WHAT PRICE U THANT?

I’ve never met any movie stars, though I’ve seen their movies. I’ve never met any well-known athletes, though I’ve seen them play. I have a cousin who, according to family legend, briefly dated Courtney Love while recording with a band called “Faith No More,” but I haven’t seen him in years. I’ve never met any famous authors, though I’ve read some of their books.

I wouldn’t mind this — or maybe I would, but at least I wouldn’t complain of the unfairness of my unfamiliarity with the famous — except that I seem to be constantly meeting those who’re just met them. People and ideas are the only things much worth talking about: “The two most enjoyable activities of mankind,” said someone, probably French or maybe from Vienna at its most decadent, “are gossip and metaphysics.” But my gossip, like my metaphysics, is awfully thin — the names I have to drop, like the ideas, far too often someone else’s coin.

Last week I had another secondhand brush with fame, eating with a Polish Dominican who’d had dinner two nights before with John Paul II. Usually it’s hard to tell just how much dropping a name is worth. Does it count for anything to have stood in an elevator with three members of the cast of Moose Murders, the most notorious musical flop in Broadway history? How valuable is Bart Starr? What price U Thant? I know someone who spent a day with Karl von Hapsburg, but it somewhat lessens the value of the name-drop to have to explain that Prince Karl is the man who would be emperor of Austria- Hungary if only the last eighty years of history could be undone.

In any boasting contest, however, there are a few names that beat all others. “I simply must stop dropping names,” goes the old British music-hall joke, “as the Queen was saying to me just the other day.” President Clinton is at a discount lately, but Lauren Bacall is worth betting on, Michael Jordan is good for raising the stakes, and being able to mention having breakfast with April’s centerfold is usually enough to take the pot.

But the pope is the one unbeatable hand. I was at a discussion on natural law a few years ago when the question came up of what Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia thought. “Oh, Nino, Nino,” began one of the scholars, “I had lunch with him just last Wednesday and asked him what he thought he possibly meant by that speech on natural law.” And in the sudden silence that descended on the table, the voice of a Catholic writer piped up, “You know, that’s an amazing coincidence. I was having lunch with the pope that same day, and he wanted to know what Scalia meant, too.”

Compared with such professional gamesmanship, my play is purely amateur. I tried mentioning to one of THE WEEKLY STANDARD’S editors that I’d had dinner with someone who’d had dinner with the pope, but she didn’t seem impressed. The truth is that vicarious naming just isn’t worth much, and I have little else to spend.

The actress Jill St. John once came to my hometown, but it wasn’t until years later — when I saw on the VCR her underclothed performance in the James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever — that I understood why all 10,251 people in Pierre, South Dakota, elbowed me aside in the rush to meet her.

In high school I had a friend whose father had been the back-up punter for a last-place team in the early days of the American Football League, and sometimes he’d drive us to school, listening to the radio news the whole way. The only thing I ever heard him say was, “Damned Republicans,” but he said it at least twice each morning, sometimes when the newscaster was reading the high-school football scores.

There have got to be more valuable stories for me to tell. I knew someone in graduate school who collected, for conversation while dining out, the gruesome deaths of famous intellectuals: the Catholic mystic Thomas Metton electrocuted in Bangkok when he reached from the shower for a towel and grabbed an electric fan; the post-modern literary critic Roland Barthes run down by a laundry truck in Paris; the sixteenth-century Francis Bacon shivering to death on a damp mattress when he refused to be put up in a dry but inferior bedroom after having spent the afternoon slaughtering chickens and stuffing them with snow to see how well they’d keep.

I’m thinking of taking it up as the highest form of name dropping. If the subjects are long enough dead, all name-droppers are reduced to secondhand naming. And if the subjects are philosophers — well, if they’re philosophers, what could be better? Gossip and metaphysics, all at the same time.

J. BOTTUM