High life
Temporary hitch
Taki
When the mother of my children Comes to town, I turn to culture. It is no good trying to have a grand old time in a night-club with someone who disapproves of a) drinking to excess, b) night-club habitués, c) loose women and d) buying drinks for perfect strangers who befriend drunken suckers like yours truly for just such a purpose.
Depressed as I've been all week by the upcoming victory of the draft-dodger, I thought the Swagger Portrait exhibition might lift my spirits. It wasn't as swaggering as I expected, but still 'The Morning Walk' by Gainsborough, the Boldini and the typi- cal Spectator reader by Tissot did the trick. A couple of weeks ago I ran into Lord Gowrie, a man who has forgotten more than most art experts will ever know. The good lord is optimistic about art in general and what the coming inflation will do to the art market. In fact, I'm looking foward to the Thum und Taxis jewellery sale in Geneva this month. Gloria Thurn und Taxis is the sister of Maya Flick (born Schoenburg) and she has proved herself an able businesswoman since the death of her prince. Big Al Taubman could do worse. Mick Flick, Maya's husband, should buy the lot for her. She's the prettiest girl in Europe and Mick — who looks straight out of central casting as a field-marshal — as nice a very rich man as is possible to find.
But back to the mother of my children. We also looked in at the Turner gallery next door, the wing given to the nation by that most vulgar of shoe salesmen, Charlie Clore. Again, the nation could do worse. Here is, in my not so humble opinion, the greatest of English painters, an Impression- ist 50 years before the word was invented, a genius of beauty, grace and colour, and yet there are those who will pay 11 million big ones for a Jasper Johns.
Mind you, at least Johns puts paint on canvas (just like my little boy, and with worse results) to make a living. Living in Cadogan Square, I pay people of the estate to paint the house I have bought but do not own, and the scaffolding goes up and stays up — for four months with no end in sight. The fix must be on because no four-storey house takes four months not to be finished.
Worse, while playing tennis with Freddy Field, the gentle pro who runs the Cadogan tennis courts, I noticed an enormous satel- lite dish over the north side of the square. We peasants labouring under the Cadogan feudal system are not permitted to install anything that might give us an extra chan- nel or two. I wonder who is fiddling with the TV and why there is a dish for one and not for the rest.
Needless to say, this is a mere bagatelle compared to the fiddling Clinton has done with the great American public's psyche. Here is a man who dodged the draft and has now managed to present his cowardice as moral courage. It needed no courage to resist the war in Vietnam. The leaders of the anti-war movement became instant media darlings and Clinton knew it. A.N. Wilson, the man who denies the divinity of Jesus Christ, wrote that 'almost all decent- minded young Americans resisted the war'. No, A.N., the decent-minded answered the call of their country, the chicken-livered and opportunistic went to Canada and Moscow and are now about to run the good old US of A. I am so disillusioned, I plan to get good and drunk chez William F. Buckley as the results come in on election night, the mother of my children notwith- standing.
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