Taki

Introductions Scene: a drawing room in London. When the recording starts, Taki is already mid-anecdote… Taki: … I was sent out to Monte Carlo to speak to Roger Moore. The Spectator offered to pay all my expenses. I said thank you, I’ll pay my own. I went and had a terrific drunken dinner with Roger who really spilled the beans, cos we were buddies. I came back. The tape was empty because I’d never turned the recorder on. Joan: I’d known Roger since I was 15, because my father was a big agent in London and I came back from school — oh, 14 actually, because I left school at 15 — and there’s the most gorgeous man I’ve ever seen standing there. He came over and said: ‘How do you do?

Harvey Weinstein was a very sought after dinner guest back in the days before he was a convicted rapist. Mind you, he and I started out as mortal enemies, over a woman, needless to say. I won the first skirmish although I didn’t know it at the time. (The lady went home with me and Harvey badmouthed me to her.) Once I found that out I wrote in my New York Post column of the time that Weinstein was an enemy of good manners and good tailoring. He found it funny and approached me at a party I was giving with Michael Mailer in a downtown New York tavern. As he was known as a brawler, I stood up and got ready to rumble. But it was not to be. He graciously put out his hand and told me in front of witnesses that I had never done him any harm and that he wanted to be friends.

As he left the editorship of The Spectator in March 1984, Alexander Chancellor wrote in this space: ‘When I joined the paper as editor in 1975, people were in the habit of asking me what my “policy” was going to be… How desperately uneasy this question made me. If there was a lavatory in the vicinity, I would lock myself inside it. I was sure I ought to have a “policy”… but I most certainly hadn’t got one.’ As his assistant editor, I witnessed the dismay on the faces of proprietors, advertisers and various big shots at Alexander’s answers to this sort of question.

I stood in front of the mirror in the £61-a-night hotel room in Paddington, buttoned my polyester dinner jacket and straightened my bow tie. The last time I’d worn a dinner jacket was nearly three years earlier, I remembered, at the Cigar Smoker of the Year. What a night that was. I dug through the pockets in case there was any MDMA still hanging about. I found a dog-end and a 100mg tablet of Indian-made Viagra. I took a selfie in the mirror, picked up the gift-wrapped birthday present and card, switched off the studio-quality strip light, and closed the door behind me. As I tripped down the front steps of the hotel into the velvet September evening, headed for Taki’s 80th birthday party at Loulou’s, life felt pretty good. ‘Fancy a nice time, dearie?

The staples of my daily alcohol consumption on the cruise were champagne, gin, red wine and Polish vodka. One morning I woke up in my cabin more hungover than usual, also depressed. Turning my head to the side and looking through the gap in the curtains I saw that we were no longer at sea but docked in yet another Mediterranean island port with barren sun-bleached hills above and beyond. Reaching for my daily news-sheet, delivered to the cabin the night before, I read that what I was looking at this morning was Heraklion in Crete. Further reading informed me that if I returned to the ship from the shore excursion early I could go to the ‘Walk-in wrinkle solution’ on deck 9 at 2 p.m. Turning next to the Spectator cruise itinerary pamphlet, I read that, at 3 p.m.

Ok, so first things first. Jeremy Clarke didn’t fall overboard after all. He did, though, dance all night every night (almost), have everyone in stitches and host a rip-roaring High Life vs Low Life pub quiz. He even wore a fez with unexpected aplomb. Taki forwent the delights of his own High Life to join ours. He was exceedingly generous to his dining companions with his wine choices, and had us enthralled with his insider tales of Spectator days gone by and libel actions lost (mainly) and won (occasionally).

There is something repulsive about the sea, especially when seen from the altitude of the upper decks of a monstrous floating pleasure palace where all intimacy with it, including the sound and the smell, is lost. On the inaugural Spectator Mediterranean cruise I paid attention to the sea but rarely, and usually when speed walking along one of the upper decks in a dinner jacket and bow tie, and late for something, and wondering where the hell I was supposed to be going. Then my stare would stray over the guard rail to the barren wastes of glacial blue flecked with white stretching away as far as the eye could see, like some dreary desert seen from an aeroplane. On some deeper level the sight horrified me, and I’d count the days until I could get off this infernal thing for good.

Last Saturday afternoon, in Venice, 31 Spectator readers, plus Martin Vander Weyer, the great Taki and I came aboard the Cunard cruise ship Queen Victoria for the inaugural Spectator Mediterranean cruise. The first chance we had to get to know one another was a pre-dinner drinks party in Hemispheres, the ship’s nightclub. I was late, and apprehensive about how things would go. The ship’s commodore, a lonely, courtly figure encased in a starched white uniform, was there in the Spectator readers’ midst offering his right hand to anyone who wanted it. I removed a flute of champagne from the offered silver tray and plunged in. The first reader I spoke to said, ‘My name is Fanny and I am bisexual so there’s hope for you yet.

Some years ago, Taki and Jeffrey Bernard each wrote the other's obituary. When Jeffrey died on 4 September 1997, The Spectator published Taki's version. Radio 4 are today broadcasting Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, and so it seemed a good time to revisit the piece:  In real life Jeffrey Bernard was much the same as he was in print. He was dyspeptic but almost always lightened the atmosphere with a flash of humour and the de rigueur four-letter word. He had a wintry smile and was a master of the unkind remark. People who are always trying to be funny rarely are. Jeff never gave the impression he was trying, and invariable always was. His so-called cruel streak is well known.