Cheap tricks
Taki
The telephone rings and a downmarket voice greets me with a cheery hello. ‘This is Peter McKay, your old friend,’ says the bubbly one. ‘We hear that Vanity Fair paid for your party.’ For any of you unfamiliar with McKay, he is a scandalpurveyor of talent, malice and unparalleled mischief, who writes under the pseudonym of Ephraim Hardcastle in the Daily Mail. My first reaction, needless to say, is to wonder why VF should pay for my party. And I tell him so. ‘No, VF did not pay for my party, but Graydon Carter, the editor, and his wife Anna, as well as Dominick Dunne, a VF columnist, were invited as they are old and good friends of mine.’ McKay obviously read this as an affirmation because the next day he led off with an item which stated that ‘the shindig, which lasted until 5 a.m., was planned in consultation with Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, which flew its society writer, Dominick Dunne, to London, berthing him at Claridges, to report exclusively on the bash. Columnist Taki often rebukes vulgarians whose parties feature in celebrity magazines. Did VF buy up his birthday bash?’ The mind boggles. The English language provides words only up to a point when one wishes to answer in the negative. If one goes on too long, one tends to protest too much. So, what to do? Hang up is one way, but it will be taken as an affirmation. Make sure gossip merchants do not have one’s telephone number is another, but that, too, will be seen as an affirmative answer to their non-posed question. Kill all gossip columnists seems to be the only solution. But then I might have to commit suicide myself.
The trouble with gossip-mongers, especially those working for British papers, is their malice. And their lack of access. When I saw the item which referred to me, the penny dropped. The man who is trying to fill Nigel Dempster’s shoes had rung me the night before my bash and offered to send a photographer. I trust the Daily Mail as much as I trust Bill Clinton, so I politely but firmly said no. The only photographer allowed in was doing it for VF because, as I told him, I trust Graydon Carter. Punto basta, as they say in the land of pasta. The result was, of course, a bitchy item hinting very strongly that I had taken a dive and sold my party out. To gossip-mongers like McKay, it was a normal thing to do.
There is a rich Iraqi woman in London as I write, one Rena Sindi, who has come to London from New York to do just that. Give phoney parties paid for by celebrity magazines and luxury-goods merchants. Gossip columnists don’t know the difference between, say, Rena Sindi and Countess Bismarck. They are both called society hostesses by them. It’s like calling gangsta rap and Mozart’s Don Giovanni one and the same: music. Sindi will come up with Eurotrash and desperate New York socialites and desperate London Dlist celebs and ring up the gossips. The opposite applies to the countess. She will ring up her friends and her husband will pick up the bill and c’est tout. This is what London society has morphed into nowadays, at least where the gossips are concerned.
A wise man once observed how easy it is to tell a lie, how hard to tell only one. Gossips are known for avoiding hard work so, after their first one, they go on lying with a clear conscience. God bless them. What would we do without their snide comments about people they’ve never met? As the mother of my children said to me, ‘People in glass houses ... ’ Which brings me to Intelligence Squared, and the London–Paris festival which took place last weekend at the Royal Geographical Society and turned out a great success. It was a weekend of lively debate with heavyweights like BernardHenri Lévy, François Bujon de l’Estang, Dominique Moisi, even Taki, among the contributors. I participated in the ‘Better Paris than Washington’ debate, arguing for Paris. On my side were the French Ambassador and the gentle and very wise William Pfaff, of the International Herald Tribune. We had Bruce Anderson, Peter Jay and Christopher Hitchens against us. Hitchens was OK, not too insulting, Peter Jay was fat and very pompous as well as boring, and then the Brute went to work on the French. It was not pretty, nor very funny, but certainly insulting. He called them ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’, and because the Brute looks menacing when he speaks — he is, after all, one of Britain’s scariest characters, especially if he threatens to undress — my side took it rather badly. ‘You don’t know the Brute,’ I told them.
He once stayed with me in Gstaad 12 years ago. During dinner with Arkie Busson’s father, a war hero in Algeria, he talked non-stop about Agincourt. Pascal Busson said nothing. Then the Brute started on the Greeks, and how South Africa barely let them in as whites. I stood up over him, demanded he apologise and retract, otherwise ‘I will perform a mawashi geri [a round kick] on your fat head’, which he immediately did, and then we went back to dinner as if nothing had happened. There were 12 witnesses. The Brute has no shame, but nor does he intend harm, which is more than I can say for gossip-mongers.
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