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An English prof. made an earthshattering discovery about ten years ago — that there is a strong link between having money fall upon you and being happy. No, he didn’t win a Nobel for it, nor for the conclusion to his findings, which was that money buys autonomy and independence. The prof. should have won a Nobel Prize for excessive stupidity instead, especially for his last neologism, that ‘to turn a really unhappy person into a very happy person using money alone would take about £1 million’.
I ain’t so sure about the last one. I gave a member of my family much more than one million quid 20 years ago and the guy is still miserable and angry — mostly at yours truly. That arch-phoney Sigmund Freud was on my side on money matters. He said that happiness is the adult fulfilment of childhood dreams, and children, said Siggy, do not dream of money. Ergo, money does not buy happiness. A far more serious and better person, Gore Vidal, is on record as saying that, if the poor were ever to find out how much fun the rich really have, they would probably rise up and kill them all.
My only contribution to wealth epigrams is the one I borrowed about those who marry for money — they earn every cent and then some. I do not include women in that, only men. Most women I know who married for moolah have led charmingly carefree lives, with lotsa staff to boss around, lotsa houses to receive grand people in, lotsa toys to fly and sail privately in, and lotsa, lotsa walkers to keep them company when the old boy is in a board meeting and they happen to be bored.
Trophy wives are now a cliché, proof that men are insecure and prefer taut to stretched skin. I take a back seat to no one where a beautiful young girl is concerned but, where pleasure in bed is concerned, veterans are known to sparkle. And I don’t believe a word about the Duchess of Windsor and all the oriental tricks she supposedly used on the poor Duke, who was rumoured to be hung like a nine-month-old baby. Although an expert on going down, all she did to capture him was talk down to him.
I haven’t enough space to list the great courtesans — because that’s what they really are — who nowadays pose as ladies of society, and there’s also the monster that goes by the name of libel that seems to lurk at my shoulder as I write about such a touchy subject. Suffice it to say that in my long life among the rich and infamous, the ratio of rich men landing glorified hookers is about 50–50. In the ex-Soviet Union’s case, it’s 99 to 1 in favour of the hookers.
The trouble with having been around a long time is that one really does know most of the secrets. And vice versa. Since the Sixties there have been rumours galore about certain French society ladies who used to work for the most famous madam of all time, Claude. Well, I hate to disappoint my gossip column buddies, but I knew every single Madame Claude girl and not one made the big time, except a pair I introduced to two Indonesian generals who represented Pertamina (the national oil company) back in 1965, and chose to leave Paris and go back with them. (Old dad was doing business with Pertamina and had asked me to find some debs for them while a contract was being signed in the City of Light.) I went to Claude, dad was amazed, the contract was signed, and when my father returned to Athens he told my mother, ‘The little one isn’t as big an idiot as he acts, he has beautiful and very willing young friends.’
My great buddy Porfirio Rubirosa (unlike the Windsor man, hung like a mule) at least married rich women — three of them — took their money and divorced them, and then married beautiful but impoverished youngsters. He was a sexual Robin Hood, or so I like to think. That ghastly Roussel fellow, who took Christina Onassis’s millions, is an exception where earning one’s ill-gotten gains is concerned. He mistreated the poor little rich girl something awful, and now lives in Switzerland enjoying moolah that should never have gone to him.
The irony is that many of the men I’ve known who married for money were or are gay. Before all these drugs came along I was reluctant to ask them how they managed their conjugal duties, but now the question is academic. VV, as in Viva Viagra, should be the crest that gays who married rich women have embossed on their rings, but then who am I, a poor little Greek boy, to try to set a fashion.
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