High life
High and mighty
Taki
TWashington DC he nation's capital can look very beautiful on an early spring morning from a room high up at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, The Ritz-Carlton used to be called the Fairfax, I believe, back in the bad old days of the Greek colonels, when it served as the headquarters of the heroic oppositioa to those friends of mine who are at present rotting away in a Piraeus jail. The Greek embassy is a stone's throW away down Massachusetts Avenue, but as yet I've been lucky enough not to run into any of the well-fed 'gentlemen' that the olive republic has chosen to post here In order to cover up for the phoniest Greek since the one that betrayed the 300 SPar" tans long ago. But Papandreou, Mercontli and the rest of the motley group of socialists, are hardly the talk of the town, as they say. This is Contra and anti-Contra time, and the paid propagandists that make city what it is, are hustling and running harder than Sammy Glick ever did. Pers° nally, I think the Sandinistas have nothing to worry about. Anything Congress cornc." up with in favour of the Contras, those nic` people in the Kremlin will match and the some. The only way to get rid of tha communist cancer in Nicaragua is to do Soviet a la Budapest-Prague-Afghanista.n. Send in the Marines, win, and then tall!: Alas, in a democracy things work different lY, and I can see the day that half of Central America will be Cubanised, and some timid soul will rise in the Senate and demand an inquiry of why we lost it. But a high-life column is not the place to discuss such biological contradictions as the will of the people. High life should be about the high and the mighty, like the daughter of Fancy Nancy, one Patti Davis, who has just published a 'novel' about her father, the President of the United States. Patti Davis (she uses her mother's maiden name in order to mislead us into thinking she's just another female) is a 33-year-old who has had a chequered career, to say the least. She's been a spinner of ballads, has sung rock, has acted in a few films, and is at present doing the talk shows — once aptly described as the death rattle of civilisation — selling her novel. I have not read the novel, therefore I feel I'm unique- ly qualified to state my opinion. The fact that she calls it a novel is bad enough. It's nothing of the kind. It is a straightforward account of how ghastly, uncaring and superficial her parents are. She describes her father in a manner that would make it difficult for even the great Sherlock Holmes to guess his identity. Now for any of you who have read Ancient Greek tragedy, stabbing one's mother in the back is nothing new. What I am protesting about is the hatchet job Miss Davis performs on her father. Here is this rather inarticulate-sounding woman, un- talented, and with those grabby, retarded, and startled-at-all-times kind of looks, who suddenly decides to reach for fame and fortune by doing what even an elegant type of man like Billy Carter did not stoop to do. And what is Ronald Reagan's re- sponse? 'I hope she makes a lot of money from it,' says the great forgiver. Well, I'm not RR, and I cannot forgive the bad luck most recent presidents of the republic have had with their offspring. The only one who was blessed with children who have nothing in common with the Ford, Carter and Reagan Kinder, is Richard Nixon. Both his daughters have shown plenipotential dignity while their father has been in and out of office. They have not profited from his position, nor nave they sold themselves to the highest bidder, or to the lowest common denomi- nator. But the press being what it is, one is as likely to read a kind word about them as Nancy Reagan is likely to stop taking Jerry Zipkin seriously. And speaking of seriousness, the fun- niest book about the White House is the one by Christopher Buckley, my old friend and best man, who has published an uproarious account of White House goings-on during the tenure of the 41st President, in 1988. Buckley is an insider and knows. Yet his novel is what a novel should be, real goings-on but with fictitious People. Its title is The White House Mess, and it's the closest to the best satire Evelyn Waugh ever wrote.
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