Los Angeles
I have just spent a hippocentric few days on a horse ranch in Santa Barbara County, California. I was the guest of my friend Monty Roberts, the inventor of horse whispering. Monty first developed ‘Join-Up’ to stop the cycle of violence typically accepted in traditional horse-breaking. His methods still infuriate traditionalists who believe that cruelty is the only way to domesticate horses.I have never been in the least horsey, having taken a flyer as a boy when a nag that was supposed to be almost comatose took off and launched me over a fence. I was so grateful to find myself intact after this misadventure that I decided, then and there, never to risk my skeleton again in hazardous athletic practices. I always thought that equestrianism was rather unnatural anyway, and it was not until I was married to a keen horsewoman that I grudgingly, and expensively, came around to it. At one stage, my parents hoped I might ride and I even had a horse at our country shack in Victoria, which I occasionally sat on in my Gene Autry cowboy suit for the purposes of photography. There was a cupboard at our house full of sporting equipment in pristine condition. There were cricket bats, boxing gloves, tennis racquets, golf clubs and, most poignant of all, one ping pong bat and a box of white celluloid balls. They all represented my father’s desperate desire to turn me into a sportsman.
Happily, I have outlived most of my more athletic contemporaries, who jogged, golfed and squashed themselves into coronary occlusion, but I really admire Monty and so does the Queen, I discovered. Last year the Monarch bestowed on me a small but colourful token of the Nation’s esteem, and after the ceremony at Buckingham Palace I was due to go to Guildford to attend one of Monty’s spectacular and moving demonstrations. In the brief moment I had with the Queen, I mentioned I was going to see Monty and she lit up, almost ecstatically. ‘What on earth did you say to the Queen?’ my friends asked later. ‘I just dropped the name of a cowboy,’ I replied.
Despite my hatred of sport, I confess that I do have Amelia, my little blonde Australian personal trainer who wakes me up every morning and drags me out for a walk or a swim, if the hotel pool is free of incontinent kiddies. There are pools I have encountered on this interminable American tour which are nothing more than big blue specimens. Now we are in Los Angeles and staying at the magnificent old Biltmore hotel downtown, the ‘Host of the Coast’ and once the playground of movie stars, presidents, royalty, and Shirley Temple. If only the clientele had been restored along with the building. Alas, the opulent marble halls in the Renaissance style are now thronged with conference delegates wearing back-to-front baseball caps, three-quarter-length cargo shorts and flip-flops, not seldom jamming doughnuts down their throats and swigging from bottles of Budweiser and Dr Pepper. On our walks around town there are still marvellous buildings from the Twenties and Thirties to be seen, especially the Richard Riordan Central Library by Bertram Goodhue, in the Egyptian style of 1926 and crowned with a mosaic pyramid. Walking in this area, as in too many other American cities, it is necessary to step over or give a wide berth to those trickling bundles sprawled on the pavement or huddled against walls. It’s tough, but as the doorman advised me, ‘It’s better not to think of them as people.’
The third act of the show, always the hardest, occurs in the dressing room after the performance when friends, family, fans and total strangers congregate to drink whatever I provide, still or sparkling. Incidentally, I wonder when exactly fizzy water became ‘sparkling’? Probably when it became expensive. I have cruelly tried it on a waiter: ‘May I have fizzy water please but not sparkling?’ The result was as the reader might have expected, and the waiter thought I was a loony. Many of the hotels I have been staying in provide bottled drinking water, or ‘designer’ water from Norway and some Pacific island or other. On holiday some years ago, I actually glimpsed the plant where this exotic and expensive liquid is bottled and noticed that it was upholstered with slime. The tap is still my preferred source of refreshment.
An Australian woman told me I must see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, though I could hardly believe that Fitzgerald’s whimsical tale could ever be fattened out into a movie. ‘Look, you’ll love it,’ she said, ‘and it’s a true story!’ F. Scott Fitzgerald’s secretary Frances is an old friend of mine, now 93, and she is still very pretty, funny and lively. She was the author’s PA, before the initials were invented, during the last two years of his life, for she did his shopping, dumped his gin bottles in Sepulveda Canyon and even made his funeral arrangements. Frances once told Scott that in the afterlife he might be required to make little ships to put in all the bottles he had ever emptied. Delighted, Fitzgerald used this line in one of his last ‘Pat Hobby’ stories. I hear my extravagant countryman Baz Luhrman is planning to make another Great Gatsby movie. If he does it will be number six and none of them have been any good. In my copy of the book Fitzgerald has written to someone, ‘You might have seen the movie, but I think the book stands by itself.’ I think I might show this to Baz.
© Barry Humphries