Chumbhot said, “Is it true that Mrs. Cartland was not invited to the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana?” How well I thought the late Truman Capote could have handled all this. He lived for gossip and he was also a marvelous liar. No fact ever gave him pause. When truly inspired, like Joan of Arc attending to her voices, he would half shut his eyes and start inventing stories about people whom he had often never known or, indeed, even heard of. Although he felt himself to be the heir to Proust, a reference I once made to Madame Verdurin drew a blank. I saw him perhaps every other decade, usually by accident. Jackie Kennedy, whom he claimed to have known since childhood, actually met him at a lunch in New York just before the 1960 election. Truman had spun a number of fantastic stories to a table of bemused ladies. At the end of lunch, he asked Jackie if she had a car and, if so, could she drop him off on her way home? She had. She did. In the car, he gave a great dramatic sigh. “Now you’ve seen me singing for my supper!” He became Pagliacci. Since Jackie had enjoyed him, I warned her, “Just remember all those scurrilous stories you found so interesting about other people he’ll now start to invent about you.” Luckily, Jackie was never innocent about the Capotes whom she regarded as so many denizens of a zoo which she liked occasionally to patronize. When Jack and Jackie moved to the White House, her stepsister observed that, “This will be the most disdainful administration in history.”
Chumbhot is waiting for my answer. Am I to turn Capote-esque? “No,” I said, “Mrs. Cartland was not invited.” I recalled Princess Margaret, cigarette holder in one hand, a gin and tonic in the other. It was her gift to extract some joy from whatever hand, no matter how bad, life had dealt her. “Of course we were going to invite the old thing,” she said, “but the bride’s family said that if she came, they wouldn’t and since you can’t have a wedding without a bride…”
Finally, Mrs. Cartland, escorted by an amiable grown son, made her entrance on a sudden gust of hot air from the garden. As tribute to the heat she wore neither hat nor wig, only wavy tufts of pale hair adorned her gleaming rosy pate.
“The traffic!” Cartland was accusing.
“Good afternoon.” Chumbhot was demure. In Bangkok, “The traffic!” is almost a greeting. A stickler in print for etiquette, preferably royal, Mrs. Cartland did not curtsey to Chumbhot, so different from the court lady’s beached-crab number: Autre temps as E. Nesbit’s Psam-mead liked to murmur at such moments. Mrs. Cartland and son were apparently in the neighborhood in order to check on the distribution of her books throughout Southeast Asia, a formidable task, they sighed, considering her alleged popularity.
In the dining room. I sat on Chumbhot’s left, Mrs. Cartland, a monument draped in damp pastel colors, on her right. Conversation did not flag. Mrs. Cartland was indignant at the way the press had been treating “Dickie.” Dickie Mountbatten. “All this nonsense about his…private life. Perfect nonsense! And then they dare to write about Nehru and Edwina [this was Lady Mountbatten], too vile, really.” Mrs. Cartland was beginning to shake with indignation. I couldn’t help but think that if the diarist of that period, Chips Channon, was reliable in these matters the press was surprisingly accurate and rather mild. What was common knowledge in a certain world was plainly not to be shared with Mrs. Cartland’s virginal readers. Chumbhot, who knew the same gossip that the press was working from, said, innocently, “Have you no laws in England to protect the royal family? Don’t you have…what is the phrase?” She turned to me.
“Laisse majesté, which you have in Thailand,” I added.
“Yes, we do. But what, Mrs. Cartland, do the English do to journalists who attack the Queen?”
“Since Her Majesty does nothing but good, they never do.”
I turned to Chumbhot. “What do they do to the press in this country?” was my contribution.
“Oh, I think we still kill them.” This made for a more serious mood. As Mrs. Cartland restlessly stirred her soup, she began on the American influence on the British press, getting it somewhat backward, I thought. She expressed outrage that Charles and Diana were being persecuted by the press when she had never seen a more loving devoted couple. She was, she confessed, very close to them and knew how hurt they were with the press telling ridiculous stories about them. “From that glorious moment in the abbey when they were pronounced man and wife, the troubles began in our press. Or, I should say, the American press.”
Chumbhot picked up our previously agreed-upon cue. “How lovely the abbey must have been. We saw it only on television, of course, but you were there.” She smiled her gentle tiger smile. Cartland stammered “Yes yes yes…then to read in the dreadful press—”
“Do tell us what the abbey was like, with the divine music, the service…”
Mrs. Cartland was having trouble with a quail’s egg. She coughed and cleared her throat. Chumbhot looked at me. I nodded, “Go!”
“You were there?” she asked directly.
“Well, it was for young people, really. So I gave away my tickets—”
“Surely,” said Chumbhot, “the revered Queen Mother is hardly in her first youth.” And so it went but not before Mrs. Cartland, perhaps suspecting an American plot, described the inadequate military materiel that the United States had sent to poor beleaguered England, fighting its lonely battle to save civilization. “I know. I was there for Lord Beaverbrook. He taught me how to write. He would have me go down to the docks as those shoddy insufficient arms arrived.” Definitely a hot day in Bangkok.
NINE
No sooner do I vow to put death, at least temporarily, on that proverbial back burner than I learn that my coeval, television’s Johnny Carson, has died at seventy-nine of emphysema. I was a few weeks older than he. He had rung me last month to say that he had been living pretty much in seclusion at the beach and had only just heard that Howard was dead. We reminisced about his visit to us in Rome and Ravello, a first (and I suspect last) visit to Italy for him. He was not one for foreign climes other than Wimbledon and tennis. In Italy he was a dutiful sightseer but as we climbed Palatine Hill, “Everything here is steps,” he sighed, “and broken marble. This place is going to sink under their weight one of these days.”
What would Montaigne have thought of him? Had he been a mere entertainer-interviewer, nothing at all. But since Montaigne was deeply interested in politics, Carson would have interested him very much. John was the only political satirist regularly allowed for thirty years on that television time which is known to be prime and so he was able to influence the way the people at large thought about many things that were often unexamined in the media until he put his satiric spin to them. Montaigne wrote to influence the kings of France and Navarre and so was heeded in a way that the performer Carson was also able to influence, in a much smaller way, American politicians. He once told me that he could predict the winner of any approaching presidential election by the reactions to certain jokes he’d tell to the live audiences at his Burbank studio. He’d make amiable fun—at least it seemed amiable—of the entire field but all the time that sharp ear was listening carefully to the laughter and, even more attentively, to the silences. He read this microcosm of the American people like a barometer.