Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin Read online

  For a while, I thought other places might be sending us their rich people. (“Listen, if Frank down at the Savings and Loan doesn’t quit talking about how many Jaguars he owns, we’re just going to have to put him in the next shipment to New York.”) It even occurred to me that whoever is in charge of these other places might have misread the poem on the Statue of Liberty, which definitely says, “Give me you tired, your poor.” People make mistakes.

  Then I realized that the rich people were coming here on their own hook. They are swarming into New York because they want to be with people who are like they are—rich. There are a lot of places around the country, after all, where someone who is driven around in a stretched-out Cadillac limousine might be made light of (“Will you look at that thing old Albert’s got himself? Don’t you figure he must think he’s always on his way to a funeral?”). For all I know, there are places around the country where someone who is driven around in a stretched-out Cadillac limousine might have rocks thrown at him.

  “Send ’em back where they came from,” a taxi driver who was hauling me up the East Side Highway one day said as he struggled to get around a gaggle of limos. He had devised a rich-people repatriation plan that sounded very much like Fidel Castro’s Mariel boatlift, except that he’d use private jets instead of fishing boats.

  “But that would be prejudiced and unfair,” I said, although not terribly forcefully.

  1986

  Dinner at the de la Rentas’

  Another week has passed without my being invited to the de la Rentas’. Even that overstates my standing. Until I read in The New York Times Magazine a couple of weeks ago about the de la Rentas having become “barometers of what constitutes fashionable society” (“Françoise and Oscar de la Renta have created a latter-day salon for le nouveau grand monde—the very rich, very powerful, and very gifted”), I wasn’t even aware of what I wasn’t being invited to week after week. Once I knew, of course, it hurt.

  Every time the phone rang, I thought it might be Mrs. de la Renta with an invitation (“Mr. Trillin? Françoise de la Renta here. We’re having a few very rich, very powerful, and/or very gifted people over Sunday evening to celebrate Tisha B’Av, and we thought you and the missus might like to join us.”). The phone rang. It was the lady from the Diners Club informing me how quickly a person’s credit rating can deteriorate. The phone rang. It was my mother calling from Kansas City to ask if I’m sure I sent a thank-you note to my cousin Edna for the place setting of stainless Edna and six other cousins went in on for our wedding gift in 1965. The phone rang. An invitation! Fats Goldberg, the pizza baron, asked if we’d like to bring the kids to his uptown branch Sunday night to sample the sort of pizza he regularly describes as “a gourmet tap dance.”

  “Thanks, Fat Person, but I’ll have to phone you,” I said. “We may have another engagement Sunday.”

  The phone quit ringing.

  “Why aren’t I in le nouveau grand monde?” I asked my wife, Alice.

  “Because you speak French with a Kansas City accent?” she asked in return.

  “Not at all,” I said. “Sam Spiegel, the Hollywood producer, is a regular at the de la Rentas’, and I hear that the last time someone asked him to speak French, he said ‘Gucci.’ ”

  “Why would you want to go there anyway?” Alice said. “Didn’t you read that the host is so phony, he added his own ‘de la’ to what had been plain old Oscar Renta?”

  “Who can blame a man for not wanting to go through life sounding like a taxi driver?” I said. “Family background’s not important in le nouveau grand monde. Diana Vreeland says Henry Kissinger is the star. The Vicomtesse de Ribes says ‘Françoise worships intelligence.’ You get invited by accomplishment—taking over a perfume company, maybe, or invading Cambodia.”

  “Why don’t we just call Fats and tell him we’ll be there for a gourmet tap dance?” Alice said.

  “Maybe it would help if you started wearing dresses designed by Oscar de la Renta,” I said. “Some of his guests say they would feel disloyal downing Mrs. D’s chicken fricassee while wearing someone else’s merchandise.”

  Alice shook her head. “Oscar de la Renta designs those ruffly dresses that look like what the fat girl made a bad mistake wearing to the prom,” she said.

  “Things were a lot easier when fashionable society was limited to old-rich goyim, and all the rest of us didn’t have to worry about being individually rejected,” I said.

  “At least they knew better than to mingle socially with their dressmakers,” Alice said.

  Would I be ready if the de la Rentas phoned? The novelist Jerzy Kosinski, after all, told the Times that evenings with them were “intellectually demanding.” Henry Kissinger, the star himself, said that the de la Rentas set “an interesting intellectual standard”—although, come to think of it, that phrase could also be applied to Fats Goldberg.

  Alone at the kitchen table, I began to polish my dinner-table chitchat, looking first to the person I imagined being seated on my left (the Vicomtesse de Ribes, who finds it charming that her name reminds me of barbecue joints in Kansas City) and then to the person on my right (Barbara Walters, another regular, who has tried to put me at my ease by confessing that in French she doesn’t do her r’s terribly well). “I was encouraged when it leaked that the Reagan cabinet was going to be made up of successful managers from the world of business,” I say, “but I expected them all to be Japanese.”

  Barbara and the Vicomtesse smile. Alice, who had just walked into the kitchen, looked concerned.

  “Listen,” Alice said. “I read in the Times that Mrs. de la Renta is very strict about having only one of each sort of person at a dinner party. Maybe they already have someone from Kansas City.”

  Possible. Jerzy Kosinski mentioned that Mrs. D is so careful about not including more than one stunning achiever from each walk of life (“She understands that every profession generates a few princes or kings”) that he and Norman Mailer have never been at the de la Rentas’ on the same evening (“When I arrive, I like to think that, as a novelist, I’m unique”). Only one fabulous beauty. Only one world-class clotheshorse.

  Then I realized that the one-of-each rule could work to my advantage. As I envisioned it, Henry Kissinger phones Mrs. D only an hour before dinner guests are to arrive. He had been scheduled to pick up a bunch of money that night for explaining SALT II to the Vinyl Manufacturers Association convention in Chicago, but the airports are snowed in. He and Nancy will be able to come to dinner after all. “How marvelous, darling!” Mrs. D says.

  She hangs up and suddenly looks stricken. “My God!” she says to Oscar. “What are we going to do? We already have one war criminal coming!”

  What to do except to phone the man who conflicts with the star and tell him the dinner had to be called off because Mr. D had come down with a painful skin disease known as the Seventh Avenue Shpilkes. What to do about the one male place at the table now empty—between Vicomtesse de Ribes and Barbara Walters?

  The phone rings. “This is Françoise de la Renta,” the voice says.

  “This is Calvin of the Trillin,” I say. “I’ll be right over.”

  1981

  CRIMINAL JUSTICE, CRIMINALS, JUSTICES, BUT (PROBABLY) NO CRIMINAL JUSTICES

  “I am an absolutist on the First Amendment, except for people who show slides of their trip to Europe. They should be arrested. If they can’t be held, they can at least be knocked about a bit at the station house.”

  Crystal Ball

  So far, despite all the attention given to the wannabe terrorist from Nigeria widely known as the Underwear Bomber, nobody has mentioned that I predicted this turn of events. How many dead-on predictions does a person have to make to get a little credit around here? Am I implying that I’ve been similarly prescient in the past? Well, now that you mention it, yes. In a 1978 column about what was then being called the New Right, I said that I’d had some experience in the early sixties with the previous New Right, a movement most mem
orable for speeches that reached a level of boredom not witnessed in this country since members of the Communist Party droned their way through the thirties. Given the number of years between the two New Rights, I wrote, another New Right should be coming along around 1994. Sure enough, in 1994, a number of readers (three, if memory serves) wrote to remind me that my prediction had been uncannily correct: Newt Gingrich had led the Republicans in a historic takeover of Congress, and the press was full of stories about the power and vibrancy of the New Right.

  A coincidence, you say? A lucky guess that I couldn’t repeat? Wrong. In a book I published in 2006 called A Heckuva Job: More of the Bush Administration in Rhyme, here is what I said, in one of the nonrhyming passages, about the so-called Shoe Bomber of 2001: “I’m convinced that the whole shoe-bomber business was a prank. What got me onto this theory was reading that the shoe bomber, a Muslim convert named Richard Reid, had been described by someone who knew him well in England as ‘very, very impressionable.’ I had already decided that the man was a complete bozo. He made such a goofy production of trying to light the fuses hanging off his shoe that he practically asked the flight attendant if she had a match. The way I figure it, the one terrorist in England with a sense of humor, a man known as Khalid the Droll, had said to the cell, ‘I bet I can get them all to take off their shoes in airports.’ So this prankster set up poor impressionable Reid and won his bet. Now Khalid is back there cackling at the thought of all those Americans exposing the holes in their socks on cold airport floors. If someone is arrested one of these days and is immediately, because of his MO, referred to in the press as the Underwear Bomber, you’ll know I was onto something.”

  That’s right: I predicted the Underwear Bomber in 2006. You could look it up. Around the same time, I repeated the prediction in public appearances and, as I remember, a couple of times on television. (I firmly believe that, in this world of ever-diminishing irreplaceable resources, using a line only once represents the sort of wastefulness our society can ill afford.) And what transpired on Christmas Day three years later? Another bozo tries to blow a hole in an airplane and succeeds only in setting his underpants aflame in a manner that might have rendered him ill equipped for the seventy-two heavenly virgins who were to be his reward if he succeeded. And how is this bozo described by friends and family? Naïve. And where was this bozo educated? University College London, within commuting distance of that diabolical trickster Khalid the Droll.

  Has that name—Khalid the Droll—been mentioned even once in the endless press and television interviews with so-called security experts who prattle on about “connecting the dots” and “fostering interagency cooperation” and “eliminating stovepiping”? No, not once. Not once have the people who pontificate from Washington on Sunday morning television shows—the people I refer to as the Sabbath Gasbags—said, “Somebody should have followed up on Trillin’s underwear tip.” Not once has anybody considered the possibility that, after the shoe-bombing scheme worked to perfection, Khalid the Droll announced to his cell, “When they’ve had a few years of taking off their shoes, I bet I can make them expose their private parts to full-body scanners.” Not once has one of these after-the-fact analyzers considered the possibility that, just as the thirties Communists and the early-sixties New Right tried to bore us into submission, Khalid the Droll is engaged in an elaborate scheme to embarrass us to death.

  And what will be the next step in this scheme? I’m working on my prediction now. I just hope somebody is paying attention this time.

  2010

  What Whoopi Goldberg (“Not a Rape-Rape”), Harvey Weinstein (“So-Called Crime”), et al. Are Saying in Their Outrage over the Arrest of Roman Polanski

  A youthful error? Yes, perhaps.

  But he’s been punished for this lapse—

  For decades exiled from L.A.

  He knows, as he wakes up each day,

  He’ll miss the movers and the shakers.

  He’ll never get to see the Lakers.

  For just one old and small mischance,

  He has to live in Paris, France.

  He’s suffered slurs and other stuff.

  Has he not suffered quite enough?

  How can these people get so riled?

  He only raped a single child.

  Why make him into some Darth Vader

  For sodomizing one eighth-grader?

  This man is brilliant, that’s for sure—

  Authentically, a film auteur.

  He gets awards that are his due.

  He knows important people, too—

  Important people just like us.

  And we know how to make a fuss.

  Celebrities would just be fools

  To play by little people’s rules.

  So Roman’s banner we unfurl.

  He only raped one little girl.

  2009

  Marc Rich and Me

  As it happens, I went to Boy Scout camp with Marc Rich. That’s right. Who’s Marc Rich? Is that what you said? The question, if I may say so, reveals an abysmal ignorance of world affairs. Marc Rich happens to be the reclusive, enigmatic, fabulously wealthy commodities trader who was just accused by the government of flimflamming it out of $48 million in taxes and is now believed to be hiding out in Zug, Switzerland, or maybe Spain. That’s who. I went to Boy Scout camp with him, in Missouri. In 1949. We lived in the same tent. The name of the camp was Camp Osceola, BSA. It was where Boy Scouts from Kansas City went to camp. I can tell that you don’t believe any of this.

  One reason you don’t believe it is that you think I make things up. The other reason you don’t believe me is that all of the stories you’ve read about Marc Rich talk about how he came to this country with his family from Europe during the war and grew up in Brooklyn with his friend Pincus (Pinky) Green—also a fabulously wealthy commodities trader now, although only marginally enigmatic—and life as a Kansas City Boy Scout doesn’t fit your picture of the young Marc trading some Borough Park candy store owner one used Batman comic for enough egg creams to float the entire stickball team. All of the stories you’ve read, that is, unless you happened to read the story in The Kansas City Times on October 5, which revealed that before moving to Brooklyn, Marc Rich’s family lived in Kansas City for six years (“Mr. Rich’s life-style apparently was nurtured in Kansas City, where he spent his formative years, investigators said”) and that for two years Marc went to Southwest High School, which is where I went and where, as long as we’re on the subject, the photographer David Douglas Duncan went, and also Charlie Black, who played basketball for the University of Kansas. The Kansas City Times did not reveal the Camp Osceola angle. I’m revealing that now. Marc Rich and I were at Osceola together. Not Pincus Green. I’m not one of those people who can remember every tiny event of their childhood, but I can tell you that there was nobody at Camp Osceola called Pinky.

  Still don’t believe me? Then do this. Ask someone who attended the second session of Camp Osceola in 1949 about this incident: After lunch one day, Skipper Macy—the director of the camp, and the man who always said “fine and dandy”—got on the subject of languages. Don’t ask me why; I already told you that I don’t remember every little detail. Skipper tried to find out which camper spoke the most languages—ordinarily, I’ll admit, that was not a question that provoked intense competition at Osceola—and which camper do you think was finally called up on stage and slapped on the back by Skipper and told that it was fine and dandy? Right. Marc Rich. You have probably already guessed which Troop 61 Boy Scout—known up to that time mainly for his inability to do knots—said, “And to think … we’re in the same tent.” Right again. Me.

  I hope you don’t think I’m bringing this up to get a little reflected fame from the fact that my lifestyle was nurtured in the same tent as the lifestyle of the defendant in the single largest tax evasion case in the history of the republic—like those people in Kansas City who say they bought a necktie at Harry Truman’s haberdashery at Twelfth and Ba
ltimore. If everyone who says he bought a necktie from Harry Truman really had bought one, the store wouldn’t have gone broke, and Harry Truman wouldn’t have gone to the Senate, and Roosevelt would have been succeeded by William O. Douglas, and Clifton Daniels would be married to the daughter of a man who was known as “The Cravat King of KC.”

  The reason I’m telling you this is that the public should hear about Marc Rich from someone who actually knew him—instead of from all of those people who told The Kansas City Times that they couldn’t quite remember which one he was. We were at Camp Osceola together, in the same tent. We actually sang the same song together at campfires. The song went like this:

  Softly falls the light of day,

  As our campfire fades away.

  Silently, each scout should ask,

  “Have I done my daily task?

  Have I kept my honor bright?

  Can I guiltless rest tonight?

  Have I done and have I dared

  Everything to be prepared?”

  Now do you believe me?

  I want you to know that what I am revealing about Marc Rich at Camp Osceola would be of no value to the FBI, which already knows that Marc speaks more languages than most Kansas City Boy Scouts and may even know that I can’t do knots. I wouldn’t rat on a pal. If I ratted on a pal, I couldn’t guiltless rest tonight. I do think, though, that the public has a right to know about the Camp Osceola angle. I can just imagine the questions the reporters from The Kansas City Times—not to speak of The New York Times—would have asked me had they but known that Marc Rich and I were in the same tent. They would want to know if Marc and I—on campfire nights, as the fire was burning down to embers—talked about crude-oil prices and arbitrage. They would want to know if Marc tried to snooker any campers out of their canteen money. They would want to know whether Marc was elected to the Great Tribe of Mic-o-Say—whose song, sung to the tune of “Oh Come All Ye Faithful,” went “O come all ye tribesmen, braves and mighty warriors, oh come ye, oh come ye, to the Great Mic-o-Say”—and, if so, whether the Indian name he adopted (since all tribesmen adopted an Indian name) was something like He Who Buys Cheap and Sells Dear, or maybe Brave Who Cooks the Books. They would want to hear from someone who really knew Marc Rich. That’s why I’m revealing all of this.