Culture Vultures: Liar, Liar
Steyn, Mark
CULTURE VULTURES by Mark Steyn Liar, Liar I well remember the first time I heard the name M. Larry Lawrence. I was in the hot tub with the Princess of Wales when she said, "Is it true you and Al...
...His tortuous answer foreshadowed the problems he's had since: "I felt the numbness that prevented me from integrating into all aspects of my life the implications of what that tragedy really meant," he said "We are in the midst of a profound shift in the way we approach issues...
...He should have remained at Arlington, with slashes chiseled through the relevant parts of his tombstone ("SIC—U.S...
...Lying comes naturally, effortlessly to them...
...Speaking of South Pacific, did you know Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote it in my hotel...
...Vice President...
...Let lying dogs sleep, I say...
...It comes as some surprise, then, that the guy who's championed all these bogus issues, Al Gore, is proving so spectacularly incompetent at being bogus himself, tying himself in knots over Love Story...
...That bit was Larry's idea...
...Ambassador, I feel your MARK STEYN is theater critic of the New Criterion and movie critic of the Spectator of London...
...Bill Clinton said recently that he hadn't eaten in McDonald's since becoming president...
...Bob Dole actually was one—but, according to polls conducted a couple of months before the presidential election, over 5o percent of Americans had no idea he'd been in the army...
...Perhaps in claiming Tipper as the inspiration for the doomed Ali McGraw character, the vice president was just indulging his well-known taste for deathbed scenes: after his '96 Convention speech about the sister who died of lung cancer and the '92 Convention speech about the son who was nearly killed in a car crash, maybe he was worried about running out of stricken relatives...
...In 1994, when Vice President Gore swore in M. Larry Lawrence as Ambassador to Switzerland, it must have been like the Stanley Cup of horse hockey: Larry: "Thank you, Mr...
...54 February 1998 • The American Spectator Instead, the poor fellow has been furtively disinterred from the National Cemetery and returned to San Diego...
...As M. Larry Lawrence would say, tell it to the Merchant Marine...
...And it worked...
...Race is an obvious example, as President Clinton's woozy "national conversation" is proving all too well...
...it wasn't the sex that ended his career, but the way the sex had rotted his integrity...
...Given the ease with which he bamboozled the White House and the State Department's "background checkers" ("bamboozled" is the official explanation, though it's more like a strange overeagerness to look the other way), Larry Lawrence should have stayed in Arlington as a monument to the Clinton administration, a Tomb of the Unknown Donor: "But we didn't know he was a phony/a foreign national/an agent of Red China/an international drugs dealer/an Indonesian gardener making $15,000 a year (delete as applicable...
...Bill: "Mr...
...Burial at Arlington hardly seems enough: he should have had a full-scale lying in state...
...The display of Baum working at the Coronado is still up there, notwithstanding that, as Larry's fulsome obituaries were succeeded by their emptysome rewrites, the Oz business, like Larry's Merchant Marine service and his professional football career and his vice-chairmanship of the Nobel Peace Prize Commission, proved to be the merest fictions...
...MERCHANT MARINE")—in the same way that, in Budapest, the streets' pre-Communist names have been restored but the signs honoring Marx and Lenin have been left in place with red lines scored through them: lest future generations forget...
...Larry had da nerve alright...
...Strange, I mused, but never gave it another thought...
...Somewhere in his youth, it seems, Ambassador Lawrence had misheard the Cowardly Lion's song: "Oh, I could show my prowess Be a-lyin', not a mowess If I Only Had Da Nerve...
...Larry: "Really...
...Larry pretended to be a war hero...
...And, after all, who among us has not occasionally told a little white lie on a résumé, a bank loan form, or a cemetery application...
...Speaking of foreign parts, did you know I'd been torpedoed off the coast of Murmansk...
...See how easy it is...
...In modern British politics, there are only a handful to whom that title could apply...
...Cherry trees were cut down...
...Whereupon I discovered that not one contemporary account of Oz's creation even mentioned the Coronado...
...And Baum had based his design of the Emerald City on the Coronado...
...I have vivid and painful memories of convoys being torpedoed in the Arkansas of my boyhood...
...On the other hand, by the time you read this, it may well have emerged that even this was a fantasy and that he just wandered in off the street and started hanging around the lobby, dispensing bonhomie and asking if you wanted help with your bags...
...Thus, the author of a recent biography of Jonathan Aitken, a more recently disgraced Cabinet minister, chose for his title not a reference to Aitken's dodgy Arab business deals or his taste for sado-masochistic sex, but a blunt summation of his principal offense: The Liar...
...Oh, yeah...
...What's clear, though, is that, even in a liars' culture, Gore is having a harder time of it than Lawrence and Clinton...
...Speaking of your hotel, did you know my third cousin died of second-hand smoke inhalation there...
...All of us at some point in our lives confront the George Washington moment in our own particular way...
...A few years ago, on the last night of a BBC TV shoot in San Diego, the local cameraman suggested we celebrate the end of the film by having a drink in the Hotel Del Coronado...
...By that definition, M. Larry Lawrence had been in training for his post all his life...
...That's why I'm challenging the Republicans in Congress to support the Cherry Tree Cutting Reform Bill I've proposed...
...Alas, Larry's been hustled back to San Diego in a laundry basket, his place on the nightly news already supplanted by Nino or the new fat pill...
...We did a rough budget based on the Baum-in-San-Diego angle and then I flew home...
...Even in an age of sound-bite politics, Britain retains a sense that in public life this is the greatest sin of all...
...In America...
...Gore's equivalent came after the Washington Post caught up with him after the dead sister speech and asked him why, if he'd pledged himself to fight smoking after his sister's death in 1984, he was still claiming to be a proud tobacco farmer in 1988 and still taking tobacco money until 1990...
...and I said, "Why, yes, it was back when I was a millionaire philanthropist and Al was my hotheaded young ward...
...I really do believe that in our politics and in our personal lives, we are seeing an effort to integrate our emotional lives in a more balanced fashion...
...But so are the hot-button issues du jour, "gay rights" and "global warming...
...It's not just that they're congenital liars, they're congenial liars...
...Whoops...
...In a present-tense culture whose collective memory of anything before the death of Elvis is increasingly wobbly, all that counts is the story you tell this week...
...Even his shiftiness is wooden...
...So many areas of public debate in America are now conducted in such a blur of evasions that anyone with a functioning sense of integrity would instinctively recoil from such a world...
...You're familiar with the scene where Bruce discovers that someone's been using the Batphone to make nonBat-related calls from the Batcave and...
...The American Spectator • February 1998 55...
...Gore can't manage that...
...As Erich Segal almost wrote, Gore means never having to say you're sorry.44 Even in a liars' culture, Gore is having a harder time of it than Lawrence and Clinton...
...coma...
...Personally, I thought it was a ghastly place, but, lurking in one subterranean passage outside a karaoke bar from which some caterwauling no-talent was bellowing "I Will Always Love Yoo-oo-oo-oo," I noticed a display of photographs of L. Frank Baum and his Wizard of Oz stories, with an accompanying note explaining that L. Frank had written the original book while staying at M. Larry's hotel...
...They've got video footage of him stepping through those Golden Arches, but so what...
...Larry, Al, Bill: Liar, liar, pants on fire...
...perhaps we shouldn't be surprised...
...Speaking of the war, did you know I was the model for Ensign Nellie Forbush in South Pacific...
...It appeared, instead, that Baum had written The Wonderful Wizard of Oz while working as editor of Chicago Show Window, a trade magazine for window decorators...
...In the "Profumo scandal," which rocked Britain in the sixties, it's worth noting that John Profumo was forced to resign as Secretary of State for War not because he'd cavorted with call girls but because he lied to the House of Commons...
...Nowadays it's not whether you lie, but how well you lie...
...With an actor playing Baum, writing Oz up in his room while staring out at the ocean...The San Diego crew, anticipating another lucrative booking, agreed, and excitedly we all repaired to the bar...
...Who cares if the only military record he had was "In the Navy" by the Village People...
...The director and I had long wanted to make a profile of Baum, and what better place than here...
...Who can say...
...I was in the hot tub with the Princess of Wales when she said, "Is it true you and Al Gore were the real-life models for Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson...
...Thomas A. Edison himself had supervised their installation...
...Enter the President...
...Still, in an age when everyone's lying, it takes some finesse to produce a world-class double whopper with cheese...
...Al: "Really...
...There are still places where truth matters...
...At the time of writing, Larry's ownership of the hotel is about the only item in his remorselessly shrinking curriculum vitae still standing...
...According to the seventeenth-century English diplomat Henry Wotton, an ambassador is a man sent abroad to lie for his country...
...Likewise, the vice president, who, on successive days after his claim to have inspired Erich Segal's Love Story was exposed as hogwash, first stuck by his story, next said that journalists had "misheard" him, then denounced them for violating an off-the-record briefing...
...Er, no, he didn't...
...The president, for example, has his own unique form of mea culpa: "I cannot tell a lie...
...As it happens, I too was a victim of M. Larry Lawrence's tall tales...
...More recent Baum biographers have been happy to play up the Coronado angle, adding credence, en passant, to the hotel's other fancies: "When it was built in 1887, the Coronado had more lights than any structure outside New York City...
...Al: "Really...
...Not only that, but the chandeliers in the hotel's Crown Room had been designed by Baum himself...
...hell, they enjoy it so much they do it even when there's no need...
Vol. 31 • February 1998 • No. 2
