San Francisco Notebook

I am in San Francisco where I began an American theatrical adventure ten years ago. It is a beautiful and stylish town but it is impossible to enjoy a stroll in the city centre without being pestered by beggars. Not seldom hostile, these pungent tatterdemalions seem to be accepted by the locals as though they existed, like the cable cars, Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge, in order to lend their city its special identity, as did the flower children of the Sixties.

During the big sales last week, the walk from Saks to Neimen Markus was like struggling through a crowd scene in Les Misérables. Marie Antoinette populated her park with faux milk maids, shepherds and picturesque peasants, and a whimsical 18th-century grandee — was it Beckford? — liked to decorate his estate with peasants, banditti and beggars who would slip into their habiliments before dawn, and take up their assigned positions in grottos and follies. Perhaps the beggars of San Francisco are really actors employed by the city to enliven its pavements, or perhaps they are former hedge-fund managers and stockmarket brokers, America’s nouveaux pauvres. I recall a rhyme from my childhood which always produced a frisson of fear:

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As the nicely dressed Christmas shoppers and well-heeled townsfolk steer themselves past mendicant claws and rattling cups, turning unseeing eyes on scrawled placards bearing words like ‘Hungry’ and ‘War Victim’, they must feel a faint premonitory chill; a fleeting vision of the future.

At a Thanksgiving dinner here the other night a woman on my left, whose name may have been Shirlee-Anne, told me how much she adored a French singer called Edith Pilaf. She may have been a close relation of a woman I know who called the Greek singer Nana Moussaka and the New Zealand diva Piri Piri Te Kanawa, or the lady I heard in a London restaurant ordering, rather loudly and confidently, a caftan of wine.