Jaywalking

With this second volume of memoirs, Jay Landesman continues the saga of an obscure cult figure who fought and clawed his way through life in America only to end up across the Atlantic in a granny flat of his "grand" Georgian slum in Islington. Having left America for a one-year talent tune-up in 1964, he and his career-obsessed wife, the song-writer Fran Landesman, arrived in London with two anxious children, all the wrong clothes, a trunk full of unproduced manuscripts - and Peter Cook's phone number. The next 25 years they spent perfecting a post-modern lifestyle which confused even the most ardent deconstructualists, a hilarious litany of epic failures and unintentional successes. "Jaywalking" traces from a personal rather than a sociological point of view the emergence of Swinging London, the pathetic "underground" of the late 1960s, and the entertainment, theatrical and artistic scene which sets a new record in name-dropping. Landesman's morals are low, he is a gossip and a philanderer, but all the same he emerges as a Zelig-like recorder of history, an amiable survivor born to amuse the bored. It is the saga of a family which has led one of the more original lives of the 20th century.