‘Slouching towards Bethlehem’ is, of course, a literary reference itself. As Miss Didion dramatically points out in her preface: ‘This book is called Slouching towards Bethlehem because for several years now certain lines from the Yeats poem which appears two pages back have reverberated in my inner ear as if they were surgically implanted there.’ The whole of ‘The Second Coming’ is indeed printed a few pages back, along with a deflationary extract from the sayings of Miss Peggy Lee (‘I learned courage from Buddha, Jesus, Lincoln, Einstein, and Gary Grant’). The title essay duly begins: ‘The centre wasn’t holding’. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to her with the necessary force that ‘The Second Coming’ was written half a century ago. The centre hasn’t been holding for some time now; actually the centre was never holding, and never will hold. Probably all writers are at some point briefly under the impression that they are in the forefront of disintegration and chaos, that they are among the first to live and work after things fell apart. The continuity such an impression ignores is a literary continuity. It routinely assimilates and domesticates more pressing burdens than Miss Didion’s particular share of vivid, ephemeral terrors.
London Review of Books 1980
In Hefnerland
1. The Playboy Party
At last, that very special moment. Playmate of the Year Barbara Edwards composed herself at the far end of the astroturfed marquee. The stage she stood on recalled the train motif of her ‘pictorial’ in the current magazine; the blancmange-coloured dress she wore matched the press-kits that lay on every table. With her make-up scored by tears of pride, Barbara thanked the assembly for sharing this very special day. ‘And now, the man who makes the dreams come true, ladies and gentlemen, Mr Hugh M. Hefner!’ Barbara faltered, then added, on the brink of crack-up: ‘I love him so much.’
Hef took the stage. For a man who never goes out, who rises at mid-afternoon, who wanders his draped mansion in slippers and robe (whose lifestyle, on paper, resembles nothing so much as a study in terminal depression), Hef looks good — surprisingly, even scandalously so. A little haggard, maybe, a little etiolated, but trim and ferret-fit in blazer and slacks. It was 4.30, so Hef had presumably just rubbed the sleepy dust from his eyes and climbed from the trembling, twirling bed which he so seldom leaves. ‘I work in it, play in it, eat and sleep in it,’ he has said. What doesn’t he do in it? Well, perhaps this is the look you get, when the day’s most onerous chore is your twilight visit to the men’s room.
‘It’s a very special day for us,’ Hef confirmed — and Barbara was a very special lady. She was also an exception to the recent ‘run of blondes’: why, the last brunette he’d crowned was Patti McGuire, ‘who went on to marry Jimmy Connors’. At this point Barbara seemed suddenly subdued, no doubt by the prospect of going on to marry John McEnroe. ‘Without further ado’, however, Hef gave Barbara her special gifts, all of them taxable: $ioo,ooo, a new car (not a pink Porsche or a crimson Cadillac but a dinky black Jaguar), and the title itself: Playboy Playmate of the Year.
The assembled shower of pressmen, PR operatives, hangers-on and sub-celebrities — Robert Culp and Vince Van Patten were perhaps the most dazzling stars in this pastel galaxy — listened to the speeches, applauded zestlessly, and returned to their lite beers and tea-time vodka-tonics. More animated, in every sense, was the tableful of centrefold also-rans to the left of the podium, who greeted each remark with approving yelps of ‘Yeah!’ and ‘Wha-hoo!’ and ‘Owl-right’. These are the special girls who languish in semi-residence at Playboy Mansion West, sunbathers, Jacuzzi-fillers, party-prettifiers. Now what is it with these girls? The look aspired to is one of the expensive innocence of pampered maidenhood, frill and tracery in pink and white, flounced frocks for summer lawns. They also have a racehorse quality, cantilevered, genetically tuned or souped-up, the skin monotonously perfect, the hair sculpted and plumed; the body-tone at its brief optimum. Compared to these girls, the ordinary woman (the wife, the secretary, the non-goddess) looks lived-in or only half-completed, eccentrically and interestingly human.