The Ideal Man by Joshua Kurlantzick

Author:Joshua Kurlantzick
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781118098110
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Published: 2011-09-25T20:00:00+00:00

11

Perched at the top of the stairs to his house, smoking a long cigarette, Jim Thompson waved down to the crowd of guests who’d arrived at his home on Soi Kasem San for dinner. Usually that meant six or eight invited guests, enough to fit around the antique gaming tables he used to eat off of in his dining room, with many of the invitees clutching letters of introduction to Jim Thompson like they were priceless documents.

Frequent visitors to the house recognized the usual mix of people at dinner: local friends, shoppers from his store, and, of course, many of the world’s most glamorous, rich, or powerful people. Kennedys, Eisenhowers, Barbara Hutton, Truman Capote, Somerset Maugham, Benny Goodman, nearly every prominent royal or heiress in Europe—they all just had to eat at Jim Thompson’s house when they came through Bangkok, since you couldn’t come to Thailand without sitting at the table of this most famous man.

Thompson would escort his dinner guests up around his balcony, past a stone figure of the god Vishnu, and then out to the veranda overlooking the murky Klong Saen Saep, where canal boat conductors blew their whistles and riders hopped off the still-moving boats onto rickety docks. Underneath their feet, the guests could see the antique teak planks of Thompson’s floor, polished to a high sheen by the frequent movement of stockinged feet. From a side door, the houseboy Yee would emerge, bearing tumblers of imported scotch and cubes of ice. Thompson would lead a short tour, taking several guests through the front hall, into the dining room, downstairs into the garden of frangipani and palms and jasmine plants, and then under the house, built on stilts in the old-fashioned Thai way, though most Thais in Bangkok now preferred Western-style homes.

Thompson’s home actually was a collection of traditional teakwood Thai houses, joined together and painted a soft red, with some of the original dwellings dating to the early nineteenth century. To get the houses to Bangkok from rural Thailand, Thompson had floated them down to the capital on a massive barge.1 At a time when most wealthy Thais were abandoning traditional dwellings, Thompson’s decision to preserve—and live in—traditional homes shocked some of his friends, but soon living in older teakwood homes became the rage of Bangkok. Other rich men and women competed to build their own Thompson-style traditional palaces.

Unused to the enervating Bangkok heat, and dressed in suits and long gowns, some of the visitors would slip into Thompson’s study, where a weathered sixth-century Buddha image overlooked the only air conditioner in the home.2 The rest of the crowd would follow through hallways where stone Buddha images sat in niches carved into the walls like impassive sentries, and descend the stairs under the house, where Thompson had amassed perhaps the finest private collection of Southeast Asian art in the world. Few other collectors seemed interested at the time, but his art would spark a revival of demand for Southeast Asian painting and sculpture. At markets,

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