Wednesday, June 19, 2013. Warm muggy-ish day, yesterday in New York. Sunny in the morning and early afternoon, and clouding over around four. Followed by a light rain, often steady and cooler air.
I went down to Michael’s to lunch with an old friend of California, Richard Ayoub and Nick Urbom. Richard works in television production. Lately he’s been running a web site about Rumors. They are the site that clears up rumors about celebrities, True or False. Liz was there and these California boys were very impressed to see Miss Liz lunching at a table nearby. Even better, I knew she’d stop by after her lunch and they’d even get to meet her. And so it was.
![]() | ![]() | | Richard Ayoub and Liz Smith meet and become fast friends yesterday in Michael's. | ![]() | ![]() |
I took a picture with my new camera. Liz was camera ready, just having come from taping her weekly Fox News segment. I don’t know what the segment is because I’ve never seen it but I do know that what you see is what you get, because she’s always the same person. Her manner and slant is exactly the same as in print, on a podium or on TV. Or face to face. She’s very Broadway still, although not like Walter Winchell. More like Molly Ivins or Ann Richards. It must be in the water down there. Richard Ayoub didn’t tell Liz this, but he’s from Texas too and you could see they knew the same language.
At table discussed amongst other trivia and palaver, Social Media which I don’t participate in, and which Richard does. He told me that the last time they came to New York they booked a room in a very famous and distinguished hotel. Just to see what it would be like to stay there.
It was a terrible experience, and afterwards he tweeted his disappointment. Shortly thereafter, he received a tweet from the hotel’s manager who apologized and told him if he ever returned they’d like to make it up to him. Richard was just surprised that the manager saw his tweet. So this trip, he took them up on the offer. This year they were put up in a suite with everything first rate, and they were even given a discount on a double. Everything was fantastic. Richard and Nick will be staying there again.
I don’t tweet. I find I just want to get away from the cell. I dropped mine on the cement sidewalk a couple of weeks ago. Its rubber protector had already deteriorated and dropped off. I shattered the cover. It looks like it got hit by a (very small) metal ball. Now when I look at it I’m only reminded that I rarely look at it anyway.
We got a lot of messages about yesterday’s Diary about Anthony Marshall. All from people who are very upset with the idea of this 90-year-old man being incarcerated. I know not everyone feels that way. My friend Margo Howard told me that Andrea Peyser“wrote the meanest piece I think I have ever read.” In the Post. Evidently Ms. Peyser is still locked into calling Mrs. Marshall names, among other free-floating condemnations. What is that?! I get that kind of vicious anger with children at a certain phase in their lives, but an adult woman?
![]() | ![]() | | According to Ms. Peyser: "Anthony Marshall (with wife Charlene) and Frank Morrissey, want another reprieve from prison for ripping off Marshall's mom, Brooke Astor." (photo: Steven Hirsch). | ![]() |
I met Andrea Peyser once. I can’t remember where. It was just in passing. She seemed unremarkable, almost oblique, but pleasantly so. I wondered later if she were really like that voice she so viciously eviscerates others with. I wondered what her mother was like. Or maybe her father. I wondered if in fact she was really just like a Nathanael West character -- doing it for the money and then went back to her TV, opened a Bud, putting her feet up, and watched Friday Night Wrestling with her friend or her brother or her husband or her cat. It’s hard to be that mean and “mean it” all the time when you’re writing. Unless ....
That’s the thing that has bothered me since the beginning with this Astor case. It was a public hanging before they even went into the courtroom. The papers were full of false or exaggerated stories that played right into the idea that the Marshalls were gold diggers and abusing a helpless old woman. Just like the rest of us we keep in our own closets. It is not rational to assume that Mrs. Astor was abused. She had a staff of ten and round-the-clock nurses and doctors visiting very often. She was treated like the queen that she was in her world. Except she was very old and very ill, and very frail.
Over the history of this case I’ve received many messages from readers sympathizing with the Marshalls because they too had had to deal with the ordeal of Aging, and its effect on the individual and his or her family. I don’t know what they’re talking about because I have never had to deal with that. When my mother began to be frail, she was still strong and she had my sisters to look after her. As it was, she lived alone after my father died, to the end of her eighty-two years.
But, I later learned, she was lucky because, like Brooke Astor for example, many people have a very hard road before they depart this life. And the money can buy the medication and care, however, that can keep them going long, long after they’ve otherwise departed in mind, and even body.
The other part of the story, the Will, i.e.,The Money is a very old one. The other day I was in Crawford Doyle bookstore on Madison Avenue between 81st and 82nd, and I spotted a new paperback titled “Behind Closed Doors; The Tragic Untold Story of Wallis Simpson.”
I happened to pick up book to see if it were one I’d missed or just a re-publishing of the same old.. Anyone who has followed those lives (The Windsors) has read just about everything in print about them. I’m not sure what the fascination is (I’m sure there are those who claim to know), even though I am drawn to it. There is something about those lives that is intriguingly pathetic, and yet compelling, and yet frivolous, and yet profoundly impressive in human terms.
When I got it home, I called Peter Rogers in New Orleans to ask him if he’d read it and had he told me about it. He had. I remembered; he loved it. Then he said: “It’s excellent and when I finally put it down I thought I never want to read another word about those two again.”
The book, by Hugo Vickers, is a stunner in terms of its ability to convey a character’s life as a Drama in Progress. It begins with the death of the Duke, who died in 1972. Soon the Duchess was lost without him. Her life lost its center. There were always a lot of stories about them -- that she really didn’t like him at all, and treated him miserably.
![]() | ![]() | | The Duke and Duchess of Windsor and their official wedding portrait by Cecil Beaton. | ![]() | ![]() |
Maybe, but it was One Life just the same. Sorry girl. The Duchess began to lose it within a couple of years. Meanwhile in the staff, (the downstairs, mainly the office staff – lawyers, doctors, etc.) had their own drama watching the lone fish in the shrinking goldfish bowl. All of this is reported like a Diary or a business calendar.
Hugo Vickers has been obsessed with these sorts of characters all his life and he is very good at it. He is an excellent observer, and a dramatist when need be. You read about who came and visited, who answered the telephone, what was said, not said, who complained about the food, or whom did the Duchess really detest and more and more. The Duchess herself is a lonely, almost absent figure in the drama. Mainly because she’s at the end of her life, and it was apparent to her right after the Duke died.
And then comes the professional helpers. Aha! The ones, who in the name of assistance (legal, medical), begin to dissect the center until their victim is stranded on a rock, at sea. Because the Duchess had no family living, and because the Duke had set everything up (in terms of Wills, distribution of property, etc.), she knew nothing. And she had much, money, jewels, art, antiques. They had lived like Royals. The house on the Bois was small compared to Buckingham Palace, but it was palatial and grand. The treasures were far fewer and the staff far smaller than back home in London, but kid, it’s “the air” that’s different up there. You can’t even buy it, so forget about it. |
