Letters
Von and games
Sir: As someone who knew the late Frau Jonna Btllow and her gregarious get-ahead son Claus more years than I care to think of before that alleged 'rascal' chose to join the rich-white-trash and playboy fils-d-papa Jet-set lived within and gossiped about by Your regular contributor, Mr Taki Theodoracopoulos, I was rather surprised to find that well-heeled Levantine Lothario, Jane Fonda's fitness fiend opposite number in the fascising male chauvinist camp, in his admittedly very fair and highly informative review (6 August) of Mr William Wright's odious and prejudiced book about goings-on in Rhode Island still far from docketable as chose jukee, falling into the author's error of awarding Claus the German nobiliary particle 'von'. The latter was perfectly properly used by, amongst others, Count Friedrich Wilhelm, the general who beat Ney at Dennewitz and usefully helped to give Wellington his close- run win at Waterloo, by Karl, the field- marshal who invaded Belgium in 1914 and was than narrowly seen off on the Marne, by the post-Bismarckian chahcellor, Prince Bernhard, and not least of course by Baron Hans, the conductor first husband of Cosima Wagner, née Liszt, whose given name is so suggestively shared by Claus's adorable and adored teenage daughter. But to none of these VIPs is Claus even remotely related. Nobody with any knowledge of Denmark or the Danes, and least of all Claus's distinguished maternal grandfather, himself in his day something of a Danish legal eagle, could ever have considered prefixing the name Billow by those three little Mitty-mythomanic letters. (These had anyway lost what chic they had ever possessed in Copenhagen after the Danes had had to forfeit Schleswig- Holstein to the Prussians, something one would have supposed Claus's avid and tricky mistress Alexandra, herself born yloltke and not von Moltke, to have been ideally fitted to remind him of.) So suburbanly snobbish a social solecism, Which could be dismissed as mere show-off silliness in a man whose undoubted intelligence and ability had on merit earned him before marriage a highly responsible Job with the hard-headed oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, may nevertheless have helped to Make him some of the stuffier enemies Contributing to the judicial, possibly even unconstitutional, error which I, like Taki, have always hoped and expected must be in due course reversed and erased on appeal. Incidentally, the ancient and mediatised family whose pretty-boy tennis coach descendant poor-little-rich-beauty Sunny Crawford first married was of course
Auersperg and not, as twice printed in the review, Auersberg. How would Taki take to being spelt Tacky?
Alastair Forbes
Chateau d'Oex, Switzerland
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