TOYS FOR PLAYBOYS
Martin Vander Weyer on what the man of the world can get for just
£286,725
I KNOW several small boys who could identify the marques of passing sports cars long before they could read or write their own names, and one mother who worried that her toddler son started pretending to shoot people even before anyone had shown him a plastic gun. Deep in the male psyche there is a lifelong passion for loud, metallic, go-faster, life-threatening toys. For obvious psychosexual reasons, most of them turn out to be elongated, tubular, powered from the blunt end and explosive in the wrong hands, or even the right ones. Is this something to be ashamed of? Quite possibly. If I confess straight away to owning a British racing green MGF with a throaty engine-throb and a bright red, Swedish-made, petrol-powered hedge-cut- ter with a massive 29-inch blade for maxi- mum foliage penetration, I suspect you'll begin to see where I'm going with this anal- ysis. If I were richer, I would probably own several more of these objects of desire. If I was very rich indeed, my life would be full of long, hard, growly, pointy things, and all the paraphernalia that goes with them. Take boats, for instance. Only a Greek billionaire who had passed his 89th birth- day — such as John Latsis — could seri- ously want to own the staid 400-foot converted ferry Alexander, on which the Prince of Wales and Mrs Parker Bowles enjoyed their controversial summer cruise; but even that floating retirement home had plenty of speedboats and jet-skis aboard to give the party oomph. For the plutocrat still in his prime, all that is required is 70 or 80 foot of wake-churning, bow-lifting power: possibly a Bangkok- built, Austrian-designed Ladenstein motor-cruiser with curved deep-leather sofas, mirrored stateroom and whirlpool bath (yours for about £1 million); or, for shorter outings, a totally erectile Wellcraft MerCruiser two-seater powerboat. ('Its helm is white,' says the blurb. 'That way it matches your knuckles.') Those with slight- ly less money and more taste might go for a reconditioned, classic, teak-built 60 mph
Riva speedboat, available from Riva Revival (UK) Ltd at (rather improbably) Llanwrda in deepest Wales.
As for sailing boats, the rule of thumb is that price rises exponentially with length: half a million will buy you something respectable in the 50- to 60-foot range, but extending the length overall means multiplying the price outrageously: David East, yachtbrokers of Woodbridge, Suf- folk, are offering the elegant, aluminium- built, cutter-rigged 95-foot Camelia with three staterooms and quarters for a crew of four — now lying in the western Med at a bargain $4.45 million. And just think of all the extra toys you will need to complete the package: not just the satel- lite navigation kit but the Bloomberg screen and the Internet link, so you can carry on trading pork-belly futures in Chicago online; the Porsche £5,000 sports bicycle for exercise ashore; the clay- pigeon release so you can give your made- to-measure matched pair an airing off the stern; the Breitling 'Emergency' chrono- graph (that's a posh word for wristwatch) with 'built-in microtransmitter' as worn by non-stop round-the-world balloonists, or possibly the Chopard 'Mille Miglia' model, with tachometer and 'rubber strap with Dunlop racing tyre design'.
You'll need the right kind of car to get you to the boat, of course. Alan Clark types may go for a 1929 Le Mans-winning 6.5 litre Bentley, at a quarter of a million plus. For the rich who are less handy with a span- ner, the ultimate roadster is still the fiery 'I always come here after shopping to take the weight off my feet.' red Ferrari — though Eric Clapton, whom I once encountered ordering a new one at the factory in Marinello, having written off his previous one, preferred them black. A mil- lionaire I know has three red ones and exer- cises them like racehorses at dawn, before the local constabulary are out of bed. James Cagney's old 1957 Ferrari California Spyder recently went at auction for £286,725, but a supremely sought-after 1962 250GTO in show condition could set you back £2 mil- lion — worth every penny no doubt, if that's your bag, for the operatic exhaust roar as you open the throttle on the Autoroute du Soleil.
Or perhaps you prefer to fly. A second- hand Learjet 25B with 10,000 hours on the clock and a nice patina to its cappuccino leather upholstery can be had (from a deal- er in Dallas) for $995,000: to make the most of it you'll need a team of pilots and Dallas-style stewardesses. You could have fun designing the uniforms, but the more rugged, lower-budget flyer may do better out of a quick trip to North Weald Airfield in Essex to secure an ex-Royal Navy single- seater Hawker Hunter in camouflage drab, a snip at £45,000.
If you really can't stretch to any of these image-boosting super-luxuries, you can cer-
tainly still afford a replica Dirty Harry Mag-
num .44 air pistol at only £170 — the perfect answer when a big blonde finally asks you, 'Is that a gun in your pocket...?'
And if you can scrape together £7,000 or so, you can afford to be a born-again biker.
A high-powered motorcycle provides all the characteristics of the essential male toy — noise, thrust, danger, oily bits — plus a unique opportunity to dress up in buttock- hugging leatherware. Every weekend our country roads are plagued by them, not rid- den by Hell's Angels and tearaways but by fortysomething building-society managers giving vent to their innermost urges.
Adverts for 'the most powerful production motorcycle in the world', the Suzuki GSX1300R Hayabusa, support my thesis perfectly: almost subliminally, on the hill- side behind the surging red bike, is the out- line of the Cerne Giant, that prehistoric chalk figure with his huge knobbly club and rampant phallus.
Ancient or modern, young or old, rich or not so rich, it all seems to be about the same thing. But at least the very rich have more choices as to how to express their masculinity. And not all of those choices involve shiny machinery: you might prefer to own a thoroughbred stud farm or a polo team, for instance. But, given the nature of the anxiety for which this is the therapy, it may not be ideal to install a bunkhouse full of high-goal Argentinians within striking distance of your trophy wife. It may be bet- ter to spend the money on a good psycho- analyst and a discreet plastic surgeon.
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