Gold Dust, Gastric Acid and True Love

A few days ago, or so the Associated Press claims, a 13-foot Burmese python burst after it apparently tried to swallow a live, six-foot alligator whole. The snake was found with the alligator’s hindquarters protruding from its mid-section, which suggests the reptile may have clawed at the python’s stomach as it was being eaten.

To any Hindustani who is or has been married, this situation will seem familiar. Not to the Jesustani, who has been indoctrinated since birth to believe that slowly dissolving in gastric acids is a passionate, fulfilling experience.

It isn’t a coincidence, I’ve long believed, that the world’s greatest film industry grew in this greatest of lands, for the idea of Jesustan is founded on the suspension of disbelief. Among the core fantasies on which the entire edifice rests is the belief that something called True Love exists. Unlike us Hindustanis, Jesustani wage-slaves do not work endless hours merely for the loot. They toil instead for love of their people, love of their planet and love of something called self-realisation. You will never catch a Jesustani soldier admitting he signed up to feed his eleven brothers in Begusarai. He will instead insist that he did so for love of his nation, love of freedom or even love of Beloved Leader. Etcetera.

Most peculiar of all, Jesustanis marry for True Love. Not because to-be Husband-Ji wanted a fat dowry or was sick of the self-loathing caused by masturbating to fantasies about Bhabi-Ji, you see. Nor because Mummy-Jaan and Daddy-Jaan were making to-be Beast-of-Burden-Jaan’s life even more hellish than she imagined a life of servitude to a low-life halwai would be. Not because the condom didn’t work, nor because they were sick of being bitten by mosquitoes while furtively shagging in the North Delhi ridge. In other words, Jesustanis get married for no good reason at all.

The one good thing about this is that it generates a fair amount of high-grade tamasha.

In weeks to come, the United States Supreme Court, no less, will decide the fate of a minor TV star’s claim to her very rich, very stupid and very dead husband’s enormous fortune. In 1991, the senile oil tycoon J Howard Marshall II ran into Anna Nicole Smith – who used to call herself Vickie Hogan before she graced the centre-fold of Playboy magazine and starred in particularly third-rate afternoon TV shows – at a strip club in Texas. Ms. Smith was particularly down and out at the time: so down and out, in fact, that the strip club wouldn’t let her work in the evenings, before prime-time dirty old men, and had given her a slot in the afternoon instead.

We will never know, of course, just what drove J Howard Marshall II into the strip club that particular afternoon. He was, we have been told, also down and out. His wife had died, it is true, and so things were not so bad – but so had his mistress, because of a seizure she suffered while undergoing a facelift surgery. $150,000 down the tube, and nothing to show for it, and in that moment of darkness he bit. Before long, Howard Marshall II was buying Ms. Smith expensive jewellery and cars. He also paid for a pair of magnificent breasts that enabled Ms. Smith pull herself out of the strip club and on to the pages of Playboy.

By 1994, Ms. Smith had become something of a star model for products that needed endorsement by women of a certain age with breasts of a quite different age, notably Guess Jeans. What happened next? True Love, of course.

But Ms. Smith was not the only one who felt True Love for the millionaire. Marshall’s son, Pierce, was less than happy about the marriage, and even more so when his father died eight months later leaving her an enormous fortune. Various courts in Texas have held that the True Love Pierce felt for his father (who hadn’t even bothered to make a mention of the son in his autobiography) was greater than that his father felt for Ms. Smith, and therefore ordered therefore that the loot go to him. Another court in California, though, took a strong dislike for Mr. Pierce and ruled in Ms. Smith’s favour to the tune of $ 500,000,000.00 (sic.). Now, the Supreme Court, no less, will judge these claims.

Other courts have been hard at it too. Just last year, there was the case of Iryna Singerman, whose accountant husband seemed surprised to discover that the 22-year-old mail-order blonde from Ukraine had been banging a mystery millionaire who had given her a gold-coloured Mercedes. If it hadn’t been for self-delusion brought on by blind faith in True Love, the husband would have known this was precisely what accountants, bankers and other dead people ought to expect. And then there was the even sadder case of Richard Foster, a real-estate agent who was for some reason shocked to discover that his wife, having run up an $ 150,000 jewellery bill, decided that it was more fun hanging at Hollywood parties than with an ageing kaddoo.

Its rare you find anyone who sees through this True Love stuff, although my journeys through history led me to at least one Zen Master, the late Peggy Hopkins Joyce.

Born in 1893 to a small town barber in North Carolina, Joyce famously asserted that ”true love was a heavy diamond bracelet, preferably one that arrived with its price tag intact”. After one brief and disastrous marriage for love, she wed the youngest son of a wealthy Washington, D.C., family. Using the seed capital, she engineered another short-lived marriage to the millionaire James Stanley Joyce. It ended in a highly publicised, scandalous divorce, but by then the new Mrs. Joyce had made good. In the spring of 1920 alone, she spent $1 million in a single week, buying $300,000 worth of pearls, a $65,000 Russian sable coat and a $30,000 chinchilla. Three other divorces followed, punctuated by affairs with the likes of Charlie Chaplin. At 60, she entered her last marriage, this time to a bank clerk 20 years her junior: she had, by then, had her fill of travelling, in the words of one biographer, “from adventure to adventure, from country to country, and from man to man”.

I salute her: she was Queen-Ji, woman-e-awwal, chick-e-rustom, because she saw through the scam. In another world and another time, she would have been happy. “What a pity”, said Armand-Emmanuel du Plessis, Duc de Richelieu, on hearing that the extremely rich, extremely old and extremely stupid widow of his best friend had died the previous day, “she would have been a fine catch the day before”. Thing is, even Christ suffered his agonies for the good of mankind. What's the point of being eaten alive for no reason at all?