Bondi to Big Apple

When she was offered the job of New York correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, mother of twins Caroline Overington relocated her family to a different world.

When I asked my husband Martin if he would consider moving to New York, I could see what he was thinking, which was: ‘That’s crazy!’. At the time, our twins Michael and Chloe had not yet turned two. They were absolutely cherubic – bodies still chubby from babyhood, legs bowed and hair white – divine, but very hard work...

They were also nowhere near toilet trained and needed six or seven nappy changes a day (and more at night). They drank milk from bottles that had to be scrubbed and sterilised, and ate only boiled and pureed food. They couldn’t dress themselves or walk long distances without stopping, arms in the air, to insist on being picked up. Martin and I managed only because I didn’t work full-time, and we had help from the creche, friends and neighbours. Martin typically walked out the door before 8am and didn’t return until after dark to children already asleep; he was the main breadwinner in our house.

“So, let me get this straight,” said Martin, as he contemplated becoming a full-time stay-at-home dad for two, maybe three, years. “We will move to New York, into what I imagine will be a standard two-bedroom apartment, and all four of us will live in this apartment, and you will work there as well?” I nodded. “You don’t think we’ll have enough money. We won’t have a car. We don’t know anybody in America. The children have no friends there and no family either.” Again I nodded. “Well Caroline,” Martin said, “that sounds just wonderful. I can’t tell you how overwhelmed I am.” In truth, he didn’t want to refuse me the opportunity to live and work in New York, so he resigned from his job and we duly prepared to leave.

From the earliest days, I was frantically busy. Fairfax – publisher of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age – requires its New York correspondent to keep an eye on many things: the New York stock exchange and corruption on Wall Street, for starters, plus the Broadway shows and any social trends (such as the Atkins diet) that might be of interest to readers. I was also closely watching the ‘war on terror’. Having arrived in the US in February 2002, four-and-a-half months after September 11, the impact was still obvious. When I went to the site of Ground Zero, I found workmen still searching through the dust for human remains. Most of New York’s shops still had pictures of weeping American eagles in the window or flags flying from their doors. The posters of the missing hadn’t come down.

The US was at war in Afghanistan. Cars were emblazoned with stickers that said ‘Support Our Troops’ and ‘God Bless America’, and there was another war on the horizon – Iraq. A lot of the debate about that war was taking place at the United Nations headquarters on the East River. I was issued with a special media pass so I could penetrate beyond official guided tours to report on the General Assembly and Security Council debates.

Fairly quickly, I realised the time difference between Sydney and New York could work in my favour. When I woke in the morning, it was close to midnight in Sydney. I could spend several hours with the children, exploring New York, tending to the washing, playing games and mashing bananas. In the afternoon, I would travel to the United Nations headquarters or retreat to my office, while Martin took over the business of caring for Michael and Chloe.

Nevertheless, my home and work lives were constantly colliding. About a week after we moved into our Upper West Side apartment, which was lovely apart from a few catches – it was underground so we looked at people’s feet walking by from our windows and there were rats rustling around in the trash cans outside – I was instructed to fly to Hollywood to cover the Oscars. Russell Crowe had been nominated for best actor for A Beautiful Mind and Nicole Kidman was up for best actress for Moulin Rouge!. My first reaction was: ‘What about the children?’ Martin settled it by deciding we’d all go.

While my friends thought going to the Academy Awards would be glamorous, the reality was quite different. Journalists don’t get to kick back in a big old armchair and pass wicked comments about what the stars are wearing. Instead, we watch the ceremony on TV in a small room next to where the ceremony is held. The organisers provide power points for computers and headphones so everyone can hear the speeches over the clattering of keyboards owned by the dozens of journalists wedged into the tiny space. I sat there for four hours, noting every detail, and the silly thing was, I had to do this in a ball gown. The organisers are very strict: no-one is allowed in unless they’re wearing ‘black tie’ – I felt ridiculous dressed like Scarlett O’Hara with a headset on. Several times I stood up from my desk and got my skirt tangled in the TV camera leads lying all over the floor.

On the upside, I did get to see the stars close up. They came into the anteroom after they’d won their awards and it was invariably disappointing. Women who look absolutely ravishing on screen can be positively plain away from it, and they were all too thin. Almost all the female stars had had some plastic surgery. Up close, you could see where the skin had been stretched and where the nose used to be before it was reconstructed.

The exception that year was Halle Berry. She admits to plastic surgery, but I couldn’t see what she’d had done. She won the best-actress Oscar, pipping ‘our Nicole’. When she came into the interview room, I went into a kind of shock. No amount of make-up could have spoiled her face. She had curves and a radiant smile. The man sitting next to me actually growled when he saw her.

The following day I had an interview with the only Australian to win an Oscar that year – costume and set designer Catherine Martin, who won for Moulin Rouge! (directed by her husband, Baz Luhrmann). Martin wanted to go surfing, so I made my way to Catherine’s hotel, the Chateau Marmont, with a nappy-clad Chloe in my arms. I took a seat in the lobby, and a few moments later a glacial beauty with a newborn in her arms asked if she could take the vacant seat at our table. It was actress Uma Thurman, who proceeded to carefully remove an extremely full breast from her blouse and nurse her baby. I didn’t think big stars would breastfeed, but there she was. When I told Martin later, all he could say was, “You saw Uma Thurman’s breast?”

Three days later I was in tears. It was the twins’ second birthday and we hadn’t been in New York long enough to make friends, so there would be no party, not with other children anyway. I was racked with guilt about moving the family from our friendly street in Bondi to a dark, damp basement where nobody ever popped in for a cup of tea. Then and there, I decided I had to find myself some friends.So I wrapped up the twins and headed for Central Park and, of course, there was nobody else there. The wind was howling. The sky was dark. I wasn’t sure what we were going to do in a cold sandpit with just a broken bucket to play with.

Suddenly I saw another mum with two children – twins, I was sure of it. “Hi!” I said across the sandpit, keen to make a connection,“I’m Caroline.” As luck would have it, the woman was also new to New York. She’d come from Israel, her children were the same age as mine and we lived on opposite sides of Central Park. I felt so proud of myself: see, it wasn’t hard to make friends, just go out there and do it! But the children were freezing and we couldn’t bond for long. The other mum took a piece of paper from her handbag and scribbled her telephone number on it. I clutched that piece of paper in my fist and walked home triumphant.

Martin was impressed, but when I dug in my pocket for the piece of paper to check my new friend’s name, there was nothing there. I searched furiously for the scrap of paper and finally, when I had to admit I had well and truly lost the piece of paper, the thought crossed my mind for the first time: ‘This is just too hard.’

If making friends was tricky, nothing compared with finding an apartment that suited us, resisting the Manhattan trend to relinquish one’s children to nannies, and – the most mammoth challenge of all – finding a kindergarten. As Woody Allen once said, if you don’t get your kids into a good kindergarten in New York, they won’t get into a good school, and if they don’t get into a good school, they’ll never get into a good college. And if they don’t go to a good college, they’ll never get a job on Wall Street. Before the age of three, their life is essentially ruined.

As it transpired, Michael and Chloe did go to a good kindergarten, but not one of Manhattan’s best – partly because we could never have afforded it, but also because we would never have got them in. Statistically speaking, it is tougher to get into one of Manhattan’s best kindergartens than it is to get into Harvard.

Aside from kindergartens, New Yorkers have many other obsessions, especially how fat everybody is getting. Given the fattest Americans tend to be of the Texan variety, Texas was where most of the documentaries about obesity were made. I watched one, once. The reporter made much of the fact that the top-selling food at the State Fair of Texas in 2002 was deep-fried Oreos (chocolate biscuits). I thought this was silly – surely you can’t get as mountainous as people are in Texas by eating a few chocolate bickies.

 

Photography: Andrew Lehmann. Hair & make-up: Yolanda Lukowski.