Taki lives the High life
On board S/Y Bushido, off Corfu
From my porthole I can see Roger Taylor — drummer of Queen — talking to his three blonde and beautiful daughters. The eldest, Rory, has just become a doctor, the other two are still kids, and there are also two very talented boys, not on board Tiger Lily, his boat. One of his sons is an extremely talented drummer, which I guess goes with the territory, as they say. Rock stars do not for typical loving families make, but Roger’s seems to be an exception.
Speaking of rockers, I could not have been more pleased about that turd Charlie Gilmour getting 16 months. I know, I know, he’s young and he was upset about his real old man, but this is lawyer bs. I would have given him 24 months, and an extra six for having cut his hair and for playing the victim. He’s nothing of the sort. He knew damn well what the Cenotaph is all about, and in any other civilised country he would have got more. Back in 1959, a drunken American student tried to light his cigarette from the eternal flame underneath the Arc de Triomphe, and got a year in a tough jail and a fine that broke his parents. That was then, this is now, and Charlie, as they call him, has had too many hacks asking for mercy, which means the fix is in.
And speaking of the fix, I predict Murdoch will get off and be allowed to purchase Sky, and everything will be hunky-dory once it blows over. Back in 1994, Sue Douglas and John Witherow hired me to write Atticus for the Sunday Times. Witherow proposed 80. ‘I get 80 from the Speccie,’ I told them. ‘Cut the crap,’ said Sue. ‘The Spectator doesn’t pay you 80,000 pounds per annum.’ The penny dropped and all I said was, ‘Where’s the contract? I’ll sign anything.’
The funny thing was that a week later, at a New York party, the great Rupert himself came up to me and told me how happy he was ‘that you are joining our family’. I was flattered, to say the least, until I heard him tell his wife Anna, whom I was seated next to at dinner, to be very careful what she said in front of me. A couple of years later, at a New York bash, he approached me and asked me to ‘stir it up a bit’. Namely to go after Mort Zuckerman, the owner of the New York Daily News, direct competitor to Rupert’s New York Post. Which I did, until I was told in no uncertain terms that Rupert had ordered the then editor of the Post — I also had a column there — never to allow me to attack Zuckerman. Go figure!
Strange people, these Murdochs. They’re neither Brits, nor Aussies, not even Yanks. What was it they used to call Jews? Cosmopolites? My buddy Leopold Bismarck was staying on board with his beautiful wife Debonnaire, and he slipped me a Somerset Maugham short story, ‘The Alien Corn’, while recovering on deck from a very hard night ashore. I had never read it, and it blew my mind, as they say in Hollywood. I’ll go straight to the point.
Ferdy Rabenstein is a dandy, invited to all the grand parties of the time, a lover of a grand duchess, popular and sought after by grand people because of his wit, money and great taste. He does not hide his Jewishness, in fact he is known for his ability to tell the best Jewish jokes in the most perfect accent. The narrator eventually meets his family, one that has been ennobled after having changed their name from Bleikogel to Bland, and having acquired a very grand house in the country.
Sir Adolphus Bland is an MP, his wife Muriel claims to have been brought up in a convent, and their two sons are the most perfect English upper-class gents one can imagine. I will not spoil it for you, but it’s such a good story, it made me look back at my past 40 years in England and reflect. The eldest son, George, his parents’ favourite who was expected from childhood to ‘play his part in the affairs of the country’, breaks away and goes off to Munich to study music. He does not want to shoot, he does not want to hunt, he does not want to be an MP, he does not want to be a millionaire. He does not want to be a baronet, or a peer.
‘You know, I don’t like the English people,’ he tells the narrator. ‘I never really know where I am with you. You’re so dull and conventional. You never let yourselves go. There is no freedom of the soul, and you’re such funks. There’s nothing in the world you’re so frightened of as doing the wrong thing. I don’t want to be English. I want to be a Jew. I am a Jew and you know it, and a German Jew into the bargain. You don’t know how much more easy I feel with them…’
The story ends tragically, but the beauty of it is that Maugham knows all about life and people. It was obviously written between the wars — hence George’s love for Germany and his people — but when I finished it I thought of the Murdochs, wandering cosmopolites seeking power and wealth, and of the Blands frightened of doing the wrong thing, and of George wanting to be Jewish. I once knew a family just like the Blands, and they’re still with us, and how sorry I felt for them once I read ‘The Alien Corn’. I know it sounds phony, but I actually feel sorry for the Murdochs.
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