High life
Post Mort
Taki
loria Steinem used to be a sexy babe with marvellous long legs, streaked peek-a- boo hair and a pair of outsize glasses which became her trademark. Oh yes, I almost forgot, she was also a leading feminist dur- ing the ghastly Sixties, and she started and edited Ms magazine, the first journal ever for those without a gender. She was a star and a celebrity, but unlike most American celebrities she was clever and unlike most of her feminist friends very attractive. Twenty-five years later she has given up the trademark shades and the streaked hair, but from what I understand (I certainly have not read her book on self-esteem) none of her man-bashing ideas, except for renouncing certain personal choices she made, like her three-year affair with Mort Zuckerman, the real estate tycoon turned Tolstoy.
Zuckerman is no friend of mine. I once dined with him and he spoke non-stop about how he rescued Nicholas Daniloff, a Moscow-based hack who was picked up for a couple of days by the KGB and treated not unlike Fergie is in Palm Beach, or Klosters for that matter. You'd think Mort had rescued Wallenberg from the commu- nists. Plus another thing: Zuckerman did something not even Princess Michael of Kent would try. He speculated on land, built a lot of high-rises, made a lot of moolah (all to the good), bought a couple of magazines (still good), and then award- ed himself a column.
Now some of us who were born into poverty and have struggled out of it through the power and integrity of our penmanship may be excused for taking umbrage. The way it goes, Mort, is as fol- lows: first you become a stringer, then you join a wire service; if you're any good then a magazine or national newspaper picks you up and only then, if you are very, very lucky, do you become a columnist like Taki. Zuckerman did nothing of the sort. For that he's not taken seriously among the great and the good in this town, nor in that brothel Washington DC, but personally I don't care. What bothers me about Zucker- man unbound is that he turned the only shade-to-the-right-of-centre national news magazine, US News and World Report, into yet anothei liberal mouthpiece. (He also played in the Artists and Writers softball game before the ink was dry on his maga- zine purchase.)
Nowadays Steinem and Zuckerman are doing a Stalin v. Hitler act, bearing in mind, dear reader, that those two monsters '(Stalin and Hitler) were once bosom bud- dies. The reason is Steinem's book. In it she pulls a very fast one. Steinem claims that Zuckerman was everything she's not, 'a man with a weekend house that cost sev- eral years' worth of funds for the entire women's movement' — in short, that he was a greedy social climber who used her. So what else is new? I have spent more on women than Zuckerman has on his houses, yet I'm no feminist hero. What do you say about that, Gloria?
The trouble is Steinem gets caught out. In an interview she says that Zuckerman never helped Ms magazine. It now trans- pires that he gifted Ms with 400,000 smack- ers outright and lent it a further $700,000. Gloria claims she misunderstood the ques- tion. I say horsefeathers. The NY Observer, the hottest newspaper in the Big Bagel, has
nailed her, but has also nailed Zuckie. They are both of a kind, celebrity-obsessed, smart as whips and intellectually dishonest as hell.
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