Post 606 - May 8, 2024

The cat is asleep on my gym clothes bag. Michael is still in bed. I can hear the gentle white noise of traffic outside, but I could be easily convinced that it was ocean surf if someone made a case for it. It’s as peaceful inside as it would be sitting alone on a beach.

At one end of Manhattan, below us, the criminal trial of our 45^th President has just about finished its second week. Uptown, about half a mile above us, Columbia University is still shut down to everyone except faculty, students, and administrators because of the student protests. If we didn’t leave the apartment or turn on the news, we would never know that either of those things were happening. Our apartment is a calm island in what is, apparently, a boiling sea of political intrigue.

When my parents were first married in London, they lived in a little back alley called Wimpole Mews in Marylebone. All cobblestones and carriage houses, the tiny street is now a highly desirable place to live. One of the tiny houses on the short cul-de-sac is on the market as we speak for £4.7 million.

Even when my parents lived there, it was a nice place to be. The Queen’s personal physician lived a few doors along. Periodically, a great, black car would be sent to pick him up and take him to the palace to attend to Her Majesty.

A few houses up on the other side, the building at number 17 was owned by an osteopath named Stephen Ward. He lived there with a woman called Christine Keeler.

Christine grew up in Uxbridge in Middlesex. After what sounds like a truly awful childhood during which she was sexually abused by both her stepfather and his friends, Christine Keeler made her way to London. She got a job as a topless showgirl at a place called Murray’s Cabaret Club in SoHo. It was there that she met Stephen Ward. They moved in together and lived in the carriage house near my parents in Wimpole Mews.

In addition to being an osteopath, Ward was also an artist. He had many influential friends in London society. Keeler later said that he was a double agent, with contacts at both MI5 and the KGB. She maintains that their relationship was platonic. Soon after they met, at a pool party in the countryside somewhere, Ward introduced Keeler to the then Secretary of War John Profumo. Keeler and Profumo then began a brief affair.

After her fling with Profumo, she slept with a Russian GRU officer named Yevgeny Ivanov, and after him, a Jamaican jazz singer named Lucky Gordon, and after him, an Antiguan jazz promoter named Johnny Edgecombe. Edgecombe was a jealous man and at one point got into a fight with Gordon and slashed his face with a knife. When Keeler broke off contact with Edgecombe, Edgecombe turned up in Wimpole Mews and fired five shots into the lock on Keeler and Ward’s front door.

The shooting incident brought the entire scandal to light. What came to be called the Profumo Affair caused a media circus. Secretary of War Profumo eventually had to resign his cabinet post. Stephen Ward found himself on trial for vice charges. He was accused of living off the “immoral earnings” he had received from pimping out Keeler and her friend Mandy Rice-Davies.

At the time, the trial was considered to be an act of political revenge. The monies that Ward had gotten from the two women were incredibly minor compared to his own regular income. Nonetheless, Ward was convicted. Before the jury returned to give its ruling on what sentence he should receive, Ward killed himself by taking an overdose of barbiturates.

Keeler, of course, ended up on the same list that Stormy Daniels now finds herself on. They are the people who brought down famous, powerful men simply by sleeping with them. Monica Lewinsky, Donna Rice, and Wallis Simpson are but a very few enshrined there with them. It isn’t just women on the list. Lord Alfred Douglas’s affair with Oscar Wilde sent the latter to trial where he, too, was eventually convicted of participating in unnatural acts and imprisoned. Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein were each sent to the trashbin of history for their abuse of their sexual partners.

During her testimony, yesterday, Stormy Daniels described spanking the former president on the ass with a rolled-up magazine. Like the strand of pubic hair that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas left on a can of soda for Anita Hill, I don’t think we are going to be able to forget that. It is an image, even just casually mentioned, that is now etched into my brain as if it was indelibly printed with acid.

My parents lived in Wimpole Mews at about the same time that Christine Keeler was being introduced to John Profumo. Coincidentally, it was also around the same time that I was conceived. They moved to the United States where I was born long before the shooting incident with Edgecombe, so we all missed the resulting hysteria.

My parents didn’t know either Stephen Ward or Christine Keeler. Even though the mews can’t be more than ten houses long, all that was happening a few doors away and Mom and Dad were none the wiser for it. They were aware of the Queen’s physician’s comings and goings, but the really juicy stuff down the way all happened behind closed doors. They had no idea about any of it until it all broke in the news. By then they were settled in the United States with yours truly.

Men, in general, can’t always control themselves sexually. The urge is just too powerful and too unrelenting. Like everything else, there are degrees of it – some men have a close to non-existent sex drive and some can think of nothing else. When Sigmund Freud first said that men’s motivations were primarily sexual, it was considered scandalous. As far as I can see, though, he has yet to be proven wrong.

I have long thought that men who push and fight the hardest for power are doing so, whether consciously or not, primarily to expand their sexual access. Like everything else, there are exceptions to that, but time and time again, men who climb to the top often find themselves lying in a heap at the bottom of the hill because they haven’t been able to keep themselves sexually in check.

There are many cultures the world over that require women to keep themselves covered. That’s not for the women, it’s for the men. It’s to reduce temptation.  “In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on upon as something shocking…” Just the sight of an ankle could be enough to send a man into a frenzy he can’t control. It’s not morality, it’s biology.

By saying that, I am not for one second giving any of these predatory men a pass. I am not suggesting in any way that they couldn’t help themselves and were victimized by the women who were their undoing. They did that all by themselves. Countless men go through their lives in an honorable way, respecting women and keeping their innate urges under control.

Our former president does not appear to be one of those men. “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything… Grab ’em by the p$%*y. You can do anything.”

I wish I could get that image of the rolled-up magazine out of my head, but it’s solidly in there with the Coke can and the stained dress. It’s not going anywhere.

The judge in the trial unfolding downtown seems to be on the brink of sending the defendant to Rikers. The former president has been repeatedly warned to behave properly in court and he has, repeatedly, refused to do so. If he were anybody else, he would have been sent to a cell long ago. This is a man, however, who was once The President of the United States of America. Such a person has never stood trial like this before. We have never seen anyone in his position so defiantly refuse to follow societal norms. The judge is on unstable ground.

In none of the historical cases, was the sexual act, itself, the reason for the consequences. It was always the lying, the manipulation, the overheard secrets around the act that did everyone in. If Edward VIII merely slept with Wallis Simpson, nobody would have cared. He, however, wanted to marry her and make her Queen. Nobody could stomach that. Times and beliefs change, of course, and now the King of England’s Queen is as divorced a woman as Wallis was.

Nobody cares that the former president slept with Stormy Daniels. We’ve long gotten used to the idea of him peeing on Russian hookers so, frankly, this seems tame in comparison. He is on trial for falsifying where the hush money he paid Ms. Daniels to keep quiet about it came from.

People who live outside New York can be forgiven for thinking the city is a zoo these days. It simply isn’t. Central Park, a block away from us, is still as serene as it ever was. Seemingly overnight it has gone from being a starkly gray charcoal sketch into being a vibrant van Gogh painting full of color and life.

100 Centre Street, where the trial is taking place is miles away. The Columbia campus is closer, but it too is far enough removed from us to feel as if it’s in a different city altogether.

Michael is now up. He is puttering around in the kitchen. Like the cat, as soon as noises start coming from there, I start to think about food.

It will be interesting to see what comes of this trial. Will he be convicted? Powerful men have a history of avoiding legal consequences for their actions. Social consequences are another thing. Harvey Weinstein just had his trial overturned, but it’s not as if he can suddenly return to his former life. He’s still a pariah.  O.J. Simpson spent the life he had left after being acquitted as a criminal in society’s mind. He rarely left his house.

I don’t know that even his most ardent supporters think that our ex-president is innocent. It seems to me that people either think he’s guilty or they just don’t care. He’s done so many awful things that they’ve just blurred together into a fuzzy lump.

Earlier in the trial, 45’s former lawyer Michael Cohen nicknamed the ex-president “Von SchitzinPantz.” Now MAGA supporters are wearing nappies to rallies and wearing shirts with “Real Men wear Diapers” emblazoned on them. As real an issue incontinence is for some people, this seems a surreal twist. Dear lord in heaven, it’s only May.

Time for breakfast. Afterward, I will venture out onto the streets to see what people are doing. Are they yelling? Are they marching?

Blissfully, from my spot on the sofa, I just can’t tell.