Gstaad

Gstaad   Here in Gstaad there is no worker alienation. Nor are the rich especially worried. The talk is about snow conditions, upcoming parties, the price of real estate, Brexit and, of course, socialism, a disease that strikes those far away from this Alpine resort, but has yet to infect any of the locals. I had a long chat with a friend of mine, born and bred up here, who makes his living teaching people how to ski and fixing their television sets after hours. ‘Don’t you ever mind when you see first hand how plush the new chalets are, especially of those like myself who made it the old-fashioned way, by inheriting it?’ Not a bit, was the answer, ‘Life’s like a casino, some win and some lose.

Gstaad My annual end-of-year party in the Bagel was a bust. Too many people brought their friends and I ended up asking men and women to please leave both my bedroom and, especially, my bathroom. I had some very pretty young things drop in. Some even overstayed and — surprise, surprise — there were some items missing after the clean-up the next day. But that was then. I’m now in Gstaad for the duration. The good news for the nouveaux is that it rained like hell for three days, washing away all the snow. Skiing and new moolah don’t mix. Main Street now sounds a bit like Beirut — or should that be Athens? However it sounds, it’s not like the Helvetia of the good old days.

Gstaad A couple of columns ago I wrote about an incident that took place at the Eagle Club here in Gstaad. I indicated that if cowardice prevailed, I would go into detail (and I’ve had two weeks to think about those details). Well, cowardice did prevail, but although the Eagle has not lived up to the requirements of a club, what happens in a club stays in a club. I need to live up to the standards of someone who joined 60 years ago and generously contributed to it financially when it was floundering and about to go under. As I wrote a fortnight ago, the mix of gentlemen and low lifes is a toxic one. The latter are bound to step out of line and revert to type. Like throwing a punch from behind having misinterpreted a joke, or lying about what had taken place beforehand.

Gstaad  What I miss most up here in the Alps are the literary lunches conducted on the fly with writers like Bill Buckley, Alistair Horne, Natacha Stewart, occasionally Dmitri Nabokov and, yes, movie star and memoirist par excellence David Niven. This was back in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, during the winter months and in between ski runs. Bill would ring early in the morning and suggest a run somewhere, then he’d pick an inn in the vicinity where we’d meet David and Natacha, two non-skiers, and that was that. Buckley always referred to me as Führer — once on the slopes, of course — as I would go down first, followed by him and Alistair Horne, the two not always steady on their skis, and at times more out of than in control.

After the heat in Greece, the Alps are cool and green and very comfortable. My sensei Richard Amos is over here and we squeezed two weeks of intensive karate training into three days. Nothing makes me feel better than the sense of total exhaustion after a hard day’s fighting. We do kihon, kata, and then we let fly in kumite. Except that recently I’ve caught him diving, as they call it in the ugly game. Fight like a man, I say, through gritted teeth. He picks up the tempo but my suspicions remain. The sensei (teacher) is taking it easy on the sempai (senior). I hate it but it’s the way of our world, the best one there is, the world of martial arts and of the bushido spirit.

 Gstaad It’s my last week in the Alps, and the snow is gone, replaced by brilliant sunshine. Silence reigns, broken only by the occasional clear, sharp wind. The town is now empty and clean, and the air bracing. I love the village out of season, when the shoppers have finally gone and the locals are preparing to release the cows into the mountains. Training at altitude will make it easy to go at it hard once I am back in the city — at least for a week or two. There is nothing like a three-month Alpine break for the old ticker. Dinner parties out of season are very gay affairs between old friends. Vivien Duffield gave one last week that could have been written by a Hollywood scriptwriter.

Gstaad Back in the good old days a funicular used to take skiers up, bucking all the way and stopping from time to time when the snowdrifts across the track got too deep. We used to wax our skis at every opportunity, deposit them in the baggage car, and ride the outdoor car. Most of us had a flask with good stuff in it, and once on top we’d push our laced-up boots into the toe irons and clamp them shut. We’d then wrap the long leather straps of the skis tightly around the boot, and presto, we’d be ready to ski. Skiing back then was an adventure, not just something to say you’d done. You had to put on lots of pullovers to ward off the cold, and top them off with a bulky ski jacket.

 Gstaad The snows came tumbling down just as the camel-drivers headed back to the Gulf. In fact, they never saw the white outdoor stuff. And a good thing it was, too. The outdoor stuff makes everything look so pretty that the glitzy types might have been tempted to return. God forbid. Let them stick to the indoor white stuff. The problem with Gstaad is the local council. They remind me of the EU: they’re intransigent, short-sighted and stick to a losing game. In Brussels they keep passing more and more laws and regulations. In Gstaad, they keep putting up their prices and building more and more apartments. As a gentleman with a close association to The Spectator told me, ‘My son doesn’t come here because there are no young women around.

Gstaad  New Year’s Eve was a Rhapsody in Blue, with a clarinet glissando that promised joys to come, and the Gershwin downbeat not registering until 6 a.m. The hangover was, of course, Karamazovian, but who the hell cares. I am finally solid again, and even the flu I caught on the trip over is on its last legs, lingering and as annoying as EU regulations, but no longer to be taken seriously. I had lots of close friends for dinner, but the new chalet was packed by the time I began slurring. Mind you, it’s during dreamlike moments such as those between midnight and dawn that wisdom strikes: there is something very wrong with people’s values around these parts.

‘Come up, slow down’ is the official slogan for Gstaad, but they seem to have forgotten one last important phrase — ‘and blow some serious cash.’ For most visitors, money is no object. But Gstaad is making an effort to attract people with less giant budgets. While chalet owners such as Madonna give the resort its showy reputation, there is another side to it — a sleepy Swiss village where the cows outnumber people. Gstaad is picture-postcard pretty. In the village centre you’ll often see a horsedrawn carriage jing-ling around the streets. An old Bernese mountain dog named Nico rides in the passenger seat. And while the streets are lined with high-end designers, the sweet wooden chalets which house them are pure alpine charm.

New York Back in the Big Bagel once again preparing for the greatest debate ever, one that will decide the fate of the western world once and for all. In the meantime, the mother of my children is doing all the heavy lifting back in Gstaad, moving to my last address ever, that of my new farm, La Renarde. One of those American feminists remonstrated with me not long ago for making some chauvinist remark — on purpose, I might add —just to get her goat. My, my, how easy it has become to get that goat. In a 1939 film, Dodge City, Errol Flynn plays a Kansas marshal circa 1872 who visits a local newspaper and sees the virginal and sweet Olivia de Havilland writing away at her desk.

From my bedroom window I can see a little girl with blonde pigtails riding her bicycle round and round for hours on end. She’s German, looks ten years old and lives nearby. Next month I am finally moving to my new home, a beauty built from scratch amid farmland. Cows, deer, the odd donkey graze nearby, a far better bunch than the one Gstaad attracts nowadays. I am, however, king of the mountain. My place is the highest chalet on the Wispille, one of the three mountains that dominate the Mecca of the nouveaux-riche and the wannabee. Life is swell, as long as the old ticker keeps ticking. An approaching birthday tells me that it’s time to take stock, do something of consequence, begin taking life seriously at last.

   Gstaad Going up on a chairlift with the town’s doctor, I asked him, ‘How’s business, doc?’ ‘Never better,’ said the kind medical man. It seems the richer we get the more medical help is needed. ‘I get calls 24/7 for all sorts of ailment relief, especially coughs and colds,’ said Dr Mueller. ‘Rosey students, as opposed to local kids, are the most demanding.’ I’m not surprised. Le Rosey has the highest fees of any place of learning — anywhere — so it’s hardly surprising that some of the little monsters think a cold or a cough is something money can do away with in a jiffy. When my boy was there he suffered from a sleeping disease. He would feign sleep as soon as classes began.

Gstaad War and Peace has been in the news lately, so what was it that Leo wrote about all happy families being alike? Tolstoy came to mind last week right here in Gstaad, when I encountered probably the worst-looking family I’ve had the bad luck to run into in the past 79 years. I wonder if Count Tolstoy ever considered writing a saga about how ugly families are all different in their ugliness. It was early evening and I walked into the Posthotel, where Papa Hemingway once stayed while researching A Farewell to Arms. (He climbed daily on skins and schussed down after fortifying himself with glühwein.) Hemingway, alas, was not around, but a family that was obviously from the Gulf was. To call it a freak show would be too charitable.

OK sports fans, what do Dame Vivien Duffield and Evelyn Waugh have in common? The answer is absolutely nothing, so why start 2016 with such a dumb question? Waugh was short and round and so is Vivien, but apart from weight and height there are no similarities. So why ask? Easy. I was reading about a dinner party Waugh gave for Clare Luce in November 1949 at the Hyde Park Hotel. He later wrote to Nancy Mitford complaining how much money the dinner had cost him, and how Clare — in my not so humble opinion the greatest woman of the 20th century — had failed to write a thank-you note. Waugh was a hell of a writer but a pretty piss-poor human being. He was petty, a closeted tortured gay with seven children.

I have finally moved into my new flat, a jewel of a place in a pre-first world war Park Avenue building. The finishing touches won’t be made until Christmas 2016, as work is only permitted during the two summer months. That is the way it should be. The past three years have been agony for me. I’ve been living in an apartment that shook all day while Jeff Koons, a so-called artist, was putting up a behemoth in the shape of a house directly behind me. Worse, a Russian oligarch, who had hired dodgy construction workers to tear down and rebuild a monument to his thievery, had them ignore night-time regulations, which made sleep impossible. I had sold my brownstone when my children chose to live in Europe and my household staff announced the stairs were too many and too steep.

It’s a famous quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald, one that Elton John should ponder (when he’s not out shopping, that is): ‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.’ Mind you, Elton John is a hysterical, spoilt, ugly fat man who thinks his opinions count. (Perhaps they do with non-talents such as Liz Hurley and Victoria Beckham.) I now know who Dolce & Gabbana are because of the row over children conceived by IVF and surrogacy, and they seem like nice billionaires, except they threw in the towel right away and apologised.

Gstaad A naked, very good-looking young man skied down the mountain evoking shrieks of laughter and admiration from the hundred or so skiers lining the slopes. He turned out to be J.T., my son, and it was an act of protest against the mind-numbing conversation about titles among some at the Eagle club. A friend had skied ahead and was waiting for him at the bottom with a blanket. Needless to say, it became the subject du jour, and someone even filmed young women cheering the streaking skier as he shussed his way down at record speed. His naked run to glory succeeded in getting the subject changed up at the club. Talk about titles is a no-no, and should be left to NOCDs (not our class, dear). J.T.

Gstaad Once upon a time clergymen saw mountain peaks as natural steeples leading them ever closer to God. Doctors considered mountains the best medicine for tuberculosis, while explorers saw them as rocks never before touched by humans. I thought of those good people while T-barring up the Eggli in way below freezing conditions but in bright sunshine. For some strange reason, whenever I’m really cold I try to think of the German 6th Army trapped in Stalingrad, numbed in body and mind by the cold, while Hitler sat toasty warm back home and ordered them to fight to the death. After that, skiing in subzero weather is easy. Nowadays most skiers wear helmets and ski masks, but at 78 years of age I refuse to look ridiculously like a boy racer — and to hell with safety.

 Gstaad The very end of 2014 laid an egg, and an expensive one at that. I missed David Tang’s bash in London because I thought it too much to fly over for a cocktail party, but my restraint cost me quite a lot. It would have been worth rowing across to see Tony Blair schmoozing my old proprietor Lord Black. Two more wrong choices followed: I skipped Jemima Goldsmith’s party as well as her brother Ben’s wedding for a shindig of my own —one that turned out to be a bust. None of my gels turned up, but a lot of strangers did, and, to add insult to hurt feelings, a waiter told me at 3.30 a.m. that it was time to wrap it up. The party invitation read from 10.30 until dawn. He must have been on a different time zone and I told him so.