Beautiful People: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints (30 page)

Sparks fly out of the mishigas meter. It is smoking.

“Meeting new people is really wonderful,” I muse as I toast myself a crumpet. “New friends can have a transformative effect on one’s life. Why, when I met Jonny, I found out that I was middle-aged. And now, whaddya know, Granny meets me and she finds out that Jonny is a fagele.”

*  *  *

Granny emerges from her room some time after lunch, at which point I decide to go on the offensive.

“What a fabulous suit you are wearing!” I exclaim, referring to the cobalt blue St. John knit with the gleaming gold buttons.

“Black people love my clothing,” says Granny, caressing a large Chanel earring and shifting from one Ferragamo heel to the other. “They love color. I love color. The women in my building don’t appreciate it. They are boring. I have nothing in common with them. You see (beat), I was married to a judge.”

Granny’s deadpan declamatory delivery is not only hilarious but also highly informative. All has been revealed. Combining what Jonny has told me with what I have just heard, I now understand who Granny is.

Granny came to America nearly a hundred years ago. She bought nice clothes. She aspired up, not down. She discovered
the power of accessories. Out of all the people in the house, Granny and I have the most in common. She is a superannuated female version of me, a feisty first-generation immigrant who enjoys dressing up and has clawed her way to the middle without really knowing why.

Granny and I bond, effortlessly.

“Can I see your bracelet?” I ask, after my eye is drawn to the rope of gold on her right wrist.

“Tiffany’s. It’s my Roy Cohn bracelet. My husband bought it for me after he won a big case against Cohn.”

After discussing all her jewelry, we embark on an enthusiastic rant about how generally more fabulous we are than anyone else in the Western Hemisphere. We are now a “we.” Everything is about how incredibly great and special we are and how pedestrian/uninteresting/unstylish the rest of humanity is.

We get quite carried away with ourselves. We become quite obnoxious, Granny and I. And why not?

We are the Beautiful People, and we know it.

*  *  *

Jonny and I drive Granny back to Philadelphia.

After being in the car for about twenty minutes, Granny and I begin to calm down. We have finally run out of self-congratulatory steam. Granny becomes a little contemplative. She takes a long look at me and my Jonny. The realization that we are a happy couple is starting to sink in.

“I always thought that when I reached old age I would sit in a rocking chair and stare into the middle distance like Whistler’s mother . . . ” She pauses and touches the side of her
wig with a cupped hand. “But you know what? Nothing changes. The mishigas just keeps on coming.”

We take Granny up to her chicly decorated apartment. In the hallways we meet some of her coresidents.

None of them are as fab as Granny.

T
HE FLOOR PILLOW

In 1977, the year of the Queen’s silver jubilee, an overweight punk-rock friend pogoed onto the floor pillow, causing it to explode and fill our home with crumbling Styrofoam nuggets. Biddie and I dragged the half-empty sack out to the nearest bus stop and left it waiting poignantly in the rain.

In what can only be described as a coincidence of gargantuan proportions, Jonathan Adler, my Jonny, the love of my life, now designs and manufactures, along with his ceramics, gorgeous squishy floor pillows. Maybe I’m biased, but his floor pillows seem so much nicer than the one Biddie and I dragged around London for so many years.

J
AMES
B
IDDLECOMBE

I’m happy to report that the incredible and talented Biddie has outlived the floor pillow. He continues to perform, delighting audiences from Stepney to Ibiza. He even has his own website—
www.biddie.co.uk
. As I write he is illuminating the pantomime
season at the Malvern Festival Theatre and wowing the audience with his interpretation of a character called Widow Twanky in
Aladdin.
“She’s a very lanky Twanky who doesn’t hold with hanky panky!!” Despite our advancing years, we continue to call each other “daughter!” He continues to insult me about my lack of height. He recently sent me a bogus circus-midget application form with a sequin glued to the outside of the envelope. I was quite taken in. I should have smelled a rat when I got to the bit where I was asked to specify my “height (above sawdust).”

T
ERRY
D
OONAN

My dad outlived Betty by seven years. He missed her horribly and assuaged his pain by prominently displaying a pair of her high-heeled lace-up ankle boots on his mantelpiece to remind him of the good times.

S
HELAGH
D
OONAN

My gay sister remains happily married to a lady called Anna, who is a leading light in the South London belly-dancing community. They have a gorgeous daughter called Tanya, who is much smarter and taller than I was at her age.

Upon reading the “Gifts” chapter, Shelagh wrote to me with her reactions. Here is an excerpt from her letter:

How did we both turn out queer? Who knows! Like you, I was simply trying to make sense of who I was.
Loved everything you wrote with the notable exception of your depiction of me in the 1980s: it was an incredible time of personal and political ferment: nuclear weapons, exhausting experiments in non-monogamy, excitement and subversiveness in discos with names like
Daisies
and
Rackets!
It was all very different from the Slag/Shelagh who emerges in your pages—earnest, grumpy and a bit dowdy, like the dykes who (rarely) appear in
Will & Grace.

Your loving sister XXX

*  *  *

In her letter she also accuses me of deliberately characterizing lesbians as stylistically challenged, fanny-pack-toting drears in order to create a foil for my own spotlight-grabbing persona.

Naturally, there is not one iota of truth in these outrageous and totally unfounded accusations. I am chalking her feelings up to gay sibling rivalry.

M
Y VERY FIRST DECORATIVE ACCESSORY

In 2000 I was clearing out my parents’ attic when I stumbled upon my first great love, that red glass decanter. I dragged it back to New York, where it sits proudly on my desk, a testament to my congenital affinity for camp and exotica.

M
Y FELLOW COLLEGE VERMIN

Joy stopped drinking astringent and had three kids. Sadly, Rose died in 2001, leaving a gorgeous daughter called Eleanor,
who so far shows no signs of wanting to make cottage cheese in her panty hose.

U
NCLE
K
EN

Though fraught with problems, Ken’s marriage to Pat endured. They remained together for the rest of his tormented and difficult life, proving the old adage that there is indeed
someone for everyone.

Ken has long since departed for that great floor pillow in the sky, where I hope, God has seen fit to restore his sanity. I would like to think that he now spends his days lounging about, rolling his own cigarettes, and discussing my inclination to write confessional books with Terry, Betty, blind Aunt Phyllis, Lassie, and a happily unschizophrenic Narg.

T
HE
M
ALAYSIAN
S
IMULATOR

Long gone, as is the Commonwealth Institute itself. Probably shut down by the health authorities, which is just as well. It was a breeding ground for cold germs. Biddie caught an atrocious flu after nodding off and snoozing through half a dozen presentation cycles.

M
Y SANITY

Haven’t lost it yet. There’s still plenty of time. Head thrashing recurs once in a while. My dog, Liberace, usually wakes me up by licking my face.

S
KIPPING

Still a firm believer. I don’t recommend doing it in public, unless you are either very old or very young.

T
HE COLOSTOMY BAGS

I drove them around for a few more years. Never did find a use for them. I hope I never will.

R
ITA

I have no idea what happened to Rita the tart.

I try to conjure happy endings for my long-lost neighbor. Maybe she found God or won the lottery and bought a pub on the Costa Brava, where, tanned and podgy, she now entertains retired members of the offtrack betting community.

Somehow I doubt it. Rita’s willingness to embrace her role as underclass slag did not bode well for her future. She was a perfectly styled victim who might just as well have had a sign on her back which read, “Please don’t invite me for a weekend at your Elizabethan country house. Instead, please bludgeon me to death with a large wrench and throw me in an alley.” No amount of floor pillows could get her out of the gutter and into one of Nigella Lawson’s dinner parties.

The misery of her life reaches across the decades and yanks at my heartstrings.

Why do I care? Having myself traveled the bumpy road from
common
to
vaguely presentable,
I wish only the best for others.

T
HE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE

Quelle surprise!
They were right under my nose all the time.

Wait! I feel another
Wizard of Oz
moment coming on:

if I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again

I won’t look any further than my own backyard.

*  *  *

No wonder Dorothy has so many friends.

ALSO BY SIMON DOONAN

Eccentric Glamour:
Creating an Insanely More Fabulous You

Wacky Chicks: Life Lessons from Fearlessly Inappropriate
and Fabulously Eccentric Women

Confessions of a Window Dresser: Tales from a Life in Fashion

1
Pacamac: an unstylish but extremely popular brand of lightweight raincoat made of semitranslucent gray plastic. Umbrellas were thought to be effeminate. Real men wore Pacamacs.

2
I refer to the pill-popping, hellcat heroine in Jacqueline Susann’s
Valley of the Dolls.

3
Wee
is a very important word in Northern Ireland, among savory and unsavory folk alike.
Wee
indicates something small but also something which is regarded with pleasure and/or affection. “Will you take a piece of soda bread?” a neighbor would say. “Yes, just a wee piece now,” Betty would reply.

4
The Well of Loneliness
(1928): a brave but suicide-inducing early lesbian novel by a lady named Radclyffe Hall, whose friends wore monocles and favored bulldogs over poodles.

5
I have a distinct memory of Oscar-winning Hattie uttering these words in a movie the name of which escapes me. If I have misattributed this quote, then I offer passionate apologies to all concerned.

6
Foo-Foo was a very well-known nightclub-owning drag performer who happened to live next door to Joy’s mum. When, years later, Foo-Foo died, the whole city, including football stars like David Beckham, turned out. Manchester has always loved a trannie.

7
Clobber: trendy sixties Brit-speak meaning “fashionable attire.”

8
Champers: abbreviation for champagne popularized in the television series
AbFab.

9
Yma Sumac: a glamorous songstress. Back in the fifties, when Yma and her five-octave range burst onto the scene, her press releases claimed that she was a Peruvian princess. She said she had grown up in the Andes, surrounded by eagles and panthers. Rumors subsequently abounded that this was pure fantasy and that she was just a nice girl from Brooklyn called Amy Camus, who had reversed her name.

10
Tippi Hedren: the much-pecked star of Hitchcock’s
The Birds.

11
For my court appearance, I wore a nice little suit, a crisp white shirt, and a narrow red tie. Next to my giant lawyer I must have looked like an innocent prep school boy, or Happy Harry. Either way, the judge took pity and reduced the charge to reckless driving. I paid, with great difficulty, a nominal fine.

12
Twinkie: old-school Greenwich Village vernacular referring to a fresh-faced male frequently seen in the company of less fresh-faced males, a.k.a. trolls.

13
Mishigas: Yiddish, crazy Jewish in-laws expressing themselves in an uninhibited fashion.

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