Beloved of the gods
Taki
In the Oresteia, Aeschylus never gives us the precise origin of the curse on the house of Atreus, but one can safely assume it had something to do with hubris. Sophocles, of course, believed that punishment, plague and madness were linked to those the gods blessed with their attention. In other words, their afflictions became the source of benefits. There was no revenge. Just the magnificent sweep of great Greek tragedy.
To mention Robert Maxwell in the same breath with Agamemnon and Oedipus must surely rank as the greatest barbarism of all time — an insult to the classics — but mention him I will, if only for the hubris involved, and the suffering of the 30,000 pensioners left holding the bag.
I thought of the porker when I was recently sent a brochure by Camper- Nicholson of his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, named after Maxwell's daughter, whom I recently spotted dining at Christopher's
with some very good friends of the heir to the throne. Being superstitious, like all Ancient Greeks, I did not give the boat a single thought. Even if I could afford her, I would not touch her with the proverbial ten-foot pole because of her previous owner. Mind you, she's a terrific ship, beautifully designed by Jon Bannerman and safe as hell, but it's the devil that owned her that bothers me. Let's face it, the Maxwell family stinks to high heaven. Neither of the brothers involved with the crook has bothered to apologise to those whose pensions were plundered by their father, and the women have been even worse. The wife insisted she was broke, and Ghislaine went a step further when she declared that the only ones who suffered from the massive fraud were the family.
But what should one expect from people with Maxwell's blood running in their veins? I felt sorry for the family when he died, but now I feel only contempt and rage. Nobody should speak to them, and I wish I could ban them from Christopher's, something I just might do.
And speaking of contemptible people, what about Ronald Reagan's ugly daugh- ter, over in London huckstering her even uglier book? I wonder what hubris Reagan and his wife are guilty of to deserve such a repellent offspring. Her main motivation, as in the case of most, of her fellow Mummy-dearest authors, is money. I can see a hustler like Kitty Kelley inventing all sorts of stories, but one's own daughter doing it is hard to take. Although I have always thought Nancy Reagan was the pits, this is no way to write about her. But there is a very good way of dealing with the author's spitefulness: not, I repeat not, to buy her filth. Leave her to Hollywood where she belongs.
But back to the classics. The gods paid some attention to me last week when the biggest-selling French daily named me (along with a picture) as the lover of Prince Edward. Having dished it out plenty, I should be able to take it, but I won't. For the first time in my life I'm suing, and I do so because I never said what I was sup- posed to have said about the poor man. I only answered in the affirmative when asked whether there were rumours that he was gay. There are. (The question and part of my answer were bleeped.) See what I mean about hubris and, in turn, the bene- fits of punishment?
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