High life
Unreliable evidence
Taki
Imet Woodrow Wyatt only once, in the ladies room at Orly airport. Rocco Forte had flown a planeful of swells to Paris for the Arc, and, after a brilliant afternoon of racing and boozing, we were driven to Orly where we waited for the rest of the troops. On my way to the men's room I noticed a long line queuing patiently. 'What's hap- pening?' I asked no one in particular. 'Oh nothing. Woodrow is having a rather long pee,' came the reply. 'But he's 100 years old, he might be in there for days,' said yours truly rather loudly. I then crossed over to the ladies room which fortunately was empty.
While washing my hands like a good lit- tle boy, Woodrow Wyatt walked in and came up to me. 'Are you Taaaaki?' he asked in the most affected accent I had ever heard in my long life. 'Yes, siree, that's who ah am,' I answered in my best Texas delivery. He said nothing, turned his back and walked out. He had obviously heard my crack. I never saw him again. When his memoirs were published last year I found a howler concerning my person, but did nothing about it out of deference to Petronella's feelings. No longer. Everyone, including our charming deputy editor, has commented on them.
It has to do with Princess Pushy, Mickey Suffolk, Badminton and the poor little little Greek boy. If memory serves, Woodrow wrote that the Kent woman had com- plained to him just before the Badminton ball, on the occasion of Anne Somerset's wedding, how she was dreading dinner at the Suffolks because 'that horrible Taki would be there'. (She asked to come to din- ner, and, typically, then asked who would be there.) Not to worry, said Woodrow, I'll tell Mickey to tell the Greek to keep his mouth shut and not to write a word — or something to that effect, as I don't have the extract in front of me.
Well, for reasons known only to Mickey and me, Woodrow was showing off. Lord Wyatt, as he was not in 1987 when all this took place, was — how should I say.it? not obsequious, but definitely respectful in the presence of the Earl of Suffolk and Berkshire. In other words, Wyatt did not go around telling Suffolk what to do. Need- less to say, he did not mention a word about the greatest Greek writer since Homer, and in a way it's a pity he didn't. If he had, I would have come down even harder on the Austro-Australian woman than I normally do.
Mind you, Paul Johnson tells me Woodrow was a very good guy, and if Paul says it it's good enough for me. Diarists are notorious makers-up. It is in the nature of the beast. Paul Johnson once wrote an essay about keeping a diary. 'It is the author's assumption that we shall be inter- ested in what he has to tell about himself. The ingredients that justify the vanity implicit in such exposures are candour and innocence. Most unpublished diaries con- tain such elements, simply because they were written without plans for publication in the first place.'
This is obviously not the case with Lord Wyatt's diaries. Ergo, they are unreliable, kept with future publication in mind. But they're harmless and amusing, which is a hell of a lot better than the malicious false- hoods we read in the Murdoch press nowa- days. I began keeping a diary while doing porridge, and have continued to this day. The trouble is that when one is going through as intense an experience as prison one tends to think that the intensity will remain even after one is free. Not so. If
you want to remember old wounds, you must get all the details down, especially the passion. Otherwise the diary will read like cold potatoes.
Let's see. Coming up is the busiest week of the year, socially, that is. The trouble is I'm planning to get soused every night, which makes it impossible to get it down while it's fresh. The next day I usually remember nothing, a slight handicap for a Greek Saint-Simon. The fun begins with Dixon Boardman's bash on Tuesday for New York's prettiest girls, followed by the Durand-Rizk ball at the Knickerbocker club for the Bagel's chicest 200, then the Valentino shindig — the best food, the best wine, the best host — and rounding off the week a surprise party for a friend of mine who recently inherited millions, and whose only claim to fame is that he once shook the hand of a man who shook the hand of the chauffeur of Robert De Niro.
Previous page
