All in the past
Talc'
Gstaad
It's been a busy and much too quickly gone-by summer. New sailing boats, the Olympics in Athens, judo and karate seminars, lotsa writing, and not much time left for doing absolutely nothing, which summers used to be all about. Do some of you remember how summers lasted longer back then? When all men seemed to wear Panama hats? At least in places like the French Riviera and Glyfada beach, ten miles east of Athens. It's all in the past now, those boozy, lazy, sun-soaked unending summers, and although I don't really worry about it, the end of August is always sad, even when one is not about to return to boarding school.
When I think back to the terrible depression the imminent return to school brought on, I understand that it was the good times that traumatised me, not the bad. One moment you're 15 years old and pulling girls on the Riviera, the next you're stuck in a bleak boarding school with doubting-your-exploits, pimple-faced schoolboys telling you you've made it all up. It's enough to make one want to spend the rest of one's life with sophisticated, beautiful women on the Riviera.
People are funny about the past. I only remember the good times, even in boarding school. But it's those endless Greek and Riviera summers which stand out. Papa did the paying, Mama did the worrying, and we had all the fun. The memory of crossing the ocean on the Constitution (one great luxury liner) is particularly vivid. Isla Cowan, the truly stunning girl from Texas who loved me but said no. Judy K, the smart as hell but homely girl from New York who thought I was terribly immature but said yes. The daughter of coilboat Olga' (a shipowner) whom I met on the way back who kept changing her mind. (She kept changing boyfriends, but I was too young to realise what was going on.) The first-class passen gers who seemed straight out of F. Scott Fitzgerald. but then to a 15-year-old everyone was straight out of F. Scott.
What the hell. Nostalgia is no big deal, just a way of life for some of us old-timers. The fights in Juan les Pins, over girls of course, the dinners with Lord Hanson at La Bonne Auberge (we were always his guests and the invitation included pink champagne, cigars and even the ride home in a Rolls), the butterflies in the stomach when up early after a terrible loss at the casino the drunken night before. It sounds awfully silly now but, believe you me, it beats hanging out with obscene rappers and monosyllabic American morons on megayachts. As is the case today.
Mind you, selective memory is tricky. Take, for example, something I read in the Daily Telegraph recently: Alexander Waugh's memoir of his family. I don't know Alexander Waugh, having met him only once, when he crashed my Celebration of Communism's Collapse ball at the Savoy. Like most crashers, he never thanked me, but then freeloaders never do. All I know about him is that personal hygiene is not his strong point. In fact, he's very smelly, or so I'm told. In his opus he claims that the Waughs are good feuders. That they are. He also claims that John Pilger was so terrified of my father that he used to blanche at the sound of his name'.
Well, there's something wrong here. If John Pilger, another man I've never met, and one whose political opinions I don't agree with, blanched at the sound of Bron Waugh's name, I'm Monica Lewinsky. If he's anything, Pilger is physically brave, and to say that he was terrified of a pussy like Waugh reminds me of that old Swiss yarn that the Wehrmacht did not attack Switzerland because the finest army ever was scared of the Helvetian peasants. (They would have taken them in three days.) We all see our loved ones through rose-coloured you-know-whats, but facts are facts.
My problem with Auberon Waugh and his buddy Richard Ingrams was their cruelty. When Patrick Hutber, a financial journalist, lay dying in hospital after a car accident, those two individuals made cruel fun of him in print, disregarding his family's feelings as they kept a bedside vigil. Hutber's sin was that he went to work for Jimmy Goldsmith, Waugh's and Ingrams's bete noire. I always believed that Waugh's problem with Jimmy was women. Jimmy got them, Waugh did not. Nor did Ingrams. So they went after him in print, and Jimmy defended himself the only way he could. By sueing the hell out of them and winning a Pyrrhic victory. I still believe that their dislike of Jimmy was mostly envy.
As I said, it's all in the past now, and perhaps I shouldn't bring up old feuds between men long dead, but cruelty is vile, and the Waughs have tempered their great talent with much cruelty. In today's world the cword is one we can all do without.
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