Royalty's Connubial Jamboree
Greer, Herb
Runyon type and she an over-painted blonde showgirl with a perfect build up to the neck and a perfect vacuum above it, represent one of the many facets of what may really be the long-heralded...
...What advice, I wonder, do the stars, by way of Sidney Omarr, have for our new President on the dawning of his first full day in office...
...Jacobo Timerman, publisher of the Buenos Aires daily La Opinion, was arrested in April 1977, by order of one of Argentina's "warlords...
...Money isn't everything though...
...O...
...It is opened to the horoscope page...
...Only the grimness of the subject may explain why in spite of all the hullabaloo the book did not immediately make the bestseller list...
...Every sort of gewgaw from pencil cases and cheap compacts to pottery mugs, postage stamps, and limited editions of very expensive porcelain plates Herb Greer is an American author and playwright living in Manchester, England...
...Goldstein...
...Given the manner in which the media now treat the Royal Family, such a transformation will not be easy...
...No author I can think of has been quoted so profusely, written about so extensively, or lionized so extravagantly in the first few weeks after the publication of his book...
...It was at that point rather than later that the subliminal uncertainty which attends the future of an unmarried Prince vanished...
...And though I stand in awe before his brilliance, there is a limit to my line of credit for Jacobo Timerman...
...Much of the "power" of the Royal Family rests on that reluctance, but it is not absolute or, these days, undisturbed...
...The Royal loose end was tied up, and we could all relax-almost...
...The venerable relative herself, having exhausted her supply of chocolates and Jane Austen's prose, has come downstairs for refills, just in time to let me in...
...Runyon type and she an over-painted blonde showgirl with a perfect build up to the neck and a perfect vacuum above it, represent one of the many facets of what may really be the long-heralded emerging Republican majority...
...Now retired, he lives as a writer and lecturer in Brookline, Massachusetts...
...Then as now the country was volatile at home, with violent trouble across the Irish Sea, very unpleasant demotic strains in political life (today these masquerade as demands for "more democracy"), and a tendency, especially among the poor, to ideological fanaticism and overriding sub-group loyalties...
...O...
...The lines are still fresh in my mind as I alight from the cab and find that I have lost my latchkey...
...A passing reference to Lady Diana-in the Times, of all newspapers-was distinctly untraditional, and rather startling...
...Charles's Mother can still compel respect, but whether he himself will survive the malice of those evil tempered witches who reversed the fairy tale by refusing to come to the weddingor whether British Royalty, like those dusty mugs and plates in the antique shops, will sink in this turbulent century and become a souvenir of things long gone-is an uneasy question to echo in St...
...Paul's after the songs and celebration of July's Royal Wedding have died away...
...Neither of them seems destined to shine in refined society, but, to judge from the girl's mink and the diamond ring on her escort's finger, they have their own reasons for believing in the American Dream...
...Prisoner is a shattering denunciation of Argentina, an ear-piercing outcry against its military caste gone berserk, an anguished vision of what may 'Alfred A. Knopf, $10.95...
...Herb Greer ROYALTY'S CONNUBIAL JAMBOREE Curiously, the Royal Wedding seemed to have happened before it had actually taken place...
...This was in large part the effect of the must which (so it seemed) afflicted most of the light media in Europe-and a few of the heavy British ones-while the Prince was engaged in his long teasing game of cherchex la femme...
...Because this would imply that Timerman is another Dante...
...But there's a curse attached to it...
...Timerman himself called me "a nobody"-but in a closed meeting...
...I shall later explain why I am not at all certain that the narrative is 100 percent factual...
...despite having laid out several grand for a private box, our hero has been forced by the fire marshals to cool his heels outside the ballroom for several hours...
...So here was an innocent man who had suffered humiliation, anguish, and torture and in the process witnessed the hairraising cruelties of Argentina's parallelgovernment, a "government" that consisted of: military leaders [who organized] their personal domains, each one becoming a warlord in the zone under his control, whereupon the chaotic, anarchistic, irrational terrorism of the Left and the Fascist deathsquads [which had prompted the military to overthrow the legitimate but disastrous government of Juan Domingo Pe ron's widow, Isabel] gave way to intrinsic, systemized, rationally played terrorism...
...Naturally the souvenir industry jerked into high gear...
...Prisoner is a remarkable book...
...So why don't you just shut up and buy me a f drink...
...Not long after the engagement it suggested that she "would very likely" be the future Queen...
...Perhaps "relax" is not quite the word...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1981 19...
...All of this, however, was thoroughly traditional...
...Steer clear of self-deception...
...But my despair is short-lived...
...Benno Weiser Varon DON'T CRY FOR JACOBO TIMERMAN The weaseled words of Prisoner JVithout A Name Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number' reminds me of the story about the woman who, asked about the enormous solitaire she wears, explains: "This is the famous Goldstein diamond...
...Locked out at three in the morning-the perfect end to a perfect party...
...That climactic frenzy more or less had to leave the wedding as an afterthought, a bit of an anti-climax...
...The crisis has passed but he is still furious...
...Obviously he was all along innocent of whatever caused his arrest, for had the military judges of the War Council found a single shred of evidence against him, they would not have decided that his detention was "baseless...
...Benno Weiser Varon lived as a newspaperman in Latin America and returned there years later as Ambassador of Israel...
...The stars-both Hollywood and celestial varieties-are sometimes wiser than we know...
...Just ask Jimmy Carter...
...Judged as such, without the intrusion of the personality of its author, I might have joined in the raves...
...Fa Crissakes, Shoily, dose crumbs treated me like dolt...
...The published text got a feline, not to say bitchy, review from American novelist Paul Theroux in the Sunday Times, but that did not seem to dull the public's appetite for the show's plastic chic...
...Not, in other words, a deeply serious figure like his Mother...
...After all the false starts, blind alleys, rumors and jokes (some not very polite), and the gossipy absurdities, the bathetic high drama of those last few days of suspense, and then the real announcement-well, what was mere churching, even in St...
...Without wanting to make too much of a stray remark (and a journalistic remark at that), the unsure tenor of it does send the mind spinning back into history...
...Probably a great deal more useful and direct than much of the advice Reagan will receive from bureaucrats, lobbyists, pundits, and politicians over the next four years...
...But I feel obliged to let the unsuspecting reader in on a secret: I'm part and parcel of the Timerman controversy...
...Respect for such things is a matter of habit and custom, and the British have usually been 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1981 more reluctant than most peoples to throw away their customs...
...Cut the crap, Harry," she says...
...The fact is that he spent half a year in two legal and three clandestine prisons...
...Prince Charles, as he is projected in the media-the only frame in which most Britons ever see him-is an entertaining and agreeable sort, amusingly jug-eared, not that brilliant, prone to fall off horses and travel a lot, and of course very rich, with maybe a touch of the clown about him...
...I am, if not the, at least a bete noire of the Timerman camp...
...Such fury must have been earned, and I shall soon explain how...
...Play waiting game...
...On one single Sunday the New York Times carried six different articles on Timerman, none of them short, including one written by Timerman himself...
...Outside it has finally started to rain, which can only mean that President Reagan has retired for the night...
...There was even a tacky little show in London's West End, a staging of mock-heroic verses by Australian critic dive James, about the Prince and his hangers-on...
...Timerman is a publisher's dream...
...Even now many Britons grumble over what these very expensive Royals are good for, what they can do that some democratically elected figure could not do as well...
...flooded the up and down markets...
...The latter today are not confined to the poor, as we see in the Civil Servants' strike...
...The custom of reverence for the Monarchy is not, one suspects, much more deeply rooted among those electors than among their illmannered leaders-none of whom wishes Charles a prosperous and Royal happyever-after...
...It is...
...My own horoscope is even more to the point: "Older individual is in your corner and proves it...
...What's the gorse...
...The trouble is Jacobo Timerman...
...A docudrama for TV has been announced already, a film may follow, there will be handsome profits for all concerned...
...The Government, qua government, would have gladly complied...
...In other words: Prisoner is an important, extremely well-conceived, and even extraordinary book...
...Not that that camp has been interested in publicizing my existence...
...Written material requires close scrutiny.'Not bad...
...The gorilla Generals wanted to arrest the judges of the Supreme Court, but Presi dent Videla threatened to resign and a compromise "solution" was found: Timerman was set free, but expelled from Argentina to Israel, stripped of his citizenship and of his assets...
...Is the book worth all the fuss...
...I remember reading somewhere that Ronald Reagan is an Aquarius, and that he is interested in astrology...
...The first had his head chopped off by a dictator...
...One of the staples in British antique shops is the detritus of past souvenir-hawking on one Royal occasion or another...
...There being no uncertainty at the time about the engagement or the marriage, one was shaken by that subjunctive mood...
...But the extremists among the military balked and thus Timerman spent another two years under house arrest in his own apartment...
...As soon as the engagement was announced the Lady Diana was, for all practical purposes (nearly all), a member of the Royal Family...
...Each officer of a military region had his own prisoners, prisons and form of justice, and even the central power was unable to request the freedom of an individual when importuned by international pressure...
...Only under duress, when confronted with a few things I said in an article "Don't Rescue Latin American Jews" (Midstream, December 1980), did one of Timerman'$ sidekicks, Rabbi Morton Rosenthal of the AntiDefamation League of the B' nai B'rith, call that article "rubbish" (as reported in the New York Times...
...It's at the latter that tortures are performed...
...The answers to this complaint are generally abstract, having to do with continuity and a sense of tradition: the kind of language which is used to justify the price of those antiques so expensively auctioned at Sotheby's in Bond Street...
...Paul's...
...A light flicks on behind the door and a small, familiar round face peeks out through the curtains...
...be in store for Argentina's 400,000 Jews, and a moving description of one man's experience in Argentina's Hades...
...The last time Britain had a King called Charles was in the seventeenth century, when there were two of them...
...beside me on the backseat I notice an abandoned evening newspaper...
...Whether it will change enough to make him a respectable King and the center of gravity for the nation is less certain...
...No book I can remember has received so much immediate attention...
...The right guy won the election, dint he...
...Had the author invented the tortures and the "terrorist sensuality" and the "eroticism of violence" which he attributes to the Argentinian brand of sadists, it would be an even greater feat than his surviving them...
...His image may alter with marriage, a little-a very little...
...You can be damned shave dose punks ain't hold da last a Harry Horstheimer...
...A Council of War then decided that his arrest was baseless and recommended his re lease...
...The left-wing leaders of the Greater London Council ostentatiously and sneeringly refused their invitation to the Royal Wedding, having as they said, "better things to do for the people who demo cratically elected us...
...Mr...
...I hail a cab...
...However, I don't doubt the veracity of the torture methods described...
...There is no chronological sequence in Prisoner and so the reader may not be able to guess whatt happened when, or how long the different phases of Timerman'$ ordeal lasted...
...So what if it's a little crowded...
...It's a great book, written by a journalist who as a newspaper publisher in Buenos Aires combined stellar writing talent with superb business acumen...
...Finally, the Supreme Court reviewed the case and demanded that he be set free...
...not real name] Shirley takes a more philosophic view...
Vol. 14 • September 1981 • No. 9
