DIARY
FRANK JOHNSON Isuppose some readers will think that the only reason I have advertised, on this week's cover, Jennifer Paterson's Spectator cookery column is because television has suddenly made her one of the most famous people in the country. If readers think that I would do that kind of thing, they are cor- rect. Miss Paterson has just completed, with the equally authoritative Miss Clarissa Dickson Wright, Two Fat Ladies. It sound- ed rather impertinently entitled to me. But it was clearly the most original cookery series in television history. Apparently another series is planned. I just thought that not all viewers might know that Miss Paterson's incomparable way with both food and food writing is regularly on dis- play in this magazine. She has, for an addi- tional reason, a unique place in the maga- zine's history. When — as I did The Specta- tor a year ago — people join something new to them, whether a magazine, a regi- ment, a club or a family, they invariably become gradually aware of some 'incident' in that institution's past of which the new- comer is only told reluctantly. Miss Pater- son is our incident. She used to cook for our weekly lunches. As I understood it although the magazine's staff were loth to speak whenever I asked about it — one week, before lunch, she threw much of the crockery out of the rear window of the top- floor kitchen. She was annoyed that some people from the advertising department had left the crockery untidy. The then edi- tor, Mr Charles Moore, dismissed her, on the somewhat petit-bourgeois grounds that you can't have people throwing crockery out of windows. That sounds the kind of remark that magistrates make. Perhaps, as magistrates do on these occasions, Mr Moore added: 'What if we all did it?' I was of course entirely on Miss Paterson's side. I often throw whole articles out of the win- dow. This week I asked around the build- ing, what then happened? I am relieved that she retains her Spectator connection, but how did she do so, having been dis- missed? 'Well, er, she just came back,' a survivor of the period cautiously told me. But when she just came back, what did Charles Moore do? I inquired. 'I don't quite know,' was the reply. 'I think he gave her a column.'
Anews report from Hollywood this week, under the headline 'Jack Nicholson Beat Me Up, Says Prostitute', had a last paragraph reading: 'Nicholson is already under police investigation after being accused of hitting a dinner guest and rup- turing her silicone breast implants.' It was one of those paragraphs which should be put in the 'The Way We Live Now' file; felicitously conjoining, as it did, two of the most modish concerns of our age: male vio- lence against women and artificially created beauty. But many of us would like to have been told more about that very modem dinner party. What occasioned Mr Nichol- son's onslaught on those implanted breasts? Had the lady victim provoked the attack by tugging out Mr Nicholson's hair transplant? Had Mr Nicholson tried to intervene when the lady punched another male guest in the liposuctioned stomach? Had the whole scene been started by an argument as to whether Ralph Nader or Vice-President Gore had done more for the Brazilian rainforests? Or were the guests quarrelling about which of them, as children, had most been subjected to sexual abuse by their fathers, mothers or grand- mothers? Or was there nothing fashionable or politically correct about the occasion at all, and they were just rowing over whether Jack Nicholson was, as he claimed, related to our own Sir Harold Nicolson (different spelling, though)? After all, both are asso- ciated with the arts. Why do not our news- papers these days give all the facts? Spending last weekend in Paris, I passed the Comedie Francaise. The colonnaded building, dignified but not pompous; the location, in a square which, unlike Hauss- mann's grands. boulevards, does not quickly tire the eye; the welcoming old bookshop, and true Parisian café opposite — this is how a national theatre should be, I thought. Then, coming off the Eurostar at Waterloo on Sunday evening, ours could be gazed on. The approach to it was a subter- ranean stone wilderness of puddles, lager cans, skateboarders and graffiti — tramps of both sexes warming themselves at a fire made from a mattress. The theatre itself was two large concrete slabs in the moon- light, bigger versions of the kind normally good for balancing very high cranes. The soul was filled with national shame, then a desire to blame someone. I blamed France. Le Corbusier, father of the breeze-block school, may have been Swiss, but he took off from Paris, and those 'seminal' flats of his (1945-50) are in Marseilles, though his grim hand reached everywhere. Paris was not bombed; otherwise, because of the world-wide influence of architects such as Le Corbusier, the present Comedie Frangaise would have been rebuilt postwar as a concrete lozenge. As it is, when they do have an empty space, Paris puts some- thing depressing in it (La Defense, for instance). Just as I am glad that London fought on, I am glad, for different reasons, that Paris surrendered without a fight. But it is an example of history's unexpectedness that London was the city more damaged.
Since writing that first item about Miss Paterson, I have been entertained to dinner by Mr and Mrs Charles Moore, so I have had a chance to ask Mr Moore himself about The Incident. His recollection is that he had already given her a column before the crockery left the window. If so — and I hope he is not simply being The Incident's revisionist historian — his dismissal of her was as foolhardy or brave, depending on your point of view, as Truman's of MacArthur, or of that British officer who just after the war sacked Adenauer as mayor of Cologne. How was he to know that Adenauer, like Miss Paterson, would become a star? Mr Moore also supplied me with an eye-witness account of the crisis. It is the stuff of which reliable historiography is made. He and Miss Paterson went to recover the defenestrated crockery from our garden, but they could not find it there. Apparently, it had landed in the garden of the people next door: the National Associa- tion of Funeral Directors. Thank God it could therefore only have hit someone whose job requires a sense of humour.
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