Gift of time
Now back to the rehabilitation. Flying is like bathing — only more so. Those blessed hours when we can ignore the claims of the telephone, the doorbell and the world —• without guilt or recrimination. A free gift of time, almost too good to waste on work and one up on the bath as the books you always wanted to read don't have to get wet. Mind you, this trip I've given in and I'm writing the notebook in mid-Atlantic, up, up and on my way to address, among others, that bastion of American male chauvinism, the Dutch Treat Club — trust the New Yorkers to make a supreme virtue of paying for your lunch on the nail, They've been doing that since 1905 when four writers, four illustrators, two newspaper editors and one publisher chose this way to "facilitate the meeting of kindred spirits" — that is to pass on the trade gossip of the week. The numbers now, run into hundreds but the categories and ratios remain the same — except that publishers seem to have edged out illustrators. Every Tuesday, these literati meet for lunch to be regaled by two turns, an entertainer and a speaker — these categories appearing, tiferefore, mutually exclusive in America.
According to their 1974 yearbook, "this is the combination that makes the post-prandial part of our sessions rewarding to the mind and often to our baser senses." Challenged by this, I began to worry exactly what kind of speech I was expected to make. Even more so, when I remembered that the lunch was to be held in the Regency Hotel, declared by Ladybird Johnson a "national historical monument" on the grounds that Richard Burton and' Elizabeth Taylor spent their honeymoon there. Whether' this appealed to Mrs Johnson's mind or her baser senses, history does not record.
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