Taki

Rome To the Eternal City for the saddest of occasions, the funeral of the mother of Taki, 17, and Maria, 15, two of my four grandchildren. Assia was of noble birth and met my son John Taki at the Rosey school in Switzerland, where they both studied skiing and other such useful pursuits. They had a grand wedding at her ancestral home near Rome, and went off on their honeymoon on my boat with 12 of their friends. After the two children were born they separated but remained closer than they ever were while married. She fought for two years the ghastly leukemia that finally killed her at 41 years of age.

‘I was 12 when I first got laid.’ ‘Where was that?’ ‘In Middlesbrough.’ ‘How the hell did you get lucky at 12 in Middlesbrough, when I only managed it at 15 and on my father’s boat off Cannes in 1952?’ ‘It was a dark and stormy night.’ This was no tortured confession by some doomed poet or gender-confused feminist, just party banter between the great Rod Liddle – who went Bulwer-Lytton on me – and the poor little Greek boy. The setting: the Old Queen Street garden where The Spectator is located and where we celebrated the sainted editor’s 50th birthday. Before I get to that, though, what is it about Middlesbrough? Is it the water, the climate or the girls that helped Rod lose his virginity so early?

Southampton, Long Island ‘Why, oh why, do the wrong people travel?’ sang Noël Coward back in the early 1960s. Lucky Sir Noël, he never met the present bunch. Just as the Bolsheviks deemed the aristocracy and the intelligentsia to be enemies of the people back in 1917, good manners and conservative dress are viewed today – at least in the Bagel – as false and affected. But I’m getting away from the subject at hand. I just bought Masquerade, a doorstopper biography of Sir Noël, but I remember the song from way back, before the one time I met him. It was 21 June 1969, in Vevey, Switzerland, and Charlie Chaplin’s daughter Josephine was getting married to a Greek friend of mine, Nicky Sistovaris.

Southampton, Long Island They’ve honed the skill of attracting attention by building some of the largest and ugliest houses this side of the Russian-owned Riviera ones, yet the luminous little village still retains signs of a bygone civilised era. A few grand houses built a long time ago are proof that not all Americans are nouveaux-riches, and some even have good taste in decoration – you know the kind: wicker chairs, yellow and white umbrellas, and long green lawns. I used to own a house like that, with swimming pool, tennis court and a cellar full of wine, but I sold it because of its proximity to a relative of mine. My daughter was heartbroken at the sale, especially after I bought a large piece of land in northern Connecticut and made plans to build a Yankee palace.

New York He’s oilier than Molière’s Tartuffe but gets away with more. His latest move involves the martial art of jiu-jitsu, where he managed to get a referee to reverse his decision. I’ve been competing in martial arts for close to 60 years now, and have rarely, in fact never, witnessed a ref reverse his or her decision. But I’m no bad loser like Zuckerberg. Some of you old-timers may even remember something called fair play. Bad calls are inevitable in sport, and one is used to taking the bad ones with the good ones because in the end they all even out. Facebook’s honcho ended up a multibillionaire under a bit of a cloud, accused of having stolen the idea from twin brothers who could not have been overly smart to trust him in the first place. Never mind.

He bore his death sentence more gracefully than most heroes I’ve read about. As the end approached, his columns showed no self-pity or regrets. Meticulous detail was Jeremy’s forte, and atmosphere. Oh, how I envied his ability to convey the mood of a place, the setting that he was writing about. He could replicate a conversation in a pub as if he had recorded it, and it never once sounded made up.  He was the patron saint of the poor but happy. Unlike his predecessor Jeffrey Bernard, who weekly lamented about being broke and ill, Jeremy was the exact opposite, describing his cancer towards the end like a disinterested scientist quoting from a medical case.

New York At a chic dinner party for some very beautiful women, your correspondent shocked the attendees by quoting an even greater writer than the greatest Greek writer since Homer – Rod Liddle – and his definition of why royalty matters: because it is ‘anachronistic and undemocratic’. Hear, Hear! A particularly attractive guest, Alissa – on a par with Lily James – took me aside and asked me if I really believed what the greatest writer ever, Rod Liddle, had written and I had just quoted. She also asked whom I had in mind as the greatest Greek writer since Homer, and I answered: ‘Moi.’ I then sat down and patiently if not too articulately, owing to a large intake of vodka, explained: God is also an anachronism, but I believe in him as do billions of others.

New York Tennessee Williams wrote Baby Doll with her in mind, and she was considered the sexiest blonde bombshell ever, much sexier than Jean Harlow, whom she portrayed on film. She was great in The Carpetbaggers, The Great Divide, Harlow, Giant and countless other 1950s, ’60s and ’70s hits. Carroll Baker is 91, still very much compos corpus and without make-up; a lively dinner companion who Michael Mailer and I took out to dinner last week. No, they don’t make them like her any more – except for Lily James and Keira Knightley. I sat next to her in an Italian outdoor restaurant, ordered some good wine and the three of us downed two bottles in no time.

New York The concept of creativity and invention can be a doubled-edged sword. It can be fresh, uplifting and original, like the off-Broadway play directed by Michael Mailer that I’ve just seen, or it can be a phoney rip-off of a Shakespeare classic, a terrible modern take on Hamlet, blackness and homosexuality that I have not seen and do not plan to. What makes me laugh is the reviewer at the Bagel Times who gave a good one to the latter, Fat Ham, as objective a judgment as, say, an appraisal of Mao’s Little Red Book would have been in a Beijing daily circa 1964. Favouring the message over the fun is in vogue nowadays, but Michael’s Darkness of Light: Confessions of a Russian Traveler eschews the norm, and takes flight.

New York The most likely place to be injured, or even killed, in the Bagel is the sidewalk, any sidewalk, where bikes and scooters have free rein to mow down the old, the infirm, and those unable to perform life-saving, matador-like avoidance moves. Yep, marauding bikers use the sidewalks of New York to beat the traffic and intimidate people, and have managed to impose their illegal presence there as a beleaguered police force turn a blind eye. It all started under the last mayor of the Bagel, one so bad that I dare not mention his name in the elegant pages of The Speccie. And it continues – but even more so – under the present mayor, a nice but incompetent ex-cop.

New York The fact that a sailor on leave cannot whistle at a pretty girl’s legs is scientific proof that America is beyond help and finished for good. That also goes for hard hats, who along with sailors were among the whistlers back in the good old days before woke ruined men, women and the country in general. Already radical activists have destroyed the notion of womanhood as well as that of biology by using words such as ‘cis’ and expressions like ‘gender assigned at birth’. All women athletes want is to compete against one another. Is it too much to ask? The castrating atmosphere that prevails over here does not bode well for the coming China challenge.

New York Just as I finished complaining last week about the inability of Americans to string together a complete sentence, I realised that they make up for it by being the worst dressed people this side of Ukraine. J. Crew has been in the news lately because the company has changed hands, with hacks waxing nostalgically about preppy style and all that 1960s stuff. All I can say is: how can they tell? Hacks wouldn’t know what style is. They thought that Gianni Agnelli’s unbuttoned button-down shirt was the result of carelessness. The last American newsman with style was Joe Alsop, now long gone, a cousin of Roosevelt and a DC insider who, unlike the motley group of grifters and wokesters assembled by the Bagel Times, was born a gent.

New York Is it poor little ol’ me imagining things, or are Americans becoming stupider by the minute? I’ve been travelling and running into the species, and I swear that the most intelligent thing I’ve heard recently from a New Yorker is: ‘Like, you know, like uh, you know, uh, like uh…’ This particular moron was talking in a loud voice and didn’t give the impression of having been hit rather hard over the head with a baseball bat. There he was, just another inarticulate and tongue-tied youngster showing signs of early-onset dementia brought on by watching too much television. Once upon a time, American ‘exceptionalism’ drove the New World’s ascendancy in a number of fields, including the arts. So what happened?

Never paraphrasing the classics was a given until woke sensibilities became a must. This was brought to mind by the BBC’s adaptation of Great Expectations, in which the convict Magwitch knocks the Empire and Miss Havisham takes opium on the side. What they should have done is have Pip hustling coke for a fellow convict of Magwitch named Escobarian, bringing it daily to the addicted old lady, and Estella sniffing – no pun intended – out the plot and giving young Pip hell. Never mind. Woke rules supreme, and because of that the scope for future reworkings of the classics seems unlimited. Let’s start at the beginning, with Homer’s Trojan War. No more tired old Menelaus and Helen, and Paris and stuffy chief Agamemnon.

Gstaad As everyone knows, the balder, shorter and more repellent the seducer, the more lavish the lunch he produces for the dumb blonde. Lunch is that symptom of decadence and dalliance for which there is no longer room in today’s functional world. These days, a rare civilised lunch has only two purposes: the seduction of a lady or the exchange of serious ideas. The latter was achieved last week at an outdoor lunch with impeccable service and views of snow-capped mountaintops. My friends John and Irina Mappin chose a fresh day and civilised surroundings to discuss Ukraine and introduce me to a 26-year-old blonde, blue-eyed beauty, an AFAB, as we woke folk call a person with a cervix.

Gstaad Tom Sizemore, the American character actor who recently died near-penniless at 61, was one hell of a thespian. In films such as Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down and Heat, he played tough soldiers and gangsters whose actions obscured a soft heart. Acting is not mugging à la Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino. It’s conveying things subliminally, which is what Sizemore did. I never met him but he once rang me from LA with a question. It was back in the mid-1990s, the Cadogan Square days, and I had had a late one. The telephone rang at about 6 a.m. and an American voice came on. ‘Taki, this is Tom Sizemore.’ ‘Good morning, Mr Sizemore. Do you know what time it is?’ ‘Ah, it’s around ten in the evening.

Gstaad The man in the white suit is not exactly a matinee idol around these parts. The mauvaises langues have it that the rich fear him more than the poor because they have more to lose. I’m not so sure, although it does make sense. This was not the case in the past: Spartan kings were in the first line of battle, unflinchingly eager to show their troops how to die. Samurais worshipped a heroic death, shunned opulence, but were employed by very rich patrons who answered to all their needs. It was a symptom of the times. Teutonic knights, those of the Round Table, and officers during the Napoleonic wars all had a lot to lose but fought bravely and to the death. I could go on about the scions of rich gentry who led attacks for both sides in the first world war.

Gstaad OK, sports fans, it’s time to spill the beans. Some time last year, I wrote about rich man’s kick-boxing, the art of punching and kicking at someone holding up pads. It’s the best conditioner I know if done correctly and non-stop. I also call it the most Christian of sports because there’s a lot of giving it out and receiving nothing in return. It goes something like this: left jab, right cross, then another left jab and right cross, then left front kick followed by right roundhouse kick, then left front kick again, followed by right roundhouse kick, and then the whole thing all over again. It takes about one minute to complete ten cycles. Which means one’s thrown about 40 punches and about the same amount of kicks.

Gstaad Some are whispering that it was the biggest haul since the Brink’s-Mat gold bullion robbery of 1983. Others say that compared with the Graff swag of last week, the Great Train Robbery was a mere bagatelle. Nobody knows nuthin, and while the fuzz are keeping schtum, the on dit is that it was the greatest robbery since the Louisiana Purchase, the trouble being that those who say such things think the Louisiana Purchase is a handbag sold by Dior. One thing I love about the Swiss is the reluctance of the police to give out any information to nosy journalists, thus keeping their own embarrassment to a minimum and the criminals off balance. When I called the local fuzz and asked about the Graff robbery, the answer was predictable: ‘What robbery?

Gstaad Attendees listened intently and cheered her to the rafters. She got a cool million for a one-hour appearance, which is more than Boris or Blair could ever hope for. And it wasn’t even her speciality – she’s an ecdysiast – but Kim Kardashian was the star speaker at the recent Miami Hedge Fund Week. That tells me all I want to know about hedge fund managers, and I had a good teacher long ago, one John Bryan of toe-sucking fame. Luckily, my father was still alive back then, and after my less than profitable experience with Bryan, old dad put his foot down. ‘I have a drawer full of mouldering proposals from financial advisers on how to become richer,’ he told me. ‘Stop looking for short cuts and try being a ship owner.