Taki

Does absence make the heart grow fonder? I’m not so sure. I’ve been away from London for one year, and was dreading the return. The grey sky, the Dickensian streets, the fat-bellied lager louts, the knife culture, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson, the coarsest of the coarse Alan Sugar in the House of Lords: a good place to miss, I told myself. Well, it didn’t last long, my dread of the return. Nicky Haslam in cabaret was a real treat, and Lord Charles Churchill’s idea to turn Nicky into a Cole Porter performer at Bellamy’s was an inspired one. John Standing singing Noël Coward was as brilliant as it gets, and Nicky Haslam crooning Cole Porter was first class.

On board S/Y Bushido, off Ibiza As everyone who has followed the America’s Cup fiasco knows, it is now up to international courts to decide who shall defend what and where. The egregious Swiss billionaire Ernesto Bertarelli is the holder, and has been sued by Larry Ellison, an American sick-making, money-grubbing billionaire, whose stink pot, Rising Sun, has to be among the world’s ugliest gin palaces. Hence when word got out that the Pug’s Club regatta was to take place off the island of Ibiza last weekend, thousands of Spaniards swelled the beaches in the hope of seeing real sailing boats fight it out at sea, rather than in some dreary courtroom in San Francisco or Geneva.

Sindelfingen Sindelfingen is a suburb of Stuttgart, and is known as the German Detroit, except that Sindelfingen is a vibrantly green and leafy town of 60,000 people, half of whom are employed by Mercedes, whereas Detroit is a dying, crime-ridden city of burnt-out blocks and empty lots, where angels fear to tread in case they’re mugged and their wings ripped off and sold to second-hand repair dumps. Sindelfingen was founded in 1263, when both judo and I were in our infancy. Last week I flew in from the Bagel for the world championships held in the ‘Glaspalast’ from 28 to 31 May. If last year’s championships were a success with 29 countries competing in Brussels, this year was a triumph for the Fatherland, as 50 nations sent in teams comprising 1,000 competitors.

Fifty-four years ago this month, dizzy with happiness at having been freed from the jail that was boarding school, I ventured down New York’s 5th Avenue looking for fun and adventure. I knew a place called ‘El Borracho’, Spanish for drunkard, where my parents used to dine. The owner was an agreeable Catalan, who had decorated the walls with paper smudged with lipstick. Whenever he’d spot a client who was beautiful, he’d ask her to leave an imprint of her lips on a square piece of paper, which would end up on his walls. This had caught on, and women — everyone wore red lipstick back then — whose lips adorned his walls, were among his best customers.

New York This being my last week in the Bagel, the butterflies have arrived with a vengeance. Stuttgart, I am told, will be no picnic. Two top judokas, one Japanese, the other German, are in my age group, which I find quite ironic. My boat is named Bushido — the way of the Samurai warrior — and my admiration for the Wehrmacht’s fighting qualities and spirit is no secret. The greatest fighting unit ever — and I include the Spartans, and the US Marines — was Rommel’s 25th Panzer Regiment of the 7th Panzer Division. I only hope the father of the German I will meet in Stuttgart was not a member. If he was, goodbye title. I can’t remember having spent a more pleasant two months than these past two.

New York Not that I had any doubts about how pig-headed, stubborn and ungrateful George W. Bush is, but confirmation of it never hurts. A friend of long standing revealed to me how Brian Mulroney, the ex-prime minister of Canada, and Tony Blair both went to see W in order to plead Conrad Black’s case during the closing days of the Bush presidency. The two men went separately, and neither asked for a Black pardon. They were after a commutation of Lord Black’s outrageous and unfair sentence of six years in a tough prison.

New York We had a preview of sultry August here last week, with temperatures going as far up as 93° Fahrenheit in Central Park, filled to the brim by girls in their summer dresses, and others less modest in their tiny bikinis. For some strange reason, one doesn’t notice men in their summer best, not that men dress nowadays for a walk among the magnolias and cherry blossom. Summer is etched in my psyche as the time for girls. The acrid tang of heat emanating from the sidewalks, the breezes of late afternoon, the whiff of perfume of a passing beauty all help. Summertime was a dress rehearsal of coming manhood, the realisation that sooner or later one would fall desperately in love and lie drugged with pleasure on the grass with the girl of one’s dreams.

The hardest thing in the world for an athlete is to get out of bed in the morning. Show me a man who jumps out of bed and I’ll show you someone who has never trained for top competition. It’s the brutal preparation that makes one flinch when taking the morning’s first heavy, unsteady steps toward the bathroom. Yes, it’s that time of year again, and this time it’s Stuttgart, a town known for its terrific automobiles, as the safest city in Germany, and its proximity to Erwin Rommel’s birthplace. Mind you, I don’t know how safe it will be for the poor little Greek boy this time around. I will be there at the end of May, defending my world judo (70 and over) title, but they say third time is unlucky, or is it the other way round?

New York A recent profile in a glossy described him as a member of the Wall Street aristocracy, a man to whose parties the rich and powerful trip over themselves to attend, a networker nonpareil — in short, the greatest big hitter who has ever graced this poor earth of ours. Leave it to an American glossy to out-Tatler Tatler, and get it just as wrong. His name is Steve Rattner, and he looks like a rodent, except that he wears glasses. He is a shifty-looking little balding man, who is to Wall Street aristocracy what Paris Hilton is to discretion. He is Obama’s chief adviser in dealing with Detroit, the car tsar, in fact. It was at a dinner and I was seated at the same table as the Rat and Mrs Rat, a woman who calls herself Maureen White, socialite.

New York I crossed the river last week and went into the heart of darkness. Unlike Conrad’s hero, it took me about 15 minutes by train, and there I was, right in the midst of a city bloated with squalor, oily storefronts, dilapidated tenements, vacant courtyards, and trash-strewn lots. I was the only white man in the station as I watched the arrest of a black hobo by two humongous black police officers. As the hobo was being led away, he screamed at me, ‘Give me a hundred dollars,’ and then broke up in hysterical, drunken laughter. It was three in the afternoon, and I had gone to Newark to watch my judo coach, Teimoc, compete in a ju-jitsu tournament, one from which he emerged a winner. Walking up towards the site where the competition took place was an experience.

New York ‘Lock up your daughters! Is the world ready for Taki Jr?’ This was the New York Observer headline, followed by: ‘Meet the only son of the world’s naughtiest Greek playboy’. Under any other circumstances, I’d be blushing — who the hell wants to be called a playboy aged 72 — but when it comes to JT, or my daughter Lolly, the old boy will welcome anything, and smile about it to boot. The NY Observer, a pink weekly, has been around for close to 30 years, and Peter Kaplan, the long-time editor, has done a grand job in a very difficult undertaking. Noo Yawkers have no time to read, and, when they do, their attention span is that of a popinjay.

New York Ah, finally in New York, the city of superlatives, as they say, the most diverse metropolis ever. I suppose no one has ever said it better than Jan Morris in her luminous Manhattan ’45, a title the author chose because it sounds ‘partly like a kind of gun, and partly like champagne’. Here she is right off the bat, in her prologue: ‘Untouched by the war the men had left behind them, they stood there metal-clad, steel-ribbed, glass-shrouded, colossal and romantic — everything that America seemed to represent in a world of loss and ruin.’ Morris is writing about the returning Yankee soldiers encountering the Manhattan skyline from their ships steaming into New York harbour.

So, one more winter season is kaput, the best snow conditions in 50 years gone the way of all things. Like the song says, referring to a girl, every time I say goodbye to the Alps, or to the Med six months later, I die a little. Mind you, the sea is feminine, especially in her rages, but the mountains are as masculine as they come, majestic, dangerous and permanent. This has been the Madoff season, and I didn’t make any new friends by naming names and expressing certain opinions about them. How strange people are. They take innocents down the Swanee and then howl that they’re being hard done by. Too bad. I read somewhere that Madoff was fond of Savile Row suits, expensive watches and very large houses in Palm Beach, on the Côte d’Azur and in the Hamptons.

Gstaad It’s past midway in March and the slopes still don’t have that used-up look which comes by the end of February. No gritty slush, just beautiful pure powder tracked only by furry things such as foxes and deer. While out cross-country skiing, I feel elated by animal tracks next to my own, a great silence enveloping the bowl where I’m skiing, without a human in sight. It could be Russia, with giant pines lining my path, the river slapping on the ice along the edges. Yet it’s only Lauenen, seven klicks from the glitz of Gstaad. The lake is above me, and it goads me uphill, climbing on my arms, as one’s supposed to do on cross-country skis. Once on top I rejoice and regret. Going up separates the men from the tourists.

Gstaad I stood outside the hotel lobby watching the snow blanket the parking lot, turning it into an almost pretty sight. I had been playing backgammon inside with a large and rowdy cast of characters, some of whom, like Floki Busson, mother of Arpad, and Leonida Goulandris, are veterans of the great games of the past. Others are of more recent vintage, like John Sutin, who read about the 300 Spartans long ago and applies their theory of no surrender to the game. Having watched Sutin accept a double that even Hitler in the closing days would have dropped, I went outside for a breath of air when the caravan arrived. Five long cars filled to the brim with flunkeys born under a bluer sky than that of northern Europe.

Gstaad Thirty years ago this week my daughter was three and my son had not been born. I had left Gstaad for gloomy, strike-ridden, non-stop power cuts London, and the mother of my children was peeved at me as I had begun circling the daughter of the Belgian ambassador to the Court of St James. The Speccie was selling 7,000 copies, the New Statesman 70,000, and Jim Callaghan was asking the press what crisis they were banging on about. Oh yes, Jeffrey Bernard’s column followed mine and it was called ‘End Piece’. An appropriate name for England’s oldest and most elegantly written magazine, as it looked like curtains as far as the country was concerned. Then Margaret Thatcher happened and most of you know the rest.

Gstaad Nicola Anouilh is the only son of the great French playwright Jean Anouilh — more than 70 plays, including Antigone, Becket and La Sauvage — and a close friend since Paris in the Sixties. He was of a generation just below mine, one that managed to get into Jimmy’s only during the events of May 1968, when the French bourgeoisie ran off to the south, some of their places on the banquette taken by François de Caraman, my brother-in-law, Peter Bemberg, heir to an old and vast Argentine fortune, Nicola Anouilh, and Vladimir, a Russian boy whom we rechristened Prince Touchepine, a play on words for touching one’s willy.

All’s fair Gstaad At Easter 1215, a young Tuscan married woman innocently flirted in public with a man not her husband. He flirted back just as innocently, and then things got out of hand. A vendetta was declared between Guelf and Gibel, two rival brothers of Pistoia, that resulted in extreme violence, the splitting of Guelf factions into Whites and Blacks with ensuing massacres, 1,400 houses in the middle of Florence burnt, and a feud that brought out every long-simmering antagonism from politics, to money, to envy which lasted far longer than if the flirtation had not been as innocent as it was. Guelfs and Ghibellines came to mind as the historian walked into my chalet accompanied by our chairman Andrew Neil, and two other beauties, Charlotte and Naomi.

Gstaad Last week I ventured down to Geneva for a meeting with my banker, a gentleman of the old school who did not get carried away by Bernie Madoff’s siren songs. To the contrary, he went as far as Odysseus, tied himself to his desk and plugged up the ears of his underlings. Metaphorically, that is. He had some interesting things to say. The mega-crook and fraudster never met suckers in person, except for those — mostly Jewish — friends of his in Palm Beach and in the Big Bagel. Europeans and Latin Americans were handled by his feeder fund managers, around 150 known ones, and, according to my banker, perhaps as many as 200 more unknown ones. That’s around 300 feeder funds working in secret to provide funds for a man whose name is already an adjective.