Over there was the dining table under which Ronald Reagan found the diamond earring she had dropped. Reagan, on his hands and knees under the table, had bumped into William Paley and Walter Wriston and Felix Rohatyn, all of them on their own hands and knees eager to spot the missing jewel. It was a little party for Ronald Reagan, who four weeks before had been elected president of the United States, and six weeks later would take his oath of office.
Mrs. Astor's son, who aroused the parricidal intervention by his own son, had had a career in the State Department, serving as ambassador from the U.S. in the court of Kenya's president, Jomo Kenyatta. He had turned to show business in New York and, who knows, perhaps had an idea for a musical featuring a senile old lady who had given away all her money and was devoting Act III to seeing how she could make out without servants and jewels and nurses and dogs and presidents-elect to find her mislaid diamonds.
We (my wife and I) didn't see her often, and when we did, one of us recited our standard joke. "The trouble is," she'd say chortling, "we live too far apart." The joke was that we have lived 40 years in the same building. Then we would resolve to atone for past neglects, and she would loose a bit of gossip, or gentle derogation of somebody or something, though never (in my hearing) of people who, by their conduct, give capitalism a bad name.
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