I)I A R Y
KEITH WATERHOUSE
The race is on to make Maxwell: the Movie, with at least three contenders at the starting post. My money is on Mike Molloy, former editor-in-chief of the Mirror group, who has a wealth of first-hand Maxwelliana in his television film treatment — for exam- ple, the time Cap'n Bob was reduced to a cowering wreck by the arrival of Mother Teresa and a heavy mob of nuns, hell-bent (if heaven-sent) on relieving him of a mil- lion pounds before they left the office. (He didn't have his cheque-book.) Then there was the highly placed woman executive who accompanied the old rogue on a business trip to Tokyo, where he tried to send her out to buy him a pair of socks. The lady was most indignant. 'Bob, you are paying me many tens of thousands a year for my pro- fessional skills. They do not include sock- buying.' An apparently contrite Cap'n Bob dug into his pocket and produced a brick- thick wad of yen which he pressed upon his offended senior employee. 'My dear, I'm most truly sorry and you must forgive me. Now you've been working very hard and I want you to take the afternoon off and devote yourself to shopping. Buy yourself something very silly.' As the mollified exec- utive made for the door he added, 'And bring me back a pair of socks.' If Molloy's version gets off the ground, I have offered to play a small cameo scene. When Robert Maxwell was trying to persuade me not to transfer my act from the Daily Mirror to the Daily Mail, he asked whether I belonged to the Mirror pension scheme. I told him that as a freelance I had my own arrangements. Sloshing more champagne into my glass, he invited me to outline my private pension plan, listening, as I did so, with the amused tolerance of a rich uncle hearing a favourite young nephew boast of having saved up four and sixpence. At the end of my account he patted me confidentially on the knee, and in a fog-siren purr promised, 'I could enhance that pension scheme, Keith.'
Athough I still count myself as some- thing of a Bollinger Bolshie, or anyway a Moet et Chandon moderate, I was not among the lobster soup quaffers at Labour's £500-a-plate bash at the Park Lane Hotel last week — mainly because inducements like '£25,000 will produce a professional, hard-hitting Party Political Television Broadcast' have unfortunate and inappropriate echoes of 11 will feed this child for a year'. But there is an additional reason for resisting the caring party's beanos and that is the strange corkscrew English of its general secretary's blandish- ments to possible mug punters: 'Following the letter you will have recently received from Jack Cunningham MP, Campaign Co- ordinator, I am writing to confirm whether
you will be joining us at the General Elec- tion Campaign Fundraising Dinner . . . Although places at the dinner are going very fast indeed, I enclose a second Priority Application for you, should you wish to come. . . ' Could you confirm whether you would buy even a tombola ticket from a general secretary who writes like a Reader's Digest mail shot?
Having recently become a two-fax fam- ily, transmitting regularly between London and Brighton, I am naturally now a crash- ing fax bore — don't know how we man- aged without it, such a relief not to be at mercy of Royal Mail, was resistant to it at first but am now complete convert etc. etc. etc. Although faxing is already in widespread use, most of us are still in mys- tified awe of the process, with the result that we feel constrained to be stilted and formal as required by the instruction leaflet which, like all instruction leaflets, is written by zombies from outer space. 'FACSIMI- LE TRANSMISSION' we will type obedi- ently, and then contrive to make even the most intimate of personal letters read like an office memo. It is as if in the the early days of the postal service each billet doux had to be headed 'LETTER' (in case the recipient mistook it for a telegram), fol- lowed by 'NUMBER OF SIDES INCLUD- ING THIS ONE: 2'; 'FROM: A.N. OTHER'; 'TO: HIS ADORABLE WIFE'; 'PLEASE CONTACT THE ABOVE IF ANY PART OF THIS MESSAGE IS GARBLED OR ILLEGIBLE'. I suppose we will get on more familiar terms with the
thing sooner or later, when we may look forward to the fax machine reviving the lost art of correspondence. However, in the present state of facsimile technology, it seems unlikely that a generation from now this journal will be reviewing, say, Volume I of Salman Rushdie's Collected Faxes. Like old soldiers, they fade away.
Ihave been ploughing through one of those guides to politically correct language which are breeding like rabbits on Ameri- can campuses. This one is the Dictionary of Bias-Free Usage by one Rosalie Maggio, holder of the Abigail Award from the Abi- gail Quigley McCarthy Center for Women's Research, Resources and Schol- arship. Well, she would be, wouldn't she? It is ploddingly, if sometimes hilariously, pre- dictable — for Fall of Man read fall of the human race, for fallen woman read some- one who is unfortunate/unlucky/sexually active, and never use the term darkest Africa which is 'Eurocentric, ethnocentric and inaccurate (only 20 per cent of the African continent is wooded savanna)'. Oh, and lady-killer is sexist — 'because there is no equivalent for a woman and because of the use of "lady" '. (Lady is 'generally unac- ceptable'.) But I did like the entry under Montezuma's Revenge: 'When using expressions like this, be aware of how many are male-based. Some of the time use female-based expressions, creative expres- sions of your own, or alternatives: dysen- tery, intestinal flu, travelers' tummy/ scourge...'
Pictures of the Princess of Wales sitting with her back to the Taj Mahal remind me of a friend, a photographer on one of the tabloids, who was discovered relaxing on his hotel balcony in Cairo with his back res- olutely turned against a spectacular view of the Pyramids. When his reporter colleague, evidently an aesthete, remonstrated, 'Why don't you look at the flaming Pyramids, you ignorant berk?' the smudger was adamant. 'If Princess Di's standing in front of 'em, I'll look at 'em. If she ain't, I'm off duty.'
The writer Alan Williams thought he would take his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter to see Guy the Gorilla, so named because he arrived at London Zoo from the French Cameroons on 5 November 1947. He was the biggest attraction at the Zoo for 30 years, until he expired under anaesthetic while being treated for an impacted tooth. He was the only ape ever to make it to the obituary columns of the Times. After a visit to the taxidermist, Guy was transferred to the Natural History Museum where he continued to pull in the crowds, and there, last week, Alan Williams's small daughter expected to find him. No Guy. 'We don't display him any more,' explained a tight-lipped female. Why not? 'We consider it offensive to him.' Why? 'It is demeaning. We don't display personality animals now.' But what about the stuffed lions and tigers? Don't they have personalities? 'They're not personality animals in that demeaning sense.' So the Williams tot had to make do with an ice cream. Political correctitude strikes again.
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