High life
Speechless
Taki
Lexington, Kentucky
Late April is a time when the lawns and gardens of Kentucky are painted with the real life pastels of a Southern spring- time. This is where the famouS Kentucky bluegrass grows, and a landed gentry does not allow its money to interfere with good manners and a perfect Southern hospitalitY. Perhaps this is so because, unlike the folks back in New York and Los Angeles, they didn't have to screw their fellow man to
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make it. The land is a natural savannah, and the soil is so rich it hardly needs cultivating or fertilising. There are old and stately houses which — surprisingly for America are lived in and well-kept, thoroughbred breeding farms as far as the eye can see, and a university whose students would rather read than riot. There is also an airport where I counted more private jets than there are phony arab princes.
I came down here, in what I would call God's country, in order to give a speech to some college students. My friend Dr LueY Henke is a very pretty girl whose only perversion is that she likes to teach the young. She is a professor at the University of Kentucky, and her friend Tom Donahue is the Dean of the college. Both Lucy and Tom are aberrations in their professions as they are neither Marxist nor Trotskyist. .MY speech had been advertised for some time so there were at least 18,000 people crowd- ed into the stadium for Taki's sermon.
Lucy had warned me that the audience might be a bit aggressive about some of the, 0 anti-feminist stuff that I had mentioned. 1- would talk about, so the night before, 1, vited my best new friend, Tom Wolfe, and a few other brainy people for dinner at 111Y, urban seat. One thing led to another an° before you knew it, there I was, very drun. motorboating away about the absence or good novelists, when I realised I had about one hour to catch my flight to Lexingtor' Worse, I had forgotten to prepare a speeen: which, incidentally, had to be a minunun! 45 minutes long (otherwise no girls and n_u, booze, was the way Tom Donahue had put it). And as luck would have it, the secoit ,t1 place. greatest race meeting was taking Lexington that day, and the early Mor11011! flight was booked solid with fat and bo small New Yorkers flying down for 'a stnot amount of wagering', as my travelling et panion kept telling me throughout the. gic°,, hour trip. But not to worry. Although Lu.:ci er.rier.ge;., did, when I bumped into her as from the plane but failed to recognise her, from she did offer me some eyedrops, took e me to the hotel for a quick shower, , osi.itlo hot coffee, a glass of champagne, a
I began my lecture by announcing that the slaughter. had failed to prepare a speech. Incredibly, the students began to laugh and applauded me. I found out later that they don't like the professional fee collectors who makeup the speaking circuit around the universities. You know the type: hairy, liberal, Jewish, anti-free-enterprise, anti-American, or anti- North American, rather. Nevertheless, I went on. I told them how the quality of life i
in a small town is infinitely better than in a big one; how I went into journalism; how never, but never, to believe the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian and CBS; how men and women were dif- ferent (they cheered and cheered at that one: apparently there are socio- Psychologists with enormous grants from the government, studying at the university, trying to prove that the species are dif- ferent). Finally I announced that the only woman with balls in England was the Prime Minister and that if homosexuality was nor- Mal, as a lot of homosexuals insist, the species would have been extinct long ago. Even if I say so myself, it wasn't a bad per- formance for someone who hadn't been to bed for 48 hours.
Afterwards we all went racing, to the most beautiful racetrack, Keeneland, I've ever seen in America. The track emphasises the 'sport' of racing rather than the gambl- ing side (stay away Benson). There is no Public address system, and the people crowding around the Belle Epoche Stand looked the way people used to look in the good old days. Needless to say, I was en- chanted. To be among brainy people without hair on their faces and hate in their hearts is rare. To be with cultivated and well mannered people is even rarer. And, like in Tom Wolfe's cartoon about the visiting speaker at the university in his purple decade book, I did spot a very pretty girl wearing braces four down in the sixth row.
hen she approached me for a chat after the speech I made my pitch. We are arriving in London next week and I hope you'll ex- cuse her Southern accent. And mine.
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