So, a rich, druggie, party girl, socialite dies early - do I care?

Well, I didn't but then I read an essay she wrote for  'The Speccie' back in 1996 and so now I do, just a bit.  I refer, of course, to the late Ms. Tara Palmer-Tomkinson who has just died at the very early age of 45.  Regular readers will already know that whilst my interests are fairly wide they do not extend to the wealthy socialite set, particularly those dim members of it who take drugs, as the late Ms. T. P-T was wont to do.  The only reasons I know anything of her are the fact that she was an exceedingly attractive-looking lady with a name unusual enough to catch my attention as I skimmed past the social pages.

I had, sort of, picked up on her drug habit but I can't say that it bothered me. To paraphrase the old expression, 'everyone's death diminishes me' but that is sentimental tosh.  There are quite a few people whose deaths cheer me up enormously!  But not Ms. T. P-T's, I was merely indifferent.

But then I read her piece in 'The Speccie', reprinted at The Coffee House, and suddenly "I was moved withal".  What an intelligent, elegant, witty woman she was.  How could such obvious qualities allow her to pour her life down a drain?  I reprint the whole thing as a sort of equivalent of removing my hat as her cortege passes:

It is agreeable to wake in the morning and find a national newspaper praising one’s beauty. It is far less agreeable to discover that this praise has been set in the sour old mould of ‘beauty rather than brains’.

The Times diary recently printed two stories suggesting — not to put too fine a point on it — that I am stupid. In the first, I had apparently been introduced to a member of the Life Guards and asked him, ‘Which beach?’ In the second, I had joined a conversation about Sir James Goldsmith’s party, saying, ‘When is it happening? I think I’m supposed to be going.’ The annoyance at seeing oneself so represented soon gave way to curiosity about the longevity of such stories. Like urban myths, they recur generation after generation, attached to one unfortunate female after another. The archetype of the dim society girl is everlasting. Whether she is Daisy in The Great Gatsby or this year’s gossip-column fodder, the accusations rarely change.

You may recall that in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies one of the characters greets the announcement that there is a Workers’ Revolutionary Party by asking why she has not been invited.

Here, among friends at The Spectator, I can, however, make a confession. Reader, a few months ago I did think Jimmy Goldsmith’s ‘party’ was a social event rather than a political one, and made a comment along the lines of Waugh’s heroine.

In my defence, I would say that the words ‘Goldsmith’ and ‘parties’ have always gone together so harmoniously that it did not occur to me that he might now have turned to the less rewarding business of challenging the Government. After all, my two encounters this summer with this charming and sociable man have been at Imran and Jemima’s summer party and at his soirée for John Aspinall. And history may well judge that Jimmy will be better remembered for his parties than his party.

Now for the lifeguard. Let the Times eat humble pie if it has the grace so to do. My conversational partner that night was none other than David Hasselhoff — the guard (on the beach not in the Household Cavalry) in the Baywatch television series. I thought that the people who write columns were supposed to know about these things. What is the point of them if they mistake actors for soldiers?

It strikes me that the very people who are so keen to imply brainlessness in others must be insecure about their own mental faculties. Why else should they be so rude to others whom they suspect of lacking their intellect? Learning, after all, is not the same as wisdom. Churchill did badly at school, and I have met a lot of Oxbridge-educated people who lack both common sense and finer feeling.

When, for instance, men at dinner parties insist on asking me if I have read a book or article on a subject on which I have not the slightest inclination to inform myself, I am tempted to respond, ‘Do you know the difference between Dolce & Gabbana and John Galliano? Well, don’t ask me questions to which you know I will have to say “no”.’

I share Jane Austen’s observation in Northanger Abbey that a young lady of some leisure is apt to read one thing and declare that she reads another. Like Catherine and Isabella, I prefer a racy novel to heavier fare: ‘Had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of The Spectator instead of such a work, how proudly would she have produced the book and told its name, though the chances must be against her being occupied by any part of that voluminous publication . . . the substance of its papers so often consisting in statement of improbable circumstances, unnatural characters and topics of conversation which no longer concern anyone living.’

Quite. In fact I have ten O levels, and three A levels in Fine Art, English and Ancient History. On the last point, I can echo the stripper in Rita Hayworth’s song:

I have read the works of Plato and translated most of Cato.

Zip. I am such a scholar.

I don’t care for Whistler’s mother, Charley’s aunt or Schubert’s brother.

Zip. Got to make a dollar

It ends: `I’m a broad with a broad, broad mind.’ All power to her, I say.

At school at Sherborne, I learned Spanish and French, but mine and my sister’s great love was always music. I played the piano — the ‘Moonlight Sonata’ rather than the ‘Moonlight Serenade’ — and she the flute. I hate to spoil my tabloid image, but we grew up much more like the Bennet sisters than the light-headed girls around town we are now portrayed as.

As I grow older, I am convinced that the Restoration values of character and wit are what a woman needs to prosper, rather than book-learning. People can be extraordinarily rude and the quicker one learns to shrug that off the better. It has to be some sort of compliment when people I barely know approach me with a pitying gleam in their eye and announce, ‘I don’t care what everyone else says, you’re looking brilliant.’ And if anyone does have a suggestion for how to field that one, I would be grateful.

I did not go to university, agreeing with Rupert Murdoch that it is ‘a place for people who can’t get jobs’. I got my first job instead with Rothschilds, which I left after a while because I felt unstretched. I wrote a poem on leaving, and I’m told Lord Rothschild still has it. It went:

It’s like a war, it’s like a race

To expand the Rothschild client base.

And now it’s time to make the tea:

How stimulating a job can be.

At the end of the day I’m in a mood,

I’ve been so polite when I should have been rude —

And just a girl of 21.

Perhaps I’d better hit and run.

It may not be T.S. Eliot, but at least it (damn near) scans, which is more than you can say for a lot of contemporary poetry. And not every writer can say that someone of Jacob Rothschild’s selective taste framed their juvenilia.

 

 

Comments

[Bob]

Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Edgar Allan Poe, among many others, liked drugs too and wrote great poetry and prose. It's not for everyone, but some prefer to live fast, die early and leave a good looking corpse.

[Cuffleyburgers]

She seems to have been a talented smart lady and I have no objection to good looking women who put it about a bit - it is sad she seems to have died pretty well alone (sad when anyone does) but she made her bed as it were... sad anyway.

There's other people's deaths I could be much more ambivalent about.

[Whitewall]

Families are left to wonder "why"?

[Loz]

I loved her to bits.

Poor girl suffered from an autoimmune disorder, about which I know plenty, which laid her up for months on end, and fought off a brain tumour.

And she still managed to tear this life a new arsehole, good for her. Not like the goody-two-shoes snowflakes of today, hiding in their safe zones.

Whichever one done for her, I'll be raising a glass in her memory tonight.

SoD

[AussieD]

live fast, die early and leave a good looking corpse.

Just a phrase to justify the self indulgence in substances that can do you no good and probably great harm.

Over three decades I had the misfortune to come across quite a few corpses. None of them good looking and some who still haunt me.

A young relative who is a currently serving paramedic here in Oz assures me those who die of drug overdose do not make good looking corpses.

If the lady died of an illness it was far too young.

Whitewall sums it up nicely. "Why"

[Andrew Duffin]

Thank you for posting that article David.

I must admit that my initial reaction was exactly the title of your post, and I assumed she'd died of cocaine or something.

It seems that one ought to be try to be more charitable. Mea Culpa.

But having said that - the top quarter of the front page of the Daily Telegraph? Come on chaps, get a sense of proportion...

[jimmy glesga]

She was lucky to come from a rich family unlike the routine heroin user who can cause carnage and the breakdown of a family. Being rich she could easily purchase her chosenn substances unlike others who will steal from anyone including family.