Vol. 18 No. 22 · 14 November 1996
pages 19-20 | 2848 words
National Treasure
Christopher Hitchens
- Jacqueline Bouvier: An Intimate Memoir by John Davis
Wiley, 256 pp, £14.99, October 1996, ISBN 0 471 12945 3
The 44 Restaurant in the Royalton Hotel at 44 West 44th Street is a pretty suave and worldly Manhattan lunchery. So at any rate it seems to my provincial, country-mouse Washingtonian optic. I am sometimes taken there for a treat by my editors at Condé Nast, who use the place as a sort of staff canteen. My old friend Brian McNally, demonstrating that le patron mange ici, occasionally lets me sit at his table. I have learned not to point and squeak and say: ‘Look, isn’t that the girl from Dirty Dancing!’ Everybody acts very unconcerned about celebrity, though you get the occasional ‘Hi, Tina.’ The deliciousness of the food and the epicene beauty of the staff absorb most of one’s energy in any case. So I have a distinct memory of the occasion – not very many months before her last illness – when Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis stopped by for a snackette. I happened to be browsing and sluicing myself there that day, and was amazed to see hardened New Yorkers acting like the most abject stage-door Johnnies, and indeed Janes. The former First Lady sat in the main booth with her friends, looking serene and detached, while all sorts of people took their time collecting their hats or whatever, and rubbernecking shamelessly.
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Letters
Vol. 18 No. 23 · 28 November 1996
From Editors, ‘London Review’
Fredric Jameson would like us to say that the science fiction writer he mentioned in his review of Ein weites Feld was Terry Bisson, not Bissell (LRB, 17 October). And while we’re about it we would like to apologise for the socialist who, implausibly, made her way into The First Wives ’Club: a socialite of course was intended (LRB, 14 November).
Editors, ‘London Review’
Vol. 19 No. 1 · 2 January 1997
From Richard Boston
Christopher Hitchens says of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: ‘Nor was Jackie sentimental about money … she cancelled at least one betrothal on fiduciary grounds alone’ (LRB, 14 November 1996). You can’t cancel a betrothal. Betrothal implies a promise. Promises can be broken, but they can’t be cancelled. ‘Fiduciary’ is also the wrong word. From the context it is apparent that Mr Hitchens thinks ‘fiduciary’ means more or less the same as ‘financial’. It doesn’t. Fiduciary matters have to do with trust and faithfulness. Aeneas’s companion was ‘fidus Achates’. Theirs was not a relationship in which cash was involved.
Richard Boston
Reading
Vol. 19 No. 2 · 23 January 1997
From Christopher Hitchens
Richard Boston (Letters, 2 January) can keep his Aeneas to himself. Of course I know that ‘fiduciary’ is a word derived from ‘trust’. (My old school motto was, and I dare say still is, In Fide Fiducia.) It’s for this precise reason that the financial system has ‘fiduciary’ instruments. More to the simple point I was making, the term ‘trust fund’ is indissolubly linked to marriage arrangements in the upper reaches of American society, and any female member of the Bouvier family would have learned to lisp it before she could say ‘gymkhana’. I think he’ll find that this also meets his pathetic attempt at a distinction between ‘break’ and ‘cancel’. ‘Cancel’ is no doubt better used for contracts than for promises. That’s just what I intended to convey about Bouvier betrothals.
Christopher Hitchens
Pittsburgh
