—William Cash writing in The Times newspaper recalls a Hollywood expat group from the 1990s that was called “the Viles” (at least by him) and explains why Ghislaine Maxwell failed to fit in. Here are some excerpts from his article:
…It’s not often that a journalist can claim to have coined a phrase that somehow catches the zeitgeist. Tom Wolfe did it memorably with “Masters of the Universe”, describing the Eighties money fever world of Wall Street, and Evelyn Waugh nailed it with his tribal portrayal of the decadent and titled party world of the “Bright Young Things” of prewar London.
Which brings me back to May 1997 and a splashy eight-page story in Los Angeles Magazine entitled “You’ll never have tea again” with the standfirst “The British set has come to conquer Hollywood. They’re rich, they’re naughty, and they love a good spanking”. Enter “the Viles”, as I first named this louche and often aristocratic expat LA set.
The Viles was a phrase borrowed from Waugh’s 1928 novel Vile Bodies with Waugh, who converted to Catholicism in 1930, taking a quote from the Bible (Philippians 3:21: “change this vile body”) and using it for satirical purposes.
In the magazine piece I wrote about this gloriously wild and colourful set of expats in LA who included Charles Finch (the film producer son of the actor Peter Finch), the Old Harrovian film producer George Waud (who is now married to Charlotte Tilbury), and my dear friends the producer Julia Verdin and the actress Elizabeth Hurley. The Viles phrase stuck. However, I’d rather forgotten this social species until they re-emerged in the news this week thanks to a photograph which appeared on social media of Ghislaine Maxwell at a James Bond party in New York with the former LA fixer and party boy Sean Borg, as well as Verdin and Hurley…
Other Waughs also interacted with Cash’s “Viles” on visits to Hollywood:
That Waugh’s granddaughter Daisy was in LA trying to make it as a screenwriter helped the media with their labelling. She and her father, Auberon, known as Bron, were at my 30th birthday dinner at my suburban Valley house, along with Hurley, Hugh Grant and the directors Nic Roeg and John Irvin.
After recalling several incidents from the flourishing of the Viles, Cash looks back to earlier manifestations of British influence in Hollywood.
…It was all very different from the tiny expat Hollywood world of the Twenties and Thirties, when monocle-wearing Brits including Basil Rathbone and David Niven played cricket in cream linen flannels under the palm trees. As Sir Ambrose Abercrombie, the president of the Hollywood Cricket Club in Waugh’s black satire The Loved One, says: “We Limeys have a peculiar position to keep up, you know. They might laugh at us — the way we talk and the way we dress; our monocles — they might think us cliquey and stand-offish but, by God, they respect us.”…
Here’s a link to the complete article which is also handsomely illustrated.
–The New York Times has the review of a new book by Salman Rushdie entitled The Eleventh Hour. This includes three short stories and two longer ones. One of the latter can fairly be considered a “campus novella,” according to reviewer Alexandra Jacobs. It includes an appearance by Evelyn Waugh:
…In the muddled middle is “Lost,” a campus novella meets “The Sixth Sense” meets “A Christmas Carol” meets Arthurian legend.
A college professor, the Honorary S.M. Arthur, wakes up dead at 61. Well, we’ve all wondered what that’slike. Here it’s envisioned as a pea-soupish “foggy Limbo” — like that of a newborn, suggests a female student marooned on winter break whom the professor manages to haunt.
Arthur had been a literary prodigy, a one-hit-wonder novelist who’d finagled a lifetime residency, encouraged by Evelyn Waugh. But unlike Rushdie, who wandered “lost” into an aged E.M. Forster’s office at Cambridge, he never delivered on his early promise…
—The American Spectator reviews a new novel by Scott Johnston entitled The Sandersons Fail Manhattan. This is described by reviewer Bruce Brawer as something of an update of works such as Diary of a Mad Housewife and The Bonfire of the Vanities from the closing years of the 20th century. In this, a well-connected and well-off couple become teachers at an upscale New York girls school in the hope that this will facilitate acceptance of their daughters into upscale universities such as they themselves attended. They unexpectedly confront a new teaching staff with other ideas, namely to use the school to promote the interest and university acceptance of handicapped, low income, culturally deprived children. Here’s an excerpt from the review:
…At the outset, pegging this as a light comic novel, a fast and superficial read, one doesn’t expect to care about any of these people. But one ends up cheering for several of them — and wishing for some of the others to get their just desserts. I’ve already mentioned Diary of a Mad Housewife and The Bonfire of the Vanities, but at times, while eagerly following this narrative, one is reminded of the comic novels of Evelyn Waugh and David Lodge, among others.
Diary was, of course, a movie based on a novel, and Bonfire became a movie too; I’d suggest that Sandersons would be a rollicking good film — although, for obvious reasons, I can’t imagine any Hollywood studio touching it. I can only hope that Angel or the Daily Wire, or some other counterculture producer, will snap it up. They’d be happy they did.
–Finally, The Express newspaper has discovered ITV’s rerun of the 1981 TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. Here’s the conclusion of the paper’s reviewer Maria Leticia Gomes:
…A significant part of its success lies in its dedication to Waugh’s original prose. Producer Derek Granger and director Charles Sturridge insisted that 95% of the dialogue was lifted directly from the book, giving the series a literary gravitas that few adaptations have equalled.
The programme also garnered critical acclaim during awards season. It claimed two Golden Globes, including Best Miniseries, and bagged an Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series.
Audiences revisiting it today remain equally captivated. On IMDb, one fan hailed it “the best miniseries ever made,” praising its “beautiful” direction, “remarkable” cast and “amazing impact.”
