Friday, Feb. 08, 1963

The Plastered Peer

As usual, the columnist for Lord Rothermere's London Evening News was wroth. "I come home tired and brooding over the Common Market. I switch on the telly--and what do I see? Two spiders mating. And as if that isn't enough. I am thereupon treated to the sight of two newts doing the same thing. Now love-making is a necessary and, from the point of view of those immediately involved, a most delightful thing. But it is not pretty to watch.'' Having got that off his lordship's chest. Arthur Strange Kattendyke David Archibald Gore, 52. the eighth Earl and the tenth Baronet of Arran, stopped watching the telly, polished off the whisky and soda that, he says, lubricates his pen. hitched up his pajamas, and threw another log on the fire.

Misleading & Disrespectful. In the two years that the Earl of Arran has been writing for the tabloid News, his plebeian readers have discovered in him that favorite British combination--lordly eccentricity. Few subjects are too large, and none too small, to embroil the Earl. He cannot fathom the Common Market, but he can try: "The lady from Bexhill still bangs away at me about a mass importation of French courtesans. But I think there must be more to the Common Mar ket than that." "Electrified" by reading in a Sunday women's page that a daub of lipstick artfully placed between the breasts was advised as the latest cosmetic lure, the Earl dashed off an imaginary nightclub scene. HE: "I say, old girl, feeling all right?" SHE: "Absolutely dreamy. Why?" HE: "Well, that rash of yours. Could be measles, you know, or nettle rash. Perhaps that lobster we had. Anyhow, how about a trip to the vet?"

When the Swedish Ambassador to Britain, furious at the Earl's description of Sweden as "a piddling country," challenged him to a duel, the Earl accepted with alacrity. "I have suggested as a meeting place the Hyde Park underpass, and as weapons motor cars." Then, in a spirit of charity, he re-edited "piddling" to "dull," and the international crisis eased. British names endlessly amuse him. perhaps because he himself is known as "Boofy" and sometimes as "Bonkers" Gore. "One of the oldest families in England is called Bastard," he wrote. "That must take quite a lot of living down. Moreover, it might easily lead to confusion. 'My mother was a Bastard,' though true, would be not only misleading, but seemingly disrespectful."

Big Time. Among the News's 1,448,345 readers, there are those who still believe that there is no Earl of Arran, citing as evidence the total surrealism of his prose. But he is genuine enough. His titles go back three centuries to 1662. when Charles II conferred a baronetcy on Sir Arthur Gore of County Mayo, an Irish landholder (360,000 acres). Boofy succeeded to the family titles unexpectedly; both his father, who held them, and his elder brother, who would have got them, died in the same year.

Until then, Boofy had done nothing more notable than spend 25 years in the civil service, spending an inherited fortune of -L-60,000. As soon as he was elevated to the House of Lords he began making news. Stirred by the frequency by which he was solicited by streetwalkers on his strolls around London, the Earl conducted a personal investigation, triumphantly produced the statistic that one of every 544 British women was a whore. He fortified himself for a debate on drunken driving by deliberately imbibing too much to test his own reactions, earned himself the unofficial title "The Plastered Peer."

It was an easy step from making news for others to report to making and reporting his own news. Three years ago, a suburban London daily hired Boofy as a columnist. The column caught the alert eye of Editor C. R. Willis of the News. and the Earl moved into the big time.

Dotty Peer. There his success has been nothing short of smashing. It is now the most popular feature in the paper. Mail comes in from all over, some from the streetwalkers who still remember him fondly from his investigational days. Boofy keeps in touch with them all.

"I suppose I personify the dotty English peer," says the Earl of Arran. "A lot of my friends don't like it. They think I've let the side down." But Boofy likes it, and so do his readers, especially when he examines the relationship between hunting and sex among the British upper classes ("Horses lead to divorces") and reconstructs a passionate conversation after a hunt: "Gad, you went well today." "Gad, you're going well now." "Gad. you're a sportsman." "Gad!"

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