Arrival of autumn

For the past few days I've had staying with me a great friend from San Francisco, an Irishman – I suppose I ought to say an Irish-American – who after all sorts of running battles with arthritis, cataracts and a diaphragmatic hernia is indestructibly cheerful, sassy and irascible.

On the second morning of his stay, which was an abominably hot and sweaty day, I heard him arguing with himself. 'Why is it', he roared, 'every time I come east I pack the wrong clothes?' For his business dates in New York, he'd brought a couple of what he disgustedly called 'two-ton tweeds', in fact his normal San Francisco suits. He assumed September here would be sharp and bright and chilly, just like home. 'Well, for Pete's sake,' he said, 'it's the equinox, isn't it? Rainstorms, gales and the like?' 

I lent him a paper-thin suit and he came back drenched to the toenails from a sudden, pounding rainstorm. While he was grumbling still in a bathtub, I looked it up. I wandered off, came back with an Encyclopaedia Britannica. 'It says here,' I said, 'at the time of the equinox it is commonly believed that strong gales may be expected. This popular idea has no foundation in fact. Observations taken for 50 years show that during the five days from March 21 through the 25th, and from the 21 September through the 25th, there were fewer gales and storms than during the preceding and succeeding five days. 'It was written', said the Irishman, 'by some smart-aleck New Yorker.' 

I began to wonder how many other ideas or myths are accepted, around the English-speaking world anyway, about autumn. It was another Californian who, years ago, came on Shelley's 'Ode to the West Wind' and said, 'This is double-Dutch to me. What's all this about 'Wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being?' And how about dead leaves? 'Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes?' 

'Things,' said my Californian, 'must be tough all over in an English autumn.' 

Well, certainly autumn on this coast has two breaths. A south-east wind that brings dead skies and muggy heat and then the most precious of Canadian exports, a north-west wind that brings coolness and crackling dry air and cloudless skies. It will also be a couple of months before we see any 'stricken multitudes' of dead leaves. 

In the meantime, there is a glut of seasonal habits and customs that are the truer signs of autumn coming to New York. The Sunday papers suddenly have reams of full-page ads promising us — always promising us — the most brilliant theatre season ever. This is so normal that you flip through them without surprise and are arrested only when you see the barely familiar face of some old star, long forgotten, who's being restored to Broadway in what is called 'a triumphal return'. The picture is that of a puppet in ecstasy and can usually be explained by the fact that the old star is now beaming out of a new facelift. 

And the television weeklies and supplements are heavy with omens about drastic new trends in soap operas — more sex and violence or less sex and violence — in documentaries, fearless they promise about recent American political history. And the announcement that the famous head of this network or that has been summarily fired for a younger man. Well, not exactly fired. He will turn into a consultative president or some such and the release announcing his successor usually congratulates the network for retaining the 'indispensable services' of the old man who is going to be in fact pretty lonely in his wall-to-wall cell upstairs. 

One story that in my newspaper days I seize on and write up with proper suspense was the regular late summer strike of the orchestra at the Metropolitan Opera House. This year, or that year, it was more serious than ever. The headline said — they always say — 'Musicians Threaten Met Opening' and this is followed a week or two later by a statement from the Director of the Metropolitan saying he can see no alternative to cancelling the entire season of the opera. 

Needless to say, I don't write this story any more. By the middle of September, sometimes right up to the edge of opening night, a new contract is written, the orchestra starts tootling and fiddling again and the Met is back in business once more. On second thoughts, 'back in business' is simply an idiom. There will be a season and the Met will go on losing (what is it?) forty, forty-five thousand dollars or so every time the curtain goes up. 

There are also full-page ads in the papers announcing tremendous bargains in one-way airplane fares to the Sun Belt, usually to Miami and Fort Lauderdale. This is the beginning of the Florida flee-to-the-sun-pay-later come-on. Three years ago they announced it was possible to fly to southern Florida for only $88. This year it's only $55. 'No frills' they always warn, which happily means no meals on plastic trays of plastic chicken. You can go on certain days and not on others but you can pick the regular flights. In other words, you can go by day. The airlines seem to have killed off the competition of flights leaving New York at midnight and landing in Miami at quarter to three in the morning, what we used to call 'the red-eye specials'. 

Which reminds me of another San Francisco friend who's a tall, handsome, equable man and when, in the club house, his golf partner starts untangling the incredible network of the American golf betting system and announced that he owes Ed $36, he never flinches. He's also an expensive dresser and a generous host. But the moment he has to fly to New York, on business even, he looks for the rock-bottom fare. He telephones coast to coast, he says he'll call you when he gets in. And so he does. It's always 6.45 or thereabouts in the morning and he begs breakfast. He comes in looking like the Hound of the Baskervilles after a 100-mile chase, but his spirits are high. 

You say — this is the required queue for his recital — 'What did you come in on?' 'My boy,' he says, 'I left at 10 p.m. sharp, got in at six' – he's had no food or drink, no sleep – but it cost him only $30 less than the regular fare. And thrown in with the bargain fare are two nights in a sleazy hotel and a little ticket entitling 'bearer to a free cocktail on each of the two nights he will be our guest.' 'What's your first business?' I ask. 'First business,' he says, with the blood running out of his eyeballs, 'is a little shuteye.' 

This is also the turnover time in the sports world. Even ardent tennis players and golfers forget to see if there's a tournament this weekend. Golf and tennis are going out and football is coming in. I was going to remind you that this meant American football and, of course, it does. Football is king between now and New Year's Day, after which the season is over and we go to hockey, which in this country means only, and always, ice hockey. 

But I ought to mention a new, summer mania for the fans, nothing less than soccer. Some six, seven years ago, there was a big to-do about how soccer was catching on – schools switching to it, a couple of leagues east and west in the making. That was a false alarm and a disaster for its backers, but they've tried again. And thanks mainly to the burgeoning population here of Latin American immigrants, first Puerto Ricans and Cubans, now Mexicans and Colombians, soccer it seems may soon become an American mania. 

There's a New York team, the Cosmos, which has a passionate following, baited at first by the presence of the incomparable Pelé – and I'm assured by experts that there has never been a soccer player like Pelé. But the country, the news magazines anyway, were astounded to report a few weeks ago that for the final appearance of the Cosmos, a crowd turned out in blinding rain, at night, to the number of 75,000, which would be a bumper crop a few weeks from now for the deciding game of the World Series, the baseball championship. 

The surest metropolitan sign that autumn is coming in is the chic Third Avenue bars. All summer they've been steaming with handsome lads and lasses in polyester pants and unbuttoned — the men, that is — unbuttoned shirts agog with Italian prints. The waiters, these evenings, wipe the tables with a touch more care to accommodate maturer couples in suits. Should I say 'in suits, yet?' 

And then, always in these late summers, there's a bang-up political scandal on TV or if, you might better say, some investigative caper that can be made into scandal. This time was the turn of the luckless Bert Lance, the director of the budget. He had three days of remorseless grilling from upright senators to see if his conduct of a bank in Georgia, over which he'd presided, fell sufficiently in the twilight zone between impropriety and illegality so as to make him unfit to stay in office. However it was going to come out, there was no question from the start that he alienated some powerful members of the Senate, especially because he was so amiable and he caught them out in poor homework. 

To some people, including the president, he cleared himself. To others, his having used the same collateral for two different loans to two banks was an awkward fact that would not go away. And even before he decided to resign, there was always the more — the more — awkward fact that a budget director must get the president’s budget through the Senate and had better be on the best of terms with it. And this, in the end, I believe, is what counted. 

While I was looking over a seasonal advertisement for a cheap anti-freeze for my car, my irascible Irishman came in. We'd had a boring evening with some people full of their summer trips. The chief bore was a man who'd been on a mission of some sort to Bangladesh. This hearty — a type that Johnny Mercer might have called Charlie Bigmouth — was all primed to tell my Irishman about it, and he buttonholed him and began, 'Have you, by any chance ever been in Bangladesh?' Without pausing for breath, my Irishman said, 'Yes.' And somehow we went on to other things. 

Over a nightcap later, I said to the Irishman, 'I never knew you'd been in Bangladesh!' 'Of course not!' he said, 'But that way you don't have to hear the story!'

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.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.