High life
Seals of disapproval
Taki
s everyone who has ever read any- thing about modern Hollywood knows, the place is comprised of people who think Leo Tolstoy was a screenwriter who wrote the treatment for the first version of Anna Karenina.
It is also full of what Spy magazine refers to as nose-flesh amputees, Sammy Glick types, hucksters, pseuds, multi-millionaire morons, and artsy types who make New York real estate magnates seem like Mother Teresa by comparison.
As you may have guessed by now, I am no friend of film people, nor do I admire the antics of the trained seals the great American public makes such a fuss about. The reasons I have so little esteem for them are too numerous to list in the short space the sainted one allots Taki each week, therefore I will name the one that bothers me the least, that of celebrity activism.
An egregious example of the dispropor- tionate influence the seals have was the appearance of Gregory Peck in a television commercial that played throughout the summer. Financed by Norman Lear, a billionaire who made his root of all evil by producing sit-corns for television, it de- nounced in Peck's most stentorian voice Judge Robert Bork and all the good judge stood for.
And, alas, it worked. As the great majority of the American public takes its movies seriously, the multi-face-lifted Peck (he looked Chinese, which gave him a wiser look) was seen as Abe Lincoln reincarnated, and the drivel he dished out as coming from Honest Abe's mouth. It made me mad enough to contemplate driving off the bridge at Chappaquiddick with two poppers up my nose.
Now, however, I have reasons to be even angrier. Needless to say, the latest celebrity activism has touched the Taki household, however indirectly, and I am seriously thinking of doing a Khomeini on the people involved.
The Carnegie Hill section of the East Side of Manhattan is one of the most pleasant in this most unpleasant of cities, probably because it is the site of numerous private schools and small shops, and be- cause it is a bit too far uptown for the insider traders who dominate this town. One of the schools located there is the Nightingale-Bamford School, a young ladies' place of learning known for its academic excellence as well as for its unsnobbishness. It is also the school I transferred my 11-year-old daughter to this year. It was, in retrospect, one of the few smart moves of my life. Nightingale has nearly 500 students, and for some time now it has had expansion plans in the shape of four floors. Four floors, mind you, not 14, nor 40. And in the interests of learning, not of the root of all evil.
In step Robert Redford, Blythe Danner, Joanne Woodward and some smaller fry in the trained seal hierarchy. The moronic and monosyllabic Redford signs a petition that says the extra four floors will deprive residents of sunlight, and the desperate- for-publicity Danner follows. Desperate Danner even admits that her anti-nuclear experience in California has excited her interest in activism. (I refused to read what Woodward said because I find her too ghastly even in print.) Now I am willing to bet my last drachma that none of the above lives across from the school, in fact I know they don't, but have lent their names in order to fulfil their egomaniacal impulses. To Hollywood types, activism is what plagiarism was to Joe Biden. Without it, they wither and die. But it is a crying shame when ignoramuses like Redford can for ego purposes stop a wonderful school from better educating its students. I bet they wouldn't be signing any petitions if the idiotic Norman Lear was adding on to his penthouse.
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