Though I was perhaps mercifully spared any personal encounter with her, I daresay that the most delightfully wicked person ever to have trod this earth in my time was the late Alice Roosevelt Longworth-she the irrepressibly feisty daughter of President Teddy Roosevelt and a lady so gracious as to come to parties with an embroidered pillow that said: ”If you can`t say something nice about a person, come sit next to me.”
It was sweet Alice who, in her 80s, after a double mastectomy, declared herself ”the first woman in Washington to go topless,” and who, at a much tenderer age, said of Calvin Coolidge, ”I do wish he did not look as though he had been weaned on a pickle,” and of Thomas Dewey, ”the little man on the wedding cake.”
If sweet Alice were still alive, I think, on the whole, she`d rather might not be. The boredom, don`t you know. She never could abide it.
It isn`t just the economy, the infrastructure and family values that are in such marked decline in this country these days. So, too, has the quality of insult, which is perforce to say, the quality of wit.
In fact, if the state of the economy in America was anything like the deplorable state of the insult, half of us would be lining up outside soup kitchens and the rest of us would have jobs ladling the soup.
You will, but need not, remind me of my frequent past citation of Oscar Wilde`s famous dictum: ”A gentleman never insults-except on purpose.”
What he meant was that a truly well-bred gentleman-or lady-would never, ever give offense through some inadvertent, unintentional act of churlishness, vulgarity or thoughtlessness. Any such person, of course, deserves a glove in the face.
And, here we are on the brink of a national election campaign, which should be to the practice of insult what a crisp autumn day is to football.
But what do we hear? Sludge. Mental porridge. Universal yuck.
In the good old days-when tongues were sharp as tuning forks-the Republicans would lambaste the Democrats as the party of ”rum, Romanism and rebellion,” and even as recently as Spiro Agnew`s otherwise lamentable tenure, accurately decry the news media as ”the nattering nabobs of negativism.” But what do we hear from this year`s designated GOP slasher?
Mushy invective like ”liberal!” and the terrifying words ”Murphy” and
”Brown.”
Just four years ago, Texas tornado Ann Richards had a Democratic convention splitting its gut with her tour de frappe: ”Poor George (Bush), he was born with a silver foot in his mouth.”
The best, which is to say, worst, she could work herself up to at this summer`s convention was a meek, ”I told you so.” Ann, (as Poor George once said with regard to 1980 opponent Geraldine Ferraro) kick a little ass!
Democratic vice presidential nominee Al Gore, a well enough educated fellow, had to be cornered into tossing an ill-word Dan Quayle`s way, and what was the word of choice? ”Disaster.”
Disaster? That implies sirens, explosions, mayhem-all things imparting far more energy than Mr. Quayle has expended toward anything more arduous than his golf game. It not only lacks wit; it`s inaccurate.
Why not suggest that Quayle be impeached on charges of aggravated mopery, or at least let fly the Shakespearean ”knavish coxcomb!” – the term derived from the rooster-like caps worn by the professional fools of the Middle Ages. Ouch, ouch, ouch
I have at hand a wonderful, just published new book titled, ”Oh What an Awful Thing to Say” (St. Martin`s Press, $13.95), an anthology of notable insults collected by William Cole and Louis Phillips, authors also of ”Sex:
The Most Fun You Can Have Without Laughing.”
It`s brim full of marvelous things one might say about politicians, and should:
”I think Jimmy Carter as president is like Truman Capote marrying Dolly Parton. The job is just too big for him.” – Rich Little
”Carter, Ford and Nixon-See No Evil, Hear No Evil and Evil.” – Sen. Robert Dole
”I have always found him (Franklin Roosevelt) an amusing fellow, but I would not employ him, except for reasons of personal friendship, as a geek in a common carnival.” – Murray Kempton (the late New York Post newspaper columnist)
Yo, Ronnie
The section on Ronald Reagan is a mother lode (and he departed our midst just four years ago):
”The triumph of the embalmer`s art.” – Gore Vidal
”Naming a national forest after Ronald Reagan is like naming a day-care center for W.C. Fields.” – Bob Hattoy (former president of the Sierra Club)
”I still think Nancy does most of his talking; you`ll notice that she never drinks water when he talks.” – Robin Williams
”Ronald Reagan doesn`t dye his hair-he`s just prematurely orange.”
– Gerald Ford
Yes! That from Jerry ”Golly gee” Ford. Yet in his nationally telecast diatribe against Poor George, Rhodes scholar Democratic keynoter Sen. Bill Bradley this month struggled to outpoint him with nothing more slam dunk than ”(Bush) waffles, wiggles and wavers.”
Chill, Arsenio
This witlessness seems particularly rampant lately in the entertainment community, which in these troubling times is supposed to be all that`s holding American civilization together.
In a civilized civilization, we`d have rivalries like that of Winston Churchill and Nancy, Lady Astor, who said to Winston: ”If I was your wife, I`d poison your coffee,” whereupon Churchill replied: ”If you were my wife, I`d drink it.”
Now our rivalries run to the dismal likes of late-night celebrity groupies Arsenio Hall and Jay Leno. Laying claim to the top of the ratings heap with the departure of Johnny Carson, suave, sophisticated Arsenio could muster only: ”I`m gonna kick Jay Leno`s ass!”
Mon Dieu, a line not only pathetically crude, but stolen from George Bush.
If Arsenio was going to so shamelessly plagiarize, why couldn`t he steal from Churchill, and say, ”We will have no truce or parley with you, or the grisly gang who work your wicked will. You do your worst-and we will do our best!”?
Actress Lynda ”Wonder Woman” Carter took so much abuse from Washington newsies over her husband Robert Altman`s involvement in the Bank of Credit and Commerce International scandal, and her own drearily pathetic attempts to establish herself as a local society grande dame, that she fled back to Hollywood in a rage to resume her career making steamy-sheet TV movies.
But before fleeing, she let fly, in a magazine interview, the plural of a scatological term to describe said newsies. I shan`t, of course, repeat it, but it`s a word similar to that which Arsenio and Poor George employed and it refers to an unsavory element of the human anatomy.
Lynda! Goodness gracious! If you must be crude, be so with a flourish, as misanthropic critic John Simon was in describing the inexplicably narcissistic Barbra Streisand:
”I find Miss Streisand`s looks repellent. Perhaps this is my limitation, but I cannot accept a romantic heroine who is both knock-kneed and ankleless
(maybe one of those things, but not both!), short-waisted and shapeless, scrag-toothed and with a horse face centering on a nose that looks like Brancusi`s Rooster cast in liverwurst. Streisand remains arrogantly, exultantly ugly.”
Or, Lynda might try something like Chicago playwright David Mamet`s summing up of Simon and fellow critic Frank Rich of The New York Times:
”Frank Rich and John Simon are the syphilis and gonorrhea of the theatre.”
And so it goes. Brat Packers like Sean Penn don`t even make the effort to insult. They grunt and maybe throw a punch.
Sylvester Stallone just grunts.
Best bets
Well, I`ve had quite too, too enough. I`m going to cast aside the gossip columns and entertainment magazines and turn off my television set. Instead, I shall open up ”What An Awful Thing to Say” again, (and maybe even
”Bartlett`s Familiar Quotations”) and slip savoringly back into a delightfully wicked time when the eye and ear and spleen might be gladdened by:
”What a smug stinking lot my relations (the British Royal Family) are, and you`ve never seen such a seedy worn-out bunch of old hags most of them have become.” – the Duke of Windsor
”The best time I ever had with Joan Crawford was when I pushed her down the stairs in `What Ever Happened to Baby Jane.”` – Bette Davis
”When Jack Benny plays the violin, it sounds as if the strings are still back in the cat.” – Fred Allen (`40s radio comedian)
”(Spiro) Agnew reminds me of the kind of guy who would make a crank call to the Russians on the Hot Line.” – Dick Gregory
”If you say, `Hiya, Clark (Gable), how are you?` he`s stuck for an answer.” – Ava Gardner
(To S.J. Perelman) ”From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.”
– Groucho Marx
”The word `honor` in the mouth of Mr. (Daniel) Webster is like the word
`love` in the mouth of a whore.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
”Boy George is all England needs-another queen who can`t dress.”
Actually, it was our own day`s Joan Rivers who said that, she who also said of Marie Osmond: ”She`s so pure Moses couldn`t part her legs.”
Perhaps we should not give up hope.
