The Italians mix their officers shrewdly. Some are very ferocious looking gentlemen with fast-growing beards and grenades exploding dramatically on their caps, while others are very old men in shirtsleeves, who have some difficulty in speaking. The shrewdness of this arrangement lies in the fact that the ferocious gentlemen invariably have hearts of gold, as they are eager to welcome the visitor to a land of historical monuments and ultra-modern turismo, while the old civilians, uninhibited by such consideration, plough patiently and indiscriminately through piles of luggage, murmuring to themselves, and finally signing suitcases with a flourish of such assurance that they might be Titians making their marks on their greatest achievements.
Should an irregularity be discovered, however, the administrative excitement is surpassed in no other country that I know. In England, they know the rules, and fine you. In Italy they rush to read the rules, and each man interprets them according to his conception of power, humanism, Christianity, honour and expediency. While one will accuse you of an assault on the very roots of the young republic, another will admonish you in clerical cadences for your lack of faith in your fellow men, and a third will just shout. Eventually they will become more interested in each other than in you, and it is at a point when the conversation has turned into an evaluation of the Partisans’ resistance on the Adriatic coast that it is quite safe to leave, with your contraband, naturally.
The Spaniards are far less reassuring. The calm is not the calm of Heath Row, the calm of the hospital corridor—this is the austere reticence of the Inquisition. The procedure is akin to a ghostly pavane, danced in the shadows of a bleak, comfortless shack. No language but Spanish seems to be spoken and if you are unable to answer the questions, that is the first black mark against you. In an oppressive silence, the white-gloved official indicates with choreographic gestures the objects he wishes to examine. The mime is hypnotic. Prostrated by the sheer weight of the true faith, you demolish your careful packing, and lay bare the innermost secrets of your shaving kit. When the ordeal is over, you are shot a smile of unexpected playfulness, which you have not the confidence to answer, and an imperious hand waves you towards the mystery of the horizon. It requires a nerve of iron, and a deep faith in the things of the spirit, to import even an undeclared tin of condensed milk into the land of the Catholic kings….
As for the U.S., well, we are all cops and robbers, and Japanese torpedoes are approaching from all directions. The marines fix bayonets and charge through your personal belongings. You are innocent till you are proved innocent, and guilty till you are proved guilty. No time to think or make your excuses. The G-men are after you, and how d’you like New York? Get these guys out of here, and get the next lot in, and what’s in that vanity case? Is that a radio? British? How does it work? We’ve gotten some smaller ones and louder ones and why didn’t you declare it?
Here there are no rules. The smuggler must talk faster and louder than his interrogator, and show a healthy interest in the baseball scores. That, if nothing else, will prove his innocence.
From “A Young Smuggler’s Guide to the Customs,” by Peter Ustinov, in Vogue’s Gallery, a collection from the UK edition of Vogue, published in 1962. Vogue’s Gallery is available online in the Open Library. It’s a reminder of those days when expensively produced magazines such as Vogue, Holiday, and Horizon aimed up, not down. Ustinov’s bit of throw-away humor appears alongside essays and stories by Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Bowen, Kingsley Amis, John Gielgud, W. H. Auden, Lionel Trilling, Tennessee Williams, and Colette. Here, for example, is Auden on the subject of opera:
Whether or not you will like opera will depend, then, I think, upon how characteristic of human nature, and how important to understanding it properly, you believe wilfulness to be. If you think that, normally, emotions just happen to people and that only a few hysterics try to make them happen, or that most human conduct is dictated by the demands either of natural appetites and aversions or of reason, then you will find opera artificial and insincere.
If, on the other hand, you believe that human beings are most characteristically human, as contrasted with any other creature, when they are doing something just for the hell of it, or that all men are constantly adopting some emotion and defending it with the same intense energy as that with which the characters in a Shavian play adopt and defend some point of view (incidentally, Shaw, on his own admission, learned his trade by studying opera), then all the usual objections of the opera-hater—the unromantic physical appearance of the lovers, the improbability of the plots, the suspension of action while the singers get things off their chests, the palpably sham scenery, will seem to you not objections but positive advantages of the medium.
Interspersed with the prose are gorgeous black-and-white portrait photos of Henry Moore, Audrey Hepburn, John F. Kennedy, Igor Stravinsky, and Hermione Gingold taken by the likes of Irving Penn, Cecil Beaton, and Anthony Armstrong Jones (AKA Lord Snowden). Everyone is bright-eyed, good-looking, talented, well-paid, and, with the exception of Sammy Davis Jr., white. Vogue’s color bar may have been discreet, but it was there, nonetheless.