Bette Midler as Sue Mengers

But back to Childe Hassam. His style was Impressionist but he painted idyllic images, the way I like to see life depicted, none of that depressing crap of that arch-fraud Freud. Both Hopper and Hassam would have had a field day with Nurse Jenny, and although I’ve been cruelly betrayed by Jessica Raine, if either artist were alive I’d commission a portrait of her and to hell with the expense. (I’m some art shark. A very old man once approached my first wife in the early 1960s at a railroad station and asked her to pose for him and she called him an old pervert and shooed him away. I said nothing. His name was Kees van Dongen. Then, twenty years later during a drunken moment, I gave a van Dongen away to a male friend; the painting, one of his first, was Along the Canal.)

On Monday I was cured instantaneously by the great doctor Chang, not Tang, and I now use different eye drops and have valiantly tried to stop smoking as much as I did before the scare. Just before it, however, I had the good luck to be invited by the producer Graydon Carter to the opening of I’ll Eat You Last, where I had a chat with Sue Mengers. Sue is the last of the great, schmoozy cobra Hollywood agents who at the height of her reign could make a star of anyone merely by issuing an invitation to one of her A-list parties.

Mengers is played in the one-woman, one-act play by the great Bette Midler, who is dressed to kill. She pumps out profane one-liners with a biting wit that would make Noel Coward blanch. Sue Mengers died a couple of years ago, but I can’t remember enjoying a show more. Midler is Mengers, drinking onstage, lighting up one joint after another, being brassy and outspoken and letting us in on bitchy gossip about the stars.

As I said about art, I’ve had it with depressing crap like Freud’s, and in the theater I’ve had it with even more depressing Pinteresque bullshit. Give me a foul-mouthed, profanity-laden Bette Midler poking fun at celebrities that the media take seriously—when she loses her last great client, Barbra Streisand, who also happens to be a close friend—she shrugs and says, “Ah, I think I’ll go to Israel with her and watch Barbra out-Jew the Jews.” On Elton John, she spits out that “All he does is eat when he comes to my house, and he eats everything except pussy.” It’s making 700,000 big ones a week and I didn’t invest in it when I had a chance.