THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020 15
Huey LewisAusten’s novel, whose heroine is not
only handsome, clever, and rich but a
spirited busybody, is, de Wilde said, “so
much about Emma observing things
inside her head”; Austen’s appreciation
of absurdity makes her fun to adapt.
“Life is bizarre,” de Wilde went on. She
did a double take. “Like this.” Behind
her, two teen-age girls were messing
with a cell phone near an armless statue.
“She’s taking a Boomerang of his bro-
ken penis,” she said.
Forging on, de Wilde saw Austenian
details everywhere. Passing an exhibi-
tion called “Making Marvels,” loud with
ticking and the whirring of gears, she
was drawn to a clock that resembled a
gold-leaf, steampunk R2-D2. “This is
fucking incredible!” she said. A small
boy looked up at her. “The sound of
clocks is in every room in ‘Emma,’” she
went on. “Emma’s life is orderly, beau-
tiful, and ornate. But the clock’s not
working anymore, in her life.”
De Wilde grew up in the arts: her
father is the sixties-counterculture
photographer Jerry de Wilde, and her
mother, Mary, regularly took her to mu-
seums. As a kid, de Wilde was prone to
“museum fatigue,” she said, “because I
didn’t realize how over-observant my
brain was. So I used to play this game
where I would memorize color combi-
nations that I liked: lavender, citrine,
dark green, rose.” She gestured at a
nearby painting. “Would you remem-
ber that her headband was red? But that
red is fucking amazing! Green is on the
opposite end of the spectrum, and it’s
attractive to our eyes.”
She pressed on to the European
galleries. Gérôme’s “Pygmalion and
Galatea,” circa 1890, was a “big inspi-
ration,” she said. “I have muses.” She
cited “Emma”’s stars. “Anya Taylor-Joy
is a muse, Mia Goth is a muse, Johnny
Flynn is a muse.” She looked again. “Of
course, this is a man, so he’s making
out with his muse.” Passing an 1831
David d’Angers bust of a woman with
her hair styled in egg-shaped buns, she
said, “Mrs. Elton!,” and took a picture.
Male nudes brought to mind Mer-
chant-Ivory’s “A Room with a View,”
from 1985, which she had the “Emma”
cast watch. “The pond scene”—frolick-
ing, whooping, bouncing—“is a pivotal
moment in my life,” de Wilde said.
“And it told so much about the free-
streams nearby. You wouldn’t guess that
he was born in New York City and spent
his first years in Ohio. But he’s mostly
a Bay Area kid. His father, a radiolo-
gist, and his mother, an artist who es-
caped Poland in 1939, divorced soon after
they got to California, in 1955. His moth-
er’s parents, who also fled Poland, had
died by suicide together, in Lawrence,
Massachusetts. “It was a ‘House of Sand
and Fog’ thing,” Lewis said. “And so my
mother became a hippie, basically. She
started hanging out at the No Name
Bar in Sausalito, which was affiliated
with Ferlinghetti, Lenny Bruce, and the
City Lights crowd. She took up with a
Beat poet named Lew Welch. That was
my living room when I was a teen-ager.
Gregory Corso and Gary Snyder and
Allen Ginsberg sitting around drinking
wine and smoking dope and reading
poems.” To get him clear of all this, Lew-
is’s father sent him to boarding school
in New Jersey. “I hated it,” Lewis said.
He bummed around Europe for a year,
with a harmonica, then bailed on col-
lege, returned to the Bay, and, a dozen
years and a bunch of bands later, emerged
as a Reagan-era rock star. “It’s hip to be
square,” he sang. And maybe it was.
In Great Kills Harbor, Captain Frank,
a solidly built Staten Island lifer with a
handlebar mustache and a lit cigar, was
waiting aboard a spiffy outboard loaded
with electronics. “What’s the difference
between a fishing guide and a large
pizza?” he said. “The pizza can feed a
family of four.” The boat had a clear tank
teeming with bunker—live bait—but1
GOODCASTINGDEPT.
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idtown Manhattan, 5:30 a.m.,
Huey Lewis riding shotgun.
Lewis may be many things—eighties
hit machine, MTV eyeworm, enter-
tainer for hire—but he’s nothing if not
a fisherman. So when he passed through
town in October, ahead of the release
of a new album (his first in ten years,
and likely his last, because, since record-
ing it, with his band, the News, he has
basically, as a result of a rare disease, lost
his hearing, and therefore his ability to
sing in key), he wanted to try to slay
some stripers. He’d never fished New
York City. So he signed on with Cap-
tain Frank Crescitelli, of Fin Chaser
Charters. Meetup was a Staten Island
marina, at first light.
Lewis had some urban angling ex-
perience. “When I was a kid, I had a
little El Toro,” he said. “Like, an eight-
foot sailboat. I lived in Strawberry Point,
in Marin County. And I would sail
around San Francisco Bay and take my
spin rod along with a couple of Rapala
lures and come back with three huge
striped bass, no sweat.”
The ear affliction, called Ménière’s,
comes and goes. Some weeks he’s O.K.,
some days he can hardly hear the phone
ring. This was, so far, at least before
sunup, a good day. “But I can’t book a
show when I don’t know if I’ll be deaf.”
Now sixty-nine, Lewis lives on a
ranch in Montana, with several troutdom they desire—the men as well as
the women.” They also screened “Bring-
ing Up Baby”: “I like to show a re-
bellious woman by making everyone
around her not rebellious.”
As she said this, she was standing in
front of Gustave Courbet’s “Woman
with a Parrot,” from 1866—a female
nude, splayed on a sheet in delicious re-
pose, her wavy hair spread out, her hand
extended in welcome to a vivid green
bird. “This is how I felt this morning,”
de Wilde said, smiling. “This is my emoji
for today.”
—Sarah Larson