High life
The Suzy streak
Taki
They say that sycophancy is tolerable if it's applied discreetly, but when spread thick in, say, the manner of Suzy (a New York gossip columnist) it becomes nauseating. Although I have little in com- mon with Suzy — except that we both appeared in the Court 13 soap opera of June 1986, where she testified against me — she has been on my mind of late. Since the badly needed invitation to Badminton finally came over the blower, to be exact.
As everyone who has ever hunted a fox knows, Badminton is the great country seat of the Dukes of Beaufort, and as everyone who has ever read Taki knows, the present Duke happens to have the bad luck to be a friend of mine. I say bad luck because, unlike some dukes of Wall Street, English ones don't really care for publicity, which David Beaufort gets every time I'm asked to make an appearance.
The reason for this is simple. One cannot write about high life while living in the two armpits of the western world, the Big Bagel and the Big Olive, as I do, nor can one be expected to record the comings and goings of high-lifers while ensconced in the bowels of night clubs, gambling dens, and not so secret brothels, which The Specta- tor's high life correspondent has been known to inhabit. (Oh, yes, I almost forgot, prisons too.) So, when some of those who've made a fortune by selling the dusty and useless contents of their attics to Sotheby's and Christie's beckon, my high-life reporting instincts react not unlike Jeffrey Bernard's Dionysian ones would were he to stumble upon a 'Drink as much as you can' vodka competition.
Worse, the Suzy streak starts to show, because even a survivor of the Papandreou period could not get away with biting the duke that feeds him, however occasionally. Duchess, actually, for I can think of no nicer hostess than Caroline Beaufort, and certainly no one more understanding to- ward people who suffer from the demon drink, and I speak from experience as I arrived rather drunk and made somewhat of a fool of myself.
Mind you, I only drink when I'm happy, and unfortunately I've been very happy the last two years. What makes me even happier is to sit in a vast drawing-room full of rare books and good friends, look out over a vast property, and know in my heart of hearts that it's not going to cost me one red cent. Ever since I returned Bruern to a grateful American, I find weekends more enjoyable, almost as enjoyable as the lack of telephone calls from certain friends I used to have in the art world.
And speaking of art, Anne Somerset is engaged to the artist Matthew Carr, who was at Badminton for the weekend, as was Marianne Hinton, a friend of ours, who has just published a marvellous story about the human face of socialism and Carr in a New York glossy.
It goes something like this: Carr, whose father the professor has forgotten more things than Lady Warnock will ever know, was living in a garret in Paris and trying to eke out a living by painting the family of Carlos Fuentes, the then Mexican ambas- sador in Paris and Fidel Castro's defendant in prose as Well as in poems. 'I used to have to go to the embassy every day,' says Carr, `and would be met on the top floor by Fuentes' wife, a blonde who was a starlet in Mexico. She decided her eyes hadn't been made big enough in the portrait.' Then one day he discovered the eyes had been crudely made over. He thought he was going mad. In fact it was the blonde who was playing Toulouse-Lautrec.
Things got worse, however, when Fuentes had to give up the embassy for the next Mexican who could spell Madame Claude. When Fidel's friend realised that the portrait of his wife and children was too large to hang in his new abode, he ordered it cut in half. Carr refused, and was told his fee would not be paid. So he cut it, got paid, and stopped painting for several years.
So much for socialist writers and com- passion, and so much for gossip among the toffs of Gloucestershire.
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