Dark Bilious Vapors

I'll be best man Charles, I've done the speech by Giles Coren (London Times) is worth the read:

"I SEE THAT the Prince of Wales is planning to get married without a best man. I can’t believe it. I’d already written my speech. It was a corker...

“Ahem. Right. Thank you. Is this working? Clunk. Hello? Hello? It’s a bit low. I’ll just crank it up a bit . . . ouch! Bollocks, it’s bleeding. Oops, pardon my French, ma’am. So, anyway. I’d just like to reply on behalf of the bridesmaids who, what’s that? Aren’t there? So there aren’t. Well anyway, thank you so much for coming all this way to the wedding of Charles and Dia- I mean Camilla. Sorry, still using my notes from last time . . . (Wait for laughter, if no laughter then laugh quickly to show it’s a joke).

Anyway. Moving swiftly on to the telegrams. Got one here from a Mr Al-Fayed, he says . . . ha ha. Not really. There aren’t any telegrams. It’s all e-mails these days, isn’t it? And mobile phones. As these two know only too well. Anyone got a tampon? Ha ha.

Anyway, time for some raunchy anecdotes. But before I start on those, I just want to say it’s nice to see the Queen in tonight (try to catch her eye). Charles and me haven’t had so much fun in front of a queen since that night in Bangkok at the . . . What’s that? She isn’t? Oh. That’s a shame. Well, anyway, I have to say that when Charles asked me to be his best man you could have knocked me down with a sceptre. I mean, he has so many articulate and witty friends who could have been relied on to turn out a pretty entertaining speech. There’s his geraniums, for a start . . . (Wait for laughter to die down.)

No but seriously, I’ve bought Charlie a fantastic present. Spent thousands. I left it with the butler . . . (Pause for effect, if laughs start here just go with it.) Hope he gets a few quid for it! No but . . . (Pretend to have spotted some late arrivals.) Who’s that creeping in late at the back? Nice to see you didn’t break the speed limit trying to get here on time. Lot of tunnels between there and here. Ha ha. No but, when Charlie was at Cambridge we all thought he was a bit, you know, peculiar. We were out on the piss one night and at about one in the morning we broke his door down and he was sitting there with a man in a sailor suit. Turns out it was his brother. Talk about Ducky Originals! No, but seriously . . . Hunter S and me ALTHOUGH THE death of Hunter S. Thompson has left the journalistic profession bereft, I can reveal that spirits at Tatler magazine are almost certainly as gay as ever because, after all, we still have Reggie Nadelson.

It’s like this. I was working at Tatler in 1999, editing a section called Tatler About Town and desperately trying to create the (false) impression that I was a natural born editor. Learning that my assistant had all but secured a piece for us by the one and only Hunter S. Thompson, I immediately moved in and took over (as editors have always done) so as to garner all the internal office credit for hiring the most famous journalist in the world as well as to bask in the rapport with an international celebrity.

But Thompson was a nightmare. The wrangling over money alone went on for weeks. We busted our (admittedly pathetic) pay scale by a factor of four and reduced the number of words we needed by half and spread them out over six pages with a lot of (free) Ralph Steadman cartoons to try to justify the costs. I was subjected to abusive phone calls at home in the middle of the night, full of drunken rambling, hour-long lectures on American politics, background abuse of a woman he called “ Heidi” and gunshots whistling through the Colorado night. But it was Hunter S. Thompson, after all, and, boy, would the girls be impressed. When enough cash was finally on the table Thompson struggled and puffed and blew over subject matter and style and delayed and delayed (all this over 500 words in a piddly social magazine for posh ladies) and finally delivered a rambling fantasy called “Dance of the Ben-Wah Girls” about women at polo matches stamping in the divots at half-time while wearing oriental massage balls inside their vaginas.

Not an easy thing to get through Tatler’s editorial hierarchy, but it was Hunter S. Thompson, for God’s sake, so I would do my damndest. A couple of days before we went to press I faxed proofs to Colorado for Hunter’s approval and at four o’clock in the morning he called me to demand that Steadman’s picture credit be removed: “I don’t want that old bastard’s name anywhere near mine,” Thompson demanded. “He’s a f** parasite. He’s been feeding off me for years.”

Now, you can’t use a picture without printing a credit and without the pictures we could not afford to run the piece. But this was Hunter S. bleeding Thompson, the King of Journalism. So I drove into the office in my pyjamas, ran off a proof with the picture credit removed, got Hunter’s approval (he faxed me a handwritten thank you letter with a photograph of himself which is pinned above my desk as I write), then put back the credit and sent the pages to press. When, finally, everything was in the bag, I swaggered over to the deputy editor to reveal the great coup and to bask in its glory. “I’ve had to shell out a grand for my lead story this month,” I said, trailing off mysteriously. “It’s by . . . Hunter S.Thompson.” “Hunter who?” she said, looking up from her salad box and TV Quick magazine. “Sorry, Giles. We can only pay money like that for big name writers. Like Reggie Nadelson, for example.”

Karen on 02.28.05 @ 05:20 AM CST