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. Roy won the Distinguished Writing Prize, and when she got up to speak in her soft, tiny voice the boisterous, grand room went awfully quiet. She writes about injustice in India, a very rich subject, if you get my drift. I love India and Indians, but a system that requires a bribe at every level of government — even to take a newborn home from the hospital — can never eliminate the horrendous poverty of the world’s greatest democracy. Some democracy, when Indian billionaires live in vulgar palaces next to the rat-infested, disease-ridden, unspeakable sewers so many Indians live in, and then come west and show off in St Moritz and London. If India eliminated corruption she could eventually eliminate the Dickensian poverty, but that’s not the way masters of the universe think nowadays.
On my table I had my son and his constant sweetheart, Saskia de Rothschild, Michael Mailer with a blonde who could convert Boy George overnight, that wonderful actress Lois Chiles, who played Jordan in The Great Gatsby, and who is as ladylike as Jordan was without the superficiality, and the Hungarian hotel tycoon, Andre Balazs with a German Fräulein of Aryan looks and manner. What else can I say but Wunderbar! The party continued downtown, at Balazs’s Boom Boom room, a place in which Nero would have felt right at home.
A couple of days later, and with a hang-over still hovering, Reinaldo Herrera, the wife and I were driven north by a descendant of those who discovered the Northwest Passage — Wilbur and Clark, was it? — or such was the impression he gave. One year ago, on our way to and from Graydon Carter’s Connecticut home, we spent the better part of the weekend in the car. Six hours to go, seven to come back. The reason was Reinaldo Herrera, who issued Magellan-like instructions which turned out to be the wrong town in the wrong state. This time it was perfect:
1 hour 30 minutes to go, and the exact same to return.
There is nothing quite like the autumn in New England. The countryside is aglow, with green turning to brighter hues, ambers and gold. And yellow brown and sulphur red. The colours alone make a hangover feel good, and as far as the forests and landscape are concerned, fuggeraboutit. There is nothing more beautiful than autumn, with a bit of sadness thrown in for good measure by Mother Nature. Yellow, my favourite colour, is ascendant.
The Carter house is old, as in beautiful old, an 18th-century wooden structure whose charm is unsurpassed and whose size a vulgarian like Roman Abramovich might look down on. (Incidentally, that tapped-out old bag the New York Times refers to that shameful London circus of Russian oligarchs in court as a ‘clash of titans’. If Berezovsky and Abramovich are titans, I’m Hector and Achilles rolled into one.)
Anna Carter is a Scot, and has that rare sweetness of nature and kindness of 19th-century heroines in novels — Jane Austen and all that. We sat around all weekend telling funny stories about past shenanigans, five good friends of very long standing in a warm and cosy atmosphere. It made up for my debauched week. The only thing I regretted was missing my low life colleague’s book party, so when people remonstrated with me — mainly my boy — about the state I was in, my response was that had I flown to London for Jeremy’s party it would have been far, far worse. When high and low life get together the mix is great. Then comes disaster followed by oblivion. Can’t wait to do it in the spring.
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