yet problem-solving is his business, as it is with all the corporation Roys and Rays and Phils and Bills. Equally ponderous and evasive, Don is one of the many middlemen hired to interpose between Hef and the outside world. Nearly everybody in LA retains one or two of these reality-softeners. What do you get at the end of every line? The smooth interceptions of answering services; the forensic clearances of security people; Hispanic incomprehension.

I drove to Don's office in the Playboy building, up on Sunset, to meet and chat with a 'representative Playmate'. In the sunny, genial, nude-decked PR department I was introduced to Penny Baker and provided with the relevant issue of Playboy. Miss Baker was the beneficiary of The Great Thirtieth Anniversary Playmate Search: 250,000 polaroids later, they settled on Penny: 'And now that we've found her, our greatest reward is in sharing her beauty with you.' What do they look for, exactly? 'Great nipples', 'sincere bush', 'Is there a problem with the b.r.e.a.s.t.s?' - these are the sort of concepts (I had read) that are tossed back and forth by Hef's creative consultants. For eight pages plus centrefold, at any rate, Penny's beauty, her charms, were glisteningly revealed. Her turn-ons were 'Mountains and music'. Among her turn-offs were 'big talkers and humidity'. Her ideal man? 'Someone who knows what he wants.' Penny is eighteen.

Monitored by Don's ponderous presence (he lurked there with his little tape recorder - company policy, no doubt), the interview began. Within a minute, I had run out of questions. I would get nothing but company policy from Penny, and we both knew it. Yes, she now worked on the Playboy promo circuit. No, her parents didn't object to the spread: they both thought it was neat. Yes, she belonged to the Shannon Tweed school of Playmate philosophy. 'I have a beautiful baddy,' explained Penny - and why should she be ashamed to share it with Playboy subscribers? 'How do you feel about Hugh Hefner?' I asked, and felt Don give a sluggish twitch. Penny's young face went misty. Sweetness, sincerity, sensitivity: like a big family. 'I saw him cry one time,' she confessed. 'It was his birthday. I went up and said Happy Birthday. And he, and he - well ..." A very special moment, this one, a very special memory, not to be shared.

4. The Playboy Interview

With another side of the same story comes iconoclast Buck Henry who reveals ... that those really close to Hef always refer to hint as Ner. - 'Playbill', Playboy What a scoop. I arrived at the Playboy Mansion for my interview to find that a quite extraordinary thing had happened: Ner had gone out! Now as we all know this is something that Ner hardly ever does. He hasn't been in a cab or a shop for twenty years. Only once in that period has he walked a street - back in 1967. At that time Ner still nestled in the sealed and soundproofed Chicago Mansion: he never knew the time of day, or even the season. Playboy Inc. had purchased a new property. Struck by the desire to see the place, Ner decided on a rare sortie: he would walk the eight blocks to North Michigan Avenue. Venturing out of his controlled environment, he found that it was raining. It was also the middle of the night. Legend does not record whether he was still in his pyjamas at the time ... Today, Ner had gone out to the doctor's. But he would shortly return. You pull up at the gates - Charing Cross Road, Holmby Hills.

On my previous visit I'd been unsmilingly cleared by a young man with tweed jacket, guest-list clipboard and turbulent complexion (peanut-b.u.t.ter plus pimple problem). Today the closed gates were unattended. My cab idled. Suddenly a mounted camera jerked its head in my direction - surprised, affronted. 'Let me have your name, sir,' I was asked by an ornamental boulder on my left. After several unfriendly questions and delays, the gates grudgingly parted. warning, says a sign on the curved drive: your visit may be RECORDED OR TELEVISED.

'An elegant English Tudor home, L-shaped, with slate roof and leaded windows', Playboy Mansion West teems with car-boys, handimen, minders, butlers, bunnies. Everyone is brisk with corporation esprit, with problem-solving know-how. They bear themselves strictly, in accordance with some vague but exacting model of efficiency and calm. Their life's work, you feel, is to ensure that nothing ever gets on Ner's nerves.

The library sports a double backgammon table, a panelled, Pepsi-crammed icebox, various framed mag-covers featuring Ner, and a wall of books: bound editions of Playboy and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, a modest collection of hardbacks - The Supercrooks, s.e.x Forever, Luck be a Lady, Winning at the Track with Money Management. Over the fireplace hangs a jokey, Renaissance-style portrait of Ner, emphasising his close resemblance to Olivier's Richard III. (I later telephoned Don and asked him if this visual reference was an intentional one. Bemused, Don trudged off to check, and returned with an indignant denial.) As I walked to the window two limousines pulled up self-importantly in the forecourt. Slamming doors, busy car-boys, watchfully craning bodyguards. Having gone out, Ner had now come back. The interview would soon begin. Normally, I had read, recording equipment is set up to monitor a Hefner interview; also, the drapes are carefully drawn. 'Security request we close the drapes whenever Mr Hefner is in a room.' But things are laxer now. The sun can shine, and it's still OK if Ner is in a room.

And in he came, wearing scarlet silk pyjamas, with pipe and Pepsi - all as advertised. He apologised for being late and, in answer to my query, gave a.s.surances that all had gone well at the doctor's. We settled down. The interview went through two phases, quite distinct in timbre. For the first hour or so, Ner talked like a politician: he has a hundred well-thumbed paragraphs in his head, each of them swiftly triggered by the normal run of questions. He is comfortable with criticism from the Right (abortion, censorship), rather less so with criticism from the Left (misogyny, philistinism). Actually Ner believes that these orthodoxies go in cycles: now that p.o.r.nography has become - ironically - a civil-rights issue, he can imagine himself 'returning to the s.e.xual avant garde' and reliving his old crusade. If such a challenge were to arise, the father of s.e.xual liberation won't duck it. Nor shall Ner's sword sleep in his hand - no sir.

During the second part of the interview Ner relaxed: that is to say, he became highly agitated, showing the wounded restlessness of a man who thinks himself persistently misunderstood. His eyes, previously as opaque as limo-gla.s.s, now glittered and fizzed. So did his Pepsi: he took such violent swigs that the bottle kept foaming to the brim. His language grew saltier. 'That's all bulls.h.i.t,'' he said repeatedly, swiping a finger through the air. You saw the Chicagoan in him then - the tight-jawed, almost ventriloquial delivery, the hard vowels, the human hardness of the windy city, the city that works.

What changed Ner's mood? First, a discussion of Bobbie Arn-stein, the private secretary who committed suicide after involving Playboy in a drugs scandal during the mid-Seventies. Ner was able to give himself a quickfire exoneration on this 'very sc.u.mmy case'. He was far less convincing, though, when talk turned to the case of Dorothy Straiten. There is clearly something central and unshirk-able about the Straiten story; it is the other side of the Playboy dream: it is the Playboy nightmare. All set for stardom, likely to become the first Playboy-endorsed Hollywood success, Stratten was murdered by her rejected husband in circ.u.mstances of hideous squalor. The controversy has been ceaseless (and deeply unwelcome to the corporation), with the TV film Death of a Centrefold, Bob Fosse's Star 80 and now Peter Bogdanovich's memoir The Killing of the Unicorn. Dorothy Stratten was Playmate of the Year for 1980, but she never saw 1981.

'Dorothy', he said, his face briefly wistful, 'was a very special person, very trusting, a very special - human being.' People talked about the connections between Dorothy's death and the mores of the Playboy world - 'But that's all bulls.h.i.t. There is not and never has been a casting-couch thing here.' He then went on to slander Bob Fosse (off the record: a private thing between Ner and me). 'Recreational s.e.x can still be moral - and that's what I'm all about. You have responsibilities as a bachelor. n.o.body has ever had an abortion because of me. n.o.body. It's like a family here. People stay with us for a very long time: my night-time secretary was a Playmate in 1960! I am a warm and caring person and so is the company. That's the kind of guy I am.'

The interview ended with some deliberation about the photographs that would ill.u.s.trate this article. A recent and idealised portrait of Ner was produced in its frame - the sort of thing a sports or nightclub personality might hang over his bed. Wouldn't this do? 'It's never been used before,' droned Don (who had, of course, been ponderously present throughout). I hesitated. Did they seriously think that any magazine other than People - or Playboy - would publish such an 'official' study? Was the Editor-Publisher of genius losing his grip? Should I be frank? Was now the time to start calling Hef Ner? I said nothing. We sat there admiring the photograph, all agreeing how very special it looked.

The girls are always saying they feel 'safe' in the Mansion, and yet the Easterner is pretty happy to take his leave - to leave the atmosphere of surveillance, corporation propaganda and PR p's and q's. Ner cruised out of the library and into the hall. An average evening was beginning. In the dining-room two elderly celebrities (Max Lerner and Richard Brook) were ordering complicated meals, with many doctorial vetos and provisos, while in the adjacent room the little squad of playmates and playthings, of honeys and bunnies, sat quietly around a table with their gla.s.ses (soft drinks only: Ner' doesn't want them sloppy). Momentarily hushed and alert, the girls seemed ornamental and yet not quite pa.s.sive, on call, expected to disport themselves in a certain way, expected to do whatever is expected.

5. The Playboy Philosophy

Publishing a sophisticated men's magazine seemed to me the best possible way of fulfilling a dream I'd been nurturing ever since I was a teenager: to get laid a lot - Hugh M. Hefner Hefner has been inviting moral judgments for over thirty years. It shows. It takes it out of a guy. Never altogether cynical, not yet entirely deluded, he is nonetheless committed to a sanitised, an authorised version of his Jife. The tendency is common enough, especially out here in the land of the innumerate billionaire, where a game of Scrabble is a literary event, where the prevailing values are those of the pocket calculator. 'There are times', Gloria Steinem has said, 'when a woman reading Playboy feels like a Jew reading a n.a.z.i manual.' This is a frivolous remark, and blasphemous, too. Say that about Playboy, and what's left for Der Sturmer? If commercial p.o.r.nography is imagined as a flophouse, with b.e.s.t.i.a.lity in the bas.e.m.e.nt, then Playboy is a relatively clean and tidy attic. It is hardly p.o.r.nography at all, more a kind of mawkish iconography for eternal adolescents. Playboy 'objectifies women' all right, in Joyce Wolfe's quaint phrase - but let's be objective here. According to the old Chicago axiom, there are two areas of wrongdoing: ethics and morals. Ethics is money and morals is s.e.x. With Hefner, the line between the two is blurred or wobbly. It is a very American mix.

Three points need to be made about Hefner's oft-repeated contention that Playboy is like a family. First, it is a family in which Poppa Bear gets to go to bed with his daughters. Secondly, it is a family in which the turnover in daughters is high. Thirdly, it is a family in which no tensions, resentments or power-struggles are admitted to or tolerated: at Playboy, everyone is happy all the time. Of every conceivable human inst.i.tution, a family is what Playboy least resembles. True, Hefner's daughter Christie is now the figurehead of the company; true also that he has recently opened his arms, Dynasty-style, to a second, putative son (though he admitted to me that there was, of all things, 'a problem' with young Mark). But they're grown up now: they're on the payroll, under the wing, like everybody else. Hefner isn't paternal - he is exclusively paternalistic, wedded only to the daily exercise of power.

At the time of the interview I had not read Bogdanovich's The Killing of the Unicorn. More to the point, neither had Hefner. I a.s.sume that his tone would have been very different - less spirited and aggrieved, more furtive and beleaguered. The Bogdanovich memoir is a labour of love, verging on a kind of sentimental mysticism, and its central accusation (that Hefner bears a measure of responsibility for Stratten's death, not only metaphorically but directly too) carries more emotion than weight. Some unpleasant facts, however, are now on record; and one is less disturbed by the s.e.xual delinquencies than by the corporation automatism, the com-mercialised unreality with which Playboy glosses everything it does. Expediency, double-think, self-interest posing as philanthropy - this is the Playboy philosophy, powder-puffed and airbrushed by all the doltish euphemism of conglomerate America.

You are an eighteen-year-old from some dismal ex-prairie state, a receptionist from Wyoming, or a local beauty queen - Miss Nowhere, Nebraska, perhaps. Your boyfriend's salacious Polaroid suddenly transforms itself into a first-cla.s.s air ticket to Los Angeles. Limoed to the Mansion guest-house, you are schooled by smiling PR girls, aides, secretaries. No outside boyfriends are allowed into the Mansion - and these are, indisputably, 'healthy young girls'. Natural selection will decide whether you will be orgy-fodder, good for one of the gang, or whether you have what it takes to join the elite of Hefner's 'special ladies'. Signed up, set to work in the Playboy Club or on the promo or modelling circuits, you will find the divisions between public and private obligations hard to determine. You will also experience a wildly selective generosity, the also-rans routinely overworked and underpaid, the front-runners smothered in celebrity purchases - jewels, furs, paintings, cars, and what Californians call a 'home'. If Hefner wants you to be a special lady then so does everyone else at the ranch. And when the call comes for you to join the boss in the inexorable Jacuzzi, it isn't Hef on the line: it's his night-time secretary - This process used to be called seigneurism. 'Warm and caring'? Nowadays every business in America says how warm it is and how much it cares - loan companies, supermarkets, hamburger chains.

'Without you', Hefner once joked to a gaggle of Playmates, 'I'd have a literary magazine.' Yes, but what would he have without the literature? He'd have the Playboy Channel for one thing, and all the footling vapidity of unrelieved soft core. s.e.xcetera, Melody in Love, Pillow Previews, Alternative Lifestyle Features, 'nudity', 'strong language' and what are laughingly known as 'mature situations'. Christ, a week of this and you'd be like Don the PR man ... And so we leave him, strolling his games parlour (there are bedrooms in back), his paradise of pinball, Pepsi and pyjama-parties - the remorselessly, the indefinitely gratified self. It is in the very nature of such appet.i.tes that they will deride him in time. One wonders what will happen to the girls when they grow up. One wonders what will happen to Hefner, if he ever gives it a try.

Hef at seventy. Ner at ninety. Now wouldn't that be something special?

Observer 1985

Paul Theroux's Enthusiasms

'I have always disliked being a man,' writes Paul Theroux, in a brief essay called 'Being a Man'. 'The whole idea of manhood in America is pitiful, in my opinion.' Not only pitiful: also 'stupid', 'unfeeling', 'right-wing', 'puritanical', 'cowardly', 'grotesque', 'primitive', 'hideous', 'crippling' - and 'a bore', too, what's more. Although there is some truth in these iterations, the adult male has no practicable alternative to being a man - certainly no cheap or painless one. But maybe Mr Theroux has found a way round being a man (I concluded, towards the end of this hefty selection of occasional pieces, Sunrise with Seamonsters). Being a boy!

As a novelist, Theroux is attracted to the dark, the haunted, the hidden; he is also attracted to the theme of childhood, though more for its terrors than its exhilarations. As a literary odd-jobber, however, as a left-handed gun, he is breezy, temperate and mild - often downright sunny. Nothing makes him blue. A tour of a crammed and rotting madhouse in Afghanistan can't spoil his spirits. He contrives to have a fun-filled week on the New York subway, strolling among the mangled Morlocks with the transit police. He even hits it off with John McEnroe.

Sunrise with Seamonsters is full of jaunts and larks and treats and sprees, obsessions, hobbies, self-indulgences. First, there are the trains. Theroux has already written two whole books about trains, but the choo-choos and chuff-chuffs feature prominently in this one too. The Aztec Eagle, The Lake Sh.o.r.e Limited, The London Ferry, The Frontier Mail, The Izmir Express - The Nine Forty-Five! The whistles, the manifests, the long waits and chance b.u.t.tonholings still provide endless fascination for this dark-spectacled Bradshaw, train-spotting from the wrong side of the gla.s.s. Perhaps the most reckless piece in the book is a seduction fantasy (young man, mature woman - 'her sobs of pleasure', etc.), followed by an essay in praise of the older ladies. 'At her age she could know every trick in the book and, if it weren't for her pride ... she could probably make a fortune as a hooker.' Cor. The seduction takes place in the South of France. On a train.

The book bristles with other enthusiasms. Theroux dabbles in photography; he is crazy about maps; he writes and then personally publishes a special Christmas story for his kids; he goes 'harbour-hopping' round the Cape in his boat, Goldeneye. Mr Th.o.r.eau (I mean Mr Theroux, but is there any relation?) is a Cape Cod buff, a true-blue Cape Codder, romping and gambolling there annually with his extended family. 'I get sad', moons Theroux, 'thinking that the summer is about to end.' After dinner there are parlour games: Kemps, Up Jenkins, The Parson's Cat, and Murder. Or else he rows along the coast to his folks' house, and horses around with his middle-aged brothers. 'We were not writers, husbands, or fathers. We were three big boys fooling in front of their parents.'

About a dozen of the pieces collected here are about writers; but the approach remains personal rather than literary. A couple (on S.J. Perelman and V.S. Naipaul) are warm pen-portraits inspired by friendship. Others get in as one-time idols (Henry Miller, Kipling, James) who have influenced or liberated Mr Theroux. And occasionally his pen will flash from its scabbard to defend undervalued heroes and neglected favourites (Joyce Gary, John Collier, V.S. Pritchett's Dead Man Leading). Theroux praises Pritchett's criticism for its non-academic slant, and obviously sees himself as following in this line himself. But I don't think Pritchett is ever quite as non-academic as his young admirer. A naturally alert and energetic reader, Theroux is nevertheless much happier with the particular rather than the general. When he does venture into theory ('from the Jacobeans onward [there are] villains who are truer and vastly more enjoyable than saintly heroes who never put a foot wrong'), you get a sense of something callow and furtive, as if Mr Theroux still does his reading in the small hours - under the blankets with a flashlight.

In his travels, both mental and actual, Theroux does of course address himself to harsh truths and ugly realities. He could hardly avoid them, having spent his twenties in the equatorial Third World, with the Peace Corps: 'it was a way of virtuously dropping out and delicately circ.u.mventing Vietnam'. In a brave piece called 'Cowardice' Theroux makes an amusing boast of his own gutlessness. But all travel is brave, in a sense. To some writers, leaving the house can seem quite an exploit. And, boy, Mr Theroux certainly gets around.

Uganda, Mozambique, Malawi, Tanzania, Burma, India, Malaysia: these are among the poorest and most chaotic countries on earth, and Theroux confronts them with what strikes me as an entirely boyish intrepidity. Beady-eyed, sensual and unflinching, he writes with concern, with feeling, with pity - but with no obvious distress. It is possible that his early experiences in Africa inured him to such spectacles. Certainly his one attempt at a compa.s.sionate High Style, 'Leper Colony' (1966) - 'limbs are clubs to thump dirt pits for trash, to wish for knives' - is the only example of literary posing, and the only profound embarra.s.sment, in this engaging and endearing book.

Again, it is curious how neatly Theroux sheds his complexities when he writes left-handed. Sunrise with Seamonsters is more a holiday from authorship than an extension of it. (The writing is much looser than the fictional prose, with many a ready-made formulation: 'howling sn.o.bs', 'stifling heat', 'whiff of romance', 'hive of activity'.) Why do writers travel and then tell their tales? Graham Greene, whom Theroux much admires, travels to escape spleen and to embrace nostalgic. V.S. Naipaul, another mentor, attempts to take psychological readings of foreign cultures by way of a risky self-exposure. With both Greene and Naipaul, the traveller and the writer are the same man. Paul Theroux, who has more readers per book than either, tells traveller's tales mostly for the h.e.l.l of it: long letters home. His mature responses to the things he sees are to be found elsewhere - in Jungle Lovers, Saint Jack, The Mosquito Coast.

Observer 1985

Gay Talese: s.e.x-Affirmative

Just over half-way through this interminable book (Thy Neighbour's Wife), we are given a welcome pen-portrait of Dr Alex Comfort, the aged author Joy of s.e.x and its sequel, More Joy of s.e.x. Comfort is glimpsed in one of the rumpus-rooms of Sandstone Retreat, a Californian holiday camp dedicated to the proposition that everyone should go to bed with everyone else. Strolling naked through the clumps of threesomes and foursomes, the pot-bellies and appendix scars, suntans and tattoos, Dr Comfort regularly megs his cigar to 'join a friendly clutch of bodies and contribute to the merriment.'

But what is 'the nude biologist' up to here? You or I might think that the old goat was simply having a good time at the expense of equally deluded, undignified - but much younger - married couples. Actually, though, the Doc is hard at work. In the argot of Gay Talese (similarly engrossed in another part of the room), Comfort is a 'partic.i.p.ating s.e.x researcher' working in a 'non-laboratory situation': i.e. getting laid. Well, it's a living.

This is s.e.xual quango-land. Mr Talese took a very long time to write and 'research' Thy Neighbour's Wife. His nine-year mission: to explore 'the social and s.e.xual trends of the entire nation'. The research might have been fun, but the writing was a waste of time. As Mr Talese naively snoops from p.o.r.no film-set to ma.s.sage parlour, from obscenity trial to the offices of Screw magazine, as he talks to 'ordinary' troilists, wife-swappers and haggard masturba-tors, it slowly becomes clear that he has nothing of any interest to say on his chosen subject. Mr Talese calls this clueless style 'non-judgmental' - and he isn't kidding. Out goes judgment, and in comes jargon, stock-response and humourlessness through the same door. The book is a rag-bag of cliches, most of them about twenty years out of date.

Language is the key to the imposture. Although Mr Talese thinks that, for instance, a 'voluptuary' is a woman with big b.r.e.a.s.t.s, his book is not particularly ill-written. It is conscientious, even earnest. The trouble is that almost anyone could have written it. Mr Talese's prose has the stilted, rolling, lip-smacking nullity that has been satirised by Kurt Vonnegut and, more subtly, by J.G. Ballard. The style may be parodied at random: 'Each evening that summer, Keith Krankwinkel would motor out in his cream convertible to the Santa Monica duplex of Doris Dorkburger. As Doris prepared their first evening drinks, Keith would admire the graceful contours of her...' Ballard, most notably in Vermilion Sands, uses this style to suggest a kind of existence that is at once affluent and denatured, an existence free of volition or irony. Non-judgmental Talese, however, doesn't 'use' this style: it uses him.