Silks & Sows

One day Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul, spoke to me for about 10 seconds. I found him quite charming. However, I still believe that there is something constitutionally iffy about an American citizen, through his control of much of Britain's media, determining the outcome of British elections, the policies of the appropriately grateful government and the future of Britain's monarchy. How would the Americans feel about some limey doing that to you?

The late Lord Beaverbrook, who owned the Express newspapers, was feared in my youth. One day, in the South of France, he invited me for lunch at his home. I had brought along a dizzy blonde, so the old devil lectured me, "You look very pleased with your bimbo, but I'll tell you what is really exciting. That is when you reach the age when you can only do it once a month, and?" looking at his watch, he continued, "it's tomorrow!" He was over 80 at the time, so I know what to look forward to.

Beaverbrook's papers have now been bought by a man described as the "King of Porn" and who for good measure has entered into a loose alliance with a publication linked to Mohamed al-Fayed, King of Harrods. This reminds me of the saying, "William Randolph Hearst married a prostitute and gradually brought her down to his own level." But there is a new media star who gives me hope. Nicky Haslam is a friend of mine. In his career as a martinet interior decorator he has for many years told the socially insecure how to drape their drapeaux. My daughter and I have hung by his lips in our upwardly mobile journey from Newport cottage to Chelsea chateau. Now Nicky has his own column in which he issues his edicts on all matters sartorial, hirsutorial, cosmetic and social. His review in The Spectator of the recent book The Girls:Sappho Goes to Hollywood was so brilliantly funny that only crass fear restrains me from daily purloining his bon mots.

London has been very Russian this summer. The Kirov Ballet and Opera companies have now far surpassed the Bolshoi. Pushkin's drama Boris Godunov was directed by Declan Donnellan in an all-Russian production at the Riverside Studios. Down the road at the Lyric in Hammersmith they gave us the Shostakovich version of Gogol's story, The Nose. A Complicite production of The Noise of Time at the Barbican gave mosaic fragments from the haunted composer's life, and finally there was his Paradise Moscow at the Sadler's Wells Theatre. That's a lot of Shostakovich in one stretch. If one wanted to go further East there was the Shochiku Grand Kabuki Chikamatsu-za performance of Sonezaki Shinju, and for those amongst London theatergoers who don't understand 18th-century Japanese, there were the two modern plays by Yukio Mishima and directed by Yukio Ninagawa, Sotoba Komachi and Yoroboshi. Linguistically impoverished bums settled for Bob Wilson's brilliant three-hour interpretation of Strindberg's A Dream Play, in Swedish, but with surtitles, earphones and pipes of pot for the uninitiated. (This entire paragraph has not really been intended for my readers. I wanted to see whether this cornucopia of multicultural namedropping might not inspire something truly imaginative amongst the editors of New York Press. I could then submit the final version for a deconstructionist appraisal by Prof. Derrida, and get a doctorate from the Sorbonne.)

There is an English expression, "to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear." Presumably one can reverse the expression: two examples of making a sow's ear out of a silk purse would be the National Theatre's absurd version of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, and the English National Opera's production of Don Giovanni. In both productions there is a desperate effort to be "with it" in a way that completely destroys the original. Another example of this was the Chichester Festival production of Stoppard's On the Razzle. I am told that the original production of Stoppard's adaptation of Johann Nestroy's Einen Jux Will Er Sich Machen was delightful and full of the author's erudite fireworks. This revival only brought out the heavy Viennese jokes. Is there anything worse? But German can be very sexy. The spirit of Marlene Dietrich, Lili Marlene and Kurt Weill was brought back triumphantly in a recital by the glamorous Eva Meier at the Royal Opera House Studio.

My last bit of outrage and venom ought to be directed at the new Fidelio at Glyndebourne. Though unnecessarily modernistic, I still love the story of the poor innocent Florestan being released from imprisonment to Beethoven's melodious blast of music. This summer I witnessed a similarly evocative blast of fireworks in honor of a great man and his discerning gifts to the arts, to the cause of democracy and indeed to freedom wherever and whenever it is threatened. I have never seen more beautiful fireworks in a more beautiful sylvan setting. The venue was the home of Sir Paul Getty, where he has created a park in the great traditions of English landscape gardening: the tradition of Capability Brown and Humphrey Repton, inspired by God's nature as seen in the works of painters like Claude Lorrain and Poussin. Fortuitously I have this last spring been showing my favorite gardens?Exbury, Stourhead, Wilton and Bodnant?to a new friend. It is fitting that Getty, who first saw this kind of design in his late father's English home, and who more than anyone else in his generation symbolizes the best in the "special relationship" between America and Britain, should have made such a work of art possible. The younger Getty has made the name of a great fortune synonymous with a gift from God. No easy task today.