High life

Gstaad It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, with a 24-hour non-stop snowfall, an empty main street, and the closing of the Palace hotel as well as of the Eagle club. (I give the traditional closing-day speech at the club, and this year’s was judged to have been politically incorrect.) The older I get the more I like it off season, the toadies and parasites of the truly rich having followed their masters to places like St Barts or the Bahamas. Tarts, pimps, art dealers, jewellery salesmen, real-estate sharks, you name them, we’ve got them. During the season, that is. One disgusting little man of Lebanese–Israeli origin even managed to infiltrate my backgammon game and passed his catalogue around.

Who first declared that nothing counts a lot and very little counts at all? The cynic and sesquipedalian Alastair Forbes claimed it, but he spoke with a forked tongue. Iris Murdoch hinted that it was hers, but she, too, was known for bending it. It doesn’t really matter because the saying is utter crap. A hell of a lot counts, starting with the fine line between mad love and pure madness. No, don’t be alarmed, I will not go into yet another reverie about Jessica-Jenny, as my friend John Sutin has finally come to the rescue by pledging he will do something about it.

Back in 1951, briefly home from boarding school, I went to a bar with a phony draft card, ordered a beer and watched Rocky Marciano knock out my idol Joe Louis through the ropes and out of boxing for ever. Joe was old — 35 or maybe 37 and was trying for a comeback as he was broke — and as he sat on his stool after having been counted out, he looked a lot older. Rocky crossed over from his corner, bent down to speak to Joe, and began to cry. Joe was his idol, too. (Rocky went on to become world champ and retired undefeated after 49 fights, only to die in an aeroplane accident.) That was then. Pugilists respected each other, and no one was more respected than Joe Louis, the first ‘negro’ to be idolised by white boxing aficionados.

Gstaad It’s early in the morning and very still in the silvery light of the heights up here as I look out my window. A company of wispy white clouds hide behind the surrounding mountains — a reminder that a perfect dawn makes for a perfect day’s skiing. The clouds play games. They wrap themselves around the peaks like snowcaps, then are chased away by the sun, only to return and play headdress again. Someone once compared the movement of ice to the passage of a soul to heaven. I watch the glacier across my house daily, but have yet to feel the movement of a soul, but then I’m not that spiritual. Glaciers are great to look at and wonderful to ski on — they’re flat and fast — but as far as their passing a soul to heaven goes, I ain’t so sure.

Who is worse, the pusher or the addict? I’d say it’s 50–50 as they sustain each other, although the addict has the moral high ground. Greece is the addict, and the pushers are German and French banks, with Brussels the overall godfather shipping the stuff in from Afghanistan. The godfather is not the cuddly type played by Brando and De Niro, but an autocoprophagous degenerate who managed a coup d’état while Europe slept and is now defending his turf with Caligulan levels of depravity. If I could have one wish it would be to see the dregs of Europe — dwarfs such as Barroso, Draghi, Rehn, Van Rompuy and the rest of the scum — in the dock, where the Greek colonels ended up.

Gstaad Here we go again! ‘I hear music and there’s no one there, I smell blossoms and the trees are bare, all at once I seem to walk on air...’ Some of you, or perhaps all of you, must be getting rather tired of this, but I simply can’t help it. I’m not doing it on purpose, that I swear on the Bible. In fact, I dropped in on the terribly nice village doctor although I knew it was a total waste of his time and mine. His diagnosis, as always with such symptoms: ‘There is nothing you can take to relieve that pleasant ache; you’re not sick, you’re just in love.’ Yes, folks, this time she’s Jessica Raine, that graceful and shy nurse Jenny in the Sunday-night soap Call the Midwife.

At ten minutes past four on the afternoon of 28 April 1945, a plumber by the name of Moretti shot and killed a prematurely aged man and a youngish woman, who was not wearing any underwear, in front of the Villa Belmonte, near Lake Como. Next to Moretti, who was later tried for theft and other misdeeds, was one Colonel Valerio, whose submachine-gun had jammed while trying to shoot the defenceless couple. Millions of words have been written about the last moments of Benito Mussolini and Clara Petacci, but until now not a single writer — not even the definitive biographer of the Duce, Nicholas Farrell — has managed to discover correctly Benito’s last words to Clara just before he was cut down by the cowardly communist assassin.

Gstaad OK, sports fans! The Davos irrelevance is over, Gstaad is covered with the white stuff, and in St Moritz the Russian crooks are laying a Stalingrad-like siege to the town’s ultra-expensive boutiques. So what else is new? Gstaad covered with snow, that’s what’s new. Let’s start with Davos, where publicity-seekers such as George Soros posed and postured about being against income inequality. What phonies these bums are, just as bad as the Occupy protestors but with two or three private jets and large ugly stinkpot yachts. (Unlike Taki, who has a large but beautiful sailing boat.

Edmund Wilson was America’s premier man of letters (The Wound and the Bow) during the mid years of the 20th century. To the Finland Station and Memoirs of Hecate County are still in print, as are his journals about the Twenties, Thirties and Forties. He was a literary critic par excellence, a friend of both Scott Fitzgerald (whose death at 44 years of age shook him greatly, as Wilson was one year older than the tragic Scott) and Hemingway, who counted Wilson as one of the few men he would not bully. Wilson was much married, his third wife being the very beautiful Mary McCarthy, as good a writer as he was, and one he divorced in 1946 for the equally intellectual champagne heiress Elena Mumm Thornton.

Gstaad ‘Mick Flick invites you to the Roaring Twenties’ read the invite, a black-and-white stiffy with a flapper and a Rudolph Valentino type in white tie and tails, flirting in the old-fashioned manner, she dreamlike, flapping her eyes upwards, he looking swarthy and passionate and standing over her. In the background, a roomful of swells in their finest are tripping the light fantastic. It is rare for a party to live up to expectations, especially one to which people come from very far away. I’ve given a few in my life and none of them has ever truly clicked. Perhaps it’s a matter of luck, but mainly it has to do with preparation. I haven’t got the patience, but Mick is German, a Mercedes-Benz heir, and very thorough.

Gstaad By the time you read this it will be mid-January and all your New Year’s resolutions will have gone the way of good manners or mild racist remarks. At least I hope so. Resolutions can be dangerous to one’s health, and definitely a hazard to one’s happiness. Here in snow-covered Gstaad — we’ve had more snow than there’s cocaine in South America — a new monster has reared its hideous face: envy. Yes, envy is one of the seven deadly sins, although I recognise only two as mortal ones, that and avarice. Lust, gluttony, pride, wrath and sloth, I am rather proud to be guilty of, especially the first and last.

Gstaad For a cultural pessimist like myself, things have never looked rosier. Economic depression, unemployment, environmental disasters, wars and armed conflicts: with the final destruction of modern civilisation just around the corner, I can hardly conceal my glee at being right. Mind you, as a modern prophet of pessimism, I pray non-stop that I’m wrong, and being in this Mecca of the rich and disgustingly glitzy helps enormously. What? Me worry? That seems to be the slogan of the unacceptably nouveaux riches around these parts, that is when they’re not name-dropping Madonna, who happened to drop by for the holidays with some youngsters in tow who made Michael Jackson look a gerontophile. That there’s cultural decay in a declining West is hardly worth arguing about.

So the end-of-the-year Christmas party was the best yet, even if I say so myself. The festivities began at 10 p.m. and ended somewhat hazily around 6 the next morning. My son JT provided the youth, I provided the gravitas. Actually, it was the other way round. I provided the brawn — judo and karate instructors and practitioners — he provided the artsy-fartsy types from Brooklyn with lotsa pretty girls. Cauliflower brains mixing freely with cauliflower ears. To my great regret my buddy Michael Mailer, son of Norman and a very good boxer who has gone to Hollywood and now produces movies, had to fly to South Africa, but like a good friend he left three beautiful blondes behind who all came to the party.

Let’s start with the bad news: in honour of China’s economic rise, a Chinese-looking woman was the first Christmas Grinch here in the States. The sourpuss teacher in upper New York ruined the Christmas spirit for a class full of seven- and eight-year-olds when she told them that there is no Santa Claus, and that the presents under their trees did not come from the North Pole and St Nick but were put there by their parents. Boo, you stupid woman, it’s outrageous that a teacher would strip children of their innocence and demystify something as precious as Christmas. Then there’s always the Brooklyn Museum and its annual attack on Christian sensibilities in the name of free speech with its disgusting exhibition whose name I will not mention.

Let’s lighten up a bit and have some fun before next week’s ‘Big Bazooka’, the Christmas double issue. The vast majority of us Westerners are a happy bunch despite our countries being racked by debt, rising prices and job losses. Mind you, I know 4,700 people with no sense of humour whatsoever, especially when it comes to protesters’ welfare. I mean those hardy souls who took the time to complain to the BBC about remarks made on the air about shooting the strikers. What made me laugh out loud was Ed Miliband, posing as Labour leader rather than the human biohazard that he really is, complaining in his nasal monotone about the remarks, calling them disgraceful and disgusting. He sure doesn’t have a sense of humour.

New York Sophocles was a man before his time, at least where protesters the world over are concerned. He and I were at school together although he was a few years older (496–406 BC). Antigone, among his greatest plays, is one that makes us think not just about politics, but also about the ethics that drive us to take a stance. If any of you missed it when he first put it on Broadway, here’s how it goes: The sun also rises over Thebes. The two sons of Oedipus (his name means swollen foot and he had bad luck), Eteocles and Polynices, had arranged to rule Thebes by turn, a bit like Blair and Brown. Eteocles got used to being number one and refused his brother his turn.

Henry Kissinger, writing on American foreign policy, mentions that, according to Dean Acheson, ‘Leaving high office is like the end of a great love affair — a void left by the disappearance of heightened sensibilities and focused concerns.’ Dr K. should know. He was a swinger in his younger days, was among the first to mention that power is one of the greatest of all aphrodisiacs, and knew quite a few beauties in his time. He then married the very graceful and extremely supportive Nancy and has lived happily ever after. Lucky Dr K. I am a great fan of his and consider him a modern Machiavelli, meant in the best possible way.

New York I had a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious week, and a weekend in Connecticut to recover from it. Let’s begin with the Norman Mailer benefit gala for which I had taken a table and filled it with swells and other such birds and creatures. The Mailer Centre is quite an extraordinary achievement only four years after the great man’s death. Larry Schiller, the human battery behind it, has turned Mailer’s Cape house into a young writers’ colony, handing out scholarships and shelter to them, and giving out prizes and 16-month-long fellowships to keep their literary ambitions running in top gear (32 Mailer fellowships and 225 writers have received scholarships to date). Dylan Jones of GQ magazine is also a big sponsor (Taki being a tiny one).

New York God, it’s great to be Greek right now. We’ve out-front-paged the Holocaust as well as the Israeli ‘existential threat’. (The latter has been jerked up a notch, and Big Bagel papers present the Iran problem as 1939 and the Nazis having the bomb.) When the Greek alarm first sounded in mid-2009 in a report by the IMF, what do you think the elegant Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the towering Sarkozy and the statuesque Merkel did? They did to it what I’d like to do to The Spectator’s deputy editor, squashed it and shoved it into a very dark room where no one could find it. Instead of pricking the boil — or boiling the prick, for that matter — they let it fester. This is the way of great men and women.

New York According to Virgil, Libyans are ‘a people rude in peace and rough in war’. The old boy wrote this a couple of thousand years ago, so we have to cut him some slack. And he was obviously not speaking about the present rabble. As far as I’m concerned, most Libyans are human biohazards. The media have played up their fighting abilities, but it’s all show and boast. Afghanis they are not. The Libyans were the only trophy the great Italian army ever won down south, the Abyssinians having held them to a tie. About 45 years ago, Count Volpi di Misurata invited me to lunch in Monte Carlo and told me over oysters and champagne that his father had won his title on the battlefield. When I told my dad this, he laughed out loud.