High life
Well placed
Taki
New York
My seven-year-old daughter rang me when I was in London last week and told me in no uncertain terms that if I didn't show up for parents day at her school she would join the Communist Par- ty. Now you might think that whoever is coaching her to say such things would have the good taste to get her to blackmail me in a trendier way — like threatening to become a lesbian, join a feminist move- ment, sell subscriptions to Spare Rib, or call herself a Trotskyite. All this when she grows up, needless to say. But back I did come, and I even manged to win the fathers' 50-yard dash, making my little girl quite proud and me quite ashamed that on my way to the school I had an inkling that I might be required to perform and took time out to stretch and jog a few yards as a warm-up. Little girls are much nicer than boys. My daughter won four first places, two seconds, and one third and all she could talk about was my blue ribbon. 1 only hope that when she grows up she doesn't come home one day with some hirsute Marxist professor. Many beautiful and athletically inclined girls whose grand- fathers have money somehow end up with Marxists; or perhaps it's the other way round.
So, here I am back in the Big Apple but only for a short time. I have just heard a very apt description of Denis Healey right here in the city — and by an Irishman, of all people. 'He's like a sultan,' said my friend Eddie Hayes, 'touching new bottoms every day.' Not that anyone really cares about the election over here. Dudley Moore being back with Susan Anton — the 6ft amazon who apparently does things to him that not even the Sun would print — has been given more exposure than Mrs Thatcher, the First British prime minister I just might fall ter- ribly in love with, and for good. It seems to me that this is the reason the BBC got that old phoney Walter Cronkite to report to the British people about a British election. Until two years ago, Cronkite was the most trusted man in America. Knowing the power of television, it doesn't surprise rne. In 1970, I was with Cronkite covering Nasser's funeral. Well, I was with him along with 500 other hacks. When the body went by he asked me, as I happened to be squashed against him, who the young men following it were. There were two young men, both of them his (Nasser's) sons-in- law. I don't know why — perhaps because I loathe CBS and the television medium so much — but I told him that they were both the dead man's illegitimate sons by one of Farouk's sisters. He had two seconds to think it over. And then ... he repeated it, leaving the illegitimate and Farouk out of it. Three minutes later he got the news from home that the two solitary young men werde not Nasser's sons, so he turned and glare at me and my two Paris Match photographer buddies. 'Don't worry, Walter,' I said to him, 'the information was on a par with what you've been saying about Vietnam.'
Well, if the BBC gets Cronkite to cover a British election, the very least CBS could do is get Nigel Dempster to cover the White House beat. Nigel could do wonders for Nancy, and his stuff would never bore, unlike the Valium Cronkite has been pro- ducing. Speaking about Nigel, I had lunch with him last week, and now that he has become John Aspinall's best friend this will be a regular fixture. Nigel apparently is try- ing to rescue TV-am, and I hope he does. The only thing wrong with TV-am was Anna Ford, and now that she's gone back to the Guardian things should work out. Anyway, I hope so. My own TV morning show on ABC is not the greatest of flops, nor is it a total failure. It's simply dreadful. I tried a feeble joke about a building that charged $3 million for a three-bedroom apartment, saying that the closets were too small to come out from, and the director had me in for a quick lecture. 'You're always going above the audience's head,' he groaned. 'Why are you Europeans always so intellectual?' 1 don't think I have an answer to that.
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