Six for dinner
Lots of us have played the “if you could invite anyone to a dinner party who would it be” game. My invites wouldn’t necessarily be the most admirable or historically important, although that might factor as well, but those who were most interesting and could tell stories about other interesting people. We would want folks with the “gift of gab” and the potential for some fireworks from the mixture.
No arch-villains would be eligible—as fascinating as it might be to get a sense of what makes monsters (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, et al.), the hunch is that Hannah Arendt’s observation on “the banality of evil” would apply, and banality wouldn’t for good company make.
So a list of six, with the only conditions that they are no longer among the living and would have joined that category sometime in the last century or so (perusing all of history would be too daunting, and Jesus Christ, Napoleon and Abe Lincoln for dinner too bizarre).
■ Teddy Roosevelt: Anyone who shot large furry creatures on African safaris, vanished after his presidency for long stretches to explore Amazon tributaries (during which he reportedly had last rites read over him several times), and gave a 90-minute speech with a blood-soaked shirt and a bullet in his chest (“It takes more than that to kill a bull moose”) would be the ideal host, the human dynamo to push the festivities along.
The boxing skills might come in handy at some point as well.
■ Winston Churchill: TR wrote a four-volume history of American westward expansion (“The Winning of the West,” an original, much-battered edition of which I count among my most cherished possessions). Churchill topped that with his six-volume “The Second World War” (of which he knew some things) that helped earn him a Nobel Prize in literature (back when they actually mattered a bit, before being bestowed upon pop singers), but his major contribution would be as a conversationalist and raconteur, as nicely recounted in Cita Stelzer’s “Dinner with Churchill.”
My favorite Churchill (probably apocryphal) anecdote: Lady Nancy Astor: “Winston, if you were my husband, I’d poison your tea.” Churchill: “Nancy, if I were your husband, I’d drink it.”
He could also be relied upon to supply the after-dinner cigars and scotch and make the before-dinner martinis (The “Churchill Martini”: Mix in the gin, set the vermouth bottle on the table unopened and salute France).
■ Frank Sinatra: If Churchill could tell us firsthand about escaping the Boers, Gallipoli, the Blitz and how big a bore De Gaulle was, Sinatra could regale us with stories about the Rat Pack and Vegas, the Chicago mafia, Marilyn Monroe, and the Kennedys.
He might have been “an obnoxious runt with bodyguards,” but he was at least a runt with style
(on which see the late, great Pete Hamill’s “Why Sinatra Matters”). As Dino best put it, “It’s Frank’s world; we only live in it.”
And for the after-dinner entertainment, what could compete with “Fly Me to the Moon” and “I’ve Got You under My Skin”?
■ Christopher Hitchens: You always need a contrarian who will disagree with just about anything anyone else says at the table, just for the sake of disagreeing. So who better, ever, to play that role than “the Hitch,” someone with so much contempt for smelly orthodoxies and such love of provocation as to write an entire book denouncing Mother Teresa? (“a fanatic … and a fraud”).
According to Neal B. Freeman, in a recent reminiscence in National Review, “You heard it said in those days that Hitchens was the greatest living essayist in the English language. I don’t know about that. … But the greatest living debater in the English language? On that question I was, unreservedly, a Christopher Hitchens man.”
Because Hitchens’ level of eloquence allegedly increased in direct proportion to his consumption of alcohol, he would have also made the perfect late-night drinking partner for Churchill.
■ Tom Wolfe: Someone would have to write up such a momentous occasion, and do it with as much style and wit as the occasion itself contained, and anyone who has read his takedown of Leonard Bernstein, boutique leftism and the Black Panthers (“Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s”) would know that Wolfe was the man for the job. Virtue-signaling as a means of acquiring status has always been with us, and no one documented the tendency better than the man in the white suit.
Wolfe was the ultimate participant observer, capable of setting a social scene and then blending somehow into the background to watch it unfold. If he could do justice to Chuck Yeager and Ken Kesey and the “Merry Pranksters,” he could portray a drunken Hitchens needling a glowering Churchill about British imperialism.
■ Calvin Coolidge: Because every dinner party needs a straight man; the first one to call it a night before the night goes on too long.
“Silent Cal” was a president who reportedly didn’t say much (exotic creature indeed), but that only made what he did say worth listening to.
Legend has it that at a dinner party when the young lady seated next to him said she’d made a bet that she could get him to say more than two words, he replied, “you lose.”