DIARY
BARRY HUMPHRIES MNew York y friend Taki, who so generously reviewed the opening night of Dame Edna on Broadway, nevertheless missed a good story. During the intermission, two male friends of mine — Harry, an extremely cor- rect architect from San Francisco, and Stanley, a manganese magnate from Mexi- co — were importuned in the bar by a raven-haired and immaculately frocked young woman. Did they know, she inquired, if there was to be a big party after the show, and might she accompany them thither? My friends pointed out that there was indeed to be a celebration — or a wake — but attendance was strictly by invitation. 'Even for Monica?' she wheedled winsome- ly, fluttering, one imagines, lashes. The guardians of my exclusivity repulsed her politely and returned to their seats without the penny dropping. Only much later that night did we learn that the notorious and sultry intern had indeed been in the audi- ence, and that The Spectator's social colum- nist had missed a scoop!
The chipmunk face of Hillary seems to be peeking out everywhere. Her campaign button says 'She listens — She cares'. Is this stage one in the Ednafication of America? After several months in New York, London seems increasingly remote and mythical. The hunting of foxes is shrilly deplored, but the accepted blood sport is people, espe- cially upstart wogs and randy parvenus of dubious pedigree. Both Mohamed Al Fayed and Jeffrey Archer, whatever their follies and misdemeanours, seem to have become the most popular Aunt Sallies in living memory, and the howling mob of hypocrites who pursue them is audible across the Atlantic. It reminds me of my Melbourne school, a miniature replica of an English public school, where the two most brutally persecuted boys were an Arab kid with a touch of folic de grandeur and a scholarship boy from the wrong side of the tracks who told a few whoppers and got found out. As the sole backer of my last London show Archer was rock-solid and honourable to a fault. The prigs who attack him should bear in mind that we all, to some extent, reinvent ourselves. Jeffrey has just gone to a bit more trouble.
But who was the mysterious man who stood on Victoria Station with a brawn envelope stuffed with readies? Could it perhaps have been Neil Hamilton? Was it really a brown envelope, or a discreet gold- and-olive Harrods bag? Is there some link between all these melodramatic events; a Chestertonian network of misdeeds con- trolled by some evil genius, some magus liv-
ing in All Souls? Did the recently asphyxi- ated banker, Mr Safra, ever stay at the Ritz, or take tea and crumpets in Lord Archer's penthouse? Who is the real culprit? It is seductive to blame the Russian Mob, which everyone seems determined to believe in, as we believed in those alligators in the sewers of New York. Did Prince Philip shoot President Kennedy? Will we ever know the answer to these mysteries? Cer- tainly not in this millennium. Meanwhile, the real people who take lots of cash for questions are, of course, all those QCs. The failure of America's $165 million Mars- mobile has been attributed here to 'human error'. But why human error? Why not alien error? There could be Martians the size of a virus bitterly opposed to ugly bits of machinery impertinently scratching away at their landscape, and you can hardly blame them for doing something about it.
I'm living in a wonderful building over- looking the East River and Roosevelt Island, on which stand the romantic ruins of a lunatic asylum. On the horizon are LaGuardia and Kennedy airports, and I can see the Qantas jumbos landing after their long haul from the Land of the Hot Christ- mas. Dear, distant homeland, probably the only country in the world outside Iran whose intelligentsia live abroad. To the right of my vista is the imposing ziggurat of River House, where Lilian Gish and Ethel Merman once lived, and where now resides Henry Kissinger. Through my powerful Zeiss binoculars, from which no illuminat- ed apartment window withholds its rosy secrets, I can watch the former secretary of state flossing, and much else. My building is
among the few on the East Side which accepts tenants with dogs, so that it resem- bles a high-rise kennel, a Crufts in the sky. The lifts are crowded with Pomeranians, Labradors, chihuahuas, standard poodles, Yorkshire terriers, Afghan hounds, dachsunds, pugs and Rottweilers, all clean- er and better groomed than their shifty and anoraked owners. The other day a friend's cocker spaniel died, and he experienced extraordinary difficulty in arranging for its dignified committal. His vet was on holiday, the building supervisors unhelpful, so because of the prevailing heatwave he decided to place the body in a suitcase and take it to the park himself for surreptitious burial. However, while hailing a cab on the corner of East 54th Street and First Avenue, a black man leapt from the shad- ows, seized the suitcase, and made off with it into the night, deftly solving his problem.
One of my favourite films is Garbo's As You Desire Me, of 1932, based on the Pirandello play about a Hungarian cabaret singer. I first saw this film when I was very young, and never quite understood why it exerted such a potent appeal, but I am slowly coming to terms with my Hungarian origins and I always feel strangely at home in Budapest. My genealogical divining rod twitches most suggestively over the Carpathian Basin, and while my paternal ancestry is traceably English — northern English — there are mysteries on my moth- er's side: dark eyes and hair, sallow com- plexions, labile emotions. I attribute my psychic powers and passion for music to these shadowy antecedents, and the trail leads to Central Europe. More and more do I now find myself strolling in what remains of New York's Little Hungary; a few paprika shops and goulash bars in the Upper East 80s. I have found an establish- ment called the Blue Danube, more an out- let than a shop, which obtains for me, after long delays, recordings by the throaty- voiced Katalin Karady. It is said that when von Sternberg was directing The Blue Angel, he exhorted Dietrich to 'sing like Karady!' Even when I'm in Sydney, I frequent the Cosmopolitan, a Hungarian cafe, from which Sydney Harbour resembles a shark- infested Lake Balaton.
Alot of English people are in New York to do their Christmas shopping. I was skulking in Emporio Armani on Madison Avenue yesterday and spotted the satur- nine figure of Peter Mandelson cruising the haberdashery. 'I'm English size 15 and a half,' he declared to a suitably impressed salesperson. We presume he was referring to his collar size.
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