High life
Blown to bits
Taki
My spies tell me that Big Al is not a bad shot, although recently he did shoot the peacock that was leading out the pheas- ants, which would, in a firing squad sce- nario, be like shooting the officer who gave the command rather than the condemned. Be that as it may, last week things got out of hand. It seems that Jocelyn Stevens, the English Heritage boss, and David Metcalf, a man whose formidable endowment excused him from wearing shorts while in the army, almost came to blows when the former accused the latter of poaching his birds. Now I happen to like both men, therefore I will not take sides, but appar- ently Big Al had to step between them.
What I say is how lucky both gents are not to have been shooting in Spain. There, guns fire away at a 360 degree radius, and by the end of the season not a cheep can be heard. Italy is not much better, except that Italians are worse shots than the Spanish and manage to miss most of their fellow guns. Latins in general view other guns as impediments to satisfying their desires to kill anything that flies, and shoot accord- ingly. No matter how hard Anglo-Saxons try and teach them, their reputation for malevolence survives undiminished.
After the Stevens-Metcalf imbroglio, yet another altercation took place, this one between a lady and the head keeper, but I shall keep this to myself, as I've recently made peace with her. Suffice it to say that guests ain't what they used to be. Mind you, it could be worse, as a recent case in Palm Beach will illustrate. Prince Serge of Yugoslavia is the son of Maria Pia, eldest daughter of the late King Umberto of Italy. Although he carries the Yugoslav title, Serge has come to look very like Michel de Bourbon-Parme, the long- time live-in companion of his mother. Last May, Mollie Wilmot, a hostess with the mostest in Palm Beach, and a lady who was immortalised by the jetset when a Venezuelan tanker went aground in her swimming pool some years ago — Mollie asked the captain to come in for a drink — gave a pre-wedding black-tie bash for Vic- toire de Bourbon-Parme, Michel's daugh- ter. Sometime during the long night, Serge, who is in his early 30s, got into his swim- ming trunks and went swimming. On his way back, he took a tumble and needed 13 stitches on his knee. He has sued for 125,000 greenbacks.
Now I know Serge and like him a lot, but this is no way to treat one's hostess. Serge is a European, but he's acting like the worst of American ambulance chasers by suing. Mollie. She's had more than 500 bashes in her house and no one has ever been injured or sued. If Serge fell, it's sure- ly not her fault. Imagine if our Latin broth- ers sued every time one got peppered, Europe would be like El Lay or Noo Yawk. It is a bad precedent when Euro princes sue Americans. In fact, it's unAmerican.
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