The Côte d’Azur Gives All that Poor Little Rich Gays Strive For «

The Côte d’Azur Gives All that Poor Little Rich Gays Strive For

Sunday 11^th July 2010

I’m lying on a chaise longue (from Argos in fact, superbly bought by Virgil Grayson, one of the world’s leading architects). My view, created by Virgil Grayson, is nine blue agapanthus, then a cork oak, trunk and branch forming an elbow, a bush of some rare kind placed below, to provide an exactly view-finder-shaped shot of the Mediterranean which I can hear effortlessly swishing below.

The luxury and paradise of it – I can’t begin to describe. This is the reward that Poor Little Rich Gays yearn for, the whole point of all the shopping, tycoonery, entrepreneuriation, shrife, struggle and contrivance.

We’re an old-fashioned house party at Virgil’s, rather different from Ralph Kitto’s birthday gathering at the other end of the Riviera two weeks ago. Here are people who don’t know each other, in separate suites with own bathroom. Except that we find, of course, we’ve acquaintance galore in common. It’s a small world when you’re at the top. I was explaining that Peter Finch, the film star, was the half-brother of my aunt by marriage. ‘Oh, I met him on a train to Rome when I was seventeen,’ a fellow-guest said.

They’re all very brainy and distinguished. I’m rather out of my depth. But you can slip away and Google to find out who they are. You can also slip away from the table for a rest whenever you feel like it – not that I do very often. But if only they’d introduce that for London dinner parties…

There’s a novelist who dined with Doris Saatchi and didn’t recognise George Osborne, Great Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, if you’re in US or foreign. ‘You seem to know a lot about politics,’ she said. She is writing a novel exploring a person’s life through objects. ‘Is it like the Antiques Roadshow?’ I said.

Actually that’s one of Robert Nevil’s fav TV programmes – and he’s the mega scholarly (actually checks facts, can you imagine?) historian of the Pony Club.

The others are either academics or from the museum world. Cedric Partridge, Virgil’s partner, who is not here because he doesn’t take the July heat on the Côte, is from the Museum world. He is a frequent flyer, usually with a small Rembrandt on the neighbour seat – taking it to an exhibish somewhere, you see. An Australian Greatness motored up from Rome University and has had stern words with Virgil about the stairs here being done with Satin Finish not Matt. The stairs in a new building at Rome by a very great lady architect – I should say ‘woman architect’ but I won’t – are also unsatisfactory. There’s dust and rubbish visible underneath them.

Virgil also likes to have young people. Over the years, some of them have been perfectly outrageous. Virgil looks on, benign and unfussed. Now he has a hot het with an outdoor streak and Calvin Klein red tops who is in charge of one of the building projects on another continent and goes to functions with the patrons who wear especially-made paper frocks which are afterwards put in a museum.

I’ve really got to go. A kitchen scene is brewing. The novelist has started the risotto but the Australian Greatness was going to do it! It’s the risotto war fought entre Bruce MacBain and Rufus Pitman at Anthony Mottram’s Tuscan villa circa 1994 all over again.

That was with knives!

Well, not really.

And I still haven’t fitted in the Ralph Kitto birthday party!