I used to have a magnificently grand English journalist friend here in Los Angeles called Lavinia.
Lavinia came from a prosperous family somewhere in the South of England, and was not a young woman even when I first met her. She had forget-me-not colored eyes and curly hair that had once been primrose yellow and still somehow managed to seem so long after it had turned to a snowdrop: she stood maybe five feet tall on her tippiest tippy-toes, weighed maybe 100 pounds wringing wet and wearing all her pearls, and even in the old hard drinking journalist days could match strong men martini for martini and still remain standing.
Lavinia had been to boarding school in England and finishing school in Switzerland, and reportedly in her twenties had crashed an open-top Rolls Royce by driving it off the White Cliffs of Dover: I never knew the exact circumstances but in my mind, I see her sailing tranquilly through a blue summer sky, a serene smile on her lips, a silk aviator scarf streaming behind her in the wind.
Lavinia had come to Los Angeles as a young woman journalist and had once pawned Mother’s jewels to help her magazine through a sticky patch. She had been friends with Greer Garson and Tyrone Power and could tell stories that would have made Yul Brynner’s hair curl in amazement.
Lavinia had a basso profondo voice: she pronounced Los Angeles in the old way, with a hard g, and said “orf” instead of off, and “too-er” instead of tour, and once, to my delight, “cou-pong” instead of coupon.
Lavinia once snorted at me of an editor with whom she was having a dispute that “as for what that feller thinks, I don’t care a fish’s tit or a bee’s navel.”
Lavinia once launched into a tirade against a French colleague on her magazine, citing a jaw-dropping inventory of every single most stomach-clenchingly disgusting and degrading and obscene insult that you could possibly imagine that she claimed he had shouted at her one quiet afternoon, a list she capped bitterly at last with the final condemnatory clincher, “and all along he had garlic on his breath!”
Etiquette was close to Lavinia’s heart, and one of her core beliefs was that a gentleman removed his hat when standing in the elevator and when seated at the dining table. Lavinia was appalled one year at the Golden Globes to look across the ballroom and spot the latest hotter than hot young actor about town – I’ll call him Jamie Famous – sitting happily at his table shooting the breeze with a couple of his buddies, his fashionably slouchy fedora hat perched at a rakish angle atop his A-list celebrity head.
Lavinia took this most ill. There were standards, after all: they applied to everyone, and particularly when a feller had risen to the top of his profession, it was only the more important that he adhere to them the more closely in order to set an example to those less privileged. The way Jamie was presenting himself was wrong. Inappropriate, offensive, and impolite to boot.
She brooded this over for the length of martini or two, and on the third decided that it was time to give the young feller a piece of her mind.
She made her way over to his table, and planted herself before his company, her tiny form trembling with outrage.
“Do you not know,” she boomed furiously, not troubling herself with a salutation, and causing Jamie to spill his wine in shock, “that a gentleman removes his hat while he’s at the table? It is the height of rudeness to the entire company to do otherwise. For heaven’s sake, young man, who do you think you are?”
Jamie, who is a sweet-natured soul, blinked up at her in hurt confusion.
“But Lavinia,” he stammered after a moment, because everybody knew Lavinia, “you know who I am. I’m Jamie, don’t you remember me?”
This served to incense Lavinia the further.
“I may be old,” she thundered, drawing herself to her full four foot eleven and a half inches. “But I am not yet insane. Of course I know who you are. Any fool in Hollywood knows who you are. But that was not my question. My question was who you think you are.”
The offending headpiece was removed hastily and humble apologies proffered before Lavinia turned on her impeccably shod size 2 heel and stalked off, retroussé nose held high in the air.
I miss Lavinia.
Such a sweet memory
I would have loved to see that!