Mr. Donald Trump
The Boardwalk or nearby
Atlantic City, N. J.
Esteemed sir:
I noted with dismay your public comment last week on the subject of your ex-wife Marla Maples’ proposed sale of the outsized diamond ring you bestowed upon her at your nuptials. According to published reports, you decried this act, saying: “It seems pretty tacky to me.”
I am distressed by this, sir, because you have recently moved into the posh Westchester County community of Bedford Village, N.Y., perhaps the epicenter of old money, horse country culture in the East. If you are to remain happily resident there in country squire fashion, as a number of splashy magazine spreads indicate you would like to do, I fear you’ll need a better grasp of what is and is not “tacky” in the local view.
Established in 1680, Bedford is a rustic, unpretentious sort of place — noted more for mud-splattered Jeep Cherokees than gold-plated stretch limos. But it loathes and abhors the “tacky” as other communities do sanitary landfills and nuclear power plant run-off.
Yet, in Bedford, as elsewhere, no one would consider what Miss Maples proposes to do as tacky. She is simply being natural and genuine, qualities always to be encouraged. Miss Maples is of that species known as “blond Broadway babe,” and as such, well-versed in the libretto of that Broadway classic, “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend,” i.e. “square cut or pear shape, these rocks don’t lose their shape,” and all that that implies.
Far more tacky in the Bedford view, I’m sure, would be someone who actually married a Miss Maples (knowing full well she’d earlier been a hot pants poster girl for Miracle Adhesive ceramic glue) and then expressed dismay when she hocked the rock.
In Bedford, as everywhere, the appropriate, untacky thing to say in such a circumstance is, of course, absolutely nothing.
If you are still lost as concerns “tacky,” another example might be moving into a sedate Westchester community and having oneself photographed there by a celebrity magazine while posed beside an expensive, antique classic car wearing a tweed jacket, plus-fours and golfing cap, as though that made oneself one of the local swells.
The last time anyone in Bedford saw an outfit like that was when “The Great Gatsby” played the village’s Bedford Playhouse movie theater 20 years ago. Gatsby, you’ll recall, was a parvenu bootlegger who used his ill-gotten gains to try to set himself up as an old money aristocrat.
In the minds of some, it might also be viewed as tacky for one so newly arrived in the community to offer to “get” President Clinton into a local golfing club in Westchester. This implies rather presumptively that one has more social cachet than the President of the United States. It is also rather meaningless because the local golf club being offered was not the excruciatingly exclusive Bedford Golf and Tennis, so why would he care?
Another example of “tacky” might be acquiring, say, the sprawling Mar-a-Lago estate of the late cereal heiress Marjorie Post in Palm Beach, Fla., and using it not for a private seasonal residence but a pay-as-you-go resort club.
Just as tacky would be giving free club memberships to Prince Charles, the late Princess Diana and Henry Kissinger (if not the Queen and Pope Paul), without asking them, and then using their names to lure others into the fold.
Tacky, too — as Marjorie’s daughter Dina Merrill once related to me — would be coming across boxes of old signed photographs that the late Marjorie received from such notables as Winston Churchill and, instead of returning them to the family, setting them out as though they were one’s own.
Tacky also might be buying the used, monstrous motor yacht once owned by international gunrunner Adnan Khashoggi from the Sultan of Brunei (after he’d been advised by British diplomats to get rid of it fast), and then taking out huge magazine advertisements announcing to the world that one had bought it (later confessing that one doesn’t even like boats).
Owning and operating the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants would in itself be considered sort of tacky (putting one rather in a league with yesteryear’s Mr. Minsky). So would personally intervening with the winning Miss Universe contestant to make her shed some post-contest chub when one is oneself in visible need of culinary restraint.
As for responding to New York Congressman Jerrold Nadler’s opposition to one of one’s Manhattan building projects by calling him, “dumb,” and then adding, “If Nadler spent more time in a gymnasium losing weight he would do the voters a bigger service. He needs to lose about 200 pounds.”
Yes, that too would be tacky.
Of course, you used the term “pretty tacky,” and I’ve been giving you examples of the merely tacky. What would be “pretty tacky?”
Well, in Bedford certainly, one is supposed to have one’s name in the public print only three times in life — when one is born, marries and dies.
You would seem to have exceeded that quota.
