Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [47]
Having paid homage to Maugham myself at the Villa Mauresque with my Uncle Alex and Alexa, I could hardly fail to be impressed. Maugham was the butt of many stories—most of them, unfortunately, true—but he remained, even in extreme old age, one of the most successful English writers of the twentieth century, as well as one of the century’s wittiest and most acerbic misanthropes. Maugham was to grow bitter in his old age and finally lapsed into precarious senility, but in 1959 his was a name still to be reckoned with, so I hastened to call Jacques Chambrun as soon as Livingston had hung up.
The voice that greeted me was low, rich, obviously French in origin, and full of grave courtesy. He said he would be delighted to meet me, all the more so since my family was one he respected deeply as a European and a man of culture. “We Europeans must stick together, n’est-ce pas?” he said with a sigh, and we chatted briefly in French, in which he was even more impressive.
I suggested lunch, but after consulting his calendar, lunch proved to be impossible for some time—his engagements were, I must understand, unfortunately unbreakable, since they were with many of the most important people in publishing and the cinema. I suggested that we meet for drinks, but Chambrun, it appeared, did not approve of the American cocktail hour.
I mumbled my agreement. Dinner seemed like a rather big deal to suggest to an agent as important as Chambrun, particularly since I must be small fry from his point of view. What about tea? he asked.
We agreed to meet at the Alhambra Room in a midtown hotel the next afternoon. I had happy visions of good china, polished silver, and many plates of gingersnaps, Bath biscuits, and seedcake, so I was surprised when the hotel turned out to look like what the French call un hôtel de passe—that is, one in which rooms are rented by the hour and in which the lobby is full of furtive gentlemen and heavily made-up filles de joie.
The Alhambra Room was off the lobby, past a stygian bar, and its name seemed to have influenced the rest of the hotel’s decor, which was a combination of early Beverly Hills Spanish and Moorish Gothic. At the entrance I asked the maître d’hôtel—an ancient and poorly shaved European of some kind, dressed in tails so old as to have a shiny green phosphorescence to them—for Mr. Chambrun’s table. He lowered the huge red flocked-velvet menu with faded gold tassels that he had been holding in front of him like a shield, as if I was about to attack him with one of the spears from the wall, and bowed, with a faint air of disapproval. “Monsieur le comte vous attend,” he said in what was clearly not his native tongue.
Nobody had mentioned to me that Chambrun was a count. I seemed to recall that a Comte de Chambrun had been an eminent diplomat in France at the time of World War One, probably this one’s father, I decided.
My mind was therefore not on my surroundings as my Bela Lugosi look-alike led me through the gloom to a tiny table set for two. My host was not in sight, so I sat down and looked around. Only now did I notice that there was an orchestra on a platform decorated with immense ferns. On a small dance floor, a number of elderly citizens were, in fact, dancing a spirited tango. Around me, the people taking their tea were older still. Some of the men actually wore spats, and not a few of the ladies rested their heavily beringed and arthritic hands on silver-handled canes.
The music stopped and one of the dancers, a short, rotund gentleman in a well-cut double-breasted suit, made for my table. He had a bald head and the well-fleshed features of a gourmand. It was an ugly face, pendulous and lumpy, as if molded from plaster that had