High life

There are Dames and there are dames. Dame Vivien, an old friend, became one for her philanthropy. Dame Edna, the creation of yet another friend, was given a damehood for her middle-class morality and upper-class pretensions. And now we have Dame Anna of Vogue, honoured for affecting a faux-aristocratic grandeur to the peasants of the fashion world. There is only one thing to say, and that’s ‘Gimme a break.’ The last of the Dambusters crew members is refused a knighthood, Nigel Farage ditto, yet a flatulent embarrassment like Victoria Beckham is rewarded for preening and sneering. As the mayor of Hiroshima was said to have asked on that awful August day in 1945, ‘What the fuck was that?

Gstaad  New Year’s Eve was a Rhapsody in Blue, with a clarinet glissando that promised joys to come, and the Gershwin downbeat not registering until 6 a.m. The hangover was, of course, Karamazovian, but who the hell cares. I am finally solid again, and even the flu I caught on the trip over is on its last legs, lingering and as annoying as EU regulations, but no longer to be taken seriously. I had lots of close friends for dinner, but the new chalet was packed by the time I began slurring. Mind you, it’s during dreamlike moments such as those between midnight and dawn that wisdom strikes: there is something very wrong with people’s values around these parts.

What a great year this has been, what a good mood I’m in, why, it’s almost like being in love. The year 2016 will be seen as the worst ever by many patients of Dr Klinghoffer, the famous German psychiatrist who treats those suffering from the extreme distress of post-electoral disappointment syndrome, and a man about to make a fortune treating the poor dears. There are many Brits under the Herr Doktor’s care, and his clinic, situated near Ossining, New York, resembled a British retreat for broken-down thespians following 23 June of this annus mirabilis. Now more American voices have been added, and when I last spoke to Dr Klinghoffer his heavy German accent sounded almost Hollywoodian: ‘Zese people are worse than ze English, zey cry at ze sight of an appleshdrudel.

Here we go again, my 40th Christmas column in a row, and it seems only two weeks ago that I filed the last one. This is a very happy time of year — parties galore, lots of love for our fellow man and happiness all around. Mind you, there is an old calypso that says: ‘If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, never make a pretty woman your wife...’. I’m not so sure about that; in my book, the prettier the woman the happier it makes me, but I could be wrong. My instinct tells me that a pretty woman keeps a man on his toes. No beautiful woman will stay with a man who doesn’t deserve her — not in the long run, anyway. But I’ve also noticed that many — though not all — very beautiful women are not very happy. Why is that?

Richard Spencer made the front page of the New York Times two days in a row last week, and earned a half-page report on the third day. For any of you who have never heard of him — and very few have — he is described by the mendacious Times as the leader of the ‘white nationalist movement’, a movement not too many of us who believe in the white race are aware of. Let’s start at the beginning. After I ‘sold’ the American Conservative magazine to a man called Uns for one dollar — I have kept the cheque and will cash it only if in terrible need — I invited Richard Spencer to visit me in my New York house where I offered him the job of running my website, Takimag. (He had worked at the magazine but been laid off.

 New York   If only my wordsmith friend Jeremy Clarke had been with me. What fun he’d have had with the ungallant thing I did last week. Jeremy’s writing thrives on such occasions, but alas he’s in the land of cheese and impressionism. I had just finished lunch with my friend Alex Sepkus, a designer of unique jewellery, and a Catholic priest whose name I will not reveal in view of what followed. After all, the Catholic Church loves sinners, but hooliganism is discouraged. I was walking up Fifth Avenue, which was packed to the gills with shoppers, hawkers and tourists. When I got to 56th Street, it was blocked off by armed police and steel barriers.

New York   The only thing worse than a sore loser, I suppose, is a sore winner, but thank God we don’t run into too many of those. Thirty years ago, The Spectator and I lost a libel case that cost the then proprietor and yours truly a small fortune. As it turned out, after the plaintiff had gone to that sauna-like place below, everything that I had written was the truth and nothing but. (The hubby of the woman who sued me came clean after her death, but a lot of good that did the Speccie and me.) The sainted editor at the time was Charles Moore, and in view of Justice Otton having taken a great dislike to yours truly, he ordered me to remain at home when the decision was about to be pronounced.

 New York Americans have been to the polls. Everything is over but the shouting — by the loser, that is: honest Hil. I predicted that the best Trump could have hoped for was winning the popular vote but losing the Electoral College but I got it wrong: the Donald has triumphed. An underfunded campaign — he spent barely half of what she did — with a skeletal crew and without the party’s full backing won out because not all of America agrees with the values of Jay Z, Beyoncé, Springsteen, Hollywood in general and gay marriage in particular. Trump appealed to those who have been snubbed, the great ignored.

Sixty years ago this week all hell broke loose: Soviet tanks rumbled into Budapest and put down a nationalist uprising in a very bloody manner. Down south Anglo-French paratroopers jumped into the Sinai and, in cahoots with the Israelis, took over the Suez Canal in a last gasp of colonialism by the Europeans. And in Washington DC a very peed-off President Eisenhower ordered the Anglo-French to go home or else. They went home and only the Israelis howled that Ike was an anti-Semite and many other things. And where was your intrepid foreign (future High life) correspondent while all this was going on? On an aeroplane flying from New York to Bermuda for a tennis tournament.

I was not on the winning side of the debate, despite giving it the old college try. Thank god for my South African friend Simon Reader, who coached me just before I went on. Mind you, my side felt a bit like Maxime Weygand, the French general who, in June 1940, was happily smoking his pipe back in Syria when he got the call to take over the French army. The Germans had already taken Holland and Belgium and had breached la Ligne Maginot, Gamelin had thrown in the towel, and Paul Reynaud had called for a fresh face to stop the mighty Wehrmacht. ‘Gee, thanks a bunch,’ said Weygand, but took it like a real Frenchman and surrendered to the German army a couple of weeks later.

New York  Antonio Cromartie is one of the numerous professional and amateur athletes in America who now refuse to stand during the playing of the national anthem. Cromartie plays for the Indianapolis Colts and makes over three million greenbacks per annum. He refuses to stand as a protest at white America’s oppression of black America. (The refusal to stand was started by another black football player, who makes even more money and who was adopted and lovingly brought up by a white couple.) Cromartie, you see, is the father of 12 children by eight women. He has been chased around by various agencies because he has not been rigorous in paying for his brood. In fact, he’s been avoiding bailiffs in the style of professional footballers avoiding tacklers.

New York   This is a good time to be in Manhattan, the weather’s perfect, the park and foliage still green, and daylight savings time keeps the days long. New York used to be able to build these beautiful cities within a city, like the Rockefeller Center, but that’s all in the past. The developers have got to the politicians and now have free rein. The city had an opportunity after 9/11 to make a 21st century Rockefeller Center downtown, but a shark by the name of Silverstein preferred profit to architectural achievement, as did another horror, Aby Rosen, who is busy turning uptown ugly.

New York Back in the Big Bagel once again preparing for the greatest debate ever, one that will decide the fate of the western world once and for all. In the meantime, the mother of my children is doing all the heavy lifting back in Gstaad, moving to my last address ever, that of my new farm, La Renarde. One of those American feminists remonstrated with me not long ago for making some chauvinist remark — on purpose, I might add —just to get her goat. My, my, how easy it has become to get that goat. In a 1939 film, Dodge City, Errol Flynn plays a Kansas marshal circa 1872 who visits a local newspaper and sees the virginal and sweet Olivia de Havilland writing away at her desk.

Although my birthday was in August, I chose the rather melancholy autumnal moment of September to celebrate it — mourn it, rather. There are no ifs or buts about it, turning 80 is like that final beautiful gleam of light just before you lose consciousness during a boxing bout. The beauty of adolescence is that one doesn’t know why one’s angry or unhappy. The tragedy of old age is that one does. I was a lucky young man. I was often angry but hardly ever unhappy. That is why The Catcher in the Rye was my favourite book, Tender Is the Night and The Sun Also Rises included. Holden saw through human beings — hardly an adolescent trait — and he was unforgiving about phonies.

Sicily   Under the watchful eye of Mount Etna the storied past of the island lies parched and yellowish, but as one gets nearer to the fiery growling giant the air turns cool, the sun glistening against black volcanic rock. Sicily is of two minds. Orange groves and beaches galore, then dank forests and the possibility of lava flows. Sicily’s history resembles its landscape: peaceful and religious; violent and vengeful. I first sailed to Taormina back in the Sixties, visited the ancient Greek amphitheatre and listened to Dvorak’s New World Symphony while breathing in the smells of history.

I’m jittery and fragile but free of plaster and in the dojo, slowly turning lean and muscular. Never listen to your doctor is my message. Instead of two months in a cast I spent only five weeks, and I’ve just finished a brutal three-day course of karate with both the leg and elbow still intact. Yippee! The message was loud and clear. If you’re drinking vodka at 4.30 a.m., don’t lean backwards while sitting on a ledge. When the doctors sew you up and place you in a cast, don’t listen to them; take it off early. You have nothing to lose but the plaster. And the moment you’re free, get back into the dojo. It was back in 1964, when I was still on the tennis circuit, that I saw something strange advertised outside an auditorium in Cannes.

I have a question for you, dear readers: is it me, or is there no newspaper or network in America that tells it like it is any more? Take, for example, the Anthony Weiner case. He is the pervert who keeps sending pictures of his penis to women over the internet, more often than not while in the company of his four-year-old son. If a man like that were married to Donald Trump’s closest assistant, The Donald would have been forced out of the race by now — no ifs or buts about it. But over on the other side, Hillary confirmed her trust in Huma Abedin, a Saudi-raised Muslim and her closest adviser, who finally separated from the pervert and asked for her privacy to be respected. The compliant, ass-licking media followed orders. Hillary’s polls remained the same.

Just about this time of year, 42 years ago, Dunhill’s of London, the famed tobacconist, had a bold idea. Its president, Richard Dunhill, flew 32 backgammon players to New York and had them board the QEII for the return trip to Southampton. The backgammon players were a varied group. As with cricket of old, there were gentlemen and there were players. For players read hustlers and small-time con men. Among the gents were players such as Michael Pearson, now Lord Cowdray, some very nice Americans, like Porter Ijams, whose aunt was canonised, and yours truly. The hustlers were a more amusing bunch.

OK sports fans, the Games are over, Uncle Sam and Britain hit pay dirt, and the prettiest girl of the Olympics was Morgan Lake, a black Brit high jumper who wins the High life gold medal for looks and proper demeanour. Here’s a tip for ambitious mothers: take a lesson from Morgan Lake — the name is perfect, no agent could have made it up — and instead of sending your daughters to Hollywood, where they’re more likely to end up as high-class hookers, you should guide them towards athletics and the high jump. Morgan Lake is café au lait, has a perfect body, and a very sweet innocent face. She didn’t place but was in the finals, having jumped over one meter ninety-four.

An item in an American newspaper had me thinking of my father all last week. Old dad died 27 years ago, which means I have outlived him in age, the only thing I have ever outdone him in. His achievements were too many to list here, and everything I have I owe to him. Compared to his accomplishments, mine has been the underperformance of the century, not that he ever made it obvious. To the contrary, all he did was praise me. He was extremely generous to everyone, especially his employees, took care of those who couldn’t care for themselves, was a decorated hero during the occupation, and I’m proud to have inherited his sense of humour and his womanising. He’s never far from my mind, so I didn’t need the item in the newspaper to remind me of him.