The Handbag Studio

In Los Angeles in late October of 1980, I was feeling the strange, malign electricity the Santa Ana winds bring to the city. The heat and challenge of the wind swept along Wilshire Boulevard as I went out to shop for a modestly priced briefcase in Beverly Hills. Passing exorbitant Rodeo Drive on my left, one block from the hotel, I saw, stretching away south, a street that seemed to have normal shops, and family cars bearing the normal scuffs of suburban use. Malls had not yet subsumed the business of such centres as this, and people seemed to be busily parking and seeking out the usual things.

In those days there were only two or three flights a week back to Australia. Australia was not yet a glamour destination, and only a few brave American travellers joined us natives on the planes to the far southwest Pacific and my vast native continent, which some people still confused with Austria. I was not due to leave for Sydney until the following night. I had time to shop.

I had not gone far along South Beverly when, opposite a Hamburger Haven, I encountered a store named the Handbag Studio. Its goods looked out at me through the glass, past banners which declared the Handbag Studio’s Fall Sale. I looked in through the glass. Kidskin, cowhide, pigskin, snakeskin, crocodile.

I hesitated. I had always been a cautious shopper. But the proprietor soon appeared at the door. He had a stocky Slavic look, and resembled the great character actor, Theodore Bickel — a touch of Tartar in the cheeks, a barrel chest. He was impeccably shirted and jacketed, and an Eagle Scout pin nested in his lapel. There was a glitter of fraternal amusement in his eyes. Even then, I believe I perceived that he had dealt in markets beyond my knowing.

He said, ‘So it’s 105 degrees out here and you don’t want to come into my air-conditioned store. Do you think I’ll eat you?’

‘I was just looking for a briefcase,’ I said defensively.

‘Ai, ai, ai!’ he said. ‘I have the best, young man. Hong Kong and Italy. The best!’

With these assurances, I entered the store. There aren’t too many stores like it any more. Few as intimate, as individual, as uncluttered. Items given the individual respect of their own separate display.

‘I have a good case,’ I told him earnestly. My wife and daughters had given it to me. But one of its hinges had gone, and the other was tearing too. The storekeeper respected my sentimental attachment, but pointed out though that such an accident was unlikely to befall what he was offering me. ‘You just can’t put everything in them. They’re not a truck, you know!’ His broad eyes glimmered. He introduced me to his salesman, a man named Sol. They both had the same sort of Eastern European whimsy, but you could see at once Sol’s was of the melancholy rather than the exuberant strain. As we chatted, the proprietor, with the eagle in his lapel, said, ‘I must compliment you, sir, on your beautiful British accent.’

‘Not British,’ I told him, with an automatic Fenian twitch imbued in me by Irish grandparents. ‘Australian.’ It was true that the Americans, largely ignorant of the bad odour in which our accent was held by the respectable British, unconditionally liked our nearly vowel-less, nearly diphthong-less English.

‘So then,’ he asked me, ‘how did a gentleman like you bust your hinge?’

I explained that I’d been at a film festival in Sorrento in Italy. The Australian film industry had revived in the 1970s, with directors such as Peter Weir, Bruce Beresford, Gillian Armstrong and Fred Schepisi. I had even ‘acted’ in Schepisi’s first film, The Devil’s Playground, and then, in 1977, Schepisi had made a novel of mine, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, into a film. I’d played a small part in that film as well, and since Schepisi himself could not go to Sorrento for its biennial film festival, which was devoted that year to Australian cinema, I was invited to go as his stand-in.

They accommodated us in resort hotels along the Mediterranean coast, a festival load of people who had already established themselves and would go on to great renown — Bruce Beresford, the director; Barry Humphries, alias Dame Edna Everage; Judy Davis; Sam Neill; Bryan Brown; Ray Lawrence. We were still, both as a film industry and as a nation, unaccustomed to serious attention in northern European cultural centres, and enjoyed being the plat du jour. The Italian press took each film with a heady seriousness, and we all ate many servings of sumptuous Neapolitan cuisine. But my efforts to stuff all the Italian souvenirs I brought back had busted the bag: one of its two hinges at the back was coming away, ripping fabric with it.

I told all this to the proprietor, whose name was Leopold Page. I had begun by calling him Mr Page, but he told me this was a name that had been foisted on him at Ellis Island. He told me to call him Leopold; in a short time, I took to using the diminutive, Poldek. Poldek would later explain to me that his true family name from Kraków, that beautiful Galician city, had been Pfefferberg — pepper mountain. I would come to think it a name that suited his exuberance, his feisty goodwill.

‘Do you know some friends of mine?’ Poldek asked me. He mentioned various Eastern European names from Sydney and Melbourne. No, I hadn’t had the honour to meet these people, I said. ‘They’re Jewish friends of mine,’ he explained. ‘From Kraków and other places.’

As we talked, Poldek showed me a simple lock-up shining black briefcase, with nicely patterned skin. It was spacious and many compartmented. I said I'd take it. I was grateful that the shopping had been uncomplicated and unexpectedly pleasant, and in between chatting, the deal-making had probably taken no more than two or three minutes.

I gave Poldek my credit card, and he put Sol on the phone to call the numbers through to the credit company. As minutes passed without the card being accepted, Sol kept making doleful faces at us. Poldek told him, ‘Well, keep trying, Sol!’

‘I’m trying, I’m trying. They won’t talk.’

‘Ai-ai-ai, give me the phone!’

‘You want the phone when no one’s on the line?’

‘What do you mean no one’s?’

‘I mean they went away to check the card. I mean there’s nobody on the line,’ said Sol, rejecting all assistance. So Poldek turned to me again, and showing he knew the map of the world, asked me how come I was in California on my way back from Italy to Australia?

I had a book out in the United States, I told him. The publishers, while I was at least in the northern hemisphere, had invited me to come over from Italy to the USA to do a short book tour. Poldek asked me the name of the book, and I told him, and he said, ‘My God! Sol, is that not the same book I just read a review in Newsweek?’

‘How should I know what you read?’ asked dyspeptic Sol.

I might have doubted Poldek’s claim, except that there had been a review in Newsweek. I confirmed it with the false modesty of the astonished author.

‘And now, sir, what is your name again?’

I told him.

‘Sol, Sol,’ he called to his hapless assistant, parked on the phone. ‘This guy’s a good guy. Cut ten dollars off that!’

Sol grimaced beneath his moustache, and made a Don’t blame me! sort of gesture with the hand that did not hold the phone.

Poldek confided to me merrily, ‘Poor Sol. He had a tough time in the war.’

I was by now such a cherished fellow in the eyes of Mr Leopold Page that he called his son Freddy to come over from the wholesale warehouse and meet me. Turning up a few minutes later, Freddy proved to be a muscular American boy, impeccably dressed for business, and of less pyrotechnic temperament than his father. Poldek turned back to me. ‘But what am I thinking? You haven’t met my beautiful wife, Mischa.’

At the phone, Sol gave a further doleful shrug. ‘They say they’ve got to call Australia. There’s been all this Australian credit card fraud, they say.’

‘Give me the phone, give me the phone,’ insisted Poldek in his jowly basso. ‘You shouldn’t say that sort of thing in front of a gentleman.’

Sol handed the receiver to him with a gesture that said, ‘Go ahead, big shot!’

‘Hello,’ said Poldek. ‘What is your name? Barbara. Barbara, darling, you sound like a beautiful woman. I know you have your job. But this man in my store is a gentleman all the way from Australia! Do you want to kill my business, Barbara? I know you don’t. But do I need to put up a sign saying, AUSTRALIANS, KEEP AWAY! Yes, I know you’re doing your best. But my customer has an appointment to go to? Can you help him along? He’s a writer and his schedule’s tight. Don’t do this to him, Barbara, darling. Make it quick is what I beg. I’ll put you back to Sol now, darling.’

He handed the phone back to a mournfully gratified Sol and, as Freddy the son stood by, Poldek took me aside, towards the curtain which led into the store's back room.

‘Here’s what I wanted to point out… I know a wonderful story. A story of humanity man to man. I tell all the writers I get through here. Sitcom guys. Reporters for the LA Times. I get famous producers or their wives. Did you know Howard Koch? Howard Koch wrote Casablanca. A really nice guy. You see, everyone needs a handbag, everyone needs an attaché case. I tell everyone I know the greatest story of humanity man to man. Some listen — an article there, a news item here. A nice young man, executive producer of Simon and Simon at Paramount…he does what he can. But it’s a story for you, Thomas. It’s a story for you, I swear.'

Every writer hears that sentence. People without an idea of how long a book takes to write pass on the tale of an amusing uncle or aunt, along with the strange addendum: I could write it if I had nothing else to do. The suggestion is sometimes passed on tentatively, sometimes with the sincere expectation that the writer will answer, Wow! That he will drop to his knees and embrace this jewel of a story. That it will take him a few weeks’ leisure to produce the finished manuscript.

But I had never heard the words pass the lips of a soul so vivid, so picaresque, so full of life, as Poldek.

I said, ‘What is it?’

He said, ‘I was saved, and my wife was saved by a Nazi. I was a Jew imprisoned with Jews. So a Nazi saves me, and more important saves Mischa. So although he's a Nazi, to me he’s Jesus Christ. Not that he was a saint. He was all-drinking, all-black marketeering, all-screwing. Okay? But he got Mischa out of Auschwitz, so to me he is God.’

Freddy was listening to this with a minor nod. It was the family story, as central as a book of the Pentateuch. ‘What’s happening with those crazy Mastercard people, Sol?’ asked Poldek.

Sol made a despairing gesture. ‘Not a word.’

‘Okay,’ said Poldek. ‘Stick with it, Sol.’ And to me: ‘Come back into the repair shop, I’ll show you.’