High life
Hackette job
Taki
Charles Benson is a very large, pink man who would have been my fag had I gone to Eton. He loves free food and drink more than life itself, and last week he gave his annual blinner for his birthday. Free dinners are known as blinners at Aspinall's, and the expression derives from house Players — as there used to be — known as blues.
I sat next to the divine Miss Rigg, now appearing at Wyndhams as Medea, and what a Medea she is. It all goes to show how great my ancestors were: after 2,400 years Medea is still a hit, but it owes as much to Diana Rigg as it does to Euripi-
des. After the feast, because that's what it was, Benson and I went gambling (success- fully) and wenching (disastrously), and at the break of dawn we decided to join Alco- holics Eponymous, as both of us are rather proud of our ability to drink like Cossacks.
Mind you, I had had an early start. At the party for William Cash's book about being educated in Hollywood, I had run into Nicola Formby, who played the Princess of Wales in the greatest produc- tion since Hamlet. Nicola was in the com- pany of a certain Simon Seethrough MonteCarlo, who was wearing a Soviet uni- form of sorts, surely in order to tell us something. What a pity the Soviets have collapsed. Otherwise I could have whacked him one in order to see how brave Monte- Carlo really is.
But the good thing about the Cash party was the author's sister. And his father, now my choice for Tory Prime Minister, and his mother, a beauty. As I plan to become the author's brother-in-law as soon as I have a face-lift, I was on my best behaviour, but the trouble is one drink starts one off on the wrong foot.
What surprised me was the rather hostile reaction to a very funny and well-written Opus about today's Hollywood. In my not so humble opinion, young William Cash — he's only 23, for God's sake — is being attacked because of his father's politics. Seedy hacks are envious and secretly very left-wing, and when someone leaves them- selves open like young Cash, they try and kick them to death.
I should know. Ever since the greatest book on imprisonment came out a couple Of years ago, I have had to give a few inter- views set up by the publisher. The ones by women were bad. First of all, female hacks are usually ugly, and hell hath no fury like an ugly hackette. I also do not help by advertising my right-wing views and telling feminists to go and reproduce themselves.
The latest interview of the greatest Greek writer since Euripe-dese-trousers- you-will-have-to-pay-for-them was by one Zoe Heller, for the Not-so-Independent- from-the-root-of-all-envy on Sunday. Heller got a few facts wrong. For example: the Spelling of my name, my age, my wife's name, the year my father died, the year I had my heart attack and my great-uncle's name, plus the fact that Greece never won the Davis Cup — although we did beat Ire- land in 1963 and Chile in '67.
Heller also described the wrong bath- room, and said I bark orders to my staff. She sounded shocked that I had three peo- ple waiting on me. But I believe in full employment, and it's better to work for Taki than to be on welfare. Last but not least, she describes National Review as grotesquely conservative — this coming from a woman who writes for Vanity Fair, a magazine so deeply imbedded in celebri- ties' backsides one needs a deep-sea diver's suit in order to purchase it. Otherwise, everything was fine.
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