The Players

On Friday I made a call and there was word of a German Film Festival launch. What else but? It was a MOMA thing and there were canvas bags full of pencils and pins and red t-shirts saying “Made In Germany.” Unfortunately I gave mine to a girl with glasses called Esther, she was German after all. The launch was at the Player’s Club. And this, my friends, was right on.

The Player’s Club might sound like a bling-go-go-bling-fire-up-your-golden-chains-on-me-sweetheart, but it’s not. It’s more Mark Twain and a snooker cue. Large stately dim dining room with mock-stained-glass windows and 19th century Shakespearean actors knowingly portraited in Richard III outfits. The club was founded in 1888 by this young Edwin Booth, a big tragic actor whose more tragic brother was John Wilkes Booth. John killed Abraham Lincoln in the Ford Theatre in 1865. Edwin loved to play Hamlet. He's in the middle, assassin on the left. The walls are pasted with play bills and woodcuts, the stairways are lined with cream walls and swishing paintings of Katherine Hepburn. There is a library with tables of magazines and oh-so many books and skulls. A photograph of Lawrence Etc with a thank you letter typed on heavy rippled paper: “Thank you so much for the dinner on my last visit, such a pleasure to see my former wife, love, as ever, Larry.” On a locked door a brass sign smudged dark with old smoke and perfume saying that Equity was founded in this room here, by dead secret, during the cold months of 1913.

In the three rooms of reception we swoozled around, drinking gin and talking tall. There was a buffet and a fact-checker from Harpers Magazine and his sour-faced friend. There were German girls with angular faces and their smaller minder from some consulate or other who had no hair at all but a big-pair of glasses. There were Dutch film makers out on the balcony, sucking on the cold air and a cigarette. Amsterdam Frank used to work with John Cage, the big composer, and because my mind / back was still full of the tick – see below – we talked of ticks and the time his cameraman got one in his wrist and they went to a restaurant and burned it out with a cigarette. Comrades, give me the Texan with the corkscrew any and every time. But the Players was good and the pasta was hot and there was whisky and coffee and we never deserved a drop less.

Onto the Beauty Bar, a place where the seats are barber chairs and there are those blow-dry machines if you want to duck out the red light and pushing crowd for a moment. It was a mulletted place of off-jeans and one-off trainers. Girls in 80s jump-suits, guys pushing along all limits of nerdity in their glasses, swooped-over hair and tight-to-me shirts and ties. This was such a knowing-knowing crowd they all looked the same.