High life

The last week in Gotham was exceptional fun. I saw a Broadway play, Finding Neverland, compliments of the producer, my NBF Harvey Weinstein.It had me clapping with one hand due to the operation, and standing with the packed theatre for the ovation. Shows how much the critics who panned it know. The audience loved it, as did I. It’s an uplifting, wonderful play about J.M. Barrie and the children. Then there was the blind black guy in Brooklyn who told me, ‘You’re too pale for this neighbourhood.’ Go figure, as they say in that part of town. I’m always sad to leave the city, especially with the end of spring. I miss its mixture of glitz and grit, of races and colours, of violence and pleasures, of misfits and millionaires.

An operation on my hand after a karate injury has had me reading more than usual. I even attempted Don DeLillo’s Underworld, but soon gave up. Truman Capote famously said that On the Road was typing, not writing, but old Jack Kerouac was Jane Austen compared with some contemporary novelists. Making it sound easy is the hardest thing in writing, and today’s modernists sure make it look easier than easy. But they’re also sloppy, self-indulgent and at times incomprehensible. What I don’t get is how one can enjoy a novel when the plot is not clear. When the reader doesn’t know what’s real and what’s imagined, it’s time to regress and look up Papa and Scott and Graham and Jane.

This is as good as it gets. A light rain is falling on a soft May evening and I’m walking north on a silent Park Avenue hoping to get into trouble. Fourteen thousand yellow taxis have turned Manhattan into a Bengali hellhole, blasting their horns non-stop, picking up or disgorging passengers in the middle of traffic-clogged streets, speeding and failing to yield to pedestrians as Big Bagel law requires. But on the Upper East Side, on a balmy evening, the yellow devils are causing havoc downtown, so I almost find myself singing in the rain as I head north far from the madding crowd.(Puns unintended.) Nicola’s is an Italian restaurant that used to be very much in fashion back in the Seventies and Eighties.

OK. Magnanimity in victory is a sine qua non among civilised men and women, so let me not be the first to rub it in. Last week I wrote that I feared the worst and felt sorry for Britain. I was convinced throughout the campaign that a certain testicular fortitude was missing on the part of the voters, and that David Cameron would be vacating No. 10. But, not for the first time, I was proved wrong. The only testicular fortitude missing was when Ed Balls lost his seat. So now we’ll have five more years of furious lefty hacks passing more wind than usual. There is nothing that angers Guardianistas more than when good, hard-working people vote with their brains.

If any of you sees Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, walking around with a begging bowl in his hand, it’s because he took me to dinner recently. I sort of went a bit nuts with the wine and the VF chief ended up with the bill. We went to a new Bagel restaurant, Chevalier, a futuristic marvel with great food and wine and even grander prices. New York is no longer elegant, and there are no longer society types dressed to the nines sitting on the banquettes and downing Manhattans. The Jewish ascendancy that downed the Wasps was as elegant as the one it replaced. William Paley, John Loeb and others like them dressed at Anderson & Sheppard, were shod by John Lobb, and had their shirts made by Sulka. They had exquisite manners and aped their predecessors.

Talk about how the mighty have fallen. Time magazine was for the better part of the 20th century the model for American newsweeklies. Its style of epigrammatic terseness and punchy prose became known as ‘Timespeak’, the compact format an invention of its founder, Henry Luce. Luce (‘Harry’ to friends and family) was the son of a missionary and was born in China. He was devout, brainy, single-minded and convinced that America was a miracle conceived by the Almighty. In a British boarding school in Shandong, Harry was mercilessly flogged for his insistence, at times, on speaking to God directly, but he also became proficient in French, Latin, Greek, history and maths. He then went to Hotchkiss and Yale. He was voted the most brilliant member of the class of 1920.

A recent column in the FT made me mad as hell. The writer, Simon Kuper, calls Vienna a backwater, which is a bit like calling the Queen a busted flush because of her age. Sure, he writes how great Vienna was back when the Habsburgs ruled the roost, attracting people from all over, ‘some of them nuts’. He includes Freud, Hitler, Stalin and Trotsky. Not the nicest bunch I can think of, but then the paper is a pink one. He fears London might go the way of Vienna, and price itself out of the reach of everyone but a few Chinese, Russian and Indian billionaires. He’s right about London but dead wrong where Vienna is concerned. (Vienna, incidentally, is dirt cheap.

New York ‘Gimme a BLT on rye and hold da mayo’ is a great Noo Yawk sound. So is boid for bird, and toerty-toird for 33rd Street. True working-class accents no longer exist in the Bagel, and one is far more likely to hear ‘Deme un BLT y guarde la mayo’ from our Dominican or Puerto Rican cousins. The fire escape is also going fast, and as some wit pointed out, the next time Tony woos Maria in West Side Story he’ll have to text. The outdoor fire escape is a classic piece of Noo Yawk architecture, especially in the tenements of old in the Lower East Side, now the playground of billionaires of the Arab, Chinese and Indian persuasion. Those tenements were dark red brick and served as background to some of Edward Hopper’s paintings.

Ah, spring! The spring of our frostbitten age. At the Polish Club in London, a wonderful place studded with portraits of Polish patriots who have fought and sacrificed for the West’s freedom. In this beautiful and heroic setting, your High life correspondent gave a speech about what it’s like writing for The Spectator, with some odds and ends about my life in general of 50 years ago. The big surprise turned out to be the turnout. It was packed to the rafters, with 50 or so turned away at the door. This was the work of Lady Belhaven and Stenton, and Basia Hamilton, both Poles, the former’s family massacred by Ukrainians, those nice butchers the EU threatens to go to war with Russia for. (Some threat, some army.) The sweetness of the past has both a poignancy and a pang.

End of season is always bittersweet, the melting snows a bit like autumn leaves. But the days are longer and soon spring will chase away any remaining winter blues. The Eagle Club’s closing is a perennial festive day, with speeches by our president Urs Hodler, an almost teary goodbye to our very own Pino — who has seated and fed us for 44 years — and the Taki Cup awards, won the past two years by my son J.T. in record time: 34 minutes to conquer the highest mountain in Gstaad. (Charlotte Cotton was only five minutes slower, an amazing feat for a young woman.) It was a hell of a good season — plenty of snow, some fun parties and my forthcoming move to the top of a mountain and away from the madding crowd.

It’s a famous quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald, one that Elton John should ponder (when he’s not out shopping, that is): ‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.’ Mind you, Elton John is a hysterical, spoilt, ugly fat man who thinks his opinions count. (Perhaps they do with non-talents such as Liz Hurley and Victoria Beckham.) I now know who Dolce & Gabbana are because of the row over children conceived by IVF and surrogacy, and they seem like nice billionaires, except they threw in the towel right away and apologised.

 Athens I am walking on a wide pedestrian road beneath the Acropolis within 200 meters of the remaining Themistoclean wall and the ancient cemetery to eminent Athenians. One side is lined with splendid neoclassical houses, none of them abandoned but most of them shuttered and locked up. This is the area where once upon a time Pericles, Themistocles and Alcibiades — to name three — trod, orated and debated non-stop. Back in those good old days we Athenians ruled supreme. Reason, logic and restraint placed us at the head of the queue, and genius also helped. I am climbing to the Pnyx, where Themistocles rallied his fellow citizens to defy the Persian juggernaut, and, except for a couple of stray dogs, I am alone with my hangover.

The secret of eternal youth, according to Alice Roosevelt Longworth, is arrested development, and the penny dropped last week. The mountains were misty, snow was falling and I went to the dojo for some karate training. I was sparring with a tough, fifth-degree black-belt instructor, Roland, and kept nailing him, something I hadn’t been able to do previously. That’s when it dawned on me. Respecting my advanced age, he was taking a dive. ‘If you don’t stop this crap, I’ll beat the crap out of you,’ I threatened. He didn’t — and nor did I. We ended up laughing and doing kata instead. I felt great after 45 minutes of punching and kicking, but what a bore old age is.

Gstaad A naked, very good-looking young man skied down the mountain evoking shrieks of laughter and admiration from the hundred or so skiers lining the slopes. He turned out to be J.T., my son, and it was an act of protest against the mind-numbing conversation about titles among some at the Eagle club. A friend had skied ahead and was waiting for him at the bottom with a blanket. Needless to say, it became the subject du jour, and someone even filmed young women cheering the streaking skier as he shussed his way down at record speed. His naked run to glory succeeded in getting the subject changed up at the club. Talk about titles is a no-no, and should be left to NOCDs (not our class, dear). J.T.

I hate to start with a cliché, but Count Arnaud de Borchgrave d’Altena, who died in Washington DC last week, aged 88, was the last of the great foreign correspondents — trench coat, suntan, title and 17 wars under his belt included. One accomplishment none of his obituaries mentioned (perfectly understandably, mind you) was his role in introducing to journalism, and subsequently mentoring, the greatest Greek writer since Homer, yours truly — something Arnaud kept quiet about throughout our close 48-year friendship. Here’s how it began: it was May 1967, the Greek junta had taken over the government the previous April, and Arnaud had flown in to interview the Greek strongman Colonel George Papadopoulos.

Gstaad Once upon a time clergymen saw mountain peaks as natural steeples leading them ever closer to God. Doctors considered mountains the best medicine for tuberculosis, while explorers saw them as rocks never before touched by humans. I thought of those good people while T-barring up the Eggli in way below freezing conditions but in bright sunshine. For some strange reason, whenever I’m really cold I try to think of the German 6th Army trapped in Stalingrad, numbed in body and mind by the cold, while Hitler sat toasty warm back home and ordered them to fight to the death. After that, skiing in subzero weather is easy. Nowadays most skiers wear helmets and ski masks, but at 78 years of age I refuse to look ridiculously like a boy racer — and to hell with safety.

The good news is that a Greek suppository is about to relieve the EU’s economic constipation. The bad is that there’s a Castro in our midst posing — just as Fidel did 56 years ago — as a democratically elected populist. Back then it was Uncle Sam who was the bogyman. Now it’s the EU. Back then the Soviet Bear came to Fidel’s rescue. Now it’s Putin. Personally, I’d take Vlad over the faceless unelected Brussels gang anytime. The problem is Tsipras, a vulgar-sounding name if ever there was one. Add to it the fact that he has two sons, one named after Che Guevara, the other after Carlos, the murdering Venezuelan terrorist at present languishing in a French jail.

Thick snow is falling hard and heavy, muffling sounds and turning the picturesque village postcard beautiful. I am lying in bed listening to a Mozart version of ‘Ave Maria’, a heavenly soprano almost bringing tears to my eyes with the loveliness of it. This is the civilisation of our ancestors — one that gave us Mozart, Schubert and Beethoven and built cathedrals all over the most wondrous continent in the world. It is now being replaced by a higher one in which distinctions of ethnicity and religion will no longer be tolerated. The human race has a limitless capacity for self-improvement, and it shows where architecture, the arts and music are concerned, not to mention literature.

I had a short chat with BBC radio concerning the actor Jack Nicholson, whom I knew slightly during the Seventies and Eighties. Alas, it had to do with age, his and mine, 77 and 78 respectively. No, the man on the other end of the telephone did not ask me anything embarrassing. All he wanted to know was if women still come on to an oldie, or are they, as Jack Nicholson claims, a thing of the past. Well, for starters I do not believe that Nicholson is telling the truth, that he’s now alone and fears he will die alone because women have abandoned a sinking ship. He has a sense of decorum and knows how ridiculous a man our age sounds when talking about women, especially younger women, something Jack and Taki have in common.