High life

Gstaad An article in Vanity Fair about a man I knew for over 40 years has turned me into Orlando Furioso. Oleg Cassini died in 2006 when he was well into his nineties. We met in 1956 on an aeroplane going to Bermuda to play a tennis tournament. Cassini was a good club player and a so-so skier, back in the days when few people skied. He was a heterosexual dress designer who designed very ugly clothes for women and even worse ones for men. Women, however, had made Oleg famous in an age when people were celebrated for proper reasons. He first married Gene Tierney, the beautiful sloe-eyed star of Laura, in the Forties, then romanced Grace Kelly during the Fifties, losing her to Rainier, a loss he took very badly and talked about often in the years to come.

On board S/Y Bushido Sailing down the eastern coast of the Peloponnese I thought I spotted some anti-Semites adrift, but they turned out to be Norwegians, flying a British flag. Although becalmed they needed nothing but a breeze, so we wished them good day and motored off. Ever since Shimon Peres accused the UK of anti-Semitism, I’ve been very careful to whom I offer help on the high seas. Peres, who once upon a time made some sense, recently claimed that the English were pro-Arab and anti-Israel. He was also rude about my new best friend, David Cameron, who referred to Gaza as a ‘prison camp’. But now that the wind has suddenly picked up and we are gliding along at ten knots, I am inspired to tell a few truths to old Shimon about the English.

On board S/Y Bushido If a boat can be called a work of art then surely ones designed by William Fife qualify him as the Degas of yacht construction. Fife was a Scot, but unlike fellow Scots such as Blair and Brown, he handed down beauty, not misery, modern maritime Parthenons rather than debt and anarchy. No one has ever got near him as far as art on water is concerned. Cambria, Altair, Mariquita, Moonbeam, Fintra, Viola, Nan of Fife, Mikado, Jap, I could go on. My son sailed on Mariquita as a deckhand while she raced in classic contests, and has been hooked on beauty ever since. The visual aspects of a sailing boat are like those of a woman. Proportions are all. A beautiful figure cannot make up for a very ugly face, and vice versa.

Athens As everyone knows, Sigmund Freud was a fraud. And, like many frauds, he thought the Parthenon might also be one. But he summoned his nerve and visited the sacred site and was delighted as well as shocked at what he saw. This was 1904. Like other visitors, Freud dreaded that the real thing might not live up to his expectations, but it did and continues to do so today. Unlike other cultural icons — the ‘Mona Lisa’, the pyramids — the Parthenon never disappoints, and even a philistine such as Bill Clinton has been photographed misty-eyed between the columns. Mind you, the one that takes the booby prize is the American lassie that years ago yelled, ‘Look, Ma, from here you can see the Hilton.

My last week in London felt like the end of a school term — bittersweet. I was glad to be flying off to the sun, but sad to leave good friends and very good times behind. Mind you, the last night, that of the Speccie summer party, descended into farce when my Low life colleague and I were photographed at 5 a.m. having a spirited discussion about the human condition. Jeremy wrote about it last week but he chose to forget certain details. Both he and I had been boozing for at least ten hours, but thankfully had not started until after we were presented to a very gracious and friendly Prime Minister. When a driver pitched up to pick me up for the airport I was in a bad way.

My last week in London and it is just as well. One more would most likely kill me. The least frantic event was the one that Simon Phillips and Roger Moore threw in Harry’s Bar for Unicef, as worthy a charity as there is, following the Masterpiece Fair at the former Chelsea Barracks. I sat next to Britt Ekland, still sexy and still working, but my high moment was finally meeting Sir Roger’s youngest son, Christian. Many years back Christian had designs on some young blonde friend of mine, but I checkmated him by telling her she would end up in the pokey as he was 13 years old. (He was 18, and his now father-in-law, a most charming Syrian gent, has been reading The Spectator since the Sixties.) Writing a weekly diary with metronomic regularity can, of course, bore the reader.

During my book party one month ago — rather surprisingly, the thing is selling well — I spotted Ferdinand Mount in the crowd and asked him to meet a friend of mine. Ferdy recognised the name immediately. ‘You brought cheer to the plains of India,’ he told Naresh Kumar, quoting a headline of more than 50 years ago. Mount then went on to quote from one of his own dispatches: ‘As the shadows lengthened in the Centre Court of Wimbledon, the soft touch and tricky lobs of Kumar–Krishnan tied their opponents in knots,’ or words to that effect. Naresh Kumar was one of the most popular players on the tennis circuit during the mid and late 1950s.

Is there anything worse than listening to those hucksters in South Africa going bananas over the ugly game called football? Modern society is dominated by emotion and propaganda, not to mention profit, and when all three are combined what we get is the World Cup. Technicolor pictures of fat men and women jumping up and down while blowing into a contraption called a vuvuzela dominate the front pages, as if an order had come from on high to feature the most boorish and the fattest cheering for the most foul-mouthed and overpaid. Posturing peacocks spouting gibberish go on ad nauseam about the brilliance of holding the cup in South Africa, a once wonderful country whose people will revert to murdering white farmers and each other the moment the hucksters move out.

The Greco–Roman egghead view was that events do not occur at random according to the whims of the Gods, but according to a repetitive cycle. Just as life followed birth and death followed decline, monarchy decayed into tyranny, leading to aristocracy, which decayed into oligarchy, which led in turn to selective democracy, followed by anarchy and finally back to monarchy. However one looks at it, it all begins and ends with monarchy, a very good thing as far as I’m concerned. When I was young and dumb, I flirted with republicanism, but then a very wise Greco–German proved to me that the worst king is better than the best president, at least in the highly politicised climate of the Olive Republic.

It’s a topsy-turvy world when the deputy editor of The Spectator, a lady, is in Afghanistan, while the High life correspondent of the same magazine cowers in a Belgravia basement wearing full body armour and his Wehrmacht helmet. Obviously, it should be the other way round, but now it’s a woman’s world and we men have been put out to pasture. And it gets worse. Apparently, while about to go out ‘in the field’, Mary Wakefield was told ‘rather you than me’ by a private security man. ‘Better an IED [improvised explosive device] than Taki,’ answered my fiancée, making me angry as hell and not willing to take it any more.

On board S/Y Bushido, off St Tropez My book party’s best line was Claus von Bülow’s, as told to Antony Beevor, Piers Paul Read, Paul Johnson and Sir V.S. Naipaul, among the literary worthies who took the time to attend the poor little Greek boy’s launch at Brooks’s. ‘The last book party I attended,’ said Claus, ‘was that of Leni Riefenstahl’s about 15 years ago. I had with me an Israeli friend, Ronald Fuhrer, who eventually got into a spot of trouble and had to flee England overnight. Ronnie went up to Leni, told her what a great admirer he was and asked her to sign his book. “How do you spell your name?”asked the author, abjuring the Hitler connection to the bitter end.

The block I’ve lived on these past 35 years is next to what no less a Manhattan authority than Woody Allen has called the most beautiful street in the city. At this time of year, the elms and poplar trees give my block a country feeling, which for me is as good as it gets. Country living in a city is what it’s all about. An English writer once described the place as being without trees, ‘but as if by a miracle little heaps of twigs and blown leaves gather in the gutters’. Looking out of my window I wonder what city she was referring to. The Bagel is leafier than London, at least where I live, so there.

As I write, the political situation in Britain has many of her citizens bewildered. Despite the staggering deficits and economic shocks, the good people of Britain voted with their hearts, rather than their heads. Not being a medium, I will not try to predict what will happen. My advice to loyal Spectator readers is to go to Fitzdares and place some bets. (I sold my shares in Fitzdares with profit last year.) What I do know for certain is that Britain will soon be in the same boat as my birthplace if the three stooges don’t put the nation’s future ahead of their personal ambitions. Fat chance. So here’s a brief history lesson on how Greece not only got the whole of Europe into a mess, but is also now threatening the US and even Asia.

Myrtle Beach, South Carolina Let me take you away from politics for a bit, and bring you down here to Myrtle Beach, a downmarket Miami Beach but with much nicer and friendlier locals. There is even a Hemingway Street — Papa came fishing around here — which would never happen in Miami. Only porn stars and drug dealers have streets named after them in that sweaty Sodom and Gomorrah, although the city did once allow Xaviera Hollander, author of The Happy Hooker, to ride on a float on the 4th of July. First things first, however. I flew to Myrtle Beach with some other judokas for the US National Championships and although I ended up with a gold medal, I only fought palookas, as they used to say in the world of boxing.

New York It’s up early every day, before 8 a.m., and a brisk walk through the park before breakfast on the way to judo practice. A pale green washes the fields, daffodils pushing through the crusty earth. The joggers are out in force, young Jewish princesses struggling while getting in shape for serious Bloomingdale’s shopping in the afternoon. The US Nationals are this weekend and I’ve been behaving myself. I now get hammered only twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays. The walk through Central Park is the calm before the storm, the respite before the hell I know I will have to go though on arrival. And that’s when I notice nature the best. The knotty buds unfolding, the sound of robins, the clatter of the hooves of hansom cabs.

New York April in the Bagel is as good as it gets. The girls are back in their summer dresses, people are crowding the outdoor cafés, and Central Park is an explosion of greens and pinks. Spring, as the song says, is busting out all over. And the taxman cometh — though not for 41 per cent of NYers. Last week, on tax day, it was revealed that an eye-popping 41 per cent of the state’s filers did not pay any federal income tax last year. I don’t know the London figures, but I’d guess they’d be about the same. Being on the dole nowadays is good business, and being on the fiddle is the business of today. And the steady rise in the number of people removed from income tax rolls is the best business of all.

New York If one was making £160,000 per week — that’s more than a quarter of a million dollars every seven days — it would be safe to assume that one’s father would not choose to deal in cocaine for a living. Not necessarily, it seems — at least not in the John Terry family. The man who had to stand down as captain of the England football squad for having screwed a teammate’s girl is a hell of a fellow. His mother and mother-in-law were cautioned last year for shoplifting. Now his old man is charged with dealing in the wrong kind of coke. What in hell’s name is going on here? Modern England, that’s what. Compare this with one Dave Sime, a fellow I sat next to last week here in the Big Bagel.

New York In the 45 years I spent going to Annabel’s I never once heard anyone say, ‘Let’s go to Birley’s.’ It was Annabel’s or Harry’s, or Mark’s, but never Birley’s. Now I read that Richard Caring, the man who bought Mark Birley’s joints, is trying to stop Robin Birley, Mark’s only son, from using his own name for the new club he’s planning in Mayfair. Admittedly, I’m a friend of Robin, and have never met Caring, but surely one has the rights to one’s own name. Caring says that he’s bound to honour his agreement with Mark Birley and uphold the standards Mark set in his clubs. Well, this is as much of a joke as trying to stop Robin using his own name.