as I drag him straight to the Sofitel Hotel and, for the first time in weeks, slap out my plastic. After our night with the mosquitoes in the shed I need a shower, hard liquor, and soft sheets.
JP, the mad Belgian explorer, is already down at the bar. He has sidled up to some guy who’s got a plane flying upcountry to bring supplies to the logging companies near Ouésso. That’s right in the middle of Pygmy country…
JUNE 1987
Ten years after scraping the streets of Londonas a starving musician, things are looking up.
Hey, Rock Star!” a large voice is booming across the polo field. I look up from my pony inspection to see a pin-striped, extravagantly mustachioed Sikh striding across the grass toward me. “I have a team for you,” he announces. This must be Kuldip “Collin” Singh Dhillon, about whom I have heard jealous rumors. In person, he is the most affably energized person that I’ve met in the polo world: big smile, easy laugh, and a jaunty style. Butter wouldn’t melt in his fangs.
I’VE BEEN HOLED UP on my country estate for several years now. This place seemed like the obligatory destination of my success in music. Apart from basic financial security, this was the best I could come up with as a dream to realize. It contains the recording studio of my dreams and every musical instrument that I ever dreamed of owning. It even has a couple of horses.
I had almost forgotten about horses. At Millfield I learned to
ride the hard way—hours of cantering around a paddock without stirrups. We also played polo. I was never much good at the game, but did seem to have a good seat on a horse. The riding program was so enveloping, with the cantering, tack maintenance, horse maintenance, and mucking out the stables, that riders tended to exist in a world that was removed from the rest of the school. For a while, horses even crowded out my obsession with music.
Music just came into my life and dragged me into its world. Since there was no room in the wretched struggle of my music career for horses, I forgot about them. Years later, when I got the country estate I was excited to rekindle the horse thing. Now there would be no one barking at me, and I would be able to play with my own horses without having to shovel their shit.
The only problem was that after I cantered around my fields a few times and clopped along the country lanes around my village, I pretty quickly ran out of things to do on my horses.
ON AN INVITATION OF an old friend to attend a polo game at the Guards Polo Club in Windsor, I am reminded of the most fun thing of all to do on horses. With the riders uttering strangely familiar cries as the horses gallop past me on the emerald expanse of the Windsor polo ground, the bulb blinks on in my head, and I am striding up to the clubhouse with a whole new hobby hatching.
The first person I see inside is a swooning young woman, who points me to the back office where I must talk to the boss, a Major Ronald Ferguson. This is still in the height of The Police ascendancy, and I’m wearing leather pants and a violent shirt. My hair looks like I’m being electrocuted.
The major is mystified by my presence in his office. “Are you a member of the HPA?” he asks, squinting suspiciously beneath his outthrust eyebrows. “USPA?” he ventures, upon hearing my American accent. As a nonmember of any known polo association, he tells me regretfully that I am an unknown quantity and therefore am presumed to be unsafe on the polo field. The horses are moving fast out there, and there is very real danger if a player is not qualified. Also this, by the way, is an ancient military club; it is the apex of the polo ziggurat, with a membership waiting list of generations.
So with a little research I find the Kirtlington Park Polo Club in Oxfordshire, about forty minutes away from my house. I arrive as quietly as possible, but Rupert, the club manager, erupts with enthusiasm. In a twinkling he has rustled me up a horse and helmet and has thrust me out onto the field for a chukka. Well, it’s like a pillow fight in the harem. At this entry level of play, hardly anyone can hit the ball and some of the players are kind of loose in the saddle. So there is much swinging of mallets and cursing at horses but not much galloping. If the ball goes through the goalmouth, a horse probably kicked it. By some strange miracle, however, all I can think about when it’s over is how to get more of it.
It doesn’t take long to scare up some horses (horse dealing is the second-oldest profession), and soon I’m out there every Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday, with thoughts of nothing else for the remainder of the week. In England, summer afternoons last forever. The late sun catches the greens and golds of the fields in a particular way that lights up the Saxon heart.
Sometimes my teenage son Sven rides out to the games with me, bringing along some of his suave boarding school friends. Sometimes my smaller boys, Patrick, Jordan, and Scott, pile into the car and swarm the horse box while I play. None of the lads seem interested in the horses, but they all love the truck that they travel in. So do I, for that matter; it’s my favorite vehicle. I can load six horses in the back, Margaret Churchill, who runs my horses, and her crew drive up front, and in the middle is my little traveling clubhouse. For a great view of the game I can climb up on the roof with deck chairs. The boys are all over that truck, although they don’t spend much time in the deck chairs watching Daddy’s game.
It’s a faintly familiar alien world. My new polo chums are just like my old schoolmates, but I’ve been around the world ten times and they haven’t. They are like the cast of a Merchant Ivory movie, and I’m from another planet. They are very impressed that I’m a Millfield boy, which surprises me. My old school was no Eton. It was most notable for the raffishness of the parents (King of Thailand, Elizabeth Taylor, various bin Ladens, and other nouveaux riches) but also for its sports programs. In the polo world, Millfield is second in prestige only to Sandhurst. In fact I soon learn that one of the biggest heroes of English polo is none other than my old school buddy Sniffer Kent. At Kirtlington I can dine out on just having met the man.
At first, I assume that among this rural crowd, I’m regarded as just a mysterious American with a clean slate and odd hair. But one day in the clubhouse, someone blurts out, “So what’s it like to be a pop star?” Oh well, they were on to me from day one and were just being polite. Pretty soon the conversation goes back to horses.
These are the first people that I’ve met since high school who aren’t in show business. Even in college I shrank from the light of “straight” society, and I’ve been underground ever since. These country polo folk are kind of insular themselves with their überstraightness, V-neck sweaters, corduroy pants, and Old World charm. Although they are feared and despised by the British middle class, they seem completely harmless to an American like me. The accent gets me every time. They live with frowsy grace in beautiful country estates and are extremely vague about their jobs. If you already own several acres of Twinkishire, it doesn’t take much to throw a couple of horses into one of the fields. If you have grown up in the country with plenty of time for such pursuits, you can make your own polo ponies and be equipped on Sunday afternoon with enough of a string to earn your gin and tonic. These folks are not so much wealthy as leisurely.
Kuldip Singh Dhillon is a contrast to this. There is no subtle mystery about his wherewithal at all. He is that most dreaded creature of all in the country set: the self-made man. He may have started off selling jeans in the market stalls of Manchester, but now he’s an unstoppable force. Somewhere out there in the world he’s a slash-and-burn real estate developer. In polo world he’s just having fun as he chews up the gentle folk. But his personal magnetism is such that they grudgingly enjoy his company. Hard not to.
Also out there on the polo field are the triple-alpha-type big shots. It doesn’t just take money to play polo. If you work for a living, you need to be able to walk out of the office on weekday afternoons for matches around the country. For this you need to own the office. These are the guys who show up on the field in Ferraris with hot second wives and slick livery. They are used to winning and love the idea of polo, but most are learning to ride as they try to master the game.