Long life | 3 May 2012

I’ve been sitting on a sofa in my wife’s house in Tuscany reading an article about a new play that has just opened in New York. It’s by David Auburn, it’s called The Columnist and it’s about Joseph Alsop, a once powerful Washington journalist who died more than 20 years ago. The article, from the New York Times, says that Joe is now a completely forgotten man, but not by me. The pale terracotta-coloured cover of the sofa I’ve been sitting on is a reminder of him. For it was Joe who recommended the Washington seamstress that stitched it for me — an excellent woman who, he claimed, had been one of President Kennedy’s innumerable mistresses. The date was 1986, the Independent had just been launched, I had been appointed its first Washington correspondent, and I was furnishing the rented house in Georgetown that was to double as my home and the newspaper’s Washington office. The sofa, purchased at the Georgetown branch of Habitat, eventually came back with me to Europe from that elegant quarter of the American capital and ended up in Tuscany, where it looks perfectly at home in its rustic setting.

I had become a friend of Joe Alsop after meeting him in earlier times at a lunch at the British Embassy in Washington and saw a great deal of him during my stint as the Independent’s American editor. But by then, in the 1980s, Joe’s glory days were over. It had been some years since he had stopped writing the thrice-weekly column, syndicated in 300 newspapers, that had brought him great political influence, and he had settled by then for a gentlemanly retirement in a handsome, tastefully furnished Georgetown mansion, which contained his fine collection of antiquities and objets d’art and where he gave elegant dinner parties in a dining-room lined with framed copies of family portraits (the originals having been sold to an American university).