But Enough About You: Essays (37 page)

Aside from drinking enough beer to fill Lake Erie, the great pursuit—indeed, holy grail—at AD house was losing one’s virginity. Hard as it may be to believe today, back in the early 1960s this was still a problematic goal. These days only ten minutes elapse between “Hi, what’s your name?” and “Oh God oh God oh God.” When you compare the Adelphians of 1960 with the college kids in Tom Wolfe’s novel
I Am Charlotte Simmons
, you realize what tremendous strides we’ve made in this field of endeavor.

In any event, the lucidly lurid—or luridly lucid—events depicted herein happened a long time ago, and it would be unfair to judge them by today’s P.C. standards. This is a memoir, not a manifesto. Eisenhower was president, Doris Day was the cheesecake of record, and everyone was singing along to the Schaefer beer ads on TV. (“Schaefer is the one beer to have, when you’re ha-ving more than one!”) Up to now, I’ve thought of the jacket-and-narrow-tie-wearing youth of that era as “The Quiet Generation.” No longer. There is nothing remotely “quiet” about Pinto, Otter, Coyote, Snot, Black Whit, Giraffe, Rat, or any of the other AD brothers, unless they’re passed out facedown in the snow with the blood-alcohol content of an embalmed corpse.

However sick, depraved, and irredeemably gross, the animal house of Dartmouth 1960 produced a writer who became a leading
voice at
National Lampoon
, the magazine that shaped and defined the comic sensibility of its generation. He then went on, with one of his colleagues, Douglas Kenney (who died tragically in 1980), to write a movie that accomplished the same thing cinematically, as well as to inaugurate the movie careers of John Belushi, Tom Hulce, Peter Riegert, Karen Allen, and others.

No mean feats. And to think it all began with power-booting (don’t ask) in the basement and watching brother Seal—a model for the movie’s Bluto Blutarsky, played by Belushi—pour a giant jar of mustard over his head and crawl around on all fours on the dance floor, biting girls on the bottom. Now we know. As the plaque on the statue of the founder of Faber College in the movie says, “Knowledge Is Good.”

—
The New York Times
, November 2006

I
. 
The Real Animal House: The Awesomely Depraved Saga of the Fraternity That Inspired the Movie.

That’ll Be Ten Pounds
, by Earl Spencer. Diana’s brother reveals that just before her death she told him that if anything happened to her he should build a gift shop at Althorp, the family estate, so he “wouldn’t ever have to do an honest day’s work.” He writes, “We spent many happy hours together deciding how much to charge for souvenir mugs and T-shirts.” He hopes to be able to accommodate three times as many visitors next year, but complains that the local council authorities “are being damned shortsighted about the need for more public loos.”

First serial:
Country Life
; author tour.

Chicken Soup for the Diana-Lover’s Soul: 101 Inspirational Stories to Make the Authors of the Chicken Soup Series Even Richer Than They Already Are
, edited by Jack Canfield. This collection, seventy-eighth in the successful series, inclues a wide range of heartwarming stories: a teenage boy learns to channel his anger into more positive pursuits after being sent to prison for stomping on a few freesias that were lying outside Kensington Palace not doing anybody any good anyway; a rich, aimless woman finds the fulfillment that eludes her in marriage by going on “the mother of all shopping sprees”; a businessman, moments before his car plows head on into the Arc de Triomphe, hears empty Pernod bottles rattling around in the front seat next to the chauffeur and decides to buckle his seat belt.

One Spirit Book Club main selection.

Royal Warrant
, by Mohammed al-Fayed. The author, father of Dodi, claims to have “solid evidence”—never quite specified—that his son and the princess were murdered by MI6, the British Secret Service, on orders from the Royal Family. Al-Fayed alleges that the Windsors wanted to avoid paying the £327 million in charges at Harrods—which he owns—that Diana accumulated during her marriage to Charles. “They are cheap, very cheap,” he writes, “
always
coming in asking for reductions.” The chapter about how Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, was responsible for the mad-cow-disease epidemic in Britain seems somehow off the point here.

Film rights to Oliver Stone.

Thanks a Bunch, Luv
, by Camilla Parker Bowles. A remarkably candid memoir by the infamous third person in the marriage between Prince Charles and Diana, in which she confesses to “mixed feelings at best” about the events of last August. Parker Bowles was on the verge of being accepted by the British public as the prince’s consort when the accident occurred, postponing an open liaison, perhaps indefinitely. (According to a not very nice recent poll, 90 percent of Britons wish it had been Parker Bowles in the tunnel with an Egyptian
playboy instead of Diana.) Taking pains to be polite, the author notes that “Diana wasn’t quite as dim as everyone said,” and even compliments the late princess on her “rather neat” handwriting.

Liberté, Égalité, DNA
, by Barry Scheck. Scheck, the lawyer who helped acquit O. J. Simpson, was hired by the family of Henri Paul, the chauffeur who was driving on the night Diana was killed. They were convinced that the autopsy results showing that Paul’s blood-alcohol limit was three times the legal limit had been doctored to deflect blame from the real culprit: the LAPD detective Mark Fuhrman. Scheck obtained an order to exhume Paul’s body from a cemetery in Brittany. His conclusion: “He didn’t look drunk to me.”

First Serial:
Vanity Fair.

“Looking at Myself in the Mirror”: Celebrities Talk About Where They Were When They Heard the News
, by the editors of
US Magazine
. The title, from Donald Trump’s answer, pretty much explains the basic idea. Trump calls Diana a “world-class princess,” and says that he and Diana were “really, really close,” despite the fact that they spent only a few minutes together, in a Plaza Hotel elevator. “The real tragedy,” he says, “is that she never got to experience the Royal Suite at the Taj Mahal casino.” Calista Flockhart wept because Diana would never get to see the “Baby Chacha” episode on
Ally McBeal
. And Tom Cruise fondly remembers meeting Diana after an Elton John concert and telling her “how amazing it was that so many letters of her name appeared in the word
Dianetics
,” the philosophy of the Scientologist L. Ron Hubbard.

—
The New Yorker
, September 1998

The Letters—and Life—of P. G. Wodehouse

I visited Christopher Hitchens in hospital just after he’d been given a diagnosis of mortal illness. By his bed I noticed a dog-eared Jeeves and Wooster paperback. Christopher esteemed P. G. Wodehouse above all other writers as “The Master,” a title originally bestowed on Wodehouse by another master of English prose, Evelyn Waugh.

Christopher looked at the novel. His face clouded. “I worried about bringing it,” he said, “because I thought—
what if it doesn’t work
?” The prospect of a Jeeves novel failing to work its magic was the only time in our thirty-year-long friendship that I saw him register something close to genuine alarm. The last time I saw Hitch, three days before he died in another hospital after his eighteen-month battle with cancer, he had on his lap an early British edition of this very book, Sophie Ratcliffe’s
P. G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters
.

Ratcliffe, a tutor at Christ Church, Oxford, has given us a monumental, exemplary book, excellent in every regard and indispensable to a three-dimensional understanding of one of English literature’s great figures. Many of the letters are published here for the first time. It is a worthy companion to Robert McCrum’s splendid 2004 biography.

It was said of Gibbon, author of
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, that he lived out his sex life in his footnotes. The footnotes here are often eye-poppingly fun. We learn, among much else, that Wodehouse was descended from Anne Boleyn’s sister, Lady Mary, as in
The Other Boleyn Girl
. (He was also related to Cardinal Newman.) Also that a previous recipient of the Twain medal Wodehouse is about to get went to—Benito Mussolini. (Who knew Il Duce was such a wag?) In another, we hear that in 1941 the Queen Mother ordered eighteen books for little Princess Elizabeth, the present queen, all of them by Wodehouse.

Letters are a kind of
BACKSTAGE ALL ACCESS
pass. We get the man—or woman—with hair down and no makeup. They often provide the ultimate in dish. One mourns the almost certain extinction of the genre. Future collections of e-mails and text messages of the great and famous aren’t likely to be quite this satisfying.

Let’s stipulate, too, that the bitchier the personality (Waugh, or Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, etc.), the deeper the dish. Alas, Pelham Grenville Wodehouse—his lifelong nickname was Plum or Plummie—was one of Nature’s most gentle specimens: humble, self-deprecating, shy of publicity, considerate to a fault, generous, devoted to his family and friends, forgiving and deplorably lacking in bile—qualities that ought make for pretty damn dull letter reading. To be sure, some of these pages are more scintillating than others, but there’s plenty of ginger and plenty of dish, and a lot of it is—no surprise—hilariously observed.

And golly, what a life! In terms of American history, Wodehouse was born in 1881, the year of the gunfight at the OK Corral, and died (on Valentine’s Day) in 1975, the year the Vietnam War ended. Rather a lot went on in between.

He became world-famous by his thirties, both as a novelist and Broadway lyricist. He collaborated with, among others, Guy Bolton, Ira Gershwin, and Cole Porter. As a young hustling writer in New York, he banged out copy for the
Saturday Evening Post
,
Vanity Fair
, and
Collier’s
. His signature valet, Jeeves, made his debut in the
Saturday Evening Post
in 1915 in a short story titled “Extricating Young Gussie.” Jeeves’s name was borrowed from a Warwickshire cricket player.

The late 1920s found him in Hollywood (“This place is loathesome”), drowning, stingless, in MGM honey, while doing hack work on a silly Marion Davies vehicle. His descriptions of reptilian studio fauna make for delicious reading. He mostly ignored them and beavered away at his own stuff, producing a novel and nine short stories.

His error was being candid in an interview with the
Los Angeles Times
in which he declared that over the past year, he’d been paid “$104,000 for loafing.” (This was a fair bit of pelf: more than $1 million today.) Such frankness did not sit well with the
lares et penates
of the studio, and in due course the faucets ceased their golden gush. He couldn’t have cared less. All one really needs in life, he said in one of the letters here, are two good friends, books, and a Pekingese. He might have added: his wife, Ethel, and—most of all—work.

With respect to the last item on the list, Wodehouse was graphomaniacal, churning out stories, novels, and librettos at a dizzying rate. He did boast a bit about that in his letters, but he was rightly proud of his output: 40,000 words of a novel in two weeks; an 8,000-word golf story in two days. In a letter to the satirical novelist Tom Sharpe, he reveals that he wrote the last twenty-six pages of
Thank You, Jeeves
in one day. It wasn’t the money, although like, oh, 99.99 percent of writers, he certainly did care about the dough. But it was simply that he
had
—always—to be writing.

“As long as I’m working I feel all right, but in between stories it’s rotten.” Fortunately for him—and for us—there weren’t many “in between” periods. He was the Energizer Plummie. By the 1930s he was one of the highest-earning writers in the world; only to find himself in scalding hot water with the tax man. He had unwisely entrusted his business affairs to an incompetent friend. Wodehouse’s Achilles heel was naiveté, though you
could
call it innocence.

Here the story takes a rather rum turn. In 1940 he and Ethel were tax exiles living in Le Touquet, France. Wodehouse paid insufficient attention to the howling winds of war and rumble of tanks. He wasn’t entirely oblivious, but there was the matter of Wonder the Peke and the other dogs, who couldn’t be taken across the Channel to England, where the quarantine laws were so strict. One murmurs as one reads:
Dude—lose the Pekes!
Too late. In due course, Hitler was pounding on the front door.

Wodehouse was sent to an intern camp—formerly a lunatic asylum—in Tost, Upper Silesia. (It
would
have to be called Tost.) He remarked in a radio broadcast (about which, more anon, alas), “If this is Upper Silesia, I would hate to see Lower Silesia.”

It was just Wodehouse being Wodehouse, but the japery becomes less amusing when one learns that Upper Silesia was home as well to Auschwitz. He was of course unaware of that god-awful fact, as indeed he was of most of what was going on in the world, but his
naïveté—innocence—was so profound that at times it comes off as a sort of geopolitical Asperger’s.

He became an unwitting pawn of the Nazi propaganda machine, agreeing to make five shortwave broadcasts to America on what might as well have been called Radio Goebbels. The unfortunate technicality for him was that the broadcasts could also be heard in Britain, which opened him up to charges of propaganda mongering. The tone and content was typically lighthearted, bemused, and nonpolitical, but the world was not laughing along, and soon the once-beloved author was a figure of revulsion and obloquy in his own country. Such was his innocence, believe it or not, that he cabled to Hollywood to alert his great friend Maureen O’Sullivan, “Jane” of Tarzan fame and later known as Mia Farrow’s mom, about the impending broadcasts, just so she wouldn’t miss them. Oh,
dear
.