Senior Moments Page 5
Dallas is not handsome. Not even its most ardent boosters, were they honest, would claim beauty for it. It has lovely houses, charming blocks, some almost accidentally organic neighborhoods, and some random, spectacular residential and commercial buildings. Like most American cities that came of age after the automobile took over our lives and our landscape, it falls into the same category as Gertrude Stein’s native Oakland: outside downtown, there is no there here. The city just goes on and on, one giant suburb. One neighborhood looks much the same as the others.
But if you live long enough in a place, you become sensitive to subtleties of climate and landscape. Even Bishop allowed that a former schoolmate whom she visited lived in a part of town that “was certainly pleasanter than the rest of it.” Some backyard gardeners of my acquaintance have performed miracles, creating urban oases of Zen-like calm or perfecting the Roman ideal of rus in urbe, making a plot of urban ground into a miniaturized countryside. As the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins observed in a letter, “What you look hard at seems to look hard at you.” Tiny perceptual calibrations and readjustments change your self-awareness as well as your sensitivity to your surroundings. A single tree can redeem a vast flatness; a single cloud can temper an oppressive summer day. Small gifts are small mercies, like Lady Bird Johnson’s wildflowers that carpet the interstate highways in March and April.
One’s definitions of well-being, happiness, comfort, and gratitude undergo subtle changes. Spring rains, especially when accompanied by pyrotechnic lighting effects, elicit the sweet odors of new beginnings, and even the random terrifying tornado can lift the spirit if you see it from afar. The occasional ice storm or snowstorm not only brings the city to a halt but also performs fleeting wonders on foliage and roof eaves before disappearing like a dream within two days. Bereft of New England’s autumnal palette (we have no maple trees here, and the live oak is an evergreen that drops and replaces its brown-green leaves slowly during a four-month period), one notices more delicate coloration. We have the nandina, native to Japan, spreading its delicate fanlike leaf clusters and its red berries, which complement those of the pyracantha all winter long.
I once asked a newly arrived colleague whether she missed the change of seasons in upstate New York, and she said, “You forget, Willard, that I’m from New Mexico, and I regard green as an unnatural color.” The deserts and mountains around Albuquerque and Santa Fe demand a visual readjustment so that one can register the rainbow that moves from palest yellow to deepest brown. In Dallas, the challenge is tougher still, because urban growth has inevitably denatured much of the terrain. Still, nothing proves more strongly the truth of the old adage that everything is relative than an exchange I had in my first year with a student who asked me the same question I asked my junior colleague: “How did it feel to move here?” I told her I’d never seen any place as flat and brown as Dallas. She replied, “Well, I’m from Lubbock, and I have never seen any place so rolling and green.” I visited Lubbock many years later. She had it right.
The “Big D” immortalized by a great toe-tapping number in Frank Loesser’s 1956 The Most Happy Fella was the city two characters had fled from in order to find happiness in Napa Valley. Dallas is not—or has not been until quite recently—a tourist destination. People come here on business, for conventions, to visit friends and family, and sometimes just to change planes. I doubt that anyone has logged on to a travel website and said to a spouse or partner, “Hey, dear, let’s spend a week in Dallas, see the sights, hit the shops, do the town.” You can’t really do Dallas, in the way you can explore Paris or Kyoto. People my age will remember a certain promiscuous Debbie, who did “do” Dallas, at least in a pornographic film. Things change, however. With three major museums in Fort Worth and the more-than-respectable ones in Dallas, north Texas has begun to attract art lovers who have a long weekend to spare. If you build it, they will come, not too many and not for too long, but we are now on the map.
Even the most refined aesthete, however, cannot spend an entire life in a museum. He must move out into the world. Fortunately, for aesthetes and everyone else, you can move here and you can live here. Population has increased exponentially. Corporations like American Airlines, J. C. Penney, and Exxon relocated their headquarters to north Texas within the past four decades, to take advantage of low taxes and cheap land. Finding an older native in Dallas is as difficult as finding a decent bagel. Seventh- or eighth-generation Dallasites, rare as hen’s teeth, are self-proclaimed royalty. But Dallas worships money more than lineage, just as business always trumps history in matters like the architectural preservation of neighborhoods. “Make It New” might be Dallas’s motto. It’s the American way. Block after block of Victorian domestic architecture and many early Frank Lloyd Wright–inspired prairie houses have long since been demolished. Virtually anything from before 1960 qualifies for inclusion in a “historic district.” Neighborly rival Fort Worth has profited from its second-city, poorer-cousin status and has managed with an infusion of capital from the billionaire Bass family to redeem a redbrick late-nineteenth-century downtown neighborhood called Sundance Square, slightly Disneyfied but pleasant and pedestrian-friendly.
What Dallas lacks in charm and soul it compensates for in amenities. It is the land of shopping, indeed of the shopping center—the upscale mixed-use factory outlet, and other centers of all sorts. Did Robert Frost say, “Something there is that doesn’t love a mall”? He hadn’t visited Dallas. A recent student of mine, from a French family transplanted to Dallas, has an older sister who did her college major in something called luxury management. She is returning to Dallas from Paris this year: there is more luxury for her to manage here. Across the street from the golf course at the ritzy Dallas Country Club stands Highland Park Village, a congeries of faux-Spanish buildings housing an ever-changing cast of haute couture boutiques (on my most recent visit: Jimmy Choo, Harry Winston, Saint Laurent, Christian Louboutin, Hermès, Alexander McQueen, Zegna, Carolina Herrera) as well as Ralph Lauren—which counts as practically mundane among the fancier shops—and the ubiquitous Starbucks. It vies with Kansas City’s Country Club Plaza for the title of First Shopping Center. As in Los Angeles, valet parkers will take your car for you if you wish and then return it to you. Having a service industry devoted to parking also allows ladies of a certain class and age to leave their cars at the front door of a restaurant and swan in on their high heels to their table. Shopping and dining merge with performance art.
Highland Park Village is a shopping center. People come, they park, they walk around, they shop and eat, and then they go home. We have now moved—as have all large American cities governed by the automobile—beyond that. We now have enclosed malls. These make perfect sense here, in part because of the weather. Who wants to walk outside in summer? Early morning mall walking, well before stores open, is a well-established custom here. Farther from the city, the Galleria, built at the intersection of two major freeways and anchored by large hotels, constitutes a self-enclosed world: multiplex movie theater, ice-skating rink, restaurants, and shops. When it opened in 1982, I wandered into the Dallas branch of San Francisco’s Gump’s one August morning, dressed in Dallas’s summer uniform of shorts and T-shirt (always a mistake in a land where entering movie theaters, not to mention supermarkets, requires layers of clothing). A soignée woman who would have felt at home on the Rue St.-Honoré greeted me and my partner in a resonant, plummy contralto voice: “Welcome, gentlemen, to the Crystal Room at Gump’s.”
Here is God’s plenty. For anyone who thinks of shopping as a significant and pleasurable activity—I am not one, but I have many friends who find this a nice way to pass their time—Dallas will vie with Paris and Los Angeles. I think back to my first visit to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence thirty years ago. Leaving the museum behind two American college girls, I overheard one turn to the other and say, “Oh my God, if the museums here are this good, can you imagine what the shopping is going to be like?”
She was right, of
course. Where there is wealth, there is also culture, however one wishes to define it. The Medici understood the irresistible, powerful combination of will, taste, money, and patronage. What happened in Renaissance Florence set the pattern for Gilded Age Manhattan and then, a century later, for Texas. If Henry James and Edith Wharton had lived into the late twentieth century, they would have found the plate tectonics of Texas society not unlike those of their New York and Newport. “Old money” here means fifty years; “new money” means yesterday.
This is still, in endearingly curious ways, a small town in which everyone knows everyone else. Intimacies work on smaller and larger scales. Some years ago, entertaining a visiting job candidate at a local French restaurant, I noticed a quartet of diners moving across the room toward my table. They stopped to greet me, and I made the necessary introductions: “Let me present Irina Dumitrescu, who is visiting from New Haven. This is Mr. and Mrs. Denker, and Mr. and Mrs. Perot.” The Yale graduate student was first incredulous, then impressed. “You know Ross Perot?” she asked. She accepted our job offer.
Gossip columnists revel in the misbehavior of the nouveaux riches. Everyone in the last century knew that H. L. Hunt had several families. Everyone today can watch the antics of Mark Cuban on television. Murders among the social set get the full attention of the local press. Even more modest peccadilloes, like the plastic surgery and purported womanizing of Jerry Jones, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, who could give Silvio Berlusconi a run for his money, or shoplifting by a Dallas socialite, warrant page 1 coverage.
A local observer once said that all it takes to break into Dallas society is a tuxedo and ten thousand dollars. That was in the 1950s. The cost has risen (add several more zeros to the number), but the principle still obtains. As in Manhattan, charity balls raise not only money but also the social cachet of the benefactors.
In the late 1990s, my aunt and uncle, both professional musicians, visited me when they came to town for a music educators’ convention. They had traveled extensively through Europe and Asia, but when I met them for dinner, following their tours of art museums, private collections, and the new concert hall, they gasped, “Now we understand where all the money has gone.” What downtrodden Philadelphia, my hometown, on a decline since 1950, had been trying to accomplish for years, Dallas could do virtually overnight. When the real estate magnate Trammell Crow decided in the mid-1990s to build a home for the best of his thousands of pieces of Asian art, he simply called his children together and told them he was planning to spend a couple million dollars of their inheritance to establish the Trammell and Margaret Crow Collection of Asian Art, situated between the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center (for the construction of which Ross Perot gave ten million dollars on the stipulation that it be named for the president of his company) and the Dallas Museum of Art. It is a little jewel box of wonders located between two giants.
Later, Raymond Nasher, a transplanted Bostonian who married a Dallas girl, wondered what to do with the important collection of modern sculpture he and his late wife had amassed over forty years. Courted by museums here and abroad, he finally did the right thing and gave his collection to the city where he had made his fortune in real estate. He commissioned a masterpiece from Renzo Piano. Who paid for it? He did, of course. So did the Perot family, when they donated the new downtown Perot Museum of Nature and Science. If you want something done right, do it yourself. The entrepreneurial spirit, when combined with a sense of noblesse oblige, has a lot to recommend it. Among other things, you can circumvent nasty red tape.
It has taken Dallas a while to realize that the arts are good for business, as well as vice versa. The story goes that a former mayor, himself a wealthy man, when asked to support the fledgling Dallas Civic Opera in the late 1950s (Maria Callas appeared in its first production, at the height of her career and notoriety), said, “I’ll pay anything to support the opera as long as I don’t have to go to it.” Many men of means say the same to their wives about society balls: they’ll pay double not to go to the party but stay home instead. Few eastern or old-world bigwigs have the confidence or naïveté to make their prejudices known with such unabashed exuberance. The Dallas Symphony, well into its second century, has had almost as many lives as a cat, if not the phoenix. Now safely housed, since 1989, in a hall acclaimed for its acoustics and design, it is unlikely to go away again, although it suffers from many of the problems—occasional deficits, graying audiences, unimaginative programming, half-empty houses—common to most American orchestras, many of which are in far worse shape.
The visual arts have had their share of controversy as well as success. In the 1950s, right-wingers attacked Picasso as a Communist sympathizer when the art museum mounted an exhibition. In the 1970s, a Henry Moore sculpture in front of a new city hall designed by I. M. Pei drew abusive criticism. (But so did a work by Richard Serra in lower Manhattan.) Art can be bought and sold. It therefore does well under capitalism. Living with beautiful things, as Mary McCarthy once observed, may not necessarily increase one’s ethical, moral, or political sympathies, but it does keep the economy moving and gives badges of honor to the people with sufficient income to buy, or even commission, works of art.
All of this hardly means that an American aesthetic has traditionally fared well here, aside from the ubiquitous delight in cowboy art, from the most sophisticated Remingtons and Russells in Fort Worth’s Amon Carter Museum as well as private local collections to garden-variety bulls, broncos, and mustangs that dot the landscape. Until recently, private collectors have gone in for French impressionism and eighteenth-century English painting, and they have done their houses in ancien régime or British manorial style. American furniture has done less well. When I bought my prairie-style house in the 1970s, an architect friend from California told me to find pieces by the Stickleys or Greene & Greene, of whom I had never heard. I began looking. In Dallas, mission furniture was not on the radar screen; it had long since been shipped away as being of little value or interest. Pretty soon, celebrity collectors like Calvin Klein and Barbra Streisand put American arts and crafts furniture back on the map and out of the reach of ordinary buyers.
The recent series of excellent public buildings in Dallas (city hall, concert hall, museums) has been matched by a small number of forward-looking residential ones. The few ultramodern or aesthetically daring houses stand out in a landscape of predictable choices. Perhaps it is like this everywhere. Architecturally, the Dallas bourgeoisie has always played it safe, first with mansard roofs (one tale has it that a roof was put on upside down in the 1950s and no one noticed) on pseudo-French chalets, more recently with Georgian piles, bedecked with out-of-scale Palladian ornaments and unnecessary decorative shutters. Spanish colonial has made a comeback during the past decade. The McMansions stand cheek by jowl on small plots in the highly desirable part of town called Highland Park, a self-enclosed suburb like Brookline within Boston or Beverly Hills in Los Angeles, around which the city has grown. The “homes” (real estate agents never call a house a “house”; even apartments are marketed as “apartment homes”) must be both spanking new and stylistically conventional. Any house with a library, a real room with built-in shelves for books, is not a new house. Game rooms, media rooms, rooms with pool tables, are easier to find.
One set of friends moved to Dallas from Paris in 2008 to take up work as art historians. Somehow they would have to accommodate the collections from their hôtel particulier on the Boulevard St.-Germain. For them, this was no problem. They took themselves to the local IKEA and got ready-made shelving. Their French relatives, coming to visit at Christmas, were naturally impressed by the new house, by the backyard pool, and especially by the size, elegance, and number of the bathrooms. It was, I suppose, ever thus: every culture craves and envies what another culture has. Some of my college friends who had moved to Dallas from Massachusetts at the same time I did were escorted around by a local real estate agent who, when they told her they would prefer an older house with som
e charm or character, replied bemusedly, “Oh, you mean you want a used home?” They supposed they did.
The recent mania—“Georgian on My Mind”?—infects more than residential real estate. In the same upscale neighborhood of Highland Park, my university, founded in 1911, has developed a campus that took its original design and shape from Thomas Jefferson’s for the University of Virginia. The perfect, modest rotunda in Charlottesville, harking back to the Pantheon in Rome, is an exquisite building bounded at right angles by small arcaded dormitories extending along the length of a green. In Texas, bigger is usually thought better. The optimistic, confident founders of SMU not only imitated the Jefferson rotunda but also enlarged it: the university’s first building sits at the top of a small incline and commands a campus filled with Georgian buildings, some of which are enormous, others more modest in scale. These include everything: parking garages, gymnasium, football stadium, dormitories, and classrooms, all constructed of red brick unrelieved by ivy or ornament other than the entirely unnecessary columns and pilasters that announce to passersby, “We are an institution of higher learning.” Like all university architectural idioms—the faux Gothic of Princeton and Duke, the faux Georgian of Harvard’s 1930s residential houses, the mishmash of Yale—SMU’s Herculean-Georgian takes a symbolic stand with its chosen architectural leitmotif, in this case a deeply conservative one.
When the university recently built a new museum for its small, excellent collection of Spanish art donated by the late oilman Algur Meadows, it might have commissioned something extraordinary or at least unusual. Many forward-looking locals hoped that the university would extend an invitation to Santiago Calatrava, to whom it had just given an arts award. Instead, Calatrava contributed only a single work, a sculpture-fountain whose rising and falling metal beams hypnotically mimic the movement of a wave. This piece stands in front of the aggressively Georgian museum that looks like a mausoleum perched atop a parking garage. The shiny, steely, modern fountain in fact seems out of place. My university’s trustees, many of them Dallas burghers, will take risks in business but seldom in artistic matters. All universities now commit themselves to the idea of diversity in education. We want diverse student populations and more varied curricula. But my school also insists on keeping up an architectural homogeneity. A manicured, uniform campus—however beautiful—has meaning, intended or not.