Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey by Geraldine Brooks (best ereader for epub .TXT) 📕

I looked at her over the froth of my cappuccino and wondered why she was saying such a thing. If this woman wasn’t a party person, who was? Perhaps she was adopting Australian camouflage, coloring herself marsupial gray. It’s one thing to be queen of the night in New York, but Australians know a tumbril is always waiting.

As the club’s pressures eased, she finally had some energy for other interests. She enrolled in art class (“I’d always be the last one there—hung over, wearing sunglasses”) and met a fresh-faced blond sculptor named Eamon Roche, who had become her partner in life and work. Together they were about to open a Vietnamese restaurant. Although the space was still a building site, Vogue’s editor Anna Wintour had visited the curing concrete and dangling wires the day before—“wearing about $20,000 worth of clothes”—looking for a hot venue for a party for a celebrity “so big she can’t say who it is.” Nell wasn’t sure the restaurant would be ready, but that was part of the allure: “Everyone in this town always wants to be first.” A Vogue function would be an ideal opening, for Wintour would bring the models, and a sprinkling of models made a room look right to the rest of fashionable Manhattan.

It wasn’t the career Nell had imagined for herself in those long-ago Sydney letters. But when the time came to launch herself as an actress, she’d found that she didn’t have the temperament to sit through drizzly London winters, patiently auditioning for small parts. Instead of capitalizing on her high profile after the release of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, she’d run off to Norfolk with a romantic poacher—“a bit of a D. H. Lawrence fantasy, I’m afraid—all my clothes were stained with blood from hiding his dead pheasants in my pockets.” When she did turn up for a rare audition, “It was, ‘Take me as I am or not at all.’ Just because my hair was Schiaparelli pink and I had a broad Australian accent didn’t mean I couldn’t play Jane Eyre.”

The staid world of London theater hadn’t seen it that way, and her acting career stalled. It had only just begun to revive. In 1994 she made her first stage appearance in almost a decade, playing a fading actress in a farce, You Should Be So Lucky, written by one of New York’s most famous drag queens, Charles Busch. The role won her a New York Critics Circle nomination. Choice film cameos followed. But her biggest part remained The Fabulous Nell, hostess to the famous.

I wondered if she’d seen a lot of appalling behavior at the club. “NOT ENOUGH appalling behavior!” she roared. “I saw a lot more outrageousness when I was living with the poacher in Norfolk than I have here. There, you’d go to a dinner party and the thing would get ENTIRELY disorderly and the host would end up in bed with his best friend’s wife. Here, famous people are all drinking PERRIER and worrying about what everyone thinks of them.”

It was time to visit the new restaurant to see how work was progressing. Nell looked around for our waitress. She was seated at a nearby table, tucking into a muffin. “She’s having BREAKFAST!” Nell gasped. It wouldn’t happen at any of her establishments.

We grabbed a cab for the ride to West Houston. As we pulled away from the curb, Nell leaned forward and tapped the driver on a crisply pin-striped shoulder. “Can I just comment,” she said, “on how wonderfully you’re dressed?”

Stuck in traffic in the gray, treeless streets of downtown, we talked wistfully of Sydney. She said she’d had a perfect childhood. “We were so free, ranging around all those huge backyards.” She compared it to the constrained, scheduled, indoor lives of her friends’ children in Manhattan. “We adored our parents, but we never saw them except at mealtimes. Here, the kids and their parents are never out of each other’s sight.”

I wondered aloud whether our generation really did mark the end of the era when people thought they had to go away to prove themselves. There had been such an inevitability to it, like a tribal initiation. Sometimes you looked forward to leaving, sometimes you dreaded it, but whatever you felt, you knew the departure date would eventually come.

It came for me in early September 1982. It was Australian spring, the time of year when the jasmine is in full bloom, filling the soft air with fragrance. As the taxi carried me over the Harbor Bridge, sunlight sparkled off the water as if some profligate billionaire had scattered armloads of crushed diamonds.

At the airport, the Qantas flight attendant called my seat-row number for boarding just as the piped Musak in the gate lounge turned from some unrecognizable bubble-gum tune to “New York, New York.” It seemed like an omen: “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere …”

That song wasn’t written just for twenty-six-year-olds from faraway Sydney. My father had wanted to make it in New York: among his oldest letters, I’d found one from a New York agent, replying with cautious encouragement to his query about whether he should come East. “You have the voice, and the looks,” she wrote. “But you’ll also need luck.…”

In the end, luck wasn’t with him. In late 1936 he set off with the Jay Whidden band for a national tour that was to culminate in a big engagement in Manhattan. They played to raves in cities like Denver and Shreveport. But in San Antonio they were booked into a grand ballroom—the kind the band often played in Los Angeles. The smaller, touring ensemble didn’t have a big enough sound to fill the space. They flopped. Their next engagement in New York City was canceled. The band headed home to California, and then on to Australia. “I never got to see the Statue of Liberty,” my dad often said.

I saw it for