Feeling pain
Taki
New York
My love for Ashley Judd has gone the way of Iraq. Remember a couple of years ago, when a friend of mine offered to take me backstage to meet her and I got cold feet? I have just read an interview she gave, and I thank God for my cold tootsies. Here’s the beautiful Ashley on life in general and Indian brothels in particular:
I spend time talking about how women’s reproductive health is the nexus of eradicating a lot of inequality ... I’m able to maintain healthy boundaries, to hold space with exploited people with more integrity ... I feel pain about poverty. When I go to a brothel, I feel complete and sometimes homicidal rage. And I am frankly going to die if I am not part of the solution. I will take in all those feelings, and they will eat me alive.
No Ayn Rand she. Mind you, I dig what she says about inequality and poverty and the horror of Indian brothels, but it’s the inarticulate way she says it that has turned me off. Why are young actors so embarrassingly addicted to jargon and so tonguetied? When one is as attractive as Ashley it accentuates the solecisms: hence my ardour going south.
Forty years ago I was dating a ballerina of the New York City Ballet. She was a pretty little thing but highly tuned and very nervous. She hated it when I got drunk and I knew it was not going to last. One night at P.J. Clarke’s a fight broke out at the next table — Clarke’s back then was full of white professional football players and Irish drunks who goaded the former once in their cups, so no one paid too much attention. That’s when Mary stood up and began to scream as if she were being drawn and quartered alive. It was the most embarrassing moment of my life. Surrounded by tough guys, I felt like the world’s greatest nerd. The looks I got confirmed it. So I jumped in pretending to break it up and to my horror she continued to scream and beg the owner to save me. On the way home — Danny the owner never kicked out people who started fights, only bores who started fights — I told Mary she should become a nun somewhere in the Himalayas, where, unlike New York, spirituality was appreciated more than toughness was. Inside the taxi she began to bawl again, and the driver just happened to be a Greek. ‘You no bother, lady, you animal ... ’ he tells me. ‘Scase, pusti,’ I tell him in a language he understood. End of the affair. Years later I ran into Mary, now married to a ballet dancer who looked as if he were in drag although he was wearing a coat and tie, and I began to tell the story and I saw her lips begin to tremble. I ran quicker than the Kuwait ruling family ran when Saddam invaded the place.
I say all this because Ashley, I am told, is very highly strung. Although I sympathise with her concerns, I no longer tolerate nervous women. Not that I ever had a chance with the divine Miss Judd, but, with the bad taste in men so many Hollywood stars exhibit, one never knows. Even the poor little Greek boy might have had a look-in. Never mind. This is a good time to be in the Bagel. I watched the election results with Bill and Pat Buckley, and the great Tom Wolfe in his white-suited splendour. We talked a lot about our friend Conrad Black, and how we all hope he will get a fair trial, although I doubt it. The knives are out for corporate miscreants, and giving a life sentence to a man who is 64, like Bernie Ebbers, who got 45 years, seems to me to be as unfair as life sentences for murderers are in England, where the killer walks in 12. I was also saddened to read that hacks who took Conrad’s gold for ten years or so made unkind remarks about him. It’s par for the course. I for one spoke only very kind words about him to Tom Bower, but the book doesn’t make me sound very friendly to one of the kindest and best proprietors I’ve ever had.
Mind you, when was the last time fairness won out? Borat seems to be minting money over here, but, as John Tierney wrote, it’s very funny but the joke is on the nice Americans who, instead of beating the bum up, thought it nicer to tolerate his bad manners. If someone smashed my merchandise or called my wife ugly, or brought a bag of faeces to the table, I would — if I could manage it, that is — make him eat it. I wouldn’t think it quaint and typical of the yokels of Kazakhstan. Picking on peasants can be amusing as long as the peasants don’t use their pitchforks. I still think one day Sacha Baron Cohen will get his comeuppance, and then the hacks will scream about freedom of expression. To express what? Had Cohen invented a mythical country, most Americans would be none the wiser. I am not on the side of the antidefamation police, but then I’m not a Kazakh. Why didn’t he use a Saudi identity? Because he’d be deader than my romance with the ballerina, that’s why.
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