High life

On 1 July 1961, a beautiful 17-year-old girl appeared on the cover of Paris Match, then in its heyday: ‘C’est une deb,’  announced the cover, the once upon a time annual British ritual having crossed the Channel to the land of cheese. Her name was Cristina de Caraman, daughter of the Duke de Caraman, and she was so pretty and angelic-looking that even my mother, who was always after me to marry a Greek, told me she was the kind of girl I should get hold of rather permanently. I did that summer on the Riviera, where her mother’s English family had a house high above Monte Carlo.

 Gstaad The American newspaper that prints only news it sees fit to poison good things recently announced ‘The end of snow’. ‘The planet has warmed 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1800s, and, as a result, snow is melting...’ Bring on the Pulitzers, snow melts! The Big Bagel Times also thundered that Europe has lost half its Alpine glacial ice since the 1850s — yes, the 1850s, when private jets ferried people such as Abe Lincoln around America, Otto von Bismarck polluted German resorts in his supercharged Mercedes-Benz, and young Taki steamed around the Med in a 100 mph speedboat powered by black slaves. Well, I for one don’t believe a word the Times writes, and, as I live in Gstaad, I have something of a first-hand knowledge of snow.

Damn, damn, damn! It has to be me, and all these years I’ve been thinking it was Hollywood. By the time you read this it will all be over, like the Olympics, but I had someone play 12 Years A Slave on my television set — it’s called Apple TV but I’m incapable of making it work on my own — and could only watch for ten minutes. Then I had the nice woman who assists me change the film. To me it was like watching a cartoon, as one scene jumped to another without continuity, just clips of horrible whites torturing an innocent black man. Needless to say, it won best picture in El Lay, and of course it would, wouldn’t it? Slavery makes Hollywood go weak at its knees as it’s a moneymaker like no other.

 Gstaad Walking into a dinner party for 50 chic and some not-so-chic people in a nearby village last week, I was confronted by a tall man with horn-rimmed glasses who called me his neighbour, but then added, ‘No, you’re not my neighbour what’s your name?’ No cunning linguist I, nor used to being barked at by nouveaux-riches whippersnappers, I turned my back on him and told him to ‘look it up in the Almanach de Gotha, asshole!’ He wasn’t best pleased, especially as I also called him a dickhead. Now please don’t think for a moment that I approve of my bad manners.

 Gstaad ‘On ne touche pas une femme, même avec une fleur,’ says an old French dictum, one not always adhered to in the land of cheese, or anywhere else, for that matter. However hackneyed it may sound — don’t you hate it when a hack declares an interest in order to gain brownie points for honesty? — I nevertheless will declare one. I’ve been a friend of the Somerset family for about 50 years, starting with the father, David Beaufort, whom I met sailing around the Med back in 1963. He was then David Somerset and is now the Duke of Beaufort, and his four children are all close friends of mine. His second son, Edward Somerset, was recently jailed for two years for mentally and physically abusing his wife of 30 years.

Call me sentimental, but I’ve never seen a better opening ceremony than the Sochi one, evoking Russia’s great past in literature and in many other things. The ballet sequence was tops, especially the acrobatics by the black-clad dancer portraying the cruel officer in War and Peace who seduced Natasha. All those hysterics about boycotts and terrorism, they were just hypocritical sensationalism by those PC jerks that seem to be running our lives nowadays. We westerners are averse to any discipline, impervious to duty, and disinclined to belong to a nation. We owe allegiance only to ourselves and love only ourselves. Not so over in Russia, where there’s a mystic connection between the nation and every single man and woman born there.

Gstaad A heavy snowfall diverted 40-odd private jets from landing in Saanen airport, thus the one per cent of the one per cent who came to Gstaad for a grand wedding last weekend used conventional methods of travel. Actually, it was more of the 100th of one per cent whom lefties complain about, 650 of them arriving for Tatiana Santo Domingo’s marriage to Andrea Casiraghi, son of Princess Caroline of Monaco. Our host was Vera Santo Domingo, mother of the bride and widow of Julio-Mario, among the richest families of South America and from a Colombian dynasty.

Gstaad If a catastrophic avalanche were to crush the Davos convention hall, where the fat cats of this world were meeting recently, I’m afraid there would be a lot of discreet raising of glasses by many so-called populists, basically envious haves who have plenty but don’t particularly like people who have more than they do. This Ed Miliband chappie is a populist, as are Bill and Hillary Clinton, not to mention a lot of white, brown and black trash one sees in glitzy nightclubs nowadays.

OK, folks. We’ve had enough of Hollande and his rather silly antics, although I do understand the man. Ever younger is not a bad policy, in sport as well as in sexual matters, but it does give off a certain bad smell (it’s called a Saatchi) and is something real men actually never get caught doing. Seducers have been the whipping boys in books, plays, poems and in films from time immemorial, starting with Paris of Troy. Someone called it the most ‘unspeakable type of masculinity’, a bit harsh, I agree, but there are some chaps out there whose only goals are conquest and belt notches. Although highly ridiculous — and it was funny hearing Hollande called ridiculous by another slightly comical figure, Sarkozy — a reptilian smoothie Hollande is not.

Al Goldstein, who died recently and made the front page of the New York Times, was among the world’s most disgusting men. But hardly as repellent as Charles Saatchi and certainly without the coward’s bullying manner — against women, that is. Goldstein founded Screw magazine during the Sixties and pushed hard-core porn into the mainstream without the usual excuses of it being art disguised as porn, or vice versa. He apologised for nothing and took no prisoners and gave the finger to an outraged establishment who thought him rather vulgar, to say the least. I met him once and it was on a baseball diamond.

Gstaad Although no longer a regular habit, extended benders now turn me into a sort of magnetic field that picks up pearls as though they were iron filings. They are jewels of insight not the kind tarts hang around their necks to alert the viewer of their availability. Take, for example, a description of a couple I know by a man I have never met but had read about. It was five a.m. last week, heavy snow was blanketing the place, and I had lost my balance and fallen in the bathroom breaking the glass of a picture of my then 18-year-old first wife Cristina.

Welcome, Mr 2014, if you turn out as good as Mr 2013 was, we’ll get along just fine. Throughout last year, I got happier and happier. In fact, it keeps getting better and better and at times I think there must be something very wrong with me. But I should not tempt fate, nor the Gods, because one’s fortune can change quicker than an Italian government. What it comes down to is that the mystery of joy does not pose a problem for me. I treat it as a constant, rather than as a fleeting experience. Is it a Norma Desmond-like delusion? I don’t think so, because joy is not only a way of life, there is also a trick to it: anticipation.Taki: there are too many joys to list Can anything top the feeling just before an assignation with, say, Amber Tamblyn, my latest crush?

This Christmas our thoughts need to be with our fellow Christians who are being threatened in the Bible lands. No ifs or buts about it, they are being told either to join the Sunni-led opposition to Assad and renounce Christianity or die. After decades of protection by a secular-leaning dictatorship, Christians are being given ultimatums by the Saudi-financed jihadists and face a very dark future.  There has already been Christian cleansing in Syria, especially in Homs, where 90 per cent of the Christians have fled the city for Assad-controlled areas near the Lebanese border. In Iraq things are not much better. Cities such as Mosul and Tikrit, Saddam’s home town, were once vital centres of Christianity. No longer.

 New York I’m in an extremely happy state as I write this because a young Englishman flew over the ocean just to have lunch with me and ask for my daughter’s hand in marriage. This is how things used to be done, but alas no longer. I will not reveal his name until it happens — I am very superstitious — but suffice it to say he went to Eton and Oxford, comes from a fine and very old English family and has a beautiful sister, who unfortunately is happily married. (But not to me.) So, in this pleasant state of mind, I’m only going to write about nice things. Up to a point, of course.

New York   Nature is at her best right now, the leaves still holding, Central Park awash in golden browns and reds. I go there every morning, half a block away from home, and under a giant elm I put the creaky body through its paces. Twenty push-ups, 30 deep knee-bends, 25 kicks over a knee-high bar with each leg, and finish with 25 punches against a leaf for speed and accuracy. Then a quiet walk and back to the flat for breakfast and the papers. At six in the evening I walk to the dojo and mix it up rather hard with karate sensei Richard Amos and other black belts. Tuesdays I skip the park and go straight to judo training, the judo sessions being much too brutal for wasting energy before hitting the mats.

You know you’re old when people start writing kindly about you. Especially when they are colleagues. First Jeremy Clarke, now Deborah Ross. Debbie could of course be spoofing — if you look down at your bag of popcorn you’ll miss me — but thank you very much anyway. When my new boat is ready there will be a cabin built exclusively for Deborah Ross. The only thing she really got wrong is the moolah. If I’m a billionaire, Lord Sugar is a gentleman. This sounds a bit phoney, but if I were a billionaire I’d give 850 million away; 150 million greenbacks, or 100 million quid should be tops for everyone. One can fly private, own a boat and a decent house and take care of the children and grandchildren.

Everyone’s doing it, so I might as well jump in too. After all, I knew so many of the people involved, including JFK and his widow Jackie, and — sorry for the name-drop — even the actor Rob Lowe who plays the slain president in the film that’s coming out for the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination. I met Senator John Kennedy one year before he became president, at a party thrown by Alice Topping, a society dame of the time. The first and lasting impression was of his charisma and good looks. He was 39, the room was full of beautiful women, but he did take a minute or two to ask me about school and my plans for the future. It was not any different from most politicians’ chatter, but with a difference.

I suppose the secret of death is to choose not to expire the same day as famous people. I read in Lapham’s Quarterly that JFK, C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley all met with the man in the white suit on 22 November 1963. John Jay Mortimer, a friend of very long standing, died last week and I attended his funeral in Tuxedo Park, the seat of his very old and fine family. After his daughter Minnie gave the reading, Lewis Lapham, the renowned editor of Harper’s and now Lapham’s Quarterly, spoke in a quiet, unemotional tone about his old friend. It seems that at the height of the Cold War, a Soviet bigwig editor had come to New York for a lunch with Lewis.

New York Hot money from China, India, Russia and Singapore is pouring into London; hotter money from the same countries is flooding into the Bagel. London has become unaffordable for the average Joe around Kensington and Chelsea, as has the West Village in downtown New York. Well, unaffordable is relative. There is a delicate social ecology system pointing in the wrong direction in both metropolises, but — like a stock market gone haywire, as at times markets tend to do — when the correction comes there will be lots and lots of empty luxury lots the poor can move into. London is now essentially a tax haven, and New York is where the smart money is invested in high-end real estate, which benefits from tax breaks for the very, very rich.

If, according to a Viennese wit, psychoanalysis is the disease that calls itself the cure, then Steve Cohen’s deal with the US government is the highway robbery that calls itself justice. In brief: Steve Cohen is a bald Wall Street hedgie whose $18 billion fund, SAC, has scored Madoff-like returns over the past 20-odd years. Cohen is a secretive kind of guy whose first wife blew the whistle on him because of his lack of generosity towards her. (Funny how cheap guys never learn. Always be nice to your ex.) Out of the 18 billion big ones Cohen manages, nine are his own, having piled them up over the past 20 years along with some very serious art — expensive that is, a collection a vulgarian like him might be expected to own.