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EIGHT

Outside my windows here, the familiar clatter of rain on palm fronds transports me to Bangkok. The monsoon is early, I think, moving backward in time. I must get dressed for lunch with Crown Princess Chumbhot. Presently—I’m in past time now—I shall leave the W. Somerset Maugham suite where I stay in the old section of the hotel, while Howard is in the new tower. Many suites are named for writers who have stayed in the hotel or its predecessor, starting with Joseph Conrad. Neither of us has ever stayed in the Gore Vidal suite with its view of a series of Klong-side cement factories bedecked with orchids.

We meet in the lobby. A hotel car takes us to lunch through heavy traffic. My mood lightens. Better to be back there in memory than linger here in fact. “Let the dead past bury its dead,” as my grandfather used to intone with measured glee as he gradually took up final residence in that very same past as I am now trying to do.

In the sixties, we acquired a new friend in Bangkok, the old Crown Princess Chumbhot, a tiny woman whose palace looks to my Western eye like no more than several highly polished teakwood boxes gleaming side by side in a sunny garden. Since one must never physically tower over a Thai royal, she had placed a series of stone steps beside her front door where she could station herself in a sort of pulpit and thus greet, sublimely, from above, Western visitors. Her father had been Thai ambassador to London where she had gone to school. She spoke with an Edwardian English accent not to mention wit.

Whenever we arrived at the Oriental, the hotel would alert her and she would then invite us to lunch with various interesting folk both Thai and farang, as foreigners are known. Apropos our last lunch I got two advance calls from the Crown Princess (she had married what was to have been a king of Thailand, thus making her Crown Princess; when her husband was passed over for the succession, she retained her title).

“I was very remiss,” said the cool voice on the telephone. “I had asked a few people to our lunch but then I quite forgot to tell you who they are.” I said I’d be delighted no matter who…

“Don’t speak too soon,” she said. “One of the guests is a fellow author, a Mrs. Barbara Cartland.” I was overjoyed. The ongoing pleasure of Bangkok is that people you don’t know, but don’t mind observing if only briefly, keep showing up. I reassured our hostess that I was ready for Mrs. Cartland who was famous for her splendid costumes, intricate wigs, dramatic makeup, Rolls-Royces, and innumerable romantic novels about well-born virgins, male as well as female. A Cartland law of matrimony insisted that the bride be totally virginal and inexperienced on her wedding night while, simultaneously, her groom must be equally virginal but experienced. Millions of Cartland fans were known to debate this contradiction with Talmudic zeal. Later, at lunch, the author herself joined in the debate. “After all, an experienced older lady could have contributed, in the purest way, to the hero’s education.” This was cryptic, to say the least. Mrs. Cartland was also currently celebrated as the mother of Lady Diana Spencer’s stepmother and so, in the eyes of the tabloids, an authority on the royal family whom she ceaselessly defends in the press even when they are not under attack. Recently she had objected to hints in the press that her dearest friend, Admiral the Lord Mountbatten, late Viceroy of India, had had perhaps too great an interest in the welfare of navy lads. She was also outspokenly anti-American because she believed that we had not sufficiently aided England in World War Two. Chumbhot was looking forward to a few decorous fireworks at table.

Howard and I arrived for lunch with a relative of the hotel manager’s wife; she was another British-educated Thai lady attached to the court. Chumbhot was waiting for us in her stone pulpit. She led us inside where, suddenly, the Thai lady, no young woman, promptly dropped onto all fours in front of Chumbhot who stood very straight like an effigy to herself. The lady then proceeded to writhe like some beached crab across the floor until she arrived at Chumbhot’s feet. Then, limbs intertwined, she slowly rose. For a moment I feared that she was going to levitate like Saint Teresa who was so famous for her levitations that the Pope sent for her. But then, just as she was entering his presence, she began uncontrollably to rise in the air, higher and higher. “Oh, Lord,” she cried, “not now, not now!” But at the Crown Princess’s gesture, the court lady remained earthbound. Also on hand for lunch was Chumbhot’s nephew, the architect Tri, whose Royal Yacht Club Hotel has apparently been swept away by the tsunami.

Since Bangkok traffic was the worst in the world in those days, one is never on time. But Mrs. Cartland, stepgrandmother to the new Princess of Wales, arrived more than two hours late. Chumbhot was royally gracious but seething. The heat of the day, despite fans in the sitting room, did not improve the general mood. But should Cartland misbehave Chumbhot and I had prepared a trap.

While waiting for Cartland, Chumbhot and I talked of Kukrit Pramoj who had been prime minister during many of the bad years of the American war in Vietnam, where he maintained a kind of suave neutrality despite his dislike of our crude imperialism not to mention his simultaneous Thai edginess about the Communist empire to the north, the China of Mao Tse-tung. Kukrit also published a major newspaper while supervising a dance company that he’d founded in order to preserve ancient Thai dances. He had, with brio, played the part of a prime minister in The Ugly American: “It was bliss,” he reminisced. “One rests in an air-conditioned trailer, unavailable for a real prime minister, and one’s hair is constantly trimmed, no matter how sparse.” He was amused by his co-star Marlon Brando.

The Thai royal family number in the thousands and are ranked according to which king they descend from: Rama One or Two or Three and so on. Kukrit and Chumbhot liked to quarrel over which of the two was the most royal. The current king is revered by all and treated like a living god, even by the sharp-tongued Kukrit who always spoke respectfully of his kinsman though less admiringly of the beautiful queen and her plastic surgeons. Apparently, one day during the Vietnam War, the queen called out some units of the army in the northeast of the country and went to war on her own against Communist rebels. It was said that her troops had also leaked over into Laos. Somehow or other, Kukrit persuaded the warrior queen to come home and peace was restored.

Since Thailand, also known as Siam, has never been conquered or colonized by Europeans, it has developed a society unlike any other in Southeast Asia. There are no resentments of the European powers or the “white race.” The Chinese, of course, are regarded with a somewhat beady eye while Kukrit liked to repeat an old Thai saying: “If you are in the jungle with only a stick to defend yourself and you are suddenly approached by an Indian and a cobra, kill the Indian first.” But diplomacy and subtlety are the principal Thai weapons of defense; and so they kept the American war party at a distance during the Vietnam episode.

Chumbhot said, “Is it true that Mrs. Cartland was not invited to the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana?” How well I thought the late Truman Capote could have handled all this. He lived for gossip and he was also a marvelous liar. No fact ever gave him pause. When truly inspired, like Joan of Arc attending to her voices, he would half shut his eyes and start inventing stories about people whom he had often never known or, indeed, even heard of. Although he felt himself to be the heir to Proust, a reference I once made to Madame Verdurin drew a blank. I saw him perhaps every other decade, usually by accident. Jackie Kennedy, whom he claimed to have known since childhood, actually met him at a lunch in New York just before the 1960 election. Truman had spun a number of fantastic stories to a table of bemused ladies. At the end of lunch, he asked Jackie if she had a car and, if so, could she drop him off on her way home? She had. She did. In the car, he gave a great dramatic sigh. “Now you’ve seen me singing for my supper!” He became Pagliacci. Since Jackie had enjoyed him, I warned her, “Just remember all those scurrilous stories you found so interesting about other people he’ll now start to invent about you.” Luckily, Jackie was never innocent about the Capotes whom she regarded as so many denizens of a zoo which she liked occasionally to patronize. When Jack and Jackie moved to the White House, her stepsister observed that, “This will be the most disdainful administration in history.”

Chumbhot is waiting for my answer. Am I to turn Capote-esque? “No,” I said, “Mrs. Cartland was not invited.” I recalled Princess Margaret, cigarette holder in one hand, a gin and tonic in the other. It was her gift to extract some joy from whatever hand, no matter how bad, life had dealt her. “Of course we were going to invite the old thing,” she said, “but the bride’s family said that if she came, they wouldn’t and since you can’t have a wedding without a bride…”

Finally, Mrs. Cartland, escorted by an amiable grown son, made her entrance on a sudden gust of hot air from the garden. As tribute to the heat she wore neither hat nor wig, only wavy tufts of pale hair adorned her gleaming rosy pate.

“The traffic!” Cartland was accusing.

“Good afternoon.” Chumbhot was demure. In Bangkok, “The traffic!” is almost a greeting. A stickler in print for etiquette, preferably royal, Mrs. Cartland did not curtsey to Chumbhot, so different from the court lady’s beached-crab number: Autre temps as E. Nesbit’s Psam-mead liked to murmur at such moments. Mrs. Cartland and son were apparently in the neighborhood in order to check on the distribution of her books throughout Southeast Asia, a formidable task, they sighed, considering her alleged popularity.

In the dining room. I sat on Chumbhot’s left, Mrs. Cartland, a monument draped in damp pastel colors, on her right. Conversation did not flag. Mrs. Cartland was indignant at the way the press had been treating “Dickie.” Dickie Mountbatten. “All this nonsense about his…private life. Perfect nonsense! And then they dare to write about Nehru and Edwina [this was Lady Mountbatten], too vile, really.” Mrs. Cartland was beginning to shake with indignation. I couldn’t help but think that if the diarist of that period, Chips Channon, was reliable in these matters the press was surprisingly accurate and rather mild. What was common knowledge in a certain world was plainly not to be shared with Mrs. Cartland’s virginal readers. Chumbhot, who knew the same gossip that the press was working from, said, innocently, “Have you no laws in England to protect the royal family? Don’t you have…what is the phrase?” She turned to me.

“Laisse majesté, which you have in Thailand,” I added.

“Yes, we do. But what, Mrs. Cartland, do the English do to journalists who attack the Queen?”

“Since Her Majesty does nothing but good, they never do.”

I turned to Chumbhot. “What do they do to the press in this country?” was my contribution.

“Oh, I think we still kill them.” This made for a more serious mood. As Mrs. Cartland restlessly stirred her soup, she began on the American influence on the British press, getting it somewhat backward, I thought. She expressed outrage that Charles and Diana were being persecuted by the press when she had never seen a more loving devoted couple. She was, she confessed, very close to them and knew how hurt they were with the press telling ridiculous stories about them. “From that glorious moment in the abbey when they were pronounced man and wife, the troubles began in our press. Or, I should say, the American press.”

Chumbhot picked up our previously agreed-upon cue. “How lovely the abbey must have been. We saw it only on television, of course, but you were there.” She smiled her gentle tiger smile. Cartland stammered “Yes yes yes…then to read in the dreadful press—”

“Do tell us what the abbey was like, with the divine music, the service…”

Mrs. Cartland was having trouble with a quail’s egg. She coughed and cleared her throat. Chumbhot looked at me. I nodded, “Go!”

“You were there?” she asked directly.

“Well, it was for young people, really. So I gave away my tickets—”

“Surely,” said Chumbhot, “the revered Queen Mother is hardly in her first youth.” And so it went but not before Mrs. Cartland, perhaps suspecting an American plot, described the inadequate military materiel that the United States had sent to poor beleaguered England, fighting its lonely battle to save civilization. “I know. I was there for Lord Beaverbrook. He taught me how to write. He would have me go down to the docks as those shoddy insufficient arms arrived.” Definitely a hot day in Bangkok.