High life
First lady
Taki
f Margaret Papandreou, the American- born wife of Greece's numero uno bullshit- ter, did not exist, Truman Capote would have invented her. The tiny terror knew her kind well.
The first and only time I met Margaret was on an extremely hot August evening in 1974. I was then a stringer for UPI in the Big Olive, and John Rigos, the nicest possible bureau chief anyone could hope for, had sent me to the airport to report on the second coming of Andreas Papandreou after six years in plush exile from the Colonels. (His first coming was in 1961, after 20 years in the good old USA, far away from such boring things as war, occupation, hunger and so on.) Unlike the rest of the hacks, who lined the runway hoping for a word from the great man himself, I stayed indoors and had a long cooling drink with my wife-to- be and Arnaud de Borchgrave, Chirac's new best friend. While the fourth estate sweated and shoved outside, I guaranteed Arnaud that he would get to see Andreas even if I had to tackle him. Needless to say, my plan worked. While everyone sur- rounded Assad's greatest-friend-to-be, I went up to Margaret, introduced myself as UPI with access to hundreds of newspapers all over the world, and asked for an exclusive interview from her and her hus- band. 'You do that for me, and I'll do something very good for you,' was the elegant way I put it. She dug absolutely. In two minutes flat she had the numero uno in the VIP lounge facing Arnaud, Alexandra and yours truly. But that turned out to be the problem. The numero uno took one look at me and headed for the door. Margaret followed, and so did a furious Borchgrave swearing that I was as much help to him as the Ligne Maginot was to the glorious French armies of 1940.
Seven years later Margaret became First Lady in Greece and has never looked back, as they say in the small hick town she comes from. Although she is as virulently anti-Uncle-Sam as her husband, she has followed the American system as First Lady. rather than the European one. By this I mean she has not remained in the background, but is as visible as Fancy Nancy herself. Last week I saw Margaret while lunching with my brother in the most overpriced restaurant in Athens, one own- ed by the Bank of Greece, of course. Margaret looked as I suppose she did when Andreas first saw her some 30-odd years ago. She was entertaining a large group which on first sight I mistook for some of John Aspinall's favourites, but who upon closer inspection turned out to be visiting feminists. They were in Athens, I was later informed, for an international conference of women to condemn Star Wars . . .
Now as everyone who's ever heard of Papandreou knows, Margaret believes in such rubbish as much as the Sandinistas do in democracy, or the Kennedys in celibacy. It is simply her way of getting on the front pages, and establishing credentials among those subsidised for life by the taxpayer. You know the type. Always meeting in plush hotels and resorts in order to pass anti-American resolutions. Margaret, predict, will not only become an all- important member of those free-loaders, she will one day face the cameras on her own.
Which brings me back to Truman, and the type of women he liked. His heroine Kate McCloud was an amalgamation of Zee Zee Guest, Babe Paley, and Gloria Guinness, with a little Pam Harriman thrown in. All three, except for Gloria, were born into privilege, but fought just as hard for the rich man they all landed as did la Gloria. Margaret outdid them all, however. She bet on a male navy nurse in Florida during the second world war something that even Truman's wild im- agination could not have conceived married him, and reached the top without even having to be nice to the ghastly kind who turned against Capote when he pro- filed them as accurately as he did. The only thing I regret is that Truman and Margaret never met. He would have finished Answered Prayers if they had.
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