United Nations' first reporters - 19 June 1992

We've had here in the north-east a marvellous spring and one quite rare in alternating dry brilliant warm days more like the fall with showers and brief downpours, so all the parks and the woods have a midsummer lushness and people who live on suburban plots swear they can hear the grass growing.

Well, I can only put it down to the spring and its special ability to irrigate old memories that the other day I saw a name in the paper, a by-line and a place, a dateline and I was instantly back in the Opera House in San Francisco, goodness, 47 years ago at the grand opening of the United Nations, I mean the the first plenary session of the conference of 51 nations at which the United Nations was born.

The dateline on this Tuesday's newspaper piece was Paris and the by-line was Flora Lewis and I will not waste any time in identifying Flora Lewis, she was simply the most beautiful journalist to cover that nine-week conference, which is saying something when you consider that there were about 600 accredited journalists and many of them were not journalists but movie stars and Beverly Hills society. For San Francisco is only 400 odd miles north of Los Angeles and in April 1945 just about the smartest trick you could pull – a declaration of chic far beyond going to the Derby or the first night of the opera – was to wangle a press card for the opening weeks' doings of the United Nations.

I remember in the famous hotel where Enrico Caruso fled from the 1906 earthquake in his pyjamas, in that hotel most of us – the press, print and radio, no television yet – were accommodated at least two to a room. In those days, it would have been a grotesque indulgence for any newspaper proprietor to act on the principle, which is routine today of one reporter, one bedroom, one bath. We all signed in for our credentials as I recall on a top floor of that hotel and having acquired them I remember the day I arrived going down in a packed elevator lift with other members of the fourth estate who had also signed in using I presume their own names. At any rate, I found myself squeezed up against two Washington reporters I knew, a New York woman financial writer of what we used to call mature years, a lovely blonde one Lana Turner being nudged or bullied by one Groucho Marks and panting heavily over us all was the already solid flesh of Orson Welles with his new wife, the ravishing Rita Hayworth.

I never heard of Lana Turner covering anything, but Orson Welles was there on behalf of a New York evening paper for which he wrote a column, I don't remember his attending any of the press conferences, which clocked in every hour on the hour of all the separate UN bodies that were then forming, but Mr Welles set up shop on his own in the very large Western Union basement where we filed our copy. By set up shop, I mean he was there not to attend press conferences; he was going to give them. I'm afraid he wasn't very successful as flying wedges of reporters came sailing in to get at their typewriters, he would wave at them and clear his throat resoundingly like a barker at a pleasure beach sideshow. We'd stop for a minute or less, long enough to admire his ravishing wife who was attending meekly behind him and then get down to our own business.

Well, modestly conspicuous among this circus and usually sitting there on the second row of the mezzanine of the Opera House at plenary sessions was this stunning girl, Flora Lewis. And I make no apology for using the word "girl" instead of the new compulsory, politically correct "woman". Flora Lewis was not much more than a girl she couldn't have been. Here she is today, I ungallantly repeat 47 years later, the Senior Correspondent of the New York Times of all the New York Times correspondents. She's based in Paris, but files from any place she deems to be significant in the passing parade of international politics. And she wrote something the other day in that piece in the Times that brings me a warning reminder to lay off presidential politics and the election. Miss Lewis's piece begins, "For virtually the first time since the war," she shows her age there she can't mean the Desert War, she must mean the Second World War, "Europe has been following the American presidential campaign as a mildly interesting spectator sport. Until now there was always anxious attention, people felt their own fate was at stake, they knew," she says, "for many years after the devastation of the war that they were materially dependent on America." Now she says in effect, the end of the Cold War has dramatically slackened the suspense, the new Europe has a new confidence as it enlarges and consolidates and as an example, quote, "Denmark's rejection of the Treaty of Maastricht is seen here as far more critical than who runs the United States government for the next four years."

I can appreciate for the first time that that may well be true, so saving some melodramatic turn of events like the Democrats asking Boris Yeltsin to run or Mr Bush standing down in favour of Dan Quayle, let us cease from fretting about the election, let me imitate the gesture of that mellow old Texan Mr Sam Rayburn, the late Speaker of the House who at the end of every legislative session would beckon to a favourite crony and suggest that they retire to his office breakout the bourbon and forget politics or, as Mr Rayburn used to put it, "come, let us strike a blow for Liberty".

So in the gloaming – it's a very swift gloaming at this latitude – nevertheless, in the gloaming of last Tuesday evening, an old 19th-century paddle wheeler bobbed jauntily through the waters of the lower bay. And a lady who was the guest of honour of this little cruise said "what a wonderful way to finish my time in New York to be in the harbour and have the Statue of Liberty hovering benignly over us", she was a Mrs McMenamin and the cruise was setup as a farewell party by the board members of Nightingale-Bamford, one of the most famous of New York's private schools of which the lady has just retired as headmistress. She thinks she has, as she put it, "a few books in my system" and she wants to get them out, she once, she shamelessly declares to be a writer. I humbly hope she will begin on an unfortunate sentence she left us with that could well do with a little reshaping. I want to write a book she says about restoring gender specific schools to the public school system – that is the way some even very fine educators write in this country, restoring gender specific schools, what does it mean? Nothing frightening at all, it means girls schools and boy schools, separate.

McMenamin is as you might guess specially interested in schools for girls and not mixed, she says that her 22 years at Nightingale-Bamford have supported her belief that some girls benefit directly in getting an education focused on the needs of women and she's convinced that, quote, "anchoring girls in their gender gives them the kind of strength men have had for centuries", presumably from boys only schools.

I ought to say for the innocent in such matters that the word "gender", which used to be a grammatical classification for nouns and pronouns indicating whether they were masculine, feminine or neuter is now used religiously by the more dedicated feminists instead of the word "sex", which I suppose is today steaming with all sorts of meaning, though I haven't seen any use of gender, which implies the existence of a neuter sex. Interesting.

Well, while this retired headmistress was sailing down the Hudson, 3,000 miles away, across the bay from San Francisco, an even more famous women's college was winding up its academic year and wondering how its going to go on surviving as an exclusively women's college. It is Mills College, founded 140 years ago, only four years after the first sparkle of gold in the tailrace of that young Scotsman's sawmill. Mills College has remained through all the changing in educational fashions of this century a women's college.

Two years ago, its board of governors acting on the distressing knowledge that the enrolled student body was growing smaller every year, the overwhelming fashion of the past 20, 30 years or so being to amalgamate the sexes, whoops of the genders, the board announced it would begin to accept the male of the species excepting what another educator lamentably calls "the principle of gender duality" or what the old New York song calls boys and girls together. The board of Mills College reckoned without the student body or at best guessed wrong about the prevailing sentiment, the 775 girls/women simply struck, they wanted no part of gender duality. People who had never heard of Mills College certainly saw on a tube the staring scene as the president announced to a cheering, storming rally that the board had changed its mind and Mills would remain a women's college.

In a private place, a well known journalist has written, "people should have the freedom to be with their own kind". I was at dinner sometime ago with a very a very ardent lady who wanted all clubs whether on public or private land to be compulsorily mixed. I'd always felt that on private property, Irishmen have a natural right though there are no natural rights in the Constitution, a natural right to club up with other Irishmen, chess players with chess players even men with men, Jews with Jews etc. This young lady was rampantly against the idea "you men". I said "every social club in America must be a mixture of whites, blacks, browns, catholics, protestants, atheists, Jews, males, females, gays etc", "Right" she said, "What are you going to do," I asked her about the 70,000 women's clubs in the United States?" She thought deeply for a minute "I'm against them," she said.

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