New York
I went to see a revival of Arcadia in the beautiful Ethel Barrymore Theatre last Saturday night, and it made my day. Tom Stoppard is our greatest playwright, and I think Arcadia is his best play, although a couple of other gems of his come close. I was with Marine Major Michael Warring and Marine Major Chris Meyers (retd) and their girls. Both officers saw action in Iraq, both are extremely well educated and well read, and both think that Tom Stoppard is the greatest thing since the Marine Corps. There’s nothing like Sir Tom’s intelligent wordplay and mind-boggling knowledge to put one in a great mood, until we exited the theatre, that is.
The warm glow of having witnessed something truly wonderful disappear quicker than you can say Gaddafi. Broadway is no longer the Great White Way, but a Disneyised, bustling suburban shopping mall full of megastores selling junk; a mediagenic, illuminated blur of moving electric surfaces selling more junk, with thousands of junk people gawping, eating junk food and listening to junk music blaring from their earphones. ‘Now that’s what I call romanticism versus classicism,’ I told my Marine buddies, so we decided to go downtown and get loaded.
I don’t mean to be a stickler, an aggrieved social conservative standing against youth, minorities and change, but living in the garbage culture of today does tend to make one slightly grumpy. The Marines and I wondered what a person picked at random from among the plebeian crowd would think of Arcadia — had we paid him to attend. ‘That he had landed on an another planet,’ was the collective opinion.
Mind you, we were looking at a Saturday-night crowd in Times Square, reality-show freaks being a dime a dozen, but, still, I now know why the kitchen-sink crap became so popular just as the dreadful Sixties were coming around. Personally, I always stuck with Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan, and have not regretted it for one single moment. Rattigan is having a comeback and I couldn’t be happier. Screw those filthy, smelly, cardigan-wearing critics with ugly shoes and furtive eyes who dismissed poor old Sir Terry. I’ll take the drawing-room over the filthy kitchen any day, as most sensible and good people would. It is now considered tiresome and fusty to dress well, have good manners and not use profanity, but, again, I’ll take these anytime rather than the malodorous cesspit which celebrity mags and reality shows have dumped us in.
Back in the mid-Forties, Hollywood made a great black-and-white weepie of a James M. Cain novel, Mildred Pierce. Joan Crawford won an academy award for best actress, a well-deserved one, in my opinion. Now a mini-series starring Kate Winslet has me riveted on Sunday evenings, with mixed results. The black-and-white weepie was 90 minutes long and did not stick to the book. This one is in colour, is six hours long and is faithful to the author. Kate Winslet is a far better actress than our steel-chinned Joan, the sets are perfect as are the period clothes, but it’s the atmosphere of the Thirties that I find simply sublime. Yet I prefer the golden oldie, don’t ask me why.
Winslet is far sexier than la Crawford, and in this modern version gives the goods away rather a lot — unlike Joan, who gave them away in real life but played very hard to get in the film — yet by being a better actress and much sexier, Kate’s less of a presence than the one-dimensional Joan. Go figure. Perhaps there’s too much detail, too much emotion, whereas la Crawford got the job done with a stony-faced pose and little else. I suppose less is always more, but try to teach that to the moderns, people who have never understood the eloquence of the unspoken and the meaning of understatement.
The good news is, of course, that a certain Jeffrey Epstein, friend of Prince Andrew and Bill Clinton, may still be in the soup. I certainly hope so. Epstein lives down the street from me, we’re both on 71st Street in the Bagel, which makes it very uncomfortable for a sensitive soul like myself. I cannot walk by his house without having a panic attack, and if you believe that you’ll believe that Epstein is simply a pervert and not a grotesque child molester. The good news is that court papers filed last week say that the US Attorney’s Office violated the Crime Victims Rights’ Act by signing a non-prosecution agreement with the sex offender without notifying his victims. Gotcha, you bum.
I wrote of this long ago. The fix was in because of Bill Clinton and other such whores who managed to get him a soft sentence and — as it looks now — an invalid agreement because the victims’ rights were violated. I sure hope so. Nothing would make my upcoming holiday on board Bushido more pleasant than to know Epstein will go back to jail. Mind you, I doubt it. He will pay off the victims and probably be on the Riviera this summer. If Gaddafi’s murderous family can come and go as they please while beating people up and receiving doctorates to boot, why can’t a little ole child molester pay his way to the Côte d’Azur?
Further good news is that my boy John Taki came in fourth in the Turin to Milan bike race, a fantastic achievement and a far greater one than his old man ever achieved. Bravo, JT, but when you come back home don’t walk down 71st Street. There’s a horrid child molester lurking.
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