Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [233]
It definitely wasn’t my milieu, and if I kept at it long enough I was dead certain to break my neck, but once again it got me out of the house. In fact, between riding, flying down to Middleburg for the weekends to hunt, work at S&S, and writing my books and magazine articles, I was very seldom home, and almost always reading or writing something when I was. Having set out determined not to be like my father, I ended up doing the same thing.
IT HAD always been my ambition to have my own horse, instead of hiring one at a livery stable, and with the publication of Power! there seemed no good reason not to do so. I purchased a large, elderly gelding of uncertain breeding and temperament, whom I renamed Malplaquet (after the most famous of Marlborough’s battles), and decided to keep him at the venerable Claremont Riding Academy, on West Eighty-ninth Street, near Central Park, where I had taken to riding early in the morning almost every day. It was thus that I first saw Margaret Glinn, the wife of the well-known and very successful Magnum photographer Burt Glinn. She was a blond, beautiful woman, with the grace of a born rider, extravagantly dressed, trotting a big, handsome chestnut Thoroughbred (Tabasco, whom she was later to purchase) around the Central Park reservoir. For a very long time she did not seem willing to look at me, while I glanced at her surreptitiously—which would have been hard not to do, since she was perhaps the most striking woman I had ever seen. A long period ensued in which we circled the reservoir every morning in opposite directions, saying “Good morning!” to each other as we passed, until finally, some months after our first encounter, we went around the reservoir in the same direction together for the first time.
Now that we were at least riding in the same direction, we were able to talk. It transpired that we were both English, though Margaret’s Englishness, unlike mine, was of the pure, nonhyphenated kind—she was the only daughter of a Gloucestershire farmer and had ridden since the age of three or four. Sophisticated, glamorous, and alarmingly well-traveled, she retained an English country girl’s dislike of the city, although she seemed to me to be the supreme example of a fashionable city-dwelling woman. She had married an officer in the Kenya police while in her teens, gone to live in Kenya, where the marriage swiftly dissolved, lived for a while in Paris in the motion-picture world, then met Burt Glinn and soon followed him to New York. Glinn had used her as a model, and initially they had lived together in a big apartment that he shared with his old friend Clay Felker. It was a typical bachelors’ digs, which sounded, as she described it, like that in The Odd Couple, with layers of newspapers on the floor and the smell of cigars in every room.
Burt might have been happy enough to stay there forever—he liked the comradeship and the sense of la vie de bohème, but Margaret, who was tired of communal life and living out of unpacked suitcases, eventually got him to move into a glamorous apartment of their own, with big windows overlooking Central Park, where they entertained lavishly and frequently. Years of traveling around the world with her husband as he worked had taken their toll—Margaret had decided to stop traveling, an act of independence that baffled Burt and of which Tabasco and her morning rides were a symptom. Just as the young had cried out, “We ain’t marching any more,” Margaret had put her foot down and refused to travel, except during the winter, when she and Burt usually rented a house in Cuernavaca with the Halberstams, John Chancellor and his wife, JFK’s favorite photographer, Stanley Tretick, and his wife, Mo, and other media figures.
It sounded like such a glamorous life, in fact, that I was at once envious and somewhat overawed. Admittedly, I had been brought