Taki

Gstaad A single plug by Sir Roger Moore late last year has turned me into a Papa Hemingway-like literary hero. In his Proust questionnaire in Vanity Fair, Sir Roger was asked to list his favourite writers. Poor little me was mentioned among some good ones and, presto, you’d think I’d written The Catcher in the Rye, Tender Is the Night, A Moveable Feast, The Sun Also Rises, as well as The Red and the Black. People I have never heard of have written asking about my style, writing habits, sources of inspiration, even my daily routine. (Do you write standing up like Papa, or in a soundproof room like Proust?

Gstaad If someone bet that The Spectator issue of 10 January outsold or was read by more people than any other weekly — and that includes best selling popular crap like Hello! and OK! — they’d be collecting their winnings as I write. This, of course, in the Bernese Oberland region of Switzerland, where Gstaad lies. I suppose it had to do with something concerning the Madoff gang, most of whom live around these parts, and as of this moment are pretty pissed off with a certain poor little Greek boy. As I had predicted, the gang does not fight but screams and whines a lot. Their women, rather. If a member of the weaker sex insults one, the normal thing to do is to take a swing against her man. But what happens if the man pretends to be constraining the woman?

Gstaad So what’s a few hundred dead Palestinian children when Tzipi and Ehud have gained eight to ten points in the polls? They were terrorist babies, anyway. So what if the Egyptians and Saudis are ignoring them while spending millions on hookers, palaces and yachts? The Gazans don’t deserve such goodies, certainly not palaces on the Riviera. My favourite is Yigal Palmor, an Israeli spokesman, who took umbrage when Cardinal Renato Martino, a high-ranking Vatican official, compared Gaza to a concentration camp. The Israeli whined that second world war imagery was below the belt. I suppose the Cardinal should have called it a beach resort. Oy veh, one can’t trust these Wops, they’re all a bunch of anti-Semites. The best is Tony Blair.

Gstaad When Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet committed suicide just before Christmas, I hoped against hope that others would do the same. No such luck. Villehuchet was an aristocrat, a gentleman and an honest man. He felt responsible for the loss of $1.4 billion and he took the honourable way out. I did not know Villehuchet but people who did have spoken very highly of him. The rest of Madoff’s gang I do know, and they are as likely to do the honourable thing as I am to emigrate to Israel. Most of these friends of Madoff own chalets in Gstaad, or visit regularly. I have warned personnel at the Gstaad Palace, the Yacht Club and the Eagle Club that if I come across any of them there will be fisticuffs. Not that any of them would fight. People like that rarely do.

The year 2008 was like herpes, very hard to get rid of; 2009 will be worse, trust me, as Bernie Madoff used to tell the suckers. This one, incidentally, is not over. The greatest scam ever perpetrated will go on and on. Madoff was not alone, and if the crooks in the SEC who turned a blind eye to his Ponzi scheme are ever forced to come clean, some pretty big names will hopefully end up in striped suits sewing buttons. Madoff scammed small investors, billionaires, hedge fund idiots, charities, pension funds and multinational banks. What is incredible is that his fund was repeatedly brought to the attention of the SEC, and every time he was given a clean bill of health.

Yes, Virginia, Charles Dickens did invent Christmas, at least the Christmas spirit of giving to the poor as well as the presumption and posturing of the rich. As everyone knows, it was 1843 and Dickens had spent his hard-earned cash like an oil-rich camel driver. He was only 31, but he had a large family to feed and felt he was slowly sliding toward oblivion. So he walked the Manchester streets and decided to stop browbeating his readers and return to plain story telling. That’s when A Christmas Carol took shape, and he continued developing it in his mind once back in London. In six weeks he had 30,000 words, and we have had Ignorance and Want, Tiny Tim, Bob Cratchit, Scrooge and Marley ever since.

New York A Brooklyn-born rapper by the name of John Forte had a business idea of sorts about eight years ago. It was one of those get-rich-quickly schemes that, alas, work most of the time, hence the reason so many people are out of it most of the time. He flew to South America, bought a large amount of a liquid substance, stuffed it into an expensive briefcase, and flew into Newark airport with $1.4 million worth of liquid cocaine. He was obviously hoping to make 10 or 20 times the amount once the haul was hardened by experts, cut up by more experts, and then sold to the small-time dealers who would cut it up some more, mix it with laxatives, and eventually sell it to the suckers who buy the stuff in order to clear out their nasal passages.

New York A funny thing happened to me on my way out from a party on 17 November in London. I was temporarily confused until I ran into Naomi Campbell in the Royal Hospital Gardens. She was carrying some packages into her car and offered me a ride. ‘Are you going on to Andrew’s?’ she asked sweetly. ‘Hop in, I’ll take you.’ We chatted away and I reminded her how she had once applied a vice-like grip around my neck when I was about to leave the dance floor and decapitate a poisoned dwarf, who had thrown a missile at me. It was a private party in a private house and the poisoned one had issues about his ex-wife and myself. ‘My God,’ I told Naomi, ‘lucky for me you don’t enter senior judo tournaments for men.

Arletty was a great French star of the silver screen during the Thirties and Forties, but she was also known for a few outspoken apophthegms about having sex with a German officer during the occupation. ‘If you hadn’t let them in, I wouldn’t have slept with him,’ and the better known, ‘My heart is French, but my arse is international.’ Like immortal ancient Greeks such as Socrates, Plato, Taki, Aristophanes and Pericles, Arletty used only one name, but fans knew her as ‘la môme de Courbevoie’, due to her childlike appearance at the start of her career. A new book out in France includes the love letters of Arletty and the young Luftwaffe officer who became the love of her life. When I read a review of it I suddenly froze.

New York Election nights in the Bagel were always spent at 73 East 73rd Street, in Bill and Pat Buckley’s house, more often than not described as palatial by eager-to-please gossip columnists. In reality it was a fine New York maisonette, better suited for entertainment rather than cosy living, the latter reserved for their tiny and warm Connecticut house. Alas, both Bill and Pat are now gone, so I had to fend for myself, liberal and politically minded New Yorkers not eager to entertain someone who found Palin sexy and appreciated McCain’s service to his country.

New York Back in the summer of 1960, a married Hollywood actress and her friend, a Hollywood wife, came to the south of France and met a randy 23-year-old who showed them around the place. The actress was the sexy Janet Leigh, then married to Tony Curtis, and her beautiful friend was Jean Martin, whose hubby was Dean Martin, while the randy one was the poor little Greek boy. We had a very good time boating around the various beaches during the day, dancing in Monte Carlo in the evening, Monaco being not only Russian- and vulgarian-free back then, but also looking like Ruritania-sur-mer rather than Las Vegas-on-the-sea. Both ladies were guests of ambassador Joe Kennedy, whose son Jack would be elected President later that year.

New York America’s diminished intellectualism has made this interminable election period as boring as a Nat Rothschild Corfu party for respectable folk. Part of the problem is that presidential candidates try ‘to reach out to younger voters’, hardly an admirable goal as demographic researchers have gone the way of TV programmers, targeting young morons whose Facebooks comprise 90 per cent of their education. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain have all been forced to make appearances on vile and vulgar TV shows — proof that taking the high ground is as much of a vote-getter as George Osborne’s chances of being invited back to Nat’s Corfu lair. It all started with Bill Clinton — who else?

New York ‘Oligarchs brace for a downturn,’ screams a New York business headline, a fact that sends me rushing to buy hankies, now selling at a premium at every corner store. Bloomberg News calculates that the richest 25 Russians on the Forbes list have lost a collective $230 billion since last March. Which means that these 25 have lost more than four times Warren Buffet’s total wealth. It’s very good news, unless you’re selling private jets, superyachts, are a hooker or a pimp, sell gaudy jewellery or own a nightclub. Actually, it couldn’t happen to nicer guys, not that they’re exactly down and out.

New York Peggy Noonan was a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and is a graceful essayist and good Catholic lady who happens to be a political conservative. I haven’t seen her in years but sometimes we exchange emails. She has written a book about how badly Americans need Patriotic Grace, the title of her opus, and I bought it just as the news of a Catholic archbishop being found strangled on the Brighton Beach boardwalk came in. The killers took his wallet, his cellphone and his shoes. Peggy thinks that Washington is a city run by two rival gangs who have a great deal in common with each other, ‘including an essential lack of interest in the well-being of the turf on which they fight’.

New York The war on terror, as the most inarticulate man ever to inhabit the White House calls it, has now lasted longer than the second world war. And take it from Taki, it’s not going away, not in my lifetime, that’s for sure. Insurgencies have a tendency to wear out their enemy and eventually prevail. Malaya (1948–60) is the only exception (thank you, Col. Thompson). In 1946 the French fought an insurgency in Indochina, and after eight years they collapsed in Dien Bien Phu. Algeria ditto. Ten years in Vietnam saw mighty Uncle Sam defeated, while in the Philippines the Marxist Huks are yet to be beaten. In Afghanistan, the powerful Soviet Union ate humble pie after nine years, and at present Nato is also tasting the same kind of pie, despite reports to the contrary.

In praise of older women When I read that actor Robert Wagner had had a four-year-long affair with Barbara Stanwyck back in 1952, my first reaction was that of envy and more envy. Wagner is 77 this year and Babs would have been 101, so when they were canoodling together he was 22 and she was 47. Excellent. Perfect. Young men need older women for sex as much as older men need younger ones later on. It is nature’s fit, a perfect combination which carries the eloquence of the unspoken. I am now 72 but 50 years ago I would have given two legs and an arm to bed Babs. She had made her name playing Brooklyn-bred, regular-gal toughies, but although as American as apple pie, she always had an air of mystery about her. Plus a pair of gams to drive schoolboys to onanism for life.

The party’s over, it’s time to call it a day. They’ve burst your pretty balloon and taken the moon away. It’s time to wind up the masquerade. Just make your mind up, the piper must be paid. The party’s over, the candles flicker and dim. You danced and dreamed through the night, It seemed right just being with him. Now you must wake up, all dreams must end. Take off your make up, the party’s over, It’s all over, my friend.   Gstaad The first time I heard this was back in 1956, and I was not yet 20, and it was at Merion Cricket Club, in Philadelphia, the first grass court tournament in America after Wimbledon.

Gstaad Walking up mountains is not only healthy, it gives a man time to think. In fact, climbing in solitude offers one marvellous inner adventures, with epiphanies being the order of the day. There are no boulders where I climb, just a lot of green, steep hills separated by gorges, with lots of cows to keep me company. About 15 years ago I tried climbing up steep mountains tied to a rope, but it wasn’t for me. I suffer from vertigo and the way down was hell. But I did manage to conquer the steepest overhang of Videmanette, the highest mountain in the region. Never again. The fact that the only thing preventing me from flying off into space was a rope attached to a man above me and two thin steel picks helped make up my mind. Judo, tennis, skiing and karate, yes, overhangs, no.

Regensburg The mighty Danube begins in the park of the Furstenberg Palace and flows eastward for a distance of 2,000 miles across ten countries on to the Black Sea. Last weekend, Prince and Princess Heinrich von Furstenberg, the titular heads of the family who live in that palace, gave us a little tour of Walhalla, the German Hall of Fame situated further down the river from their park, in Regensburg, the perfectly preserved medieval town where a wonderful party celebrating Maya Schoenburg’s 50th birthday has left me feeling all of my 72 years. Make that 102. But first Walhalla. As everyone knows, it was the dwelling place of the Gods, into which warriors chosen by the Valkyries were admitted.

Gstaad ‘Goblins and devils have long vanished from the Alps, and so many years have passed without any well-authenticated account of a discovery of a dragon that dragons too may be considered to have migrated.’ So the Alpine Club was informed in May 1877 by Mr Henry Gotch, the secre-tary, and the news set off great celebrations among sporty but superstitious Englishmen. The golden age of mountaineering, as it was then known, began in 1854 and ended with a bang around 1865, the year five Englishmen fell to their death climbing the Matterhorn. Among the dead was Lord Francis Douglas, whose older brother went after Oscar Wilde some 30 years later.