High life
Designing
Takt
New York Just as I was settling down in London, preparing myself for some well deserved fun, the mother of my children telephoned from New York and threatened to go off for the Thanksgiving holiday with the Puerto Rican plumber who installed the lavatories in my New York house. 'Your children need a father, and at least he's useful around the house', was the way she put it. Well, we all know how women exaggerate. There was no Puerto Rican, but the new Chinese cook looked quite shifty-eyed to me. I am now once again playing the role of paterfamilias, and living in extreme comfort in what New Yorkers refer to as a brownstone, which means, with a straightforwardness rare nowadays in the American tongue, a house built from the warm local brown stone.
The new house is just about perfect. It is more English than anything I've seen in England in the last 15 years, but such are the ironies of interior decorators. I got a Levantine man who affects an English accent to decorate my London house and, after charging me almost as much as Victor Lownes used to earn in a year, he made my urban seat look like a bad imitation of a cheap motel in Miami.
Then I hired an Italian homosexual who reeked of garlic and spoke Brooklynese (You wanna boid in da wall, I getcha a boid. I love yer pitchers, I tink dat's an El Greeco.) and he manages to do a house which is not only cosy, warm and in perfect taste, but which also looks as if an absentminded English gent has been living in it. In fact, the Italian almost went too far (You wanna have da carpet ripped as if da dog was here?). So now I have the ideal English house in New York, and an American travelling salesman's dream in London.
I am always sad to leave London and my batchelor existence, especially when I have to go to New York and play the serious family man. This time, before leaving, I made my rounds to say goodbye to a few friends, and I even went to a pub, something I hadn't done in nine years. (Some con man had tried to recruit me as an anti-Hodja agent, and had taken me to some awful pub on the Fulham Road. It finally cost me twenty pounds to get rid of him (twenty pounds that I hope one day Hodja of Albania will return to me in gratitude.) My Boswell, Jeffrey Bernard, took me to meet the governor of the Duke of York, the pub which is conveniently located about 25 yards from the Spectator's offices. Dave and I got along famously, and I plan to start pub-crawling when I return to London. Although everybody goes on about New York's energy and all that, I must say I find it rather dull. First of all I miss the newsagents round the corner from my house in London, where Paul Hines, the only Englishman I know who sports a suntan the year round, has my parcel of five papers ready each morning. New York papers I find dull and terribly sanctimonious. Then there is the problem of imposters. Americans not only accept imposters but actually seem to prefer them. There are more phoneys from Europe around this place than there are skeletons in Mitterrand's cupboard. Most of the phonies are women, and in the rag trade. There is one Italian phoney who works for St Laurent whom I knew in Italy as a Milanese version of Madame Claude. Here in New York, ten years later, she has not only acquired a title, but actually appeared on the cover of Interview magazine as the most virginal thing since the Princess of Wales.
Of course there is also Diane von Furstenberg whose name was not exactly that when she was born, and whose salon here is considered to be the greatest since that of Madame de Stael. (Diane looks at the gossip columns every day, and issues invitations to the people mentioned, then she rings the headquarters of the Gay Liberation Front and invites their kinkiest members.) The main story on my arrival concerned one of the biggest phonies, Bianca Jagger. It seems Bianca is in Nicaragua militating against the United States and threatening to go to the UN and accuse the Reagan administration of undermining the Sandinistas. I say why not. Let the biggest clown perform in the greatest circus.
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