This was a real surprise, and on my birthday (11 August) to boot: a grown man, whose parents I used to know and like, wrote in the sophisticated pages of The Spectator (‘Desperate Housewives’) that what women really want is a man with a big house. Golly, you don’t say, for God’s sake stop the presses!
Better yet get off it, Cosmo, or pull the other one, no one is that naive, not nowadays anyway. I know I sound jaded, and I’m sure the writer was playing ‘born yesterday’, but just one week before his article I had commented how one can tell a man by the type of boat he owned, or the woman he was with. Gianni Agnelli, the long gone Fiat head, and I used to play this game nonstop over the years. I’d throw out a name of a woman we both knew, and Gianni would comment on the man she would hypothetically end up with: ‘A pimp’, or ‘semi gentleman’, the worse being, ‘poor, poor man, he’ll never know what hit him’.
It wasn’t nice but it was fun, and no one took it very seriously. Gianni liked women as much as I do, but we each had our types. His were big, brassy and sexy, like Anita Ekberg, the Swedish bombshell who was his mistress for ages. Mine were sweet, young and innocent. Where the fair sex was concerned, Gianni looked for the film noir genre, I was more of a dreamer. I once brought the beautiful wife of an Englishman on to his boat — we had run off together for a dirty weekend — and overheard him describe her to David Somerset, also a guest: ‘She’s rather sweet, David, like those football wives I have to give dinner to at times.’
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