Mailer & Nixon; Summer in the Alps; Milosevic Robbed; Rushdie's Girlfriend
Reluctantly, the magazine agreed to this proviso, hoping she'd change her mind somewhere down the line. However, when they told her the interviewer was going to be me, she point-blank refused to play ball. Why? I'm not vain enough to think it's because the Madras-born model is actually familiar with my work. Pashmina, I think it's safe to say, is not a big reader. Indeed, she probably isn't even among the handful of people who bought a copy of The Ground Beneath Her Feet, her boyfriend's last novel, which, after being published with a great deal of fanfare last year, sunk without a trace.
No, Salman himself, the great champion of free speech, must have vetoed me. I can only assume he still hasn't forgiven me for a 1994 Vanity Fair piece I wrote about the comic incidents that occurred when the British policemen assigned to protect him from marauding Arab terrorists accompanied him to literary parties.
In fairness to Rushdie I can understand why he doesn't want me to interview Pashmina. The only thing I'd want to discuss with her is her relationship with him. I mean, what on Earth do the author of Easy Exotic: A Model's Low-Fat Recipes from Around the World and the Booker Prize-winning novelist talk about when they're alone? Hair-thickening products? Poor old Pashmina is so intellectually challenged she couldn't even hold down a job as a columnist for Talk. According to recent reports, her "column" was quietly dropped by Tina Brown after she turned in her first effort. Not since Arthur Miller hooked up with Marilyn Monroe has the world seen such an unlikely celebrity couple.
There's no mystery about what Rushdie sees in her. The Anglo-Indian scribbler has always had an eye for the ladies, particularly now that his eyelids have been surgically lifted. After the fatwa was imposed in 1989 and Rushdie had to curb his normal level of carousing, friends of his threw dinner parties at which he'd be seated next to a variety of attractive single women. In the piece I wrote for Vanity Fair I quoted a prominent female journalist who'd seen Rushdie in action at the time: "The thing that made me go eek-eek," she said, "is the way the women were being laid on. It was, 'Oh, be nice to Salman,' or 'Salman would like your telephone number.' I had girlfriends who were seated next to him at dinner and you had the feeling Salman had said, 'Could you invite Y, we've never met.' It felt like a form of pandering, a high-class pimping service."
At least in the early 90s Rushdie was formally separated from his then wife, novelist Marianne Wiggins. Exactly what the status of his current marriage was when he met Padma at the Talk launch party last year is less clear. Rushdie married freelance editor Elizabeth West in 1997 and, a few months before he met Pashmina, described her as the most important woman in his life. He also credited West with saving his life, a reference to her willingness to place her own life in jeopardy by associating herself with Rushdie while the fatwa was still hanging over his head. In addition to editing an anthology of Indian writing together, they have a three-year-old son called Milan.
I imagine the real reason Rushdie didn't want his girlfriend to be interviewed by me is because he doesn't want any attention drawn to the fact that he's ditched his wife and baby for a fashion model. When Hollywood stars do things like this it's only to be expected, but such behavior in literary intellectuals is less acceptable. Rushdie in particular is a figure of some moral weight. He's become a living symbol of the literary world's unwillingness to give up the right to free speech in the face of fundamentalist threats, and several people have died in defense of that right, including his Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi. Doesn't he owe it to them to conduct himself with a little more dignity? It's almost as if Gandhi, having liberated India from British rule, suddenly moved to Rome and took up with Gina Lollobrigida. As Marianne Wiggins put it, the tragedy of the whole Rushdie affair is that the man isn't equal to the cause.
The Thalasso spa at Quiberon in Brittany has a diet of delicious fresh fish, lobsters and oysters, combined with pummeling baths of ocean water. I lose 10 pounds in as many days without suffering. A room with a large sunny balcony on the Atlantic Ocean, long walks, long swims, time to read good books and sleep. Heaven. There are even some nice excursions in the neighborhood, the Abbey of Kergonan, famous for its Gregorian chant, the megaliths at Carnac and Josselin, the castle of the ancient Rohan family. During the French Revolution the Jacobin armies slaughtered the Royalist peasantry of Brittany with a brutality that is still remembered. After my stint at Quiberon I can not only fit into my clothes again, but I can also, if invited, afford to take them off.
Since I am a theater addict I normally plan a splurge at one of Europe's many summer festivals after my stint of culinary and cultural abstinence in Brittany. At Avignon you can see the French classics with the Palace of the Popes as a backdrop, and a stage ideally suited for performing elephants. Edinburgh offers everything, museum exhibits, theater, fringe cabaret and music, including massed bands of martial Highland pipers. And of course there is grand opera at Bregenz, Verona, Aix-en-Provence, Salzburg and Bayreuth. Over the last 20 years I have been to them all and been ecstatic...most of the time.
Anyway, this year I had different priorities and nipped back to London to hear the high-C coloraturas of a promising new soprano: my newborn granddaughter has great vocal powers. This did not prevent me from going to the Glyndebourne Opera for Janacek's Jenufa and Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, with wonderful decor by David Hockney. The late John Christie and his family founded Glyndebourne and have courageously supported it for over 65 years. They first gave hospitality to musicians from Nazi Europe, and thereby brought Mozart's music to the idyllic sylvan setting of an English country house on the Sussex Downs. The audience still wear formal evening dress while picnicking on the lawns. Sadly, here too there is the need for corporate sponsorship, and socially motivated tone-deaf barbarians are at the front gate. In their recent production of Don Giovanni the great lover starts in a designer's hell and stays there.
So onwards and upwards into the Swiss Alps. We all have some kind of talismanic lodestone, like Proust's madeleine, which brings back childhood memories. For me it is black cherry jam at a Swiss breakfast table. It triggers instant total recall, and few things do that at my age. And with the jam comes a breakfast roll. Not what is erroneously called a "Swiss roll," which is no more Swiss than an English muffin is English, or, in a less digestible category, a French letter is French. Orson Welles, in that wonderful film The Third Man, made the snide remark that the Swiss had not invented anything, except the cuckoo clock. That is not true. They also invented the Swiss breakfast roll, which is evocatively baked into the unmistakable undulating shape of a pair of female buttocks. This Baker's Duo has through immemorial time surreptitiously and subliminally programmed all those little jodling ski teachers to a preference for girls. Even the great national hero, William Tell, showed obvious homophobia when he chose a boy for his game with apples and arrows. When my column gets syndicated across the world there will be pirouettes of protest outside every Swiss consulate in the Free World.
My favorite Swiss Alp is in Gstaad, where I am the guest in a lovely chalet of a much more important scribbler than I. (He is a regular contributor to the editorial page of the Herald Tribune!) I go to the concerts given at Yehudi Menuhin's Gstaad Festival, and this year a bravura thespian performance at the Gstaad Symposium, by Margaret Thatcher. I hope her wise words about freedom and democracy echoed through the mountains and into the corridors of despotism of the Euro Bureaucracy. Thanks to my literary agent, Taki, who is the begetter of the Gstaad Symposium, I spent a full hour chatting up Lady Thatcher, but forgot to tell her about the Swiss breakfast rolls. And yet I think of little else.
Poor Richard Nixon. When he left the White House because of Watergate in 1974, the chorus of condemnation left him so vilified that he was almost in the Hitler league of hate figures. His only mistake was to try to protect underlings by covering up. He did not commit perjury, did not show utter and absolute contempt for the truth and for the law he had sworn to uphold, and did not subvert justice. He was driven out of office by a media that had smelled blood; here was an historic opportunity to assert the power of the Fourth Estate once and for all by forcing a president out of office. It was as simple as that, sports fans, and if anyone tells you different, tell them to put it up their Adam Clymer.
Let's take it from the top:
Born in 1913 to working-class parents, Nixon graduated from Duke with honors in law. He worked as a lawyer before serving three years in the Navy. Lt. Nixon went on to win election to Congress in 1946. Four years later he was elected senator for California, and two years after that he became vice president. So far so good, although the pinkos of the press had already marked him as a baddie because of his anticommunism.
Nixon lost the 1960 presidential election by a 0.1 percent margin. He refused to challenge the results despite ballot-rigging by Kennedy minions in the key states of Illinois and Texas. It would have been bad for the country, he said. When he finally became president in 1968, there were 550,000 American troops in Vietnam. He reduced the number to 60,000 in four years and negotiated a settlement with the North Vietnamese in 1973. But the bitterness toward Vietnam?begun by Kennedy and escalated by Johnson?tainted everything else achieved by Nixon, with the help of Henry Kissinger, including the China initiative, his Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty with the Soviets and his saving of Israel in the Yom Kippur war of 1973.
(Having covered that war both in the Golan and in the Sinai desert, I am appalled to read that the Israeli army is now using helicopter gunships firing armor-piercing missiles against children throwing stones. It is an outrage, and the jingoistic politicians and tabloids of this city should be ashamed of themselves. The Palestinians did not start this. Ariel Sharon did, and Israeli arrogance is out of control. As an Israeli told my friend Emma Williams writing in The Spectator, "He threw stones, he gets shot. So?" The Israelis may pretend to deplore the killing of children and ambulance drivers rushing to their aid, but after 52 years of oppressing the Palestinians, one day?alas, not in my lifetime?the chickens will come home to roost.)
Seven years after his death Nixon is once again being vilified by an opportunistic Irishman by the name of Anthony Summers. This is the same bullmerchant who in a previous unreadable book claimed that J. Edgar Hoover wore a dress. Summers is a typical lefty hack, eager to cash in by assassinating the reputation of people who cannot answer back. Just look at his sources for these fantasies. A New York shrink aged 102; people who heard rumors of Nixon's drug-taking from second- or thirdhand sources; a Los Angeles reporter, Bill Van Patten, now dead, who told an unidentified friend who told Summers that Nixon beat his wife. It then transpires that two long-dead California lawyers allegedly passed the rumors along to a campaign aide, who passed it on to Summers. If this is history, I'm Monica Lewinsky.
So the history-making China initiative (it shook Moscow to its core and began the era of detente between the superpowers) is brushed aside, to be replaced by the most outrageous lies and calumnies against a good man who was awkward in public but a warm and loving person in private. I say so because I know, and Summers does not. Just as I know that Summers makes Seymour Hersch almost sound truthful.
Therefore, the insistence of the U.S. government and the opposition that there was to be no second round of voting was nothing more than cancellation of democracy. The ploy was particularly outrageous given that Milosevic's coalition?and this is something no one denies?had won majorities in both chambers of the federal parliament. The government coalition now has 74 out of 137 seats in the lower chamber; and 26 out of 40 seats in the upper chamber.
The events that led to the trashing of the parliament and the seizure of power remain murky as I write this. What apparently acted as the trigger was the news that the Yugoslav Constitutional Court had ruled to annul the Sept. 24 vote. But the court had made no such ruling. Last Wednesday the court heard arguments from the Democratic opposition to have Kostunica declared the outright winner. A ruling was promised within 72 hours. Reuters ran a story saying that the head of the Yugoslav Constitutional Court, Milutin Srdic, had told the Bulgarian office of Radio Free Europe that the presidential election had to be held again after the end of Milosevic's term of office. Radio Free Europe, as everyone knows, is a U.S. agency. Bulgarians at Radio Free Europe are presumably not the first on the list of people who need to be told of a Constitutional Court decision.
According to the L.A. Times, the "court had decided 'to annul part of the electoral procedures' for the disputed Sept. 24 presidential election. The statement did not specify which portion of the election had been voided or what action, if any, would be ordered." Yet Zoran Djindjic, Kostunica's campaign manager and the most important figure in the Democratic opposition, was in no time claiming, "According to the information I have they annulled the first round." However, the Reuters report added, "He did not say where the information came from." Not surprisingly, Madeleine Albright was soon denouncing the court's decision as an effort to "thwart the will of the people." The story of the court's ruling clearly was a piece of disinformation to sow hatred of Milosevic.
The violation of Yugoslavia's electoral process was the perfect culmination of a campaign that U.S. funds had disfigured to the point of absurdity. In August the U.S. opened an Office of Yugoslav Affairs in Budapest with a view to organizing the opposition's campaign. Even The New York Times has written about the "suitcases of cash" coming in from Hungary. The U.S., with quasi-independent organizations that work in tandem with it like George Soros' Open Society Institute, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to try to oust Milosevic. At least $77 million of U.S. taxpayer money has poured into the bank accounts of the opposition in the last year alone. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) channels money to Serb newspapers, tv and radio. Since 1999 the International Republican Institute, yet another conduit for U.S. money, has been bankrolling student organizations. The Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) channels money to economists in Yugoslavia. In the words of NED Program Officer Paul McCarthy, CIPE along "with the G-17 group of independent economists, is conducting a research program to identify barriers to private sector development at the local and federal levels and to promote economic reform legislation."
The next finance minister of Yugoslavia is likely to be Mladjan Dinkic, director of G-17 Plus (same as G-17). It was G-17 Plus that crafted the Democratic opposition's economics program. In a recent interview, he stated that the opposition had already drafted a letter of intent asking for Yugoslavia's readmission to the IMF and the World Bank. He speaks with relish about free trade and privatization.
The Serbs will not enjoy what the IMF has in mind for them. They will like even less the plans of the U.S. government. Giving up independence has a price?a rather high one, as the Serbs are about to find out.