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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.

NINE

    No sooner do I vow to put death, at least temporarily, on that proverbial back burner than I learn that my coeval, television’s Johnny Carson, has died at seventy-nine of emphysema. I was a few weeks older than he. He had rung me last month to say that he had been living pretty much in seclusion at the beach and had only just heard that Howard was dead. We reminisced about his visit to us in Rome and Ravello, a first (and I suspect last) visit to Italy for him. He was not one for foreign climes other than Wimbledon and tennis. In Italy he was a dutiful sightseer but as we climbed Palatine Hill, “Everything here is steps,” he sighed, “and broken marble. This place is going to sink under their weight one of these days.”
    What would Montaigne have thought of him? Had he been a mere entertainer-interviewer, nothing at all. But since Montaigne was deeply interested in politics, Carson would have interested him very much. John was the only political satirist regularly allowed for thirty years on that television time which is known to be prime and so he was able to