Susan Penhaligon poetry: The Ashes - in memory of actor Richard Warwick

Susan Penhaligon

Madame Arcati debuted (post-Coward rehearsal) as warrior. These days, this site is a salon of the precious talents - a refuge from the tyranny of media criminality and the tiresome reflexes of tenured hacks (I have yet to see one decent media cock-cocker or cunt-cunter at the Leveson inquiry - do you now see the playground prejudices at work? The recycling of stereotypes in real-life real-time?).

But enough of transitory fashion. The passing delusions. One of the talents the Madame Arcati salon adores is actor Susan Penhaligon. I have already showcased her poetry (click here to read); and I'm honoured to publish yet another example of her work - I ho hope publishers are paying attention.


The Ashes was written in memory of actor Richard Warwick (1945-1997). Susan tells me: 'He played my husband in A Fine Romance. Tragically he died of Aids. He was one of my best friends.'

The Ashes

Into the spider's web and stone of

Cheltenham

past the Daffodil cinema,

into the sleet

towards your favourite place,

on the day we left you for the

boatman.

Down familiar roads,

maps drawn heavy in the mind,

the lines of childhood unsmudged,

your brother rattling memories on

speed -

where the tree house formed

an ark in the Yew tree,

a hidey hole by the Holly bush,

in 61 the flooded fields iced over

for you to skate the Cotswolds.

We ford the mud-filled, wet-filled

fields,

the Severn banks collapsed,

a racing, river road

collapsing trees and sky and us,

us three,

the friend, the lover, the brother,

our faces wet with flooding.

We stand before the Elephant tree

and pour you out,

from our palms where we held you

we pour you out

like spice, like adding salt,

we put you to the liquid earth

in the flooded wetlands of your

childhood.

And through the rising deep,

across the seascape fields,

the waters covered the face of

the earth

and the Ark sailed on towards us.

(Copyright © Susan Penhaligon 2012)

Michael Gross: Lust, Lies & Greed beat the de la Renta rich mob

Last year I interviewed one of America's leading delving writers, Michael Gross, about his wonderfully titled book, Rogues' Gallery: The Secret Story of the Lust, Lies, Greed, and Betrayals That Made the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Annette de la Renta (Oscar's missus) and her very rich pals at the Met were so appalled by the book's revelations that she and they quietly campaigned to get the book ignored by the media and by a public usually ravenous for cultural plutocratic filth. (Oh, there you are, Vanity Fair)

So it gives me great pleasure to report that the rich cunts have failed. The book is just out in paperback and Michael informs me that sales to date are "far more than I feared". I have little doubt that Madame Arcati's supernatural powers may have had a hand in all this. No donation required.

Unfortunately the title is still not published in the UK, thanks to our ludicrous libel laws, but the internet happily makes a nonsense of that small detail: buy a copy here. Read how the late Brooke Astor once wore a precious Greek vase as a hat at a boozy Met board meeting - and was tested for syphilis (on another occasion). Not to mention all that juice on Annette: she should be sending huge cheques to Michael for making her sound a lot more interesting than the gossip columns do, the silly bint.

And if you like interesting, do read this insightful interview with Michael in The New York Observer. Of the near-media silence, institgated by de la Renta, that greeted the book's publication, he says: "I didn't think most of the substantial media in New York City would cut off their gonads and hand them to the museum in a jar."

I am only sorry that the profile writer (I forget his name) didn't see fit to mention Madame Arcati. He's such a Gurley.

Michael Gross website

Lady Colin Campbell returns with Empress Bianca

Lady Colin Campbell

Fans of Lady Colin Campbell - Georgie to her friends - will be delighted to learn that her novel Empress Bianca is to be republished in September by Dynasty Press. You may recall that one the world's wealthiest women, Lily Safra, got the book pulped in its Arcadia incarnation following her claim that the novel's principal character, a "socially scheming double murderess", was based on her - fiction can so easily be confused with fact in certain less rigorous minds. Following a legal settlement Lady C made a number of "trivial" changes to the text and now we await the blockbuster once again. To order a copy click here. For background on Safra's lawsuit, click here.

Perhaps author Michael Gross will take comfort from this episode as he tussles with Annette de la Renta in New York over his marvellous book Rogues' Gallery.

Farah Damji: Try Me: Just give this princess a cross

A review

There are many reasons why the journalist and convicted fraudster Farah Damji won’t be forgotten in a hurry.

For me, there’s a very personal one. In Arcatiland she was the first herald of Michael Jackson’s death. She emailed the news to a posting here and I said to myself: Oh no, is she making this up? Then Sky confirmed it later. Proustian memory has now locked Damji and Jacko together over an eternal keyboard late one summer night.

And the infamous two do have one big thing in common: both, for different reasons, move us to ask of their lives - what am I to believe?

This is the question many readers will ask as they rocket through Damji’s enthralling autobiography Try Me. Critics expecting a string of self-serving excuses written in throwaway tabloidese will be disconcerted. As a piece of writing Try Me is a nuanced, self-punishing, sometimes lyrical, always compelling and an all-too-revealing performance. It's a beaut.

What’s she like? Put simply, if you gave this girl a life-size cross she’d probably have herself nailed to it just to see how it feels. That’s the kind of person who emerges from these pages.

Try Me seethes at times with a fury that’s not always easy to understand. “My temper was like a genie which possessed me…” she writes. If the heavy pall of fraud convictions, prison spells and recent criminality hangs low over her then this book may serve some kind of purpose in helping to get into the head of the inscrutable, “Chanel-clad” rich girl-socialite-magazine editor-brothel madam-fashion designer who simply can’t keep out of trouble.

Farah Damji was born in Uganda in 1966 to South Asian parents. She thinks her mother loved the extended family more than her own kids while her wealthy father’s side “were Dallas-like in their aspirations and the depths of their deviancy” with one or two involved in “semi-criminal shenanigans.” Damji haters will make much of that.

Via Tramp’s, Annabel’s and other London glory spots she soared into adulthood. At 21 she drank a whole bottle of gin just to see what would happen (think of the cross) and in New York sex, too, got the cross treatment - “I fucked frenetically for a place in the fornicators’ Hall of Fame.” In the Big Apple, she soon gravitated towards the sleb-serving glitz-dreck where nightclub managers could fix meets between the Pope and Monegasque royalty, and drugs and whoring bankrolled a world glammed up by crime movies. A collision with law enforcers was inevitable.

“Life was a game I played. I made up or changed the rules as I went along,” she writes. Later she regularly stole cash from a lover - “I never felt bad about stealing from him, it was payback in the transactional game of our relationship.” “Game” is a motif Damji word.

“Should I tell you I am a thief, that I will steal your soul?” she teases the reader. “I took people and things, the way I’m taking you now, with my long brown fingers, with the Pied Piper’s tune of distance and dreams. You know all about me. Yet still you follow.” Is this book another game?

Back in the Cool Britannia of the Noughties, Damji launches the short-lived magazine Indobrit and is immersed in controversies and the London media scene: two major affairs with married media men add to the profile. The infamy. And the in-for-me.

Then a wonderful chapter on India offers respite and a clue to her true gifts: as an explorer and observer. “India is about erasing, taking away preconceptions,” she writes. “Just the stark juxtaposition of wealth and scarcity – the tuk-tuk ride from Malabar Hill mansions to the slum dog hovels, though a short one, is hard to grasp.”

The final part of the book is a depressing litany of cops and frauds and did-she-didn’t-shes?, culminating in a long jail term. Now she has time to outline Try Me and discover Kabbalah but still she jumps prison leave and while on the run writes a blog - a first of a kind that tickles the media. The papers love it because she's an errant princess of sorts, dirty Diana-lite, but one who eats, not kisses, frogs.

I could have lived without the love affairs with the named marrieds - I’m only thinking of their aggrieved wives - and I think Damji has turned many of her crimes into abstractions so that she has lost sight of those she has harmed: you won’t find a big unambiguous sorry. Or, I didn’t find it.

Instead, you’ll encounter a gifted, highly intelligent woman observing herself in mirrors, scrutinising the different perspectives amorally, no matter the light or unflattering murk. Try Me is a trove of insights on types and experiences well outside Acacia Avenue so that reading it is an adventure in itself. A game, even.

And she's not the first princess of darkness who can write like an angel.

Try Me, click here to buy.

(For another perspective on Try Me, read the New Statesman review)

Try Me, the Spectator and the power of unseen friends

I see the Spectator hoped to run a review of Farah Damji's Try Me but was thwarted by the bonds of friendship which so frequently decide what (and how what) gets reviewed in our largely (still!) Oxbridge press.

I am printing two letters (the latter edited to save blushes) between the magazine's literary editor Mark Amory and the press director of the company credited with publishing Try Me, Sophie Cooke. In this instance I think the magazine has behaved entirely honourably: it wasn't interested in the book, then became interested because someone Amory knew said he wanted to review the title. The reviewer manqué then cried off, thinking of Answered Prayers and the horrors of social ostracism, no doubt. Amory frankly and refreshingly reveals all. Do you see the sneery smile on Madame Arcati's face?

Dear Mark,
I hope you are well. I am just following up to see if you had a chance to look at the press release I sent you about Farah Damji’s book, Try Me, and if so, if you are at all interested in doing something with it? Many thanks,
Sophie Cooke
Press Director
The Ark Press

Dear Sophie,
I am sorry I have mucked you about. I did not plan to do ‘Try Me’ then someone asked specially to do it, you decently sent me a copy and now he says he can’t because it is rude about dear friends. Why not defend them, I say but he is immoveable. Sorry.
Yours,
Mark

Other examples of missing book reviews in our national press would be most welcome.

Duncan Fallowell: 'MJ just wanted to be deeply fucked'

Duncan Fallowell writes in response to my Disneyfied cockless-cuntless Michael Jackson posting below this:

Dear Madame

I don't think his songs are asexual. Many of the later ones seem to be coded confessions. Didn't he do one In The Closet? His whole act, I think, came to embody an intense yearning to be cherished and deeply fucked. Was sexual passivity ever more vocal?

Duncan Fallowell

Dear Duncan

Still trying to get a copy of your 20th Century Characters for your Jacko piece. I recall how astute you were.

I don't think his songs were asexual, either. Like many singers he masked his true romantic interests in conventional garb. His later stuff may be coded confessions. But his persona was disneyfied-asexual - as a refuge from the feared consequences of being himself.

I'm not at all sure he wanted to be deeply fucked, at least not literally. I can recall reading Jordy Chandler's court deposition: he described how MJ would blow him and eat his cum. In the sense that he wished to ingest "masculinity", this is the nearest to being "deeply fucked" I guess. But he might have needed yet more pain killers after a bout of penetrative loving. I'm not sure he wanted that level of sexual or emotional engagement. A gobble with a boy-man was as much as he could deal with. It was playtime followed by the famed sleepover.

Of course he should have gone to prison: Genet's sweaty jailhouse fantasies might then have been brought to life in MJ. Who can say?

Love as ever, MA x

Michael Gross: His absent book and lapdog hacks

I interviewed Michael Gross the other week about Annette de la Renta's reported campaign against his book Rogue's Gallery - which guts the dubious history of the Metropolitan Museum - and you may be interested to know that the title is inexplicably absent from the online catalogue of the New York Public Library. "The library’s 2008 annual report lists an Anne E. de la Renta Cataloging Endowment Fund as part of a list of endowments that were started with a donation of at least $100,000," reports the New York Observer. Surely that can't explain the absence. Click here.

Michael gives a fascinating interview to Obsessedtv - see it here. He talks about his work methods, characters who fascinate him - eg Murdoch is now seeking respectability in his winter years after being the greatest rebel in newspapers - his career, ongoing project and his thoughts on journalists. Too many of them are "lapdogs who want to be invited back for lunch." Ah yes, the Nicholas Coleridge Syndrome we call it.

Farah Damji interview: 'No more criminals, hookers, journalists, lawyers'

Farah Damji's memoirs Try Me - published on July 6 - are the stuff of scandal. How's that for a hook? A writer and cultural commentator, a former editor, a former jailbird and now an ethical fashion designer who has blinged Madonna and Mary J, she is an "Indian woman who has lived, loved, fucked and fucked-up in spectacular fashion," according to Liz Jones' ex and newspaper columnist Nirpal Dhaliwal.

"Long before she went to prison for perverting the course of justice and theft, Farah Damji was making waves by being a coloured woman, living an anti-coloured woman's life," opens the press release for her book. The story she tells, which starts in Africa and then shifts to India, embraces the New York worlds of fashion, design and the city's glittery lowlife, always edged by celebrity, and her social, professional and sexual encounters with British media and literary figures. Her revelations, indiscretions, anecdotes and conclusions will upset and infuriate many of her subjects and their lap dogs.

If Farah sought reconciliation or redemption in writing this book she may find herself disappointed. On the other hand, her brutal X-ray honesty - which does not even begin at self-exculpation - is matched by a vivid and brilliant prose style which stands as some kind of virtue in itself. I have always been a sucker for elegant clarity. As the writer and filmmaker Farrukh Dhondy says of Try Me: "At last an immigrant autobiography that doesn't have a mission to complain."

Farah agreed to an email interview

Farah Damji! Before we get to the matter in hand - your upcoming memoirs Try Me - tell me your star sign and whether you think you're true or untrue to it. And while we're being mystical - you make many references to Hinduism in your book - have you ever consulted a psychic (if so, what was said?)

Sun sign in Libra but Scorpio everywhere else with a little light sprinkling of Leo. Librans are meant to be artistic and balanced and not temperamental. So one out of three is a fail grade. Psychics told me I would be married with the white picket fence by the time I was thirty. That fortune is a little late in the telling.

So, why did you write Try Me? It is fiercely honest and won't endear you to your critics.

I didn't write it to endear me to anyone. I am not particularly endearing. I wanted to tell my story in my own words.

How hard did you have to sell the proposition for Try Me? Was it hard going or a walk over?

Sold it three times. Once to a Big Book Publisher who then decided they were going to change MY life story after I had signed in blood on the dotted line and spent the advance. Sold it then to a teeny weeny (un)publisher who turned out to be a neo-Ghandian, post-nuclear proto-feminist who wanted to use my book to push hers and her brother's and then I landed, in the midst of drowning and not waving, like the little animals two-by-two, in the safe sanctuary of The Ark Press.

It was an easy sell because people thought they could re-package it so the story became a facsimile of itself. A popular genre at the time (2007) was Indobrit Chic-lit, it was a bit like looking in a watery reflection, in a murky lake. They didn't realise that I wasn't motivated by anything else than the need to tell MY story in my words so it was easy to walk away when things became contrary to commissioning pillow talk. I think most commissioning editors and literary agents are spawned from the devil's own seed.

Darling, now look. There's no nice way of saying this, but you've been baaaaaaad. Jailed in the US, imprisoned for perverting the course of justice in the UK, working for underworld kingpins in New York, meeting Mafia bosses, writing the kiss 'n' tell about your affair with the married travel writer William Dalrymple and having another affair with a married man, Allan Jenkins of the Observer, and more. What's the worst thing you've done of which you are ashamed?

The thing which I am most ashamed about are the years I have wasted by being absent in my children's lives. That can never be replaced and they are the ones I value the most. Shame is a waste of time. Who is going to get anything from it? I feel bad about you making me feel bad and that negativity erodes my sense of worth and success so the desire to be a "good" person is worn down. But these are all other people's ego-based value judgements. I did crime, lots of it, I was sentenced by a Judge, I did my time. People need to learn to get on with it. I certainly have. I contacted everyone ( I could find) when I came out prison and I wrote to them and apologised for being such a shit. Most were incredibly kind and gracious, one or two (mostly Asian media wannabes) were vile and cold. What to do?

How do you think the wives of these men will feel about certain intimate revelations in your book?

Oh Madame Arcati. I don't know and I don't care. These wives' husbands were sniffing around like dogs sniff bitches on heat. If a man cheats once and a woman puts up with it, she has created a vacuum where there used to be trust and commitment. If you marry a rake, be prepared to be muck-raked. Both these men are serial adulterers, I wasn't the first and I certainly wasn't the last in either case. These wives stayed, whereas I wouldn't, so I can't say what they might feel, I feel differently.

I take it Allan was better in bed than William ....?

Couldn't possibly say but now that you mention it....

How do you think your family will react to private revelations about certain matters?

My parents are stuck like adolescent narcissists. I am sure they think they were perfect parents who provided every material comfort that money could buy. Indeed they did. But they were and continue to be lousy parents. I don't judge them, I just don't want them in my life, they do the best that they can and it isn't ever going to be enough so the best thing is to stop having the expectation that they will change and find that lost love elsewhere. TV or chocolate are good substitutes. Besides, who cares? I have been disinherited by my daddy decades ago...

You write in Try Me: "I’ve lived like a lost butterfly that flutters this way and that, seeking warmth and nourishment. I sought shelter from the sun that burnt my wings, yet I craved her warmth. I wanted the light." Outside metaphor, define light and warmth. And if there's one person I could promise you would never have to meet again, who would he or she be?

Light and warmth are unconditional love and acceptance, from your god, your children, your lover. It's what I sought outside myself my whole life, but never found. Light to me means God-sense in my life. I have that now. There isn't one person, I would like to never set eyes on again, there is a whole village, we'll swap names later...

I see you know The New York Post's gossip writer Richard Johnson. What's he like?

Nasty little piece of work. He doesn't really do anything anymore, he's so ******* by noon that his sidekick the scary Paula Froelich does it. Paula used to be a sweet thing, worked as the receptionist at the Holmes Place on Fulham Road but is now a little caught up in her own reflected glory. Last I heard she'd written a book of scraps and tidbits, leftovers they couldn't use on Page Six.

Indobrit - which you edited - was launched in 2002, a quarterly magazine for British Asians living in the UK. You wrote in the New Statesman of your father who left the UK and returned to Africa: "He had had enough of the British, his bastard bank manager and all the things that reminded him that, despite owning the best bespoke suits and a sizeable chunk of Soho, he was still regarded as un-British." Is this one reason why you think multi-culturalism is a con?

I think it is a con because there's no such thing. We aren't meant to be this great big melting pot society at all. We're "meant" to redefine our own versions of who we are all the time, we are all works in progress. Besides, more and more people are mixed race, live in more than one place, don't necessarily conform to the norms of their birth culture. We need to achieve transculturalism, wherein we look "above" a person's culture or creed into what that person is inside.

Are the Brits inherently racist?

I think Lord McCauley sums it up better than I ever could, in 1835 in his speech to Parliament, about India. The British are inherently fearful, that they are not good enough or that they will be "found out." Of course not all of them, but an unpleasant BNP backing minority. "I do not think we would ever conquer this country ... for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self esteem, their native culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation”

Where are you with Toby Young? He described you as a "a nasty little Indian" which he denies. Then I read Geordie Greig of the London Evening Standard was offering his services as a peace-maker. What's going on?

I awe Toby Young. What a strange thing to call me when he could have called me so much else? We are spectacularly fine. As long as he stays on his side of the bed / planet / universe and I stay on mine, we will have no more friction. It was all due to Mercury in Retrograde, bad communication and all that. Didn't the Americans cook him and eat him on Celebrity Carnivore?

Have you changed? Could you resist major temptations again? How do you know when you've changed?

Yes. I think I make better choices. I think you know when you have changed by the people who are in your life. It's a reflection of what is going on inside, in a way. So no more gangsters, criminals, hookers, journalists, lawyers, j/k. Some very solid good old friends have always stuck through sick and sin but some talented and lovely new people have entered my life too. To stay.

If there's one thing you could change about jail, it would be ....

The horribly itchy polyester sheets. I missed my Pratesi, darling. No seriously, the entire Criminal Justice system needs to be completely overhauled. Thankfully we have been relieved of that god-awful Jacquie Smith [as Home Secretary] but the prison estate is too huge and unwieldy for any effective change to take place.

I am involved in a Prison Project which teaches accountability and responsibility. I think criminals change when we as a society start to realise that we are all part of the problem and that crime doesn't exist outside of determining factors such as class, background, economics and race.

We need a much more reformative, restorative system not just one that exists only to punish. Big stick no carrot can't work. Not everyone can write a book in prison and it's a human shame that so much talent, time and potential isn't put to better use. And I don't mean making number plates, I mean teaching people in the prison system real life skills so they can go out and live valuable lives, not repeat old crimes and go back into the cycle.

Finally tell us something about your life now. Would you edit another magazine if you could?

Ethical fashion, working on a big presentation for a big high street chain, who are not too well-known for their current stand on ethics in fashion. You can't use organic cotton and then chain some sub-continental kid to his sewing machine for fourteen hours a day and pay him £1 and call it an ethical garment. There has to be complete transparency all the way down the chain, from how the textile crop is grown, dyed, manufactured, stitched, finished and to how the final item is packaged, marketed, paid for and transported. It's more than just soothing our Guardian-singed consciences because we feel we "should" do something or support a movement.

No more magazines for me, been asked but Dead Tree Media is endangered and it's a soulless life, I wouldn't want to go back to it. I love writing and am formulating a plot for my second book. My life provides fertile ground for stories! Watch this space...

Farah, I wish you all the best with your fascinating and brilliantly written book.

More about Farah and Try Me extracts, click here

To order a copy of Try Me, click here

Michael Gross: Only 'spectacularly minor' changes made to Rogues' Gallery

The US writer Michael Gross has asked me to put up this clarification on reported changes he is making to future editions (and perhaps the UK edition?) of his new book Rogues' Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money That Made the Metropolitan Museum which has apparently so upset New York social swan Annette de la Renta. The Independent's follow-up to my interview with Michael may have led some to think that he is making substantive alterations, but that's not the case:

"Just to clear this up - if such is possible - I have made precisely one change in future editions -and I think it "spectacularly minor" in the extreme. An objection was made to my description of an obituary that was missing mention of four accomplishments by the deceased. Future editions will be corrected to say the obituary was missing two accomplishments. And as a courtesy, I have added a footnote stating that a certain party who ignored six separate requests for comment before publication denies one contention made in the dozens of pages of text about said party and her family. I also intend to correct some equally spectacularly minor spelling errors and a slight misstatement of Hermann Goering's multitude of titles. Wouldn't want to offend a Nazi, would we?"

Michael Gross: National UK newspaper picks up the story

Yes. Isn't that good? Which UK national newspaper? Oh, the title quite escapes me. But I'm delighted that Madame Arcati has played her part in drawing this matter to public attention.

Michael Gross and the furious Social Empress of New York

Is it the case that the uncrowned "Social Empress of New York" has waved her sceptre and decreed that a book she finds either embarrassing or inaccurate or both should be ignored by Anyone Who Cares What She Thinks? That it should in effect be allowed to die by ordained silence? Who knows?

The Empress in question is Annette de la Renta, the book, Rogues' Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money That Made the Metropolitan Museum, and its author the legendary, the inescapable, Michael Gross. His oeuvre includes non-fiction bestsellers Model and 740 Park.

Mrs de la Renta is the wife of the - omg!, gimme the grandest-sounding adjectival phrase, please - multiversal fashion designer Oscar. They are among the society Caesars and Cleos of America (NY in particular) - with the tragic ends missing, respectively. Apparently. They're so huuuuuge that even American Vogue editor Anna Wintour over-arches her back into an ageing stoop as she scrapes about in their presence. Not even the newly refurbished Hubble telescope can fully capture their social enormity. There isn't a lens big enough!

So, when this goddam writer Gross produced his sensational NY museum history book, which does not portray Annette (the sometime guardian of the late Social Empress of New York Brooke Astor's estate, and a trustees board member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art) in an entirely approved light, all hell broke loose. Museum types raged for and against Gross' book: indisputably, Gross had hit a raw nerve about a national institution. And Annette threatened legal action - she could sue yet in the US or turn libel tourist.

Suddenly, promised book reviews did not run, scheduled interviews did not appear. All this in the Land of the Free. No writ has been served as I write.

Was she offended by the stories about her and her late, wealthy philanthropist mother Jane Engelhard or was she aggrieved by Gross' impertinence in delving into Oscar's well-known sexual past? Or all of the above?

Annette de la Renta is rich enough and powerful enough to hire the best lawyers to speak on her behalf. I spoke with Michael Gross about the affair. (If you want more background, read Jesse Kornbluth's excellent report, click here)

Michael, my dear. You're imagining that sections of the US media have banned coverage of your book, aren't you? You've got sensitive?

"No. I did a fascinating interview with Daphne Merkin, a celebrated writer, for a publication-day story on The Daily Beast, Tina Brown's web site, that has still never appeared. I also know of at least one reporter who has received a warning letter from Mrs de la Renta's lawyers saying the book is 'full of misinformation' and another, at another newspaper, whose story on the book was killed by an editor who said that they would cause the book to be withdrawn and/or corrected and the newspaper would be left 'holding the bag.' I also know of several reviews that were scheduled and then mysteriously postponed. I hesitate to be more specific since I fear that the reporters and editors who have filled me and my publisher in on what's been happening (or more precisely, not happening) might themselves be at risk of retaliation."

You're saying the New York elite have closed ranks against you in defence of their Empress?

"I know that the New York elite - call them the 4,000 - love to know and discuss things no one else (ie, the public, the great unwashed, the NOCD types) knows. Much of what is in my book is no surprise to them. Many of them were my sources.

"That said, I suspect that the core issue here is not this or that nugget of revealing information but rather something larger and perhaps more threatening, my exposure of two things: the way things really work behind-the-scenes in a great American cultural institution - which no one involved wants revealed - and the picaresque saga of Jane Engelhard, whose riveting life story still has holes in it, despite my attempts to fill them, but which is nonetheless told in full for the first time in Rogues' Gallery. Both she and her daughter have battled every attempt to shed light on this saga - battles referred to in the book."

Is this just about the de la Rentas - or have you also upset the cultural snobs by telling the unauthorised and all-too-human story behind a national treasure, the Metropolitan Museum of Art?

"The sad fact is that the sort of people who create and sustain historical repositories like the Metropolitan do not want their own histories, or those of the institutions, revealed. Otherwise, why would they repeatedly obstruct researchers and make a mere book like mine into an object lesson, a warning to any who might think of following a similar path of crumbs?"

I understand the de la Rentas' friend Anna Wintour made her feelings known ....

"I ran into Anna Wintour at Graydon Carter's Monkey Bar shortly before the book came out. We have 'crossed swords' before, beginning when she was the editor of British Vogue and began an interview by instructing me in no uncertain terms that I was not to refer to her as Nuclear Wintour, so I was not surprised when she gave me a look I can only describe (by paraphrasing a designer) as 'standing in a strapless dress next to an open icebox.'"

As Kornbluth writes of the matter: "A rich woman has used a two-ton gorilla to threaten a writer, and, for whatever reason, silence has descended." If Annette de la Renta's legal threats are intended to chill interest in Gross' book, then they may well have succeeded for now.

But would it not make more sense, and be more in keeping with the freedom-loving spirit of the US, if she published a statement of rebuttal for all to see? What is unacceptable is the suspected exercise of informal social power to, in effect, banish a book to obscurity, and with the acquiescence of a generally gutless American media. Tina Brown - when will you become the mouse that roared?

For a great read, order a copy here.
Michael Gross website