New York
I had a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious week, and a weekend in Connecticut to recover from it. Let’s begin with the Norman Mailer benefit gala for which I had taken a table and filled it with swells and other such birds and creatures. The Mailer Centre is quite an extraordinary achievement only four years after the great man’s death. Larry Schiller, the human battery behind it, has turned Mailer’s Cape house into a young writers’ colony, handing out scholarships and shelter to them, and giving out prizes and 16-month-long fellowships to keep their literary ambitions running in top gear (32 Mailer fellowships and 225 writers have received scholarships to date).
Dylan Jones of GQ magazine is also a big sponsor (Taki being a tiny one). This year they had Bill Clinton handing out a prize for distinguished biography to Cliff Richard, who really looked quite awful upon getting up on stage to receive it. I last saw him at Wimbledon trying a singalong. Never have I seen a man deteriorate more.
Well, stupid old me. It was Keith Richards who was up there being brown-nosed by Bill Clinton for a book he didn’t actually write, but such are the joys of alcohol past 70. It had been like this all night. The mother of my children thought me silly when I yelled out hello to Woody Allen — ‘We’ll always have Paris, Woody’ — but who turned out to be the lugubrious Elie Wiesel, with Mort Zuckerman awarding the goodies. Wiesel should lighten up. You’d think the Nazis were in Paris and Goering on a state visit to Washington. The war’s over, Wiesel, relax, and while you’re at it, tell Zuckerman to put less blond stuff on his 80-year-old hair — it makes him look like Barbara Cartland.
Arundhati Roy; now there’s a writer, and she’s also pretty.
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