The latest and final season of My Brilliant Friend is a dream of era-spanning Italian interiors. I wanted it all: Nino and Elena’s lush seaside apartment with its Arco floor lamps, Mariarosa’s yellow striped placemats and mid-century modern everything. But it wasn’t until Elena uses a seductively curved red desk phone to call Nino, who answers her on an equally beautiful angular blue phone, that my shoppies really hit. I started feverishly Googling “Nino’s blue phone My Brilliant Friend” but could find almost nothing online. These phones were perfect — objects worthy of obsession. Why wasn’t anybody talking about them?
I fell into an old-phone rabbit hole. I knew the era I was looking for: The season is set mainly in Naples in the 1970s and ’80s, as devices like phones and televisions started becoming common and postmodern Italian designers were ushering in colorful laminates. This led me to industrial phone design around the world. I discovered the Trimphone, Telephone No. 722, designed by Martyn Rowlands, with its slim angles. And Henning Andreasen’s simple, flat F78. There was the 1980s postmodern “Wave” phone, shaped like a curious squiggle, and the handsome Iskra ETA 900, a product of Slovenian industrial design.
How many old phones was too many for a person who didn’t have a landline? Could I drop $175 for a tomato-red Bang & Olufsen Beocom 2000? I became particularly obsessed with a huge brick of a phone called, appropriately, Enorme, with a satisfyingly Tetris-y receiver, but it was $825. I thought of ways to justify my purchase. Did it actually make more sense to buy both so I could say I was “collecting” them? Still, I talked myself down to just buying one. I landed on a classic orange 1970s Northern Electric Contempra touch-tone phone, which I bought on eBay for $65. Designed by John Tyson, it was the first phone to come out of Canada and proved so popular that it was distributed worldwide. (It’s the same phone that Nino used.) The listing didn’t specify that the phone was in working condition, but it came with a graying phone jack cord that almost certainly hadn’t been changed in 50 years.
I showed photos to friends. We all seemed to agree that of course it would look good on my wall. But one friend stipulated that I should get a landline. Was this true? “I have to get a landline?” I wailed. Having an actual phone line seemed like an unsurmountable obstacle, like learning how to hang a shelf or figuring out how electricity works. Would I have to become a new person who knew how to get a landline installed in service of reviving a piece of beautiful but obsolete technology? But then I realized she was right. I didn’t just want to have an old phone; I wanted to use an old phone. The idea of being able to dial through a receiver and chat with a friend without having to interact with a screen at all felt soothing. Maybe it would actually allow me to put my cell phone down for periods of time at home. I wanted to pick up my orange phone without knowing who was calling to say, “Hello? Who’s this?”
I contacted Verizon. Jordan, who was either a surprisingly helpful employee or a horrifyingly accurate chatbot, told me that it would cost $25 extra per month to add a landline, assuring me that there was a “90 percent chance” a vintage phone would work if it was in good condition. I told him I would think about it. “I respect your decision,” Jordan wrote.
I continued to canvass my friends. One warned me against it; he had installed a landline not too long ago, but it ended up ringing all day with spam calls. I mused out loud to my girlfriend that what I really wanted was a way to connect my cell phone to an analog phone. (She was annoyed that I had suddenly become the “vintage-phone person” of the relationship, as she already owned two.) She responded that it would be a difficult thing to rig, but maybe I could stick an AirPod into the receiver? While this obviously raised more questions — how would you charge the AirPod, would it make more sense to just cut a hole in the receiver and place it over your AirPod every time you used it, what was I actually doing with my little time on this Earth — I briefly considered it.
Then, a breakthrough: She sent me an article about a device called Cell2Jack that cost $30 and promised to do everything I wanted. Could it really be that simple? The Contempra arrived, and I placed it lovingly on my desk. A few days later, Cell2Jack came in the mail. I opened it, connected my devices with trepidation, and then turned on Bluetooth. Almost immediately, I heard the sound of an angel — a dial tone. Pressing the buttons elicited all the proper beeping noises. Not only could I call out; the phone also rang when someone called me. I was transported. I was delighted. Is this what stillness felt like? There was only one thing left to do: Find the perfect vintage Rolodex.
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