Independents switch to Reagan

Last Tuesday evening, at six o'clock, halfway along the block of 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, an extraordinary thing happened. Coming round the corner of Fifth on to 53rd, I had the feeling that there'd been an accident, not necessarily violent or flamboyant in any way, not a fire or – to go back to the first street happening I ever covered for a London paper – not a young man perched on the ledge of the top storey of a hotel taking 13 hours to decide whether to jump.

Crowds were not so much surging around a glass and steel building on the north side of the street as sifting, like mourners who've just paid their last respects to a great and good man. But it couldn't be that. True, there was a woman in tears just looking dumbly at the door, from which all the people had, at last, been ushered out. There were, in fact, many people close to tears but there was a cart from which a young man was ladling out pizzas by the glare of a single, wired-up electric bulb. There were pedlars waving T-shirts as if the season was just about to close for ever on T-shirts and so, in a way, it was, for suddenly some men appeared who were officials, without being fussy, and collared the remaining T-shirts. They were there as federal marshals and they were protecting a copyright. This provoked more tears from the hawkers because what they were hawking were coloured shirts that had scrawled across them a flowing signature. That was the clue to this bizarre street scene. The signature, if you looked close, whether you looked close or not, said, 'Picasso.' That was it.

Six pm on Tuesday, September 30th tolled the bell on an exhibition the like of which has never been seen anywhere and is almost certain never to be seen again. After over four months and day after hideously hot day, throughout our atrocious summer and on into the crisp and lovely fall, people have lined up from early morning till late afternoon, 'A crowd', as one reporter colourfully put it, '25 times the size of Napoleon's army'. A million and a half people anyway, since 22 May, have managed to get in and several more millions have failed to see displayed in historical, in chronological, order a vast panorama of Picasso's work.

Over a thousand paintings, sculptures, ceramics, drawings, prints, worked in every sort of medium, beginning with an extraordinary five by four foot painting, a wholly Victorian painting and a thoroughly professional one, of a small girl in white kneeling to her first communion, with the parents looking gravely on. What's remarkable about this is that it could possibly have been done by Picasso, the great, the explosive revolutionary artist of our century. What's more remarkable still is that it was painted when he was 14 years of age and close by are other juvenile works – a fine male nude that won him a diploma to the Barcelona School of Fine Art and an exquisite, what looks like a master, drawing of the head of his grandmother. Again, both done when he was 14.

This is the first shock, especially to anybody who sticks to the philistine belief that Picasso's later distortions of the human figure only went to show him as a colourful fraud who had to produce such stuff because he couldn't draw at all. In the early rooms of this exhibition, we see an uninterrupted wealth of drawings, in several media, that would alone constitute a creditable show for any important artist. You had to keep looking at the dates – he was 14, 15, 16 – to believe it.

And, it went on and on, from 1895 to 1970. Not of panoramas so much as a rising firework display of new colours, new combinations – a 75-year explosion of invention. At the end, you were limp not from exhaustion, but from the feeling that you'd been present at the creation.

Well at six o'clock on Tuesday, the doors of the Museum of Modern Art were closed on this incomparable show for the last time and at 6.05 the men moved in, started taking everything down and began to pack it and will now be checking the wrapping and the insurance contracts before they ship these wonders back to the 140 lenders around the world. One or two of the more thoughtful weepers watched the dismemberment begin and, as one woman said quietly, 'It's a crime, a simple crime that the huge house which Picasso built should now have to be taken apart and be gone for good.'

Still, it was, for anyone who feels that we don't live by bread and politics alone, the great summer event of New York 1980 and it was a good thing to know that the museum took in close to $3 million, which is enough to cover the cost of negotiating for this vast collection over several years and then for mounting it and repacking it and dissolving it. It may possibly surprise some innocents to hear that an exhibition taking in $3 million just managed to make ends meet but that is a very rare achievement in this day and age, which is the day of free art for everybody and the age of taken-for-granted welfare.

There was a grim reminder of the more normal situation just across town from the Museum of Modern Art. The day the Picasso exhibition closed, the director of the Metropolitan Opera announced that the 1980/81 opera season had been cancelled. This is the first time such a thing has happened in over 70 years.

The details of the prolonged squabble between the orchestra and the Guild of Musical Artists on one side and the Met's board on the other are, as always, numerous and debatable but the demand which, to a man, the board felt bound to reject was the orchestra's demand for a work week consisting of four performances only. Mr Anthony Bliss, the board's executive director, said, 'To accept this proposal would return us to the Dark Ages, season after season burdened with overwhelming deficits.' And though the musicians' lawyer retorted that Mr Bliss was engaging in brinkmanship, Mr Bliss came back with the announcement that the season is irrevocably cancelled for all practical purposes.

The practical snag to a change of mind at this late date is the fact that the artists have had to be released from their contracts to take up other engagements around the world, quite apart from the knotty fact that – the orchestra's grievance aside – there are 17 other unions that want to negotiate new contracts before they'll go back to work.

Until a few months ago, none of us was worried about the news that the Met season might have to be cancelled. This is an annual threat, a wolf cry as dependable as the cry of the Canada geese flapping south in the fall, but our familiarity with this regular moaning and groaning only deafens us to the grimmer fact that the wolf is always kept from the door only by emergency rations tossed at it, at the last moment, by the rich opera patrons who remain in our society and they, too, like triangle players, are dying off. And, sooner than later, the opera houses of this country will have to find some more dependable saviours.

The United States, I believe, is alone among the so-called 'self-governing' nations, not to mention the Soviet Union, in denying all but a pittance to its opera companies by way of government subsidy. The average annual budget of the Metropolitan Opera which, ten years ago, was £17 million is now well over 30 millions. Towards it, the National Endowment for the Arts contributes $600,000 and the state of New York one million.

So, at the start of every season, the board has to come up with at least another $29 million. In good times, as we reckon good times today, the Met's annual operating loss is ten millions. It's made up, more or less, by those moneyed individuals whose automatic largesse the opera lover and the general public has come to take for granted. In the best of times, the Met calculates that every time the curtain goes up, it loses $44,000.

Well, for the sports fans, I ought to offer a footnote to our regular presidential racing guide because something disturbing, if not sinister, has entered into the race, a subtle new tactic in jockeying for position around the bend. Of course you know by now that, in one pleasant way, this presidential race is unlike any I can remember. I mentioned a month or so ago that once the campaign officially begins, the candidates invariable announce that they will talk only about issues and scrupulously avoid talking about the character of the opponent. But this time, they started in at once tearing each other's character apart.

It was to be expected from everything we'd heard from Mr Reagan in the past year, at least, that he would, er... accuse the president of bankrupting the country and leaving us wide open to a Soviet invasion. Of course, Mr Reagan doesn't believe this but the fact is that the issues are so various and huge and complicated that the people would plainly be bored by sensible and careful discussion of, say, what's involved in achieving a diplomatic balance of power in the Middle East or how we are going to improve the national technology and yet take care of the 2,000 or more lagoons or lakes around the country into which, we've just heard, the toxic wastes – chemical wastes – from industry are beginning to seep into local water supplies.

Easier to have Reagan say, 'Get government off our backs' and Carter say, 'This campaign is no place for racism and hatred'. That remark, like several other nasty innuendoes, was a not very indirect attack on Mr Reagan as a racist and a hate monger. Mr Reagan said it was an outrageous lapse from presidential dignity. So it was. The president said he didn't mean it.

But now it's come out, on unimpeachable authority, that the strategists of the Carter campaign, with the president's knowledge, deliberately put these slurs in the president's speeches. He pronounces them and then says later he was misunderstood. This is a frightening revelation about honest Jimmy Carter.

The sense that he is calculatedly running a mean campaign is widespread and so is the recognition that Reagan, changing his mind every other day, is moving more and more to the centre. Having said, for instance, he would never support federal help for New York's finances, he's now all for it. The result has been that Reagan is moving comfortably ahead in the polls. Carter himself says if he loses New York State he will lose the election and John Anderson's support has gone down from 15 to nine per cent.

The really bad news for the president is that independents who went for Anderson are moving over not to Carter, but to Reagan.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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