High life

Gstaad The sub-primate level of conversation, as prevalent as the snow up here in the Alps, took a turn for the better last week while a select few celebrated Prince Nicolas Romanoff’s 90th birthday. Yes, most people who live up here are illiterate, but they sure know how to count, some even up to ten billion. None of the counters was present at the birthday, however, given at the yacht club by Dino Goulandris for the head of the tragic Romanoff house, just many old friends who included some of Europe’s oldest and most royal families. No camel drivers, thank you very much, no Russian oligarchs, just Former People , as Douglas Smith named his heartbreaking book on the final days of the Russian aristocracy.

Friends who were among the last to leave Palataki at New Year tell me there were stragglers waiting to be admitted, and this was as the sun was coming up on the first day of the year. My chalet, in other words, has become the last refuge of the desperate, or among those with twice as much serotonin in their blood who never give up. All I can remember is being on the top floor, and at my advanced age not using glasses, but drinking straight out of the vodka bottle. There is a portrait of my father by Dalì up there, and when in my cups I seem to become transfixed by it, a sort of Dorian Gray in reverse, my dad looking elegant and in control, me the exact opposite. Still, it was a hell of a party and both my children had a very good time with their friends.

Lanza is a noble Sicilian name which I believe appears in Il Gattopardo, Lampedusa’s immortal tale of changing times in Sicily during the 1850s. Prince Raimondo Lanza was one of Gianni Agnelli’s best friends, until he threw himself off a Roman balcony while suffering a cocaine overdose. I knew him slightly. His brother Galvano, whom I knew better, lived a long life, some might say a quite useless one, remaining in his family’s ancient and run-down Sicilian property reading books on Napoleon non-stop. One might say it was a life straight out of Bertolucci’s brilliant film 1900. I liked the Lanza brothers because I had never before met such cynical but stylish people.

The horror at Newtown, Connecticut put a damper on the unending rounds of end-of-year parties. And that includes my own Christmas blast at the Boom-Boom room in honour of Lindsay Lohan and some of the prettiest girls in the Big Bagel. At times I think I missed my vocation: Protector-Confessor of fallen women or those about to take the plunge. My only salvation lies in good old Helvetia, where the mother of my children will whip me back into shape in no time. No booze, no sex — just salads and mineral water. Ugh! Mind you, I’m not so sure about my marriage to Miss Lohan. Too many cops around her, and they make me nervous. My party began at nine in the evening and eight hours later was still going. My bill was bigger than the Greek debt, and then some.

Religion is in decline, tradition takes a back seat to fashion, and same-sex marriage is now looked upon as normal. Previous taboos are accepted, such as swearing on television, and watching films about flesh-eating zombies and blood-sucking vampires feasting amidst car crashes and explosions, not to mention non-stop violence on screen. How to balance ethics and entertainment seems to have been lost for ever among the creative types our media take so seriously. But it’s Christmas time once again, and the one thing the Christian religion preaches is to live in peace with our fellow man, which I suppose makes Christianity one hell of a failed doctrine. Let’s face it, nothing is less Christian than war.

Why do so many respectable newspapers and magazines go weak at the knees the moment an unreadable autobiography of some illiterate rock star is published? I guess no hack, however literate, can resist dropped names, or perhaps it is simple hero worship, tout court, as they say in French. I’ve never read a single one, just the reviews of some, and they leave me absolutely cold. So they took a lot of dope and slept with lotsa groupies, and then trashed the hotel suite. Big deal. Seen and done that and it’s no longer fun. But give me something well written about someone I met, however briefly, when I was young, and I’m hooked. Elsa Maxwell, for example.

The gossip is that the Washington Post is in bad trouble and losing money as only Tina Brown can. Not that Brown has anything to do with the Post. Tina loses zillions for Barry Diller, who finances the Daily Beast at about 10 million greenbacks a year, and is closing the 40 million per annum loser Newsweek, although it’s not his own money, but that of those who invest with him. If I’m confusing you, don’t blame me. I actually pay my writers, unlike that other Greek, Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington, who dropped the Greek part of her name just as the Greeks let go of the drachma and went for the euro.If it’s all Greek to you, don’t worry. It gets messier.

Why is it that adultery can ruin a man’s career but rarely a woman’s? In so-called civilised countries, that is. (In Saudi Arabia an adulterous woman is stoned to death.) An American diplomat slated to become the next ambassador to Iraq, Brett McGurk, lost his chance because of an affair with a reporter, who is now his wife. Why is it suddenly criminal to sleep with the opposite sex? Gays the world over must be over the moon. Who says that government officials are stewards of the public trust and that includes what they do in the bedroom? Poor Petraeus. A lifetime of public service gone down the drain for knocking off a leggy social climber.

Miami Beach To the Mecca of brutalism, a place that rivals Marbella for vulgarity, with sprawling marble-clad palaces, boxy condo blocks and concrete lumps in the place of old world, clubby wrought-iron and glass canopies. Clubs down here mean strippers and dancing poles, none of that all-white tennis garb and polite applause after a passing shot down the line. People order jumbo daiquiris in giant glasses and down them quicker than the girls shed their tops. Everyone holds large containers of liquids at all times, and lots of gold hangs from the necks of men as well as women. Tattoos cover men’s arms, torsos and legs, as well as those of some women, especially the uglier ones.

By the time you read this, the longest run-up to an election will be over, thank God, and the usual bores will be pontificating over the results. The irony is that for the first time ever I couldn’t care less who won. Nothing will change in the Land of the Depraved, and Big Business will continue to call the tune in DC. I watched all three debates between Obama and Romney and the word Israel was mentioned 35 times, Iran 42 times, and Canada and Mexico once each. More than 60,000 people have suffered violent deaths in Mexico this year alone, yet the problems of America’s closest neighbour get only a passing mention in a presidential debate.

New York Trains and buses have shut down, people have been evacuated from eastern New Jersey and the southern tip of Manhattan, and as of writing Hurricane Sandy has hit and hit hard: 65 million residents on the north-east of America have been affected, New York Hospital’s main power has blown up and seriously ill patients had to be carried out in the middle of the night by skeleton crews. Supermarkets are empty, their shelves stripped by people who for once took warnings to heart. Flashlights, ropes, batteries and other such contraptions are sold out, the streets resemble Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, and constant TV bulletins are warning that the world as we know it is about to end. Staten Island is underwater, as are parts of New Jersey and Long Island.

A Greek football team has been warned it will be kicked off the field if its players wear uniforms advertising its two new sponsors. The shirts have been bright pink since the team was founded, and bear the names of local brothels ‘Villa Erotica’ and ‘Soula’s House of History’. The hypocrisy involved is mind-boggling. Football in Greece has been as corrupt an institution as Greek politics, with referees known to have taken bribes still on the field, and owners of major teams who have offered such bribes still in the front office. Now a struggling team of amateurs manages to secure sponsorship and some fat guy in Athens gets on his high horse and threatens to disqualify the amateurs for advertising a brothel.

New York It’s a black-and-white 1939 oldie starring Barbara Stanwyck and William Holden, in his first film. She is thin, ballsy, bawdy and beautiful, and talks with a Brooklyn accent. He’s tall, very good-looking, a professional boxer whose real love is playing the violin. His name is Joe Bonaparte. Joe and Babs are on the roof of one of those art deco high risers that gave New York the glamour of no other place on earth. Gershwin’s syncopation can be heard in the distance while the two look down on the people going about their business. It’s night and the stars are out. Babs wants Joe to keep boxing and forget about the fiddle. ‘The little people never make it in this town,’ she tells him.

‘Your future is in Hollywood. I can make you the next Bela Lugosi,’ said James Toback, looking me straight in the eye. Jimmy Toback is a hell of a fellow. An obsessive with an encyclopedic knowledge of sport and other data, he directed such great films as The Gambler, Fingers (it made Harvey Keitel into a star), wrote the screenplay for Bugsy, and has just wrapped Seduced and Abandoned, starring Taki and Alec Baldwin, not necessarily in that order. S&A is going to Sundance and our hopes are high. Jimmy says that I came out fine, ‘the only man in Cannes among the movie crowd with some dignity’. A bit like calling someone an intellectual because his bookcase is bigger than his TV. Jimmy was a tennis player before he became a film director.

I don’t know who was the dumber of the two: the Greek banker apparently rushing to spend 100 million big ones on a London pad, or the American woman who fell off a cliff in Alaska while busy texting? Both dummies survived, which goes to show that the Almighty must have a weakness for the desperate. Lavrentis Lavrentiadis is the unusually named banker now under investigation in Greece for possible money laundering. It’s not unknown for Greeks to cheat on their taxes and purchase houses overseas, though the Russians are much better at it than the Greeks or even the Chinese. London is one big laundry machine; in fact, it should change its name and simply call itself Laundry. Now please don’t ask me about the Alaskan.

New York Ten years ago this week I put my money down and the American Conservative magazine was born. They say that owning a yacht is like sitting under a shower tearing up $100 bills. Owning an opinion magazine based in Washington DC is like sitting in a dull hotel room throwing $1,000 bills into the fire. A boat will at least get one some attention from the fair sex — if it’s large and vulgar enough, that is — whereas a political fortnightly might attract some bores with lotsa dandruff on their collars, but that’s about it. They say that owning a yacht is like sitting under a shower tearing up $100 bills For starters, Washington is as boring a town as they come.

Nueva York The dateline is in Spanish because I have yet to hear any English spoken here in the Bagel, and I landed in some style more than 24 hours ago. Never mind. Flying at 47,000 feet at close to 500 knots per hour on a G550 is as close as it gets to perfection in travelling. The G550 is the Mozart-Beethoven-Schubert-Schumann-Edward Hopper-Degas-William Holden-Burt Lancaster-John Wayne-Papa Hemingway-F. Scott Fitzgerald-Lew Hoad-Roy Emerson-Robert E. Lee-Hasso von Manteuffel of airplanes. There, you get my point, dontcha? Way up there, close to the angels, there ain’t no turbulence. The plane glides like a giant bird, and silently to boot. And it still has tricks up its sleeve.

Gstaad It was far, far worse than the Rodney King El Lay riots of 20 years ago, and it made last year’s London summer fires look like a kindergarten’s Guy Fawkes party. This was our Kristallnacht, and then some. They had hard faces, harder than a hedge fund manager’s when told a good corner table is unavailable. They came early and there were lots of them. Squat and dark, tall and wide, their fists at the ready, their firebombs hanging like war medals off their badly cut coats. They had pickaxes aplenty, but few brains to accompany them. They screamed abuse, their foul-smelling breath escaping like radiation from a nuke, and just as deadly.

Forty years or so ago, two Greek ship owners and the most famous diva of her time squared off in the British High Court over a financial dispute. Panaghis (I think) Vergottis, a gentleman and philanthropist, had sued Aristotle Socrates Onassis and Maria Callas over the ownership of a tanker, bought for la Callas by the two best friends, as they once were. Vergottis had, I suspect, fallen in love with the fiery coloratura, and once Onassis had dropped her for la Kennedy, tried to move in, unsuccessfully. Then who owned how much of a ship came up, and ended up in the High Court. The headlines back then were bigger than the ones covering the two Russian creeps of last week. But there were no theatrics.

With the exception of the French Academy immortals Michel Déon and Jean d’Ormesson, two wonderful writers and both the epitome of charm and graciousness, the French can be a pretty silly lot. They weren’t always. They got that way sometime between the two great wars, and turned even sillier during the German occupation and following their liberation by Eisenhower and co. Humiliated by Prussia in 1871, saved by America in 1917, done in for good by Germany in 1940, there were two more débâcles in store, Indochina and Algeria, but I’m jumping ahead.