When the Man in the White Suit Comes To Call
For those who like to see their name in print, the Hiltons and Kardashians of this world, make sure that when the man in the white suit visits you, you’re the only one he’s dropping in on. In fact, even if the white-suited gent visits you within a day or two of having called upon someone more famous, your goose is cooked. Newspapers, television, radio, and the horrid Internet have become so celebrity-minded, the demise of such nonentities I mentioned above would take precedence over the death of the Pope.
By now some of you may be wondering what I’m talking about. I don’t blame you. Let’s take it from the top. On March 5, 1953, I woke up early and rather nervous. My prep school, Blair Academy, was wrestling against my old prep, Lawrenceville, a school that had kicked me out for being recalcitrant and sneaking off campus at night. I had wrestled for Lawrenceville, and it was imperative for me to beat the school that had treated me—I thought—rather shabbily. During morning classes the news came in that the greatest criminal of all time (Mao’s slaughters had not become known as yet), Joseph Stalin, had croaked that morning in Moscow. I forgot all about the wrestling and spent the rest of the day on gossamer wings. I hated Stalin and the Commies more than the everyday Joe as they had burned my father’s factories to the ground in Athens and had murdered many of our workers. Oh yes, I almost forgot. Blair’s head of music, Mr. Ewing, had recently introduced a Russian composer by the name of Sergei Prokofiev, whose two famous works were Peter and the Wolf and Romeo and Juliet. I thought them crappy because they were atonal, but I actually bought a long-playing album of his called The Love for Three Oranges. Just for the title and the bright oranges on the cover.
Okay, switch to 10 years later and a late-night discussion in a Parisian café, me attacking atonal music and announcing that if I could I would shoot the best of that rotten lot, Sergei Prokofiev. “Shows how little you know about the subject,” harrumphed a chain-smoking frog. “Prokofiev died back in ’53.” And sure enough he had, but even his champion, Mr. Ewing, never heard about it because he died on March 5, 1953. Or take the case of poor Michael Crichton, creator of Jurassic Park and other thrillers, who died much too early in life and on Nov. 4, 2008. No one bothered to read his obituary because they were too busy hailing the first African-American to be elected president. The one case that made me laugh was that of Jeffrey Bernard, a drunk who used to write the Low Life column to my High Life for the London Spectator. Bernard was such an infamous boozer that a play based on him starring Peter O’Toole ran in London’s West End for years. Bernard, who had cancer, liver disease, and severe diabetes, and who suffered from acute alcoholism, planned his departure from this world like a general. He personally told me that he would have the plug pulled on a Friday evening, too late for the Saturday papers, leaving it to the numerous British Sundays to write about him at length. He told me this when I went to say goodbye to him during the last week of his life. Trouble is, the previous weekend a certain blond woman by the name of Diana, accompanied by a ridiculous towelhead by the name of Dodi Fayed, crashed and was killed in a Parisian underpass. Not a word about poor Jeffrey’s death appeared anywhere, and I only heard about it when I next visited The Spectator a month later.
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