High life

Gstaad A couple of columns ago I wrote about an incident that took place at the Eagle Club here in Gstaad. I indicated that if cowardice prevailed, I would go into detail (and I’ve had two weeks to think about those details). Well, cowardice did prevail, but although the Eagle has not lived up to the requirements of a club, what happens in a club stays in a club. I need to live up to the standards of someone who joined 60 years ago and generously contributed to it financially when it was floundering and about to go under. As I wrote a fortnight ago, the mix of gentlemen and low lifes is a toxic one. The latter are bound to step out of line and revert to type. Like throwing a punch from behind having misinterpreted a joke, or lying about what had taken place beforehand.

Gstaad I never made it to Zurich but met up with Steve Bannon through the miracle of technology, thanks to my hosts at the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche, who gave him my telephone number. He rang at a civilised time and we had a very cosy chat for an hour or so. I don’t know how it was done, and don’t ask me for details, but I could see him and apparently he could see me too. The first things I said were that I was 100 per cent heterosexual and what a pity it was that I had to be initiated into this technology while talking to a man — a man I much admire but a man none the less. ‘That makes two of us,’ answered the great one, ‘and we used to go out with the same girl....’ Like a gent, he never mentioned her name, and I didn’t ask.

Gstaad The muffled sound of falling snow is ever-present. It makes the dreary beautiful and turns the bleak into magic. Happiness is waking up to a winter wonderland. From where I am, I can’t hear the shrieks of children sledding nearby but I can see the odd off-piste skier and the traces they leave. I can no longer handle deep snow, just powder. But I can still shoot down any piste once I’ve had a drink or two. For amusement I listen to the news: flights grounded, trains cancelled, cars backed up on motorways, people stocking up on food and drink as if an atom bomb had been detonated over the Midlands. In Norway it snows every day of the winter and half of the days of autumn and spring. The last time a train was cancelled there was during the German invasion in 1940.

Gstaad They have busy eyes and the set of their mouths is that of a hungry carnivore. Their hands are always working, stroking, exaggerating. They’re salesmen to the rich and famous and flog them trinkets, pictures and dresses — and at times even people. They gush like no Hollywood agent ever did, and once upon a time I used to feel very sorry for them. That was in the days when they tried to sell antiques to the Saudis, who called the priceless classic stuff second-hand furniture, early Eisenhower Hilton Hotel-style being the gold standard for camel drivers back then. It still is. Yep, this alpine village gets them all — salespeople that is, and at times I still pity them. A Christie’s man brought a Chinese individual up to the club.

Gstaad It was nostalgia time at Prince Victor Emmanuel’s birthday party here, with many old friends reminiscing about our youthful shenanigans in times gone by. Victor, the pretender to the Italian throne, and I go back a long way — more than 60 years. In a very roundabout manner, so do our families. His namesake and grandfather King Victor Emmanuel III facilitated Benito Mussolini’s rise to power, although he was the one who dismissed him in July 1943 and declared Italy no longer a combatant. My mother’s youngest brother wrote a fan letter to Il Duce, aged 12. Benito invited the boy to visit Italy as his guest, and sure enough my uncle went and stayed with him in Villa Torlonia for a fortnight.

#MeToo! It happened right here, in Gstaad, last week. A man in his mid-fifties, about six foot tall and 165lb, grabbed me forcibly by the neck, pushed my head down, and then slid his hand between my legs. He continued to do so in a very dominating and aggressive way — he could have passed for Kevin Spacey, but with his own hair — pulling at my thighs, clawing at my chest, always drawing me closer and closer while breathing heavily on my neck. I couldn’t move my head, so I finally succumbed and lay back. He then stretched himself on top of me and held me tight. I had to give in. Yes, dear reader, however horrible it might sound to you — after all, I’m 81 — at times a boy has to surrender to superior force.

Gstaad For some strange reason there have been no #MeToo complaints around these parts. Some locals have grumbled about yours truly, and an interview I gave about this village to a Swiss daily, but although Harvey used to hang out here during Christmases past, no one’s come forward to claim rape. Is there something wrong with our womenfolk? No, most of them are semi-ladies who have made it big and landed some pretty big fish, so no use of crying wolf, sorry, rape. Even the mother of my children has expressed surprise. ‘I was pretty once, and men liked me, yet no one has ever jumped on me, except some silly Englishman with terrible breath who tried to kiss me while you were out on the dance floor.’ Well, all I can say is when in trouble, look for the money.

Gstaad I caught a whiff of it as it rolled in from the east, the smell of hypocrisy being different from others that penetrate our olfactory nerves in everyday life. It was coming from Davos and it had a Graeco-Roman flavour to it. The prime ministers of those once upon a time great countries, Greece and Italy, asked for a Marshall Plan for Africa to solve the root cause of the migrant crisis that threatens the old continent’s existence. Just think of it, dear readers. Tsipras and Gentiloni, the former a liar, the latter unelected, both leading two basket-case countries, asking for a vast programme of wealth transfer so that Europe and the rest of the world can enjoy visits by African oligarchs, colonels, generals and their whores enjoying their new-found wealth.

Before his untimely death last year, David Tang had attended a Pug’s club luncheon with the proviso that no one ask him how he felt. So all 20 of us asked him in unison, ‘How do you feel?’ He burst out laughing. Sir David — he threw a riotous party at the Dorchester to celebrate his knighthood at which I got a bit tipsy and asked a good friend of his the reason for the honour. ‘For inserting his face the deepest in Prince Charles’s bottom’ was the rude answer — was a storyteller nonpareil. It was he who first told me about Fan Bingbing. Fan Bingbing is a Chinese actress and apparently very beautiful. When I asked David if he had Fan Bingbinged her, he feigned anger and told me to have more respect for a great Chinese thespian.

I spent the better part of two sunny days indoors writing about authenticity for a Greek magazine, a strange subject in view of how inauthentic politics are in that Brussels-run south-eastern outpost dotted with islands. Mind you, what is taking place in the West makes Greek politics seem ideal by comparison. The witch hunt is on and it’s as phoney as the one that burnt those poor women in Salem long ago. Thank God for the French actress who injected some badly needed truths into Hollywood’s bullshit. Catherine Deneuve signed an open letter published in Le Monde attacking the wave of ‘puritanism’ sparked by the allegations against Harvey and co.

Gstaad  What I miss most up here in the Alps are the literary lunches conducted on the fly with writers like Bill Buckley, Alistair Horne, Natacha Stewart, occasionally Dmitri Nabokov and, yes, movie star and memoirist par excellence David Niven. This was back in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, during the winter months and in between ski runs. Bill would ring early in the morning and suggest a run somewhere, then he’d pick an inn in the vicinity where we’d meet David and Natacha, two non-skiers, and that was that. Buckley always referred to me as Führer — once on the slopes, of course — as I would go down first, followed by him and Alistair Horne, the two not always steady on their skis, and at times more out of than in control.

Gstaad When the snow finally stopped, the sublime, silent stars above made for dramatic viewing. Against silhouetted Alpine peaks, starry nights, untainted by light pollution, seem made in Hollywood. I arrived here one week before Christmas determined to get in shape following the debauch of New York. The snow was coming down, the town was empty, the slopes were perfect and both my children were with us. Then disaster: Wafic and Rosemary Saïd’s Christmas present arrived, and my thoughts went out to Bruce Anderson. The present was a super, super-duper magnum of Haut-Brion 1996, which I refused to share with guests and downed only with the family. Actually, I did share it with some very close buddies, who now ring me regularly asking for an introduction to Rosemary and Wafic.

It’s that time of year again. Yippee! And get your wallets out. Scrooges are no longer tolerated at Christmas, although once upon a time people were so fed up with the annual Christmas shakedown that in 1419 London biggies ruled that Christmas solicitations were banned. Servants, apprentices, tradesmen and churchmen had all become professional supplicants, and were not best pleased by the ukase. But as someone once said, it is better to give than to receive, so there. We now give to doormen, barbers, hairdressers, garage attendants, lift operators, building supers, postmen and rich tiny children with hands outstretched. You name it, they expect it. And let us not forget professional beggars outside expensive stores. One of them once threw the dollar I had given him back in my face.

As the song almost says, what a difference a year makes: 2017 is not over yet, but it’s been a lousy one so far. Losing two very close friends was a real bummer, for starters. Then the Brexit negotiations and the Trump presidency revealed that I had declared victory too soon. This time last year I was singing about what a great year it had been, what a great mood I was in, and so on. The British people had decided that they no longer wished to be led by and take orders from a peanut vendor from Luxembourg called Jean-Claude Asshole. Yippee! One year on, the asshole, in cahoots with British left-wing rabble, seems to have confused the issue enough that the hapless Theresa is upping the ante for Britain to become independent again. Not so yippee!

There’s fear and loathing in this town and in El Lay it’s even worse. Torquemada and Savonarola are in charge, and if this is not a new version of the Spanish inquisition I don’t know what is. The enemy is ‘toxic masculinity’, as exhibited by the latest to lose his job for ever, Charlie Rose. He’s not a bad guy but a bleeding-heart liberal who acted like Benito in front of fair maidens. Or so they claim. In the meantime, he’s toast. I have only one question: what ever happened to due process? What also bothers me is that the latest purge is the only subject of conversation nowadays.

The faux Leonardo that sold for 400 million greenbacks — plus a 50 million fee for Christie’s — was a subject dissected again and again by the glitterati at two rather splendid dinners given in the Bagel by George Livanos and Mick Flick. My fellow guests were not the types to be outraged or shocked at the obscenity of the amount of moolah involved, but it beat talking about the weather or why the media hate Trump as much as they do. For any of you who might have missed it, the Leonardo — originally thought to have been painted by Leo’s pupil Giovanni Boltraffio — was partly painted over, then scrubbed. It is now thought to have been by the master, after all. But not everyone (me, for one) is convinced.

What is left to say after the church shooting in the Home of the Depraved? Those killed in Texas included a toddler, several children and eight members of one family at prayer. It is almost too hard to fathom. I’ve been here for six weeks and three mass-murder sprees have taken place, two perpetrated by deranged male shooters, the other by a disciple of Allah from Uzbekistan, who unfortunately survived a cop’s bullet and demanded an Isis flag be raised in his hospital room. Nice. At least that ghastly man Jann Wenner has not plastered the Uzbek scumbag on the cover of Rolling Stone. After the Boston marathon massacre, he put the murderer, a Kyrgyzstani-American of Chechen descent, on the cover and carried a story that presented him as a typical American teenager.

A dinner in honour of Arki Busson hosted by Michael Mailer in his brilliant Brooklyn flat on the banks of the East River and overlooking the Statue of Liberty a quarter of a mile away. His father, Norman, had some pretty brainy people living it up in these premises, and Michael has continued the custom of feeding pretty women, bitchy columnists, talented cinematographers and brainy tycoons like Arki, who is one of the few I know who combine looks and the ability to seduce beautiful women with making lotsa moolah for clients. Needless to say, everyone got very drunk — three beautiful ladies and five horny men, including the actor Griffin Dunne, who is not only talented but also a born gentleman.(His documentary on his aunt Joan Didion is extraordinary.

I have a message for the London mayor, Sadiq Khan: you and your policies stink! While the fuzz are busy scanning the internet for racist or sexist material, crime in the capital is up by six per cent over the past 12 months and the police — handicapped by PC orders from above — have made 20 per cent fewer arrests. Statistics show youth violence and murder soaring in London, with the latter up by 84 per cent on last year. But here’s a story that’s not a statistic. Last week, my little girl Lolly was viciously attacked and robbed near the World’s End pub on the King’s Road after going to dinner with her cousin. She had spotted a hoodie (does Cameron still wish us to hug them?) on her way to dinner, a man of North African or Middle Eastern appearance.

I hate to say this, but the quality of life in the Bagel has crashed in a Harvey Weinstein-like way. The city has always had a sort of rollercoaster feel, its ups and downs driven by Wall Street and budget cuts, but its present state is the worst I’ve experienced by far. When I first came to New York, it was the true centre of the world. It was after the war and Europe was in ruins. What glamour there was in the world resided in the city. People dressed to the nines, women wore hats and gloves, and manners were far more important than money.