Hi Society: The Wonderful World of Nicky Haslam, BBC Four | reviews, news & interviews
Hi Society: The Wonderful World of Nicky Haslam, BBC Four
Hi Society: The Wonderful World of Nicky Haslam, BBC Four
Half a century of celebrity hobnobbing with dahling Nicky
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
This odyssey of party-goer and interior designer Nicky Haslam frequently resembled a Private Eye diary by Craig Brown, who’s always at his best when lacerating narcissistic name-dropping diarists from earlier generations. We watched Haslam swapping anecdotes about Picasso with the painter’s biographer John Richardson, reminiscing about how Mae West used to sleep with two monkeys on her bed, and pointing out where Marilyn Monroe and Tallulah Bankhead used to live in New York.
He’d give us their exact house numbers, he said, but he’d left his compendious address book behind. The sense of parody come to life reached its apogee when the filmmaker Hannah Rothschild (and surely only a Rothschild would pass muster to make a documentary about Haslam) read out a list of things Nicky has deemed “common”. This included anyone Scottish, the Caribbean, tassled loafers, celebrity chefs, bottled water, swans, queueing outside Annabel’s, organic food, sushi, Saint Tropez, loving your parents … the list could have expanded to fill the entire hour.
You might pronounce Haslam absurd, a frantically self-renovating social butterfly who should never have made it past the Sixties, but there is something astonishing about his sheer devotion to his chosen cause. For almost all of his 70 years, he has devoted every waking hour to networking, party-going and rubbing shoulders with the wealthy and beautiful.
His attitude is that nostalgia is worthless, and the only option is to seize the present and advance glamorously into the future. The artist Hugo Guinness recalled how Haslam used to dress in dowdy tweed suits, then underwent an overnight upgrade which made him look 30 years younger. This must have been around the time when he started to resemble an imperfect pastiche of Eddie Izzard.
“Aristocrats are not the look!” Haslam pronounced, and he should know, being descended from the Ponsonby family who were courtiers to Queen Victoria. “You have to look contemporary. It’s being how the world is.”
A facelift, perhaps?
“Why not?” cried Nicky. “Everybody should do it. It doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t cost very much, and you come out feeling a million dollars.”
Haslam’s secret – apart from his supernaturally fine eye for design and décor, which is why the likes of Russian emigrée Natasha Kagalovsky hire him to renovate their $50m Manhattan apartments – is that he’s a far more adaptable creature than most of the fly-by-night glitterati with whom he loves to hobnob. As he hugs and air-kisses his way past socialites, supermodels or Paris Hilton (with Haslam, pictured), he knows most of them are plummeting towards obsolescence, while he will keep mutating and updating. As Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter put it, “he’s kind of a Zelig figure” who has been part of every fashion trend over the last 50 years.
Even longer ago than that, Haslam was taking a precarious walk on the wild side. Min Hogg, editor of World of Interiors, scrutinised the infinitesimal print in her handwritten diary with a huge magnifying glass, and recalled how Haslam had taken her for tea at Claridges when they were teenagers. Then he’d visit gay clubs in Soho, tantalised by their illicitness. Apart from a fleeting moment of tearfulness when he was forced to confront the end of his relationship with designer Paolo Moschino, who hates party-going as much as Haslam craves it, it was only when he mused upon his homosexuality that he subsided into much-detested nostalgia. Nevertheless, his view on this offered a bracing corrective to our present era of bureaucratically enforced human rights.
“I don’t see why it should be legal really,” he murmured. “I don’t think all these rights everybody has are necessarily perfect. I think people rather enjoyed it being illegal.”
In his social circle, it was taken for granted that gays were a more highly evolved species, “prettier, cleverer, nicer, better food, better parties, more drink...”
He seemed to find today’s emancipated, integrated gayness rather lacklustre. Common, probably. Rupert Everett suggested that Haslam represented a mode of gay living that reached back to Oscar Wilde, so “he’s the end of something in one sense.” Yet even though he has acquired a light dusting of Quentin Crisp, it’s a suggestion Haslam would surely dismiss as he fills his diary with all tomorrow’s parties.
repeated on BBC Four on Monday November 23 at 00:15am
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