But Enough About You: Essays (53 page)

A more modest approach is to steer the conversation toward an apparently unrelated topic, such as tanning lotions, and then casually announce:

The Queen Mother has the most remarkable skin.

This should be quickly followed with:
Strictly between us, I find her the sweetest of the whole bunch. Giggly. Fun. Loves her gin and tonic. And puts you right at ease.

Immediately rebuke yourself for having revealed this “out of school,” and suggest forcefully that you do
not
want to see yourself quoted on Facebook, especially with Ascot approaching. Finish with:

It would only make things in the Royal Enclosure bloody awkward for me.

THE POSTHUMOUS DROP

Safest of all, as chances of contradiction or being challenged are minimized. R. Clements, of Blue Hill, Maine, uses this approach.

RC: (looking up from magazine, sighing heavily):
Well, thank God, is all I can say.

Listener:
About what?

RC:
That it never got out about us. Miracle, really.

Listener:
About who?

RC: Oh, nothing.

At this point, Clements excuses himself, leaving the magazine opened to an article about Princess Diana.

RC (returning, wiping his eyes with tissue):
Can I fix you another?

Listener:
What did you mean by that?

RC (with a hint of defiance, fighting back tears):
Nothing. I shouldn’t have brought it up in the first place.

Variation openings

—
I told her not to marry Charles in the first place.

—
It’s at times like this that I miss her the most.

—
I really wish that brother hadn’t turned Althorp into a damned petting zoo.

Followed by

—
Of course, I’m no one to ask. I did practically
live
there for a while.

Clements then adamantly refuses to discuss it further. A few minutes later, he morosely interjects:
Couldn’t see a thing at the funeral.
Wouldn’t you know, I was seated directly behind Luciano Pavarotti. Just my luck.

OTHER ROYALS

Some novice droppers prefer to start off by invoking intimacy with Lesser Royalty. This is considered okay technique, but notoriety should be imputed to the Lesser Royal in order to compensate for his/her obscurity. T. Wilder, of Bethesda, Maryland, an advanced gamesman, typically begins as follows:

So, have you spent much time in Umvig-Glumstein?

The answer usually reliably no, he proceeds:

Well, if you ever get there, let me know and I’ll arrange for you to see Schloss Schlitz. For my money, it’s far more dramatic than Mad Ludwig’s desperate attempt at attention getting, and yet it manages to be so—I don’t know—gemütlich at the same time.

If he suspects the listener knows a few words of rudimentary German, Wilder deploys the Teutonic Escalator. In place of
gemütlich
, substituting:
Oh what
is
the German for it? Farbleflemmerchinzengespritz?
(chuckling to himself)
Yes, that’s it—
Parsifal,
Act Two, scene three. Why can’t I
ever
remember?

Note that Wilder has audaciously put several balls in play simultaneously: his privileged access to the nonexistent castle, and Listener’s assumed lack of knowledge of European geography and conversational German.

Listener now on the defensive on several fronts, Wilder continues:

The current Graf is an old, old friend. Last of a line, direct descendant of Philip of Swabia; for my money, one of the less gaga Holy Roman Emperors. Isaiah Berlin and I used to get into fisticuffs over it. I miss Isaiah.

Wilder has now deftly insinuated that his views on the Holy Roman Emperors are controversial and have been a cause of tension between him and a leading intellectual. Continuing:

Anyway, the Graf is a dear old thing. Gives us the run of the place every August. Of course there
are
236 bedrooms, so it’s not as though we’re constantly bumping into each other in the hallway.

Wilder now moves in for the kill:

Anyway, if you’re in the vicinity, I could try to fix it for you to stick your head in and have a poke around. I’d arrange for you to meet him, but he can be a bit, you know, formal.

THE DNA INSINUATOR

If no royal opening presents itself, steer the conversation around to how you faint at the doctor’s office every time they take blood. Then in a tone of mild annoyance:

I just got another letter from the Kremlin. They’re after me to give them a DNA sample so they can settle this damned authenticity question about the czar’s bones.
(Sighing.)
I’ve been ignoring them for months. Well, they say they only need a drop or two. I suppose I owe it to the family.

THE CONVERSATIONAL OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE

Place a misshapen lump—any nondescript material will do—inside a glass display case along with a temperature gauge and mount it in a prominent place. Deflect initial inquiries, then in a world-weary tone, say it is the preserved heart of George III, king of Britain:

My great-great-great-great-grandfather was Nathan Hale. His brother, my great-great-great-whatever uncle, never quite forgave the Brits for hanging him. When he was visiting England he stole into the royal tomb and removed it. A bit gruesome, I know, but I can’t bring myself just to put it in a safe deposit box. I must get around to giving it back one of these days, except I’m not really sure how to go about it. Don’t let on. It would only create a huge to-do.

THE STAR AND BAR

Extreme care must be exercised here, as many Southerners are meticulously versed in genealogy. Disaster befell P. Harding of Athens, Georgia, in the course of gambiting that he was a direct descendant of General Jubal Early, only to be icily informed by someone present
that the general had died without issue. Harding countercountered by saying that the general had had a liaison with a (beautiful) farm girl on the eve of the Battle of Cedar Creek, and that the resulting love child was Harding’s great-great-grandfather.

Unfortunately, this only inflamed present company as it implied moral turpitude on the part of the Confederate god, and the evening ended in acrimony and remonstration.

One way to flush out any genealogically savvy Southerners is the Auto-Derogator Gambit. Declare, in a voice loud enough to carry the room, that it is now “universally conceded” that T. J. “Stonewall” Jackson was “vastly overrated” as a strategist. If no one approaches you with a fire poker, then the way is cleared for you to say how much this new scholarship pains you, inasmuch as you are the general’s great-great-nephew. The rest of the evening can now be devoted to refuting the new scholarship. (Note: This is a variation on the Macedonian Sacrifice, perfected by D. Reigeluth of Harrison, New York, who uses it to affect aloofness while claiming direct descent from Alexander the Great.
Or as we in the family call him, Alexander the
Occasionally
Great
.

THE GEOGRAPHICAL PREEMPT

Extremely adaptable. Can be easily inserted into any lull in the dinner conversation.

(With a trace of annoyance)
Really, a week in Monaco is just too much. Frankly three days would be more than enough. Rainiers, Hapbsurgs, Hohenzollerns, Romanovs. After a while, one yearns to be among
ordinary
people.

Or:

(With exasperation)
Five
days
at Balmoral! Shoot me! I have only so much conversation about grouse. On the other hand, I’m devoted to Princess Anne.
(Adding casually)
You going over this year?

When a listener replies that he is not, nod sympathetically.

Just as well. Anne says the shooting’s off this year.

THE GNOSTIC PARRY

G. Semler of Barcelona has written several well-regarded monographs on Counter Strategies. His most popular is the Kissinger Refuse:

Guest:
I just spent the weekend with Henry Kissinger.

GS:
Isn’t it exciting, his news?

Guest:
News? What news?

GS:
He didn’t mention? Oh. Henry does like to play his cards close to his chest. Still, if he had you out to the house, I’m surprised he didn’t . . . well, probably for the best.

ALL-PURPOSE LINES IN CASE OF EMERGENCY

—
That’s certainly not what Spielberg told
me.

—(Cupping hand over the phone)
It’s the White House. Do you have another phone I could use?

—
I’m being stalked myself. And let me tell you, it’s a damned nuisance.

—
Forbes FYI
, November 1998

President Clinton recently went to China with a staff of eight hundred. President Lincoln began in office with a White House staff of one assistant. By the time he had won the Civil War, it had ballooned to—three people. Imagine what he could have accomplished with eight hundred. The Union would probably still be dug in around Petersburg. For that matter, imagine what Clinton could have accomplished over there with a staff of three.

It was an ironic photo opportunity at Xian, as the president gazed out on those six thousand terra-cotta warriors buried more than two thousand years ago with their emperor. His entourage was even larger than Clinton’s, but the gap is closing. Richard Nixon, Quaker piker that he was, took a measly 200 staffers with him to China in 1972. In 1984, Ronald Reagan, champion of small government, took 350.

It’s fun to fly around the world with an entourage as big as the Ritz. As Mel Brooks, playing Louis XIV, put it, “It’s good to be the king.”

In world entourages, the United States appears to rule. When Queen Elizabeth visited Ghana early this year, she brought with her a relatively tight retinue of a few dozen. Of course, Her Majesty doesn’t require a military aide to carry a briefcase with nuclear launch codes. (I was once the custodian of one of our own nuclear footballs for a few heady moments, but more on that later.)

According to a recent
Debrett’s Peerage and Baronetage
, the social register of the British classes, the queen’s official household (excluding butlers, footmen, maids, cooks, postillions, and all the rest) numbers thirty-four, from the Lord Chamberlain to Temporary Equerry, including along the way two Baronesses in Waiting and an Extra Lady of the Bedchamber. The queen’s household in Scotland, meanwhile, lists twenty-two, including Hereditary Carver of Scotland, Dean of the Order of the Thistle, Apothecary to the Household
at the Palace at Holyroodhouse, and Captain-General and Gold Stick for Scotland. Wouldn’t that look great on a business card? (The former husband of Prince Charles’s consort, Camilla Parker Bowles, was Silver Stick in Waiting.) But there are even cooler titles in the Lord Chamberlain’s office, the entourage within an entourage: Poet Laureate, Master of the Queen’s Music, and Clerk of the Closet.

The Groom of the Stole, the person charged with laying the grand cloth over the monarch’s shoulder during coronations, is apparently a sanitized spelling of a medieval word for a quite different function: the groom who was in charge of the king’s privy. Monarchies have never been reticent about such matters. According to my scholarly friend Timothy Dickinson, who knows everything, “It is well attested that on one occasion Louis XIV was having an enema, and his
marchal de loge
(the marshall of the bedchamber) emerged and announced that since the king was having an enema, only the sixty senior ladies could be admitted.”
That’s
protocol.

When President Jiang Zemin of China visited the United States in 1997, he came with only eighty people, and he had more than a billion to choose from. The late King Faisal of Saudi Arabia traveled with a hundred. The late, unlamented President Mobuto Sese Seko of Zaire arrived in America in 1982 with an escort of a hundred—for a vacation. They spent $2 million in two weeks. Fidel Castro took a hundred comrades with him when he visited the Vatican in 1996, but then he may have been anticipating a firefight with the Swiss Guard.

The sultan of Brunei (until Bill Gates came along, the richest man on earth) visited London in 1992 with only twenty. However, he did celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of his coronation at home by riding though the streets of the capital in a chariot drawn by forty men. The sultan sounds like a decent fellow. He once left a $170,000 cash tip at the Four Seasons Hotel in Nicosia, Cyprus. Another time, while shopping in New York, he wanted to charge some purchases, and the clerk asked him for ID. He didn’t carry any—a common trait among those who have entourages—so one of his ten bodyguards produced a wad of Brunei cash with His Majesty’s face on it. Wouldn’t you love to be able to do that at the airport when they ask for photo ID?

What private-sector entourages lack in volume, they make up for in vanity. A movie director marveled once to a reporter about the entourage of the actor Don Johnson. “The only person I’ve ever seen with an entourage like that was Elvis Presley, but they were his cousins.” He totted up Mr. Johnson’s traveling staff: a makeup person, hairstylist, wardrobe person, helicopter pilot, two drivers, two bodyguards, a trainer, a cook, and a secretary. Don—you ask—
who
? But where do you cut? The nineteenth-century duke of Buckingham went bankrupt, but adamantly refused to alter his lifestyle. His creditors finally persuaded his nephew Charles Greville to take the matter up with his uncle.

“But good heavens,” the duke protested, “you have no idea. I’ve cut back to the bone.”

“Well, Uncle, no doubt, but you do still have six personal confectioners.”

“Upon my word, things have come to a pretty pass when a man can’t send out for a biscuit!”