The Pursuit of Laughter (24 page)

The older generation of Vanderbilts loathed the beautiful Grace at first sight, and
forbade
Neily the Fourth to marry her. They more or less cut him off, so that Neily and Grace were obliged to rub along on fewer million dollars than they might have expected. Nevertheless, it was not long before Grace knew all Europe’s crowned heads and the King of Siam, as well as everyone else who ‘mattered,’ and she never stopped inviting them to her brownstone 70-roomed mansion on Fifth Avenue or her seaside house at Newport. Her son says she was considered very exclusive; he also says that she entertained 37,000 guests in one year, which might appear almost conclusively inclusive, when the number of days she spent in ocean liners, cures and
nach
-cures (
sic
) is subtracted from the number of days in a year.

Reading this book one quickly forms the habit of adding and subtracting. Mr Cornelius Vanderbilt is very strong on figures and statistics; he knows exactly how much everything cost, from mansions and yachts to long-stemmed American Beauty roses for the dinner table. He also knows exactly how much everyone is ‘worth’ and what the dead ones left in their wills.

The secret of Mrs Vanderbilt’s success as queen of society was a combination of money, snobbery, energy and attention to detail. Not only did she remember the
individual
tastes of her thousands of guests, but ‘Mother was always careful to silence
potentially
envious tongues with small acts of thoughtfulness and gentility.’

Mrs Grace Vanderbilt had two lovely sisters, Belle and May. May’s daughter, known as Baby May, married the Duke of Roxburghe. ‘Silly old May,’ I remember Lady Cunard
saying
one day, referring to Baby May, ‘no wonder she’s tired, sitting up all night playing with her valves.’ (The Duchess was a keen wireless fan.) An almost exact contemporary of Mrs Vanderbilt, Lady Cunard was also American and a hostess; but there the resemblance ends.

Neily did not take kindly to the role his wife assigned to him of man-about resorts, as his son calls it, and dinner party host. Eventually this talented man took to the bottle: ‘Poor darling Neily is
continually
drunk,’ wrote Grace to her sister. He cleverly designed a lift which could be entered through a door concealed in the
boiseries
of their New York dining room. Sometimes in the middle of meals, when Mother became more than he could bear, Father disappeared into this lift and was not seen again for quite some time.

‘My sister and I were given lessons in proper table settings. Followed by the butler bearing various dishes and condiments on a huge silver tray, Mother led us around and around the gleaming sixty-foot mahogany table. Before I was nine, I knew precisely which dishes remained and which disappeared during a complete seven-course dinner,’ writes Mr Cornelius Vanderbilt.

English children, of course, were never allowed near the dining room. A congealed egg in the schoolroom was the best they could hope for.

The fuss about the new kind of advertising, where the name of a product is flashed on a cinema screen for a split second, so that though not consciously reading it the
subconscious
mind is supposed to register it and store it up for future use, seems rather
exaggerated
. If it persuades housewives to buy soap Y rather than soap Z (which is the most that is claimed for it), presumably Z could advertise in the same way; perhaps then the
subconscious
mind would get into such a muddle that housewives would give up buying soap altogether.

The idea that it could be politically dangerous and induce people to vote for A instead of B is far-fetched, and if A advertises himself in this way, B only has to look sharp and follow suit. Personally, I am very much in favour of advertisements which are invisible to the naked eye.

Ever since I happened to mention in this Diary how greatly I looked forward to the poems which Lord Hailsham used to contribute to the
Spectator
, there has been a stony silence—as far as poetry goes—from conservatism’s bathing belle. He probably imagined that his photograph in his bikini on Brighton beach, which I saw in
France-Dimanche
, will carry more weight with the party than ‘the fragile bark that’s me’ and that Conservatives will be more impressed by physical heroism (
France-Dimanche
says the sea was icy) than by the courage he showed in publishing his verse. This had unlucky results, for
The Times
reports that he introduced a hysterical note into the proceedings of the Tory Conference.

Small wonder; bathing in the English Channel in October would be enough to make anyone hysterical.

According to the
Star
, the Bishop of Chelmsford has appealed to people ‘to queue up
outside
a church before service so that they would attract other people to see what was going on.’ What a quaint idea of the Bishop’s. Can it really be that people so love queuing that they have only to see a queue and they are impelled to join it? Has the Bishop considered what will happen when finally, with the ringing of the five minute bell, the queue moves out of the rain to lose itself among the deserted pews of an empty church? Might not even the most ardent queue-lovers then wonder whether the churchgoers had not taken leave of their senses?

If the Bishop of Chelmsford were to cross the Irish Sea he would find churches so full that queues are formed, not as a stunt but from necessity. Most Irish towns and
villages
have two churches, one old and charming, often eighteenth-century Gothic, the
other ugly and modern. The pretty ones are empty and the ugly ones are full of
worshippers
. It always appears to me that it would be a generous, Christian and logical act on the part of the Church of Ireland if it were to give at least half of its empty churches to the Catholics. It will take more than the attraction of imitation queues, or even the musical comedy ditties of clergymen popularising dogmas (‘can anyone tell me an original sin?’) to fill Anglican churches.

Last time I was in London two foreigners stopped me and asked, ‘Where is Knightsbridge?’ I replied that it was the very street we were in. They seemed rather
doubtful
, and said they had walked twice up and down looking for a shop called Harrods, but couldn’t find it. When I told them that, though Harrods may call it Knightsbridge, the street it adorns is Brompton Road, they were puzzled. It is one thing to have your shop in a ‘good address,’ but very strange to muddle customers by giving a good address and then not being there.

This is the moment when the dozen or so best known literary folk of the Establishment are invited to state which book they consider has been the Best Book of the past year. As they are either authors who sometimes do reviews, or else reviewers who are occasionally authors, they naturally all choose each other’s books in an orgy of love and harmony.

Personally, I see no harm in this. Many of the books chosen will have been well worth reading. The French system, where by young writers have to spend months every year
making
love to old ladies and gentlemen in the hopes of winning one of the famous literary prizes, an activity which leaves them little time for writing, is much worse. In their case, of course, the after noon calls, flattery and
petits soins
they bestow get them into training for the lobbying which, in middle age, will land them safely in the Académie Française.

Apart altogether from back-scratching (and after all, even writers must live), how much is one influenced in one’s opinion of a book by friendship for the author? In my own case, I think it prejudices me a little in the book’s favour. But on the other hand personal
dislike
, or dislike of a writer’s politics, would never make me think, or say, that a good book was a bad one.

The winter collections, shown in August, and the new motors a few weeks later, are the terrible twin temptations for women and for men to indulge in dis-saving (as Mr Roy Harrod called it in an article in the
Financial Times
). Most men think it unnecessary to
dissave
on a new winter coat when last year’s is as warm as ever, and most women think it absurd to want a new motor when the old one still runs along. If women follow the
fashion
this time their spindly legs may be cold, but their heads will be beautifully warm. Anyone wishing to steal a hat will have quite a job to hide even one; to take five at a blow, as in the days of Nina hats, would be an impossible feat.

A French friend who visited London for the first time for a number of years said that he found English newspapers had become a great deal sillier during the interval; in fact, he said he could not make out from them what the news might be because they were filled with stories and photographs of actresses, dogs, runaway lovers, and other trivialities. Mr Randolph Churchill, in
What I Said About the Press
, scolds most of the cheap news papers (though not, of course, Lord Beaverbrook’s) for making money and degrading the public taste with pornography. Mr John Osborne, in his contribution to
Declaration
, complains that they contain too many articles about the private lives of members of the royal
family
.

The obvious answer to all these grievances is that if these three gentlemen had bought
The Times
or the
Guardian
they would have found plenty of news, no pornography and not a word about the private lives of members of the royal family.

While I have every sympathy with the Frenchman who did not know where to turn to find the news of the world (no capitals intended here), I have not so much for Mr Churchill and Mr Osborne, who were born and bred in London and should know by now how tiresome and stupid most English newspapers are, and avoid reading them. It may be, though, they are both fired with reforming zeal, like so many puritanical English people, and in that case they will naturally want to read more and more about their
bêtes noires
because it is no fun reforming if you have nothing to fulminate against.

In view of this possibility, perhaps the good idea I have had will not help them much, though it would be a boon to those genuinely seeking news. It is this. Newspapers should be obliged, like patent medicines, to print a formula on the front page giving a rough idea of the contents. If the formula reads as follows:

those who bought the paper would know what they were buying. It should not be
forgotten
that some people love reading about crime and looking at photographs of girls in bathing gowns; there are even people, millions of them apparently, who greatly enjoy the
Daily Express
. Rather harmless tastes, one might think, even if one does not share them. It is easy not to read what annoys or bores. Personally, I dislike all ball games, but it does not worry me that large wads of newspaper space are devoted to describing them; I skip those pages.

A very good formula is that of the Paris edition of the
New York Herald Tribune
. It has eight pages, of which three are news, two leading articles and feature articles, leaving one each for Wall Street, comic strips and sport. The sport page is mostly about American games, with lovely headlines like ‘Lakers Trampled by Knicks’, and ‘Wings Nip Hawks’, or ‘Buckeyes Edge Oregon’, or ‘Navy Mauls Rice’. The words ‘win’ and ‘lose’ are seldom seen.

There is a new revue at the Lido in the Champs Elysées, where the famous Bluebell Girls are dreams of beauty. As they dale about sparkling with sequins and nodding plumes it is hard to imagine that in a few years they may be startling people by their inside knowledge of what is going to be done to the Bank Rate. Yet that is the way the world goes.

I once knew a man who was acutely sensitive to embarrassment. At the cinema, for
example
, if a child actor appeared on the screen, he had to cover up until it was no longer there. He kept a large white handkerchief for this purpose, which he threw over his head; he only removed it when one told him: It’s all right, you can uncover now. A man of this sort would know better than to read the fourth leader in
The Times
, though I doubt whether he would go so far as to wish to forbid its appearance, even if he were a dictator instead of just a Tory minister. Similarly, Mr Churchill and Mr Osborne should cultivate the art of skipping, which is indispensable for newspaper readers.