The Collector of Art
Kept waiting
Of course. Even if they were ready, they wouldn’t have been ready. Of course not, their time is money, your time is just... well, time. And in a sense, they're right. It’s your problem.
But no matter what, you must always be kept waiting and always just a little bit longer than you’d think it has to be. They push it to the sharp point of distraction. The better to control the situation. This is a constant, just like death and taxes.
It’s nothing personal. They probably even keep Annie Leibowitz waiting; she probably has an assistant to proxy wait for her.
In the back of your mind, you’re deducting the long waiting minutes from the far shorter shoot minutes. You try not to panic. Stay calm, don’t let it get to you; take out a book. Years have taught you that a book is essential and so space is always found, although you hate to add to the weight of the equipment you’re dragging around.
Not a book to read, impossible to concentrate under the circumstances, but a prop book, the better to listen undetected. Little pitchers have big ears. The bodyguards whisper, the Personal Assistants, the Heads of Communication, the PR, shushshushshushshush about the mood of the day. The tight schedule, the sighing, the certainty that carefully planned meetings will be jettisoned today, like every other. There will always be a crisis, real or manufactured—there is always a situation, somewhere, that needs urgent attention and always more important.
Try to glance at your watch, sliding up a cuff, eyes forward to check no one’s looking, then a glance, no more.
Try not to panic. Stay calm, don’t let it get to you.
Really? 10 past already? If they say you have fifteen minutes with him, and they’re taken from the front, the back end is unmovable. Unless you can amuse them, trick them into overstaying and ignoring the fidgeting minder shifting from foot to foot behind you, tapping your upper arm from time to time, whispering into your ear. Them you must learn to ignore, a game of where the mouse chases the cat, little more.
You are told, conspiratorially, how much he hates having his photograph taken. At least that’s what men always say. Women don’t bother with such silliness, they just get on with it. You want to respond, to say indeed, this is normal, the correct way to act in a culture where we are taught to deny seeing beauty in our own self, even if only in the mirror in the morning, always better without your glasses on.
Anyway, they tell you this and smile through you, which you can only answer with a twinkle you force, mildly, as though this is the very first time you’ve heard it said. In a sense it’s true, it’s the first time you’ve heard them say it. But many others have said the same.
Tempted, to tell them that over the years, only one person has liked having theirs taken, and that if that person weren’t then a subject for police attention, it could have only been a matter of time measured in very small units before they were.
“He’s ready.”
Greets you at the door, in person. Motions you to take your shoes off, tells you to leave everything outside. Hard to work with no tools, but harder still to argue.
We trail him as he tours us through his apartment.
“My Picasso. 1963,” he points to a painting in a scrubbed white frame.
Older than him, I think.
Walks on.
“My Monet.”
Waves a hand casually. We are now in a room overlooking Hyde Park. The bridleway leading to the Household Cavalry stables lies below, the Serpentine just behind. The entire wall is double height floor-to-ceiling glass.
“Bullet-proof,” he says, noticing my eyes travelling up and down. I am measuring light, while he gauges the sort of threats known only to oligarchs and dictators. And perhaps property developers. Perhaps.
“Damian Hirst,” he nods at a crystal skull on a shelf under a bronze cast of Rodin’s The Kiss.
Not The Kiss, I later find out, but one of 150 editions officially sanctioned. Still.
Follow him to a new room, passing various sundry masterpieces.
Marilyn, by Eve Arnold.
"The Prime Minister has the same one," he says, with too much pride in his voice, about Tracy Emin's Neon.
Into a third room, a study wallpapered with giant Helmut Newton prints: we are in the innermost sanctum, in his oh-so-pretty girlfriend’s private study where she is hard at work on her correspondence.
Trophies both, a package deal, complete and symbiotic.
So pleased to meet you. And you.
Sweep through one room after another. To the bar, overlooking Harvey Nichols. Swarovski crystal encrusted drums in the centre of the room—her last birthday—“Nadja’s a great friend, she thought it would be fun…”
We are down to the last few minutes allotted.
Retrieve the equipment, rush, rush, rush. Journalist in his own world, still chatting as though we are old friends and time is infinite. As always.
Two minute warning, the PA is whispering. The driver is waiting. Places to go, people to see.
Click, click, clickety click.
Look-left-could-you-look-right. Try not to knock over the Monet on its freestanding easel, try to get an angle that avoids the phallus-like sculpture that seems to impossible to avoid.
Time, the PA is murmuring, tugging on your elbow.
Must go.
Nice to meet you.
And you.
© Copyright Michael Harding
Please note that the date for this previously published blog post has been assigned to create a sequence and not a chronology.