Stargazing
I often get my inspiration from other writers. A case in point, the stories in my emerging collection of mini-memoirs that I’ve elected to call “Stargazing.” The idea was prompted by Roger Angell’s New Yorker essay, “Who Was That?” in which Angell laments the decline of celebrity spotting, one of his favorite New York “amenities.” For him, the old New York street-meet had its own privacy protocol: one looked at the passing diva or statesman and then looked again but did not speak. His life list includes Greta Garbo, Babe Ruth, Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Jacqueline Onassis, Richard Nixon, Ethel Merman, Benny Goodman, and many, many more.
When I started to chronicle my stargazing sightings, I decided the sighting didn’t count unless I talked with the person, unlike Angell. Consequently, here are my apologies to some of the more notable notables who I was close enough to speak to, but didn’t: Nelson Mandela, John Kleese, Bill Gates, Princess Anne, and Dudley Moore, all on the Concorde; Grace Kelly, on the Penn campus; Lyndon Johnson, at the Business Roundtable at The Homestead; and Prince Phillip, on a pre-breakfast swim on Windemere Island in the Bahamas (although I did wish him a good morning). I’m adding Paul Newman’s name here because I saw him at the Cookshop restaurant in Chelsea but didn’t speak to him. (My wife, Lyn, and my daughter, Leelee, agreed that he was even more handsome in person than on film, even though his famous baby blues were hidden by rose-tinted glasses that he wore to correct his color blindness in indoor lighting.) And, I’m passing along Angell’s account about Newman for no other reason than it’s so delicious:
“Lady stops at a roadside ice-cream stand in Greenwich, and after ordering her single-scoop sugar-cone chocolate ripple notices that the midsized customer standing next to her is Newman’s own self. Now just be cool, the woman reminds herself. She pays for her cone, takes a fast, delicious gander, and walks away. Back in the car, still not staring, she reaches for the ignition but then realizes that she has no ice cream cone. What? She climbs out again, looks under her seat, looks under the car — nothing. She goes back to the counterman for help: Uh, I was here just a minute ago, chocolate ripple — I paid, etc., etc., and realizes that Paul Newman is watching her. ‘I believe it’s in your pocketbook,’ he murmurs.”
Finally, here’s my first “Stargazing” entry.
I Want to Hold Your Hand
This encounter took place on the Concorde, the fabled airplane with the stinger in its nose and swept-back wings that dazzled us with its supersonic speed and glamorous manifest. Nota bene, I should interrupt here. During the twenty-seven years the Concorde was in service (1976 to 2003), few people in their right mind flew it on their own dime. There were, however, several business types whose companies paid for them to criss-cross the Atlantic on the Concorde more frequently than they’d like, and I happened to be one of them. It was no more than an ultra-expensive way to save time and wear a tear on the traveler’s body.
And, to make it clear that it wasn’t as glamorous as it may appear, here was my routine: work all day in London and leave my office in time to catch the 7:00 p.m. Concorde; arrive a little over three hours later at JFK around 5:30 New York time; board a puddle jumper to Philadelphia and be home in Rosemont by 8:00 p.m., in time to sort the stacks of mail waiting for me before going to bed (around 2:00–3:00 in the morning London time). The next day, attend a series of back-to-back meetings at our US headquarters in Philadelphia and hop on the 6:30 overnight British Airways flight back to London, touching down at Heathrow at 6:30 a.m. Then shave, shower, have breakfast at the office, and be ready for my first meeting at 9:00. You do that once or twice a month for four years, plus frequent trips to Europe, the Far East, and California for another company’s board meetings, and being jet-lagged becomes the new normal.
Okay, back on the rocket. All one-hundred passengers were being flown high above the earth at twice the speed of sound, shoe-horned together for three hours and a fraction while spooning Osetra caviar and sipping champagne from the house of Bruno Paillard. Midway through the flight, I moved to the center bulkhead and joined a woman who was stretching her hamstrings. I (guess) we exchanged smiles and engaged in the exercise that makes it look like you’re trying to push over a lamppost or a tree before going for a run. When I noticed that several passengers were having their menus autographed by the man sitting next to her abandoned seat, I asked who she was seated next to.
She patted my arm and smiled at me. “That’s my husband, Paul McCartney. Wait ’til I tell him you didn’t recognize him!”
Totally unhinged, I said, “So, you’re Linda?”
“So, I’m Linda,” she said in the warmest and most accepting fashion. I would never have guessed that in a little over a year, this gentle woman’s voice would be silenced, wrapped in life’s sonic boom.
