Two Bits

The mere thought of a shebeen in Johannesburg’s posh suburb of Saxonwold is likely to have sent a shock wave from Jan Smuts Avenue rippling all the way through to Oxford Road, before the more down-to-earth of the larnies burst into gales of laughter.
A very long time ago I lived a stone’s throw from Saxonwold, in the neighbouring suburb of Killarney. That little enclave is known – or certainly was then – to be the home and fortress of the rich and Jewish, although I was neither.
I was a poor appie reporter but fortunate to have a friend who knew everybody. We landed a rental of the upper storey of a magnificent but run down Parktown mansion called Wynford Eagle, the former home of millionaire Punch Barlow.
The ground floor was occupied by a fiercely grumpy magazine publisher whose grumpiness, I fear, had a direct bearing on us party animals upstairs. Never mind him, our immediate neighbour was . . . Little Brenthurst, the home of Harry and Bridget Oppenheimer! This address, I must tell you, carried enormous caché and impressed the hell out of visiting skirt.
One night, for a lark, we found a hole in the security fence around Little Brenthurst and went a-visiting the Oppenheimers’ gardens. Nearly 45 years ago, security was a different ballgame. There might have been a night watchman or two, but they were easily evaded in that enormous estate. To this day I remember the huge striking two-person sculpture, called ‘Man and Woman’, by South African artist Louis le Sueur, made all the more dramatic in the clear, liquid gold Jo’burg moonlight.
A few years later I happened to be a guest at their house, accompanying firebrand black American politician Andrew Young, who came over to shock the Nats, do his bit for the revolution and enhance his standing at home. On being introduced to Mrs Oppenheimer I couldn’t think of anything to say, and blurted out that I admired the sculptures in her garden.
She arched one eyebrow and asked, in the strangled vowels of the Parktown super-rich, ‘And hee-oww do you know about the sculptures?’ This was long before all secrets were revealed on the Internet, you understand, and probably only a handful of people outside of the family-certainly not a scruff like me – knew about their private works of art.
So I told her, as casually as I could, about hopping the fence and taking a midnight stroll about the place. ‘Nice bit of park you’ve got here, Mrs Oppie’, sort of thing.
The eyebrow did the arching thing again and, fixing me with a cold eye, she said ‘I see,’ turned on her heel and walked away. I wasn’t invited back.
But I digress. Quizzed last week on why the Public Protector’s ‘State of Capture’ report said his cellphone signal had repeatedly placed him within the vicinity of the Gupta’s Saxonwold mansion, Eskom CEO Brian Molefe said he could have been visiting a shebeen a couple of streets away.
The horror! A shebeen in Saxonwold? A gambling den, perhaps, a high-class brothel, quite likely, but a shebeen, never! Maybe Molefe had been intending to make a joke, but pretty soon he realised he’d blundered badly, so burst into tears to cover it up.
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Today we will know whether it is Clinton or Trump. Has there ever been an American election so acrimonious and with two candidates so far apart, politically and temperamentally, and so universally disliked? Any outcome is going to be ‘heads you lose, tails you lose’. While it is pretty clear the media favours Hillary, don’t fall off your chair if Trump scrapes through.
There’s a connection between the US election and my story above. In the Sixties Donald Trump’s father, Fred, bought a mansion a little further along Parktown Ridge. It was called Three Ways and had at one time been owned by Issy Schlesinger, founder of today’s Ster-Kinekor. Anyhow, Fred was a wheeler-dealer who’d made a fortune building houses in New York and maybe he thought there would be easy pickings in Jo’burg. But as it turned out, he got into a couple of very questionable property deals and left the country one step ahead of some angry creditors. You know, if he’d stayed, Donald might have been a South African. Imagine that!
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For the lexophiles:
• Venison for dinner again? Oh deer!
• How does Moses make tea? Hebrews it.
• I changed my iPod’s name to Titanic.
It’s syncing now.