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So women made me, according to the good book, which is only fair. I’ve spent the better part of my life thinking, yearning, lusting and chasing after them, so the least they could do is ennoble poor little me. Our own Melanie McDonagh wrote in the 9 March Speccie on the 50 years of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. How I remember the dates of late March 1963, although back then if I’d heard the word Friedan I would have thought it had something to do with freedom in Sudan, a place I had recently escaped from once the locals decided to nationalise my dad’s giant textile factory. (The 5,000 workers who toiled in air-conditioned comfort all lost their jobs and the factory was wrecked and burned to the ground after only two years of the Africa for the Africans nationalist government of the Mahdi.)
Why do I remember the date so well? Easy. Already engaged to the French Cristina de Caraman, I arrived in New York and fell madly in love with an Anglo-American girl, who later married the great James Toback, a director and screenwriter (Bugsy) and raconteur extraordinaire, and a man who would win a fortune on any sports quiz programme, something he refuses to do as he deems it much too plebian.
While tripping the light fantastic with the Anglo-American gal, I was also taking aim at an all-American girl who had spent time in Paris but could only answer, ‘Daddy’s in Detroit’ when someone addressed ‘Bonjour’ to her. (No linguist she.) The all-American called me one night crying over the telephone that she had been attacked and that I had better come over. I lived at the Sherry-Netherlands hotel gratis as my parents kept an apartment there all year, and the all-American was living at the Carlyle.
Once there, she told me who her attacker was, John F. Kennedy himself, the 35th American president who was one year and something into his presidency. According to the ‘victim’, JFK — who kept an apartment at the Carlyle — invited her for drinks, then pounced. She claimed he stopped once she threatened to tell her father in Detroit. I made sympathetic noises and held her close and said there, there, but didn’t believe a word. Very few girls said no to JFK, the only Kennedy who was not only good-looking and gracious, but also a gentleman, something no other Kennedy clan member has ever been accused of being.
I cannot remember having had a more idyllic time than 50 years ago this week: Cristina back in Paris sending me sweet letters swearing undying love, the Anglo-American, a neurotic but a great beauty, staying up until dawn seven nights a week, and the all-American telling me how impressed she was with my habit of working at night in my father’s shipping office.
Then it all came crashing down and it was hasty migration time for the poor little Greek boy. And it was straight out of a cheap movie screenplay. Cristina flew to New York on a whim without telling me. The Anglo-American kicked me so hard on the shin that I bled. The all-American threw a glass of wine over my head when she found out about Cristina, and the latter broke off our engagement, called me a liar and a cheat and warned me that her father would shoot me if ever I came to Paris. Don’t forget, this was 1963 and men were supposed to act honourably, not like Neanderthals. I headed for Greece and the safety and comforts of home. My mother even suggested some mustachioed Greek girl as an excellent choice for a wife because she was definitely a virgin. That was all I needed.
What does all this have to do with Betty Friedan and feminism? A hell of a lot. We men were the bad guys in the battle of the sexes 50 years ago. No longer. If Friedan was worried about the withering of women’s minds by domesticity, what are we poor men to say today, battered non-stop by aggressive women who see love-making as rape and all men as potential rapists and murderers. I have never been a pincher or a groper and am very safe in taxis, but if I sometimes pay a lady a compliment, I don’t expect to be called a pig for it. I am a victim. Cristina and I married, but she never trusted me and that undermined our marriage.
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