High life
Windy city wind-bag
Taki
Chicago The Oprah Winfrey show is the most popular daytime television show in the good old USA, which means it is watched by tens of millions of people who — I assume — are both illiterate as well as terribly concerned with such weighty mat- ters as day-care centres for one-armed Navajo Indian single mothers.
The reason Oprah is a favourite of mine is simple. Until she came along, Phil Donahue, the dumbest man I have ever had the bad luck to cross swords with, was king of daytime TV. No longer. Last week I flew to Chicago and appeared on Oprah's show for the second time in three years, the subject being older men who prefer younger women. My friend Chuck Pfeiffer and I were lucky to get out of the studio alive and sound of limb.
But before I give you the gory details, a brief resume of my American television career is in order. It all began long ago when I wrote an anti-feminist tract in the American Spectator entitled 'American Women are Lousy Lovers'. Needless to say, it had nothing whatsoever to do with the sexual act, but simply poked fun at today's feminists who see everything in terms of conquest. Just as needless to say, television producers were bound to jump at the title without ever bothering to read the contents.
Sure enough, the Donahue show flew me first class all the way from Athens to Chicago, where I managed a draw with his female audience, but showed him up as the ignoramus and wimp that he is. Three months later I went on the Oprah show, and that turned out to be great fun. Oprah is intelligent, and when I told her my ideal woman was the proverbial whore in the bedroom, cook in the kitchen, and lady in the drawing room, she and some other black girls in the audience began cheering.
Last week, yet again, only three mem- bers of the black race sided with Pfeiffer and myself. When Oprah asked Chuck and me why we preferred younger women, I chickened out and said that younger women were more likely to put up with silly pursuits such as night-clubbing and heavy drinking, whereas older women, being more mature, would never put up with it.
The mostly female audience seemed to like that, but then Captain Pfeiffer got into action, and we were suddenly rather un- popular. 'Only a blind man would prefer an older woman,' bellowed the good cap- tain, and the hissing drowned out the rest of his philippic. To make matters worse, three black men stood up and agreed with us, and managed to get us into trouble through association by explaining that their preference for younger women was based on older women. . . smelling bad.
While dodging rotten vegetables I tried my best to recover some ground by evok- ing the Don Giovanni syndrome, of men thinking they'll find happiness through variety, but it was too late. We were good-naturedly booed off the stage, and probably off television forever. Which was the first good news of the day.
But more was still to come. Christopher Gilmour is a good friend of mine, an Englishman who lives and works in what is definitely the most beautiful, cleanest and best-run big city in America. Christopher immediately planned the rest of our day — and night — and it made all the booing worthwhile. Christopher knows the right spots in Chicago as well as, say, Liz Taylor knows the good hairdressers of this world. I don't think I've met a nicer bunch of people than his friends, or had a better time since Tuscany.
The three nightclubs he took us to make anything Noo York — with the exception of Nell's — has to offer seem like a Beirut dive when compared to Annabel's. Chica- go itself is a warm and hospitable city, with the beautiful modern buildings fitting in comfortably with the old, a romantic mod- ernism of sorts. Plus the trains run on time. But it was the realisation that people are truly nice the moment one leaves the ghastly Big Bagel that made the trip worthwhile, something I had always sus- pected. America without New York and Los Angeles would be a far greater country than it already is.
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