With best friends like these . . .
Just as the world is full of character assassins masquerading as biographers, it’s overloaded with bad fairies hovering over events. It hasn’t taken long for one of them to attempt to do a Sleeping Beauty on Meghan Markle.
Barry Humphries, Edna Everidge – is a comic blessing of our time. No other comedian I can think of assaults an audience’s pretensions with such merciless precision, besides which he elevated gladioli to icon status, ennobling suburban backyards even as he mocked the pretensions of suburbia, and I do love a fat spike of gladdy in a vase.
Thank God he’s only 83, with some bounce left in him. He plans to tour next year for the first time as himself, without props to hide behind, in what sounds like a final autobiography – which is important. The one thing famous people need to leave behind is scorched earth on their life story so that no spiteful biographer can taint their memory as, say, Albert Goldman did to John Lennon, whom he seemed to loathe for some deeply personal reason.
‘‘[There is] so much I have not put into autobiographies and so much that is embarrassingly intimate that it would be better if I delivered this from the stage,’’ Humphries explains. Which is to say, he’s going to get in first on all the scraggy ends of his life. It will be hilarious and disquieting, because, as openly as he flays himself, he includes his audience with all their dark and petty secrets.
And yet he never degrades himself like, say, Louis C.K., with those endless, unfortunate riffs on masturbation that must haunt him now that his career’s in tatters. Embarrassment isn’t funny. And we don’t all share such specific obsessions.
Just as the world is full of character assassins masquerading as biographers, it’s overloaded with bad fairies hovering over events. It hasn’t taken long, then, for one of them to flap her wings and attempt to do a Sleeping Beauty on Meghan Markle, new fiance´ e of Prince Harry. You can bet she’d love to send Markle to sleep for a hundred years, so she’d wake up to a prince transformed to dust, and no happiness ever after.
There are always people jealous of another’s joy who claim to have special knowledge of them. So far there’s not much revealed about Markle, who seems to have been too busy with dogs and yoga on her days off to bother with a lot of marching powder and sleeping around. As if anybody really cares lots in an internet age when to have failed to flash your pudenda on Facebook is a sign you’re some kind of freak.
Britain’s Daily Mail has reportedly paid well for grumpy comment from the maid of honour at Markle’ first wedding. Ninaki Priddy has turned out to be an exbest friend from hell who blames Markle for divorcing her first husband after just two years of marriage. The split, she says, ‘‘ended my relationship with Meghan’’, and I’ll turn psychoanalyst here and wonder whether Priddy rather fancied Trevor Engelson herself, and maybe still does. After all, she’s attractive too. And she says he’s family to her now.
My old mother used to quote some autograph album adage, ‘‘Make new friends but keep the old, the new are silver, the old are gold.’’ It was wishful thinking on her part, because she fell out with women friends a lot over trifles that wouldn’t have bothered me, but she did love a feud.
What she didn’t factor in was that old friends can collect a lot of gold for selling dirt on you if you get to be rich, famous and lucky. I’m not sure there’s much wisdom in the saying, because we get older and drift apart from friends in a perfectly natural way as our lives and interests change. If you live in different countries or cities, that makes a barrier. And, for goodness’ sake, you’re not the little girl of five in the photograph any more.
That’s what the ex bestie doesn’t seem to understand as she reveals to the tabloids that her friend Markle has changed in the past six years.
Who hasn’t? For that matter, who hasn’t left their first marriage behind? Priddy claims to be ‘‘torn between joy and deep bewilderment’’ over her memory of the apparently blissful day of Markle’ first wedding, and is dismissive of any suggestion that something was wrong enough for Markle to end the marriage. What I hear is the Memphis song It should Have Been Me. Gladys Knight and the Pips. Up loud.
So much to take in. A Facebook commentator who claims to know Markle writes, ‘‘She was a user and only wanted to be friends with people in higher places.’’ How galling that she succeeded, right? Yet as another commentator puts it, ‘‘Shut up you jealous cow.’’
No more to be said, really. Get over it, girl.