13 JUNE 1987, Page 51

High life

Getting to like Jimmy

Taki

New York Last week, while dining with the 39th President of the United States, Evelyn Waugh suddenly came to mind. If memory serves, he was once observed standing near the entrance of White's club, speaking to no one and staring at nothing in particular. When asked by fellow members if anything was wrong, Waugh shook his head and said he wished to be alone because he was a terrible shit, and a man who deserved no friends. Or something to that effect.

Given the fact that I am not half as nasty as Waugh was, I was not about to leave the table and stand by the hallway with a blank look of contrition on my face. Nor could I do a mea culpa in front of a lot of vastly overpaid American television media stars. So I did the next best thing and got blind drunk. So drunk, mind you, that I was the last to leave the dinner party after having trapped the poor peanut farmer in a corner and having explained to him at length why democracy was a biological contradiction.

Needless to say, I felt as lousy as I did because of the horrible things I've written and said about Jimmy Carter in the past. As it turns out, he was as nice and decent a man as he was an incompetent President. When I recounted how badly I felt to Pat Buckley, Bill's wife, she assured me that as a Christian I should not feel guilty. 'You hated the politician but liked the man,' was the way she put it. Amen, said I.

The dinner itself was excellent, and more fun than usual because the big shots I was sitting with ordered only Perrier water. Which meant I emptied all their glasses and talked non-stop about how ghastly television is in general, and American television in particular. I was seated in between Miss Diane Sawyer, a beautiful TV person, as they say nowadays, and Miss Helen Gurley Brown, of Cosmopolitan magazine fame. Miss Brown and I got along extremely well because she is old- fashioned, or at least she pretends to be old-fashioned when dining next to a male chauvinist who is proud of being a pig.

After dinner all the big shots headed for home, and that is when I trapped the poor ex-President. My argument was that he should not have felt sad once he was rejected by the public because had he done a good job, the populace was bound to resent him. (The ancient Greeks used to exile Aristides because he was never wrong.) Had he done a lousy job, he should have been happy to be replaced. I also proposed a plan of mine that guaran- tees everyone a vote, but some more than others. I.e., if a crack dealer in Harlem has one vote, I, for example, have 25, and someone like General Patton 100, and so on. Jimmy, as I shall call him from now on, called it an interesting philosophical argu- ment, but did not agree. After that I don't remember too much except that my hos- tess, Alice Mason, apparently escorted me out of her flat in order to make sure Carter would digest his dinner.

Jimmy Carter is as decent a man as it's possible to be — for a politician, anyway but he was obviously so insecure that he projected his malaise on to society. And speaking of society, the next evening I participated in a discussion on social climb- ing at the New School's auditorium, a discussion that was chaired by my old friend Michael Thomas, the novelist and curmudgeon. The place was full and for once I was in good form as there were a few bright young things in the audience and I was eager to make a good impress- ion.

My thesis, explained to me by my guru Professor Ernest van den Haag, went something like this. A snob is a person not 'Nice exhibition, lousy summer.' born into the nobility who aspires to be with people he perceives to be his sup- eriors. As today's New York society com- prises such people as Gutfreund, Steinberg, Ertegun and Zipkin, there is no need to want to climb. I seem to have got my point across, because when the two hours were up I was literally mobbed by hysterical women trying to rip my clothes off. They only managed to get two of my cuff-links and part of my tie before the police hustled me away. But at last I have realised why rock stars hate women as much as they do. For one brief moment I was actually frightened.

This week, of course, is the one to end all weeks. First Sir James's blast at Cliveden, and then my cousin's wedding to Tracy Ward. Harry Worcester is a book reviewer, a rock star, a real-estate mag- nate, a sportsman of renown, and the older brother of Lord Johnson Somerset, the protégé of Nile Rogers, a man who is to rock music what Marshal Ney was to the cavalry charge. It should be an interesting combination of people, and an even more interesting evening.