AND ANOTHER THING
All these parties are bound to lead to polygamy in the end
PAUL JOHNSON
This is the week when the party season rises to an ear-splitting climax. Officially, the season begins with the Royal Academy banquet and ends with Goodwood. After that, if you are seen in London you are dead. But one of the delights of old age is that you don't mind being dead. Indeed I would say that the three greatest pleasures of my superannuation are sneaking up to bed early with a good book, attending church and not going to parties. I have gen- teel battles with my wife Marigold over this last one, and of course I lose most of them. So I still do go to some parties, consoling myself with the fact that they provide copy for my meticulously kept diaries, which now go back to the early Seventies (the Sixties in more rudimentary form) and contain tens of millions of words. Parties do not as a rule provide intimate material for diarising, but they supply the panoramic backdrop — 'all those vile bodies', as Evelyn Waugh put it. The Iron Law of Parties is that below a Certain density boredom sets in. Above it, the rough-house begins. Last week, at a big diplomatic garden party, there was no short- age of guests — as a supercilious Oxford academic put it, 'the largest collection of nonentities ever assembled under a single acre of canvas' — but the space was so enor- mous that one found oneself wondering what to do. Watch the queue shuffling for- war. d to shake hands with the ambassador? Tune the precise number of seconds Peter Mandelson took to arrive, march round, find nobody, and leave? The trouble with bore- dom is that it incites one to bad behaviour. I found myself accepting a sort of hamburger fr, eln a passing serving-wench, not liking the look of it, and furtively depositing it in the large, open reticule carried by a large, foreign battle-axe. It was one of those bottomless bags which contain many archae- ological layers of grunge, with the car keys right down at the Pleistocene level. So I thought I would provide the lady with a wel- come snack during her next excavation. By contrast, at the Spectator party, by the t. 1,me I arrived the density was so great as almost to preclude movement. Horseplay and fisticuffs at this annual event are now comparatively rare — Jeff Bernard is no i'2re, most gossip columnists and other low le are no longer invited — but close 1,32°Plnquity and shoving mean that brim- "'thing goblets of wine hurl their contents rough the air. I always advise ladies to wear their oldest dresses at this event. But such counsel was defiantly ignored by the twin Egerias of the paper, Petronella and Kimberly, who were arrayed last week in stunning majesty. Oh, that Cristobal Balen- ciaga had been present to give his sardonic nod of approval!
However, it must be said that untoward incidents, in which people are drenched, insulted, made to cry, receive black eyes or simply fall over, and champagne, tomato juice or, better, blood is spilt, are the ones that get remembered. 'You should have seen the two black footmen carry out Augustus John.' Or, 'You mean to say you weren't there at Sonia's when Anna threw the wine at Jonathan?' Or, 'No, it wasn't her George Brown tried to rape, it was her mother.' The really elaborate, expensive parties, where everything is perfectly arranged and people are too terrified to mis- behave, go straight into the dustbin of histo- ry, as Karl Marx, a keen party-goer himself, would have said. Such was probably the grandest of all parties, the fancy dress ball given by the Duchess of Devonshire for the Diamond Jubilee in 1897. Everyone from the Prince of Wales to Winston Churchill was photographed in full rig, so we know what they all looked like, and a whole book was written about the event. But a woman who was actually there told me, 'Nothing happened. Fancy dress things are always a flop and this was a crasher.' The same was true of the Venice ball of the early Fifties, staged by the Chilean aesthete Charles de Bestegui — all photographs and no fun.
When I lived in Paris, I had for a time a painter's studio just off the Place Clichy in Montmartre — one gigantic room with a gallery and a grand piano, made for parties. Below was a night-club, so the noise and other goings-on didn't matter. I gave a party every Saturday to which an open invi- tation was extended to all the young arty and literary riff-raff of the Left and Right Banks, provided each brought a bottle and a pretty girl. This vie de Boheme made Murger's seem tame, and there were many memorable fights. But when I acquired a resident girlfriend she put a stop to the roisterings. She wanted parties to be planned, organised, by invitation only, just `nice people', as she put it. So civilisation marches on, while the rest of us yawn behind her broad, well-powdered back.
The real difference today is that no open- house host like myself would need to stipu- late, 'Bring a pretty girl.' They are in ample supply. What with Aids knocking people off, the sodomites triumphant in corrupting teenagers, and the creeping fashion for men to drink alone and talk about football, it is the males who are desperately needed. Or so hostesses say. Where are the blokes? Marigold, whose own annual bash took place this week, says, 'None of your unac- companied females.' I have a feeling that this problem is not entirely new. Harold Nicolson, repeating ancient Whig gossip, told me that when the Palmerstons owned the Piccadilly mansion now known as the In and Out, Her Ladyship gave regular routs during the season and never objected to male gatecrashers provided they were sober and properly dressed. And I recall myself, when I was a bachelor, in both London and Paris, being rung up at work at midday by harassed hostesses, who normally would not give me the time of day, begging me to join their over-femaled lunch parties.
Why does it matter to have the sexes equal? I don't see the need to hold dinners with a placement based on the assumption that males and females should always sit next to each other, or parties with the sexes nicely balanced. I don't mind — I actually prefer — entering a room where girls pre- dominate. If I must go to parties at all, I pre- fer the odds to be stacked in my favour. Anyway, that is something all of us will have to get used to, as the years go by. The fact is, women like parties more than men do, and as they now don't mind going out by them- selves, their propensity is bound to change the party equilibrium. Also, there are more women. I don't believe the statistics saying that the number of boys and girls born is roughly equal and always has been. Clearly, a sinister change took place a generation ago and has been deliberately concealed by the machinations of the Gay Lobby, etc. The wails of endless women in their thirties who complain they simply cannot find husbands — or even 'live-in-lovers' — persuades me that, sociological trends notwithstanding, there are now many more young women than young men. It is not for me to say why this biological malfunction occurred, nor am I called on to propose a solution, but I sus- pect it will not be long before some populist politician suggests that we relax the laws against polygamy. The Pope should look into it.
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