High life

The mother of my children rang me from Deauville and for probably the first time in her life asked me to retract something I had written. It was about Pal Sarkozy’s wife, Christine de Ganay, whom I described last week as the worst of a bad bunch. Well, Alexandra does have a point. I mixed up the cad’s wives. The poor de Ganey woman was left penniless with two young children by our pal Pal — and he is still very much with us as I saw a picture of him when his son was crowned at the Elysée. I simply mixed up his various wives and women and chose to call the best the worst. Stupid little Greek boy. This kind of thing happens to those who drink, fornicate (just) and think they know everything because they’ve been around for so long.

New York The funny thing about Sarkozy being president of France is not his size, but his family. His father, Pal Sarkozy, used to frequent the same nightclubs as I did back in the early Sixties. Of the ‘beau monde’ he was not. Pal was sort of sleazy, and sort of a conman, and sort of a playboy. None of us knew what he did, and by that I don’t mean to suggest he was dishonest, but there were always rumours about him. An inveterate womaniser, a good thing for a father of a French president to be, his women, alas, were a pretty lousy bunch. Except for one of them, Beatrice de M, a close friend of mine whom he promised a trip to the altar but then dropped, most of his ladies were not ladies.

New York Ahmet Ertegun was the greatest Turk since Kemal Ataturk, but unlike Mustafa Kemal he never killed anyone, especially a Greek. In brief, Ertegun was the supreme record man, the signer of the most important rhythm & blues, jazz, pop and rock artists of all time, the founder and builder of Atlantic Records, a company he began with the $10,000 he borrowed from his dentist. He was a diplomat’s son, his father having served as ambassador to Paris and Washington, among other posts. I met him in 1956 and we stayed friends until his death last October, when he slipped at a jazz concert, fell and hit his head and never recovered.

Southampton, New York I received a gift necktie from the King of Greece at the lunch I threw in his honour here in the Bagel. The design on the tie gave me food for thought. There were tiny white rocking chairs against the skyblue background. The message was clear. It’s time to hang it up. King Constantine is a valued friend who had advised me against competing in martial arts at my age. When he heard of my victory down south he figured I had lucked out — which I had — so in order for me not to press lady luck he went out and bought me the Brooks Brothers tie. Pushing the envelope, whether in gambling or in sport, is what makes life exciting and so unpredictable. Do you ride good fortune and double up on the bets, or do you play it safe and go home a winner?

New York It’s been a hellish week for Pug’s Club. A week in which I was unable to lend my good offices against the violent outbreak of disapprobation and impropriety. What has been until today a relatively smooth path to the great and most exclusive club in the world was threatened by a member or members unknown, although there are only seven of us. Let me begin at the start: Pug’s was founded by Leopold Bismarck, Nick Scott and myself last summer. The club was named after the main character in Herman Wouk’s book The Winds of War, who was played by Robert Mitchum in the eight-hour-long mini-series.

Miami Bragging goes hand in hand with failure. I’ve met a lot of stars in my life — sporting and literary ones, and not a small number of film stars, too — and I’ve yet to come across a successful one who boasted. Sure, there was Muhammad Ali, but his was a jig, a publicity stunt to make up for the years of white man forced-down-your-throat humility. Writers, athletes and actors, in fact all artists, have one thing in common: Insecurity with a capital ‘i’. Athletes have short careers, writers and actors longer ones. One loses the facility for words as one gets older, but makes up for it through experience. I know nothing about acting, but I do know about sport. An old boxer sees a punch coming before the one throwing it has thought of it.

‘One of the least edifying sights in  Britain today is that of Douglas Hurd expressing his righteous anger over the war in Iraq...’ So begins one Roger Cohen’s rant in the International Herald Tribune under the heading ‘Globalist’.  Some globalist. What I find much less edifying is Roger Cohen, presumably an American, giving us lessons on how to treat the Muslim threat to our Christian and enlightened way of life. Let me explain. Cohen’s beef with Douglas Hurd is that he, as foreign secretary, was gutless while the Serbs were committing genocide against the Bosnian Muslims between 1992 and 1995. Hurd I do not know and the little I met of him I didn’t like. It was during a Speccie dinner at Christopher’s following our summer party.

Gstaad Margaret MacMillan’s new book, Nixon and Mao, brought back pleasant  memories. It was February 1972, and I’d just returned to Saigon from Phu Bai and Hue in the north, where I was reporting for National Review. I was eager to get back to civilisation and some skiing in Gstaad, when President Nixon’s trip to Beijing took us all by surprise. Not Bill Buckley, however, my nominal boss at NR, who had accompanied Richard Nixon to the land Imperial England had permanently ‘turned on’ with its opium. MacMillan writes that Nixon, a lifelong anti-communist and cold warrior par excellence, was moved when Mao took his hand and would not let go. The handholding did not impress Buckley, however.

St Moritz The lack of snow drove me to the Engadine valley and the queen of ski resorts, St Moritz. Mind you, the queen is no longer what she once was. At the beginning of the last century, St Moritz was the undisputable numero uno winter spot.   European aristocracy flocked there for amusement and sport. Downhill skiing had not as yet been invented, but there was curling, tobogganing and, following the latter, the bob and cresta runs which saw brave young blades risking their necks after a night spent dancing and pursuing the fairer sex. In between the wars St Moritz reached its zenith. And even after the second world war, it managed to draw the best of what was left of the old aristocracy, combined with the smoothest of the newly rich. No longer.

Gstaad There’s more happy dust to be found indoors around here than powder on the slopes. Last week I drove to the Diableret glacier and skied my legs off trying to catch up. At 3,000 metres — the maximum height the old prop planes used to reach when crossing the Atlantic — and upwards, the white stuff was perfect. (I mean the snow on the ground.) Although I smoke non-filter Camels and drink the heavy stuff, my lungs felt perfect. My feet hurt like hell, however, and I became convinced while skiing that I had gangrene, or something equally disgusting. After two hours I could bear the pain no longer. I stopped and took off my boots. Eureka! They were not mine, but my son’s old ones, worn when he was 16 and at Le Rosey.

Gstaad A London friend has sent me a book whose subject caused a few faint complaints in the beginning but has now escalated to a full-scale furore, Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Racist and anti-Semitic have been the operative words used by outraged pundits to describe it, while people such as the Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and the director of the Anti-Defamation League Abe Foxman have gone overboard in calling the 39th President of the good old USA not only an anti-Semite but a Christian madman and a pawn of the Arabs. Let’s take it from the top. Jimmy Carter has dedicated his life to humanitarian causes and is as anti-Semitic as David Ben-Gurion. He was a weak president but always a man of integrity.

Style is the most abused word in the English language. It is usually attributed to fashionable people by those not in the know. Style, however, is an elusive quality, and few fashionable people and almost no celebrities possess it outright.  No one is capable of buying it, although thousands try. The dictionary defines ‘style’ as a noticeably superior quality. It is of an abstract nature and one either has it or one does not. As a child, I used to admire dictators, their brilliant uniforms, their swagger and their conviction. Although I hate to admit it, I still like dictators and for a very good reason: their lack of hypocrisy. They do not resort to taking the advice of pollsters and image-makers in order to find out who they ought to be.

Gstaad Penned in by the surrounding Alps, huddled around the Saanen valley and scrambling up the mountains for extra space, Gstaad bursts at the seams during the New Year celebrations. For the first time in its 100-year history, the Palace hotel sold tickets to its premises, and they sold out three days before the night of the 31st. I tried to enter the Palace at 8.30 a.m. on New Year’s Day, accompanied by my son and a couple of floozies but was refused admission because of my drunken state and also because elderly clients were coming down for breakfast. It was just as well. I can’t remember anything past 3 a.m. and there was bound to be trouble with people leaving the nightclub as we were trying to get in.

OK, 2007 is upon us, and the end of history, as in Francis Fukuyama’s fearless forecast of 1990, has turned out to be full of you-know-what. In fact, never in seven centuries, give or take a few, has this planet of ours been in more turmoil. Fukuyama is a great scholar, and he meant well, but what he got wrong was religious fervour and human nature. Basically, the urge to control one another’s behaviour. Better yet, the incompatibility of Islamic beliefs and liberal democracy. Let’s begin with Iraq. Uncle Sam’s wrongheaded attempt to placate Sunni Arabs has failed utterly. For all the rhetoric against Shiite shenanigans, it’s the Sunnis who have destroyed Iraq.

New York ‘The United States is 85 per cent Christian, which means it is more Christian than India is Hindu and Israel is Jewish. Moreover, 96 per cent of Americans celebrate Christmas. So why do we have to tippy-toe around the religious meaning of Christmas every December?’ This by the Catholic League appeared as an advertisement in Big Bagel papers, as no major American newspaper would have allowed a hack to write such politically incorrect stuff. As the great Christian holiday is upon us, the multicultural gurus who trump our rights to celebrate the birth of Our Lord go into overdrive. There is something very sick about Friendship Trees and Winter Solstice Concerts.

New York First it was Mel, as in Gibson, now it’s Michael, as in Richards. I’m sure none of you has ever heard of the latter, but he’s a big shot in America, especially among those with brains smaller than a pea. Richards played a character in Seinfeld, a programme about emptiness which is no longer on the air. I suppose celebrity is harder to give up than heroin because last week Richards used the N-word while doing a stand-up routine in a small Los Angeles club, calling two black guys who were heckling him ‘dirty n——s’. Well, he sure got back his celebrity in a hurry.

New York My love for Ashley Judd has gone the way of Iraq. Remember a couple of years ago, when a friend of mine offered to take me backstage to meet her and I got cold feet? I have just read an interview she gave, and I thank God for my cold tootsies. Here’s the beautiful Ashley on life in general and Indian brothels in particular: I spend time talking about how women’s reproductive health is the nexus of eradicating a lot of inequality...I’m able to maintain healthy boundaries, to hold space with exploited people with more integrity...I feel pain about poverty. When I go to a brothel, I feel complete and sometimes homicidal rage. And I am frankly going to die if I am not part of the solution. I will take in all those feelings, and they will eat me alive.

New York Sometimes I wonder about Americans in general and Noo Yawkers in particular. Especially while watching war films. In Saving Private Ryan, GIs seem as cool under fire as the Wehrmacht troops look cowardly and ready to throw their hands up. In reality, of course, the Germans fought gallantly against overwhelming odds in men and materials. Some SS units kept counter-attacking when at only 10 per cent of their original strength. Total air superiority did the trick for the good guys. And von Rundstedt’s genius did not help. More than one million German front-line troops died on the Western front because old Gerd knew how to run rings around the Allies while retreating. He, Model and Kesselring were masters of defence.

The telephone rings and a downmarket voice greets me with a cheery hello. ‘This is Peter McKay, your old friend,’ says the bubbly one. ‘We hear that Vanity Fair paid for your party.’ For any of you unfamiliar with McKay, he is a scandal-purveyor of talent, malice and unparalleled mischief, who writes under the pseudonym of Ephraim Hardcastle in the Daily Mail. My first reaction, needless to say, is to wonder why VF should pay for my party. And I tell him so. ‘No, VF did not pay for my party, but Graydon Carter, the editor, and his wife Anna, as well as Dominick Dunne, a VF columnist, were invited as they are old and good friends of mine.

The trouble with throwing a party is it only lasts for a few hours. Compared with the time and effort it takes to organise, it seems, well, a waste of time. John Aspinall spent months preparing the extravagances he used to stage at Howletts and Port Lympne, his perfect Palladian structure near Canterbury. At one of his parties, the staircase was festooned with dwarfs, while acrobats and wild animals roamed around the rooms. I remember playing chemmy next to Tina Onassis, or Blandford, as she then was, and a large tiger making an entrance and sniffing the green felt table. Tina fled to the loo. I was too embarrassed to do likewise and called banco instead. I was too nervous to notice whether I won or lost.