Taki

Privilege at birth displeases wannabe types, and the subject came up rather a lot last week, especially in the Land of the Depraved, where the Bagel Times regards monarchy as anti-democratic and the cause of most human ills, including the common cold, cancer, pimples, varicose veins and even athlete’s foot. In my own alma mater, the University of Virginia, founded by the greatest of all Americans, Thomas Jefferson, some physically repellent creeps have demanded his name be taken off the beautiful neoclassical buildings he designed. The trouble is that Tom, as we called him in my college fraternity, was a bit anti-monarchical himself, having sided with and advised certain colonists starting with one called George Washington.

None of this would have happened had I accepted my neighbour’s invitation to dine with a Swiss billionaire banker, or bb. (Sorry, Real life.) He’s an old friend, the bb, and untypically Swiss. He boozes, schnoofs, and chases women, or Afabs, as the absurd youth of today call them. Booze, alas, now goes to my head, and as the song says, it lingers like a haunting refrain for at least a couple of days. I had kick boxing early the next day so I chose to watch the 1949 classic, Sands of Iwo Jima, and snub the Swiss bb. The film was made in 1949 and stars the greatest of them all, John Wayne, luckily no longer with us to see what his beloved America has turned into.

Gstaad There’s a fin de saison feeling around here, but the restaurants are still full and the sons of the desert are still moping around. Building is going on non-stop and the cows are down from the mountains, making the village a friendlier and more civilised place. Something of a twilight mood has crept in, especially when I compare the cows with the people. Reclaiming vanished days is a sucker’s game, but it’s irresistible. I was up at my friend Mick Flick’s chalet the other afternoon, talking with Gstaad regulars about how much fun the place used to be. I tried the reverse of an old Woody Allen joke, announcing that taxis nowadays are so expensive I couldn’t keep my eyes on the lovely legs of the lady riding next to me.

Nostalgia barged in like gangbusters. What brought it on was a brief article about the most charming and enchanting of young women, Nancy Olson. Seventy-two years ago, she was in that rare gem of a movie, Sunset Boulevard, playing the rosy-cheeked screenwriter who was the love interest of William Holden, the writer who was handsome but entrapped by Norma Desmond, aka Gloria Swanson. Nancy’s blue eyes shimmered, and her figure was to die for, but what made her memorable was that she was as American as apple pie. Innocence trumped sex in her case, and apparently she was as decent and as intelligent as the ingénue she played in that film. She quit the movies early on because it was too narrow a life.

Gstaad As the great Yogi Berra explained: ‘It’s déjà vu all over again.’ The great one also contributed the following wisdom that: ‘You can observe a lot by just watching.’ Yogi came to mind as high inflation and a recession loom, and merry old England’s trade unions are reverting to type and blackmailing the government. And where is Margaret Thatcher now that she’s needed? Gone with the wind, that’s where. I started writing this column when James Callaghan was in No. 10 and Britain was on the brink. The Brits back then were over-taxed and the smart money had gone abroad.

 Coronis I suppose there’s always a first time, and looking back it was bound to happen. I scrambled off a sailing boat and took the coward’s way out after being bashed about by an angry Poseidon and a furious Aeolus. Actually it was the wife who couldn’t take it any more and I simply went along. Sixty years of being thrown around while giving the middle finger to Aeolus and Poseidon, and during the week of another disaster, my birthday, I threw in the towel and was driven to Coronis. A deep barometric low caused high winds with gusts of 11 to 12 Beaufort. My captain is something of a history buff and compared the storm to the one that wiped out the Anglo-French fleet in Crimea back in 1854.

An F. Scott Fitzgerald biographer by the name of David S. Brown refers to America’s promotion of deviancy (my words) as ‘the great post-Appomattox launch toward materialism’. I liked that line and was thinking about it as I left the boat in the early morning and walked into an almost perfect Greek village square for a coffee. There were some French people blabbing away with their usual hand gestures, Greeks discussing politics at high volume, and then an American couple, both quite attractive, each with a Mac in front of them and absolutely impervious to anyone or anything in their immediate surroundings. Talk about a launch towards materialism. The two of them never once looked up from their screens.

 Patmos Judging by the news, the world is finally coming apart: Chinese lab escapee Covid is still going strong, monkeypox plague is afflicting gays, record heat waves are crippling Europe and America, mass shootings are becoming a way of life in the US, there’s a war of attrition in Ukraine and Taiwan is being threatened by China. Gloom and doom are everywhere but here in the holy island of Patmos, where Saint John wrote the Apocalypse 2,000 years ago, the backward natives are still using pronouns such as ‘his’ and ‘hers’, and they even identify women as a biological reality.

I now find resorts more fun out of season. Civilised tourists are as rare as an intelligent Hollywood movie, so local talent will do nicely, and to hell with the vulgar jet set. Gstaad is perfect in June and July, March and April, as are St Moritz, the Ionian Islands, and Patmos, my next destination. Once upon a time the French Riviera was a must, but now it’s a sweaty hellhole, a shabby place for not so sunny people. Although I spent my youth on the Riviera, I was two going on three in 1939, the time I would have chosen to be an adult had I been given the choice. Old hands there used to tell me about that summer, the gayest – in the old sense of the word – on record.

Michael Beloff, QC and past president of Trinity College Oxford, has just had his memoir reviewed in The Spectator, and it brought back memories. Here’s this really good man, the type who does the work, believes in the system, plays by the rules and subscribes to the old graces of courtesy and politeness, but the sort we never read about. Instead, what is shoved down our throats are today’s politicians selling their snake oil on TV, or those untalented but self-entitled celebrities boasting about themselves, and the ultimate horrors, of course, the profoundly ignorant woke brigade who block free speech. I can’t remember how long ago it was that I received a telephone call from Michael who introduced himself and invited me to the high table at Trinity College, Oxford.

Now that the weakest Wimbledon since 1973 – the year of the boycott – is over, a few thoughts about Pam Shriver’s recent revelations that her coach Don Candy, deceased, was also her lover. Candy was 50 at the time, while Pam was 17, which in my book made Candy a lucky guy, assuming it was legal. The age of consent varies from place to place, and the only time I had to defend myself was when an irate father, whose 28-year-old daughter I had dated, rang me early in the morning and complained about me being 72. ‘There is no age limit as far as being too old,’ I told him. He rudely hung up on me. But before I go on about Pam Shriver and her oldie coach, a few comments are in order about how Oprah has taken over tennis and even Wimbledon.

Looking back and trying to choose just one out of those incomparably bewitching women of one’s youth can be tricky. Giselle was definitely one of them – blonde, French, mesmeric, an apparition – but so was Kiki, very white-skinned, also French, patrician and very sexy. They were friends, those two, but they fell out after they chose the same boyfriend. They were also married to men who knew and liked the boyfriend, but back then such things were commonplace, and it was Paris after all. Both ladies are still alive and now quite old, Giselle a widow, Kiki a princess. There were many other beauties, of course, but those two stand out because of the timing: it was one hell of a winter month of sex and switch and switch again. Then the two of them got wise and it was goodbye.

London As speaker at a posh dinner given by Jonathan and Jake Goedhuis, best UK wine merchants by far, and attended by many swells including Anthony Mangnall MP, I somehow managed to finish the speech having tasted some very good wines in between. I nevertheless got lots of mileage from pointing out the fact that we Greeks were responsible for inventing the strike (Lysistrata), an act the British unions later on perfected. Ancient Greek women refused to have sex until the men stopped fighting and the ancient Greek philosopher Taki opined that the first strike ever was therefore successful, as the men naturally preferred sex to war. Ditto homosexuality, I announced. ‘We Greeks invented it, you Brits perfected it.

It’s nice to be back on the old continent again, especially after getting within a couple of hundred yards of the phoniest bunch of Hollywood East types, fakes with names such as Pelosi, Schumer, Schiff and their ilk. It meant that I flew out of the Bagel without mixed feelings for a change. America has become unrecognisable, a violent land where a Democratic Congress winks at riots and intimidations by the left, and where career criminals are seen as victims. It is a place in which one’s livelihood can end with one slip of the tongue. And they call it a free country.

He is a rich English lord with a very large house and his wife is a beautiful American with a mid-Atlantic accent. The lord is portrayed by Herbert Marshall, a screen idol of the 1930s and 1940s, his wife by Norma Shearer, a Hollywood superstar whose eyes alone enslaved men and whose figure caused me sleepless nights as a schoolboy, if you know what I mean. Then there is a suitor, Robert Montgomery, the patrician American heartthrob, who plays a rich drunken playboy who pursues Norma. But he does it with class and elegance, without a trace of toxic masculinity, a modern feminist broadside that didn’t exist among the upper classes back then. Okay, it’s a movie. But it’s one that kept me up until 3.30 a.m.

Southampton, Long Island These are peripatetic times for the poor little Greek boy, up to the Hamptons for some sun-seeking among Wasp types, and then down to the nation’s capital for the memorial service of that wonderful humorist P.J. O’Rourke. By all means take the following with a grain of salt, but even 800 million years ago, when only micro-organisms slithered around the beaches, belonging to a private club was all-important, especially in the Hamptons. Never have I seen more chest-thumping, bandy-legged, bearded louts trash-talking as they pollute the beaches in this beautiful town. Southampton was once a luminous little village that served as a seaside refuge for New York’s civilised rich during the unbearable heat of urban summer.

New York Prince Pavlos, heir to the Greek throne, turned 55 recently and I threw a small dinner for him. Pavlos is a hell of a prince, father, husband and businessman. He’s tall, good-looking, a gent in every way, intelligent, hard-working and has never put a foot wrong. Neither has any member of his immediate family. Compared with them, the rest of European royals seem wanting, but then I’m prejudiced. The Greek royals are Danes, and the oldest reigning clan of Europe. Unlike another royal family whose name escapes me – it is the Platinum Jubilee issue after all – the Hellenic one has had no divorces, no scandals, and if physical looks mattered, the Greek royals would be the ruling family of Europe. At present Pavlos comes to the dojo after work and trains hard.

A couple more weeks in the Bagel and then on to dear old London. I’ve had a very good time partying with young friends here, but the place reeks, literally as well as metaphorically. The rate of violence is creeping up, with gangs shooting at each other even on 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, right where the poor little Greek boy grew up. Where a commemorative plaque marking young Taki’s residence should have been put up long ago for services to American women, there was a corpse. The next day, it was forgotten, as an 11-year-old was gunned down in the Bronx. What used to be extreme radicalism is now the reigning ideology of every major American city. Speech patterns have changed, and the meanings of words are perceived not in the way they were intended.

New York Living a life of pleasure is fun, but it can also become tiresome. Living an ethical life of responsibility is beneficial to the soul, but also boring. I am stuck between the two at times, and I think age has a lot to do with it. A constant reminder of the very visible yoke of age comes daily, as I march up and down Park Avenue noticed by absolutely no one. I really don’t mind, cross my heart; in fact, it makes me laugh at times when I’m dressed to the nines and go unnoticed even by the panhandlers. And being dressed correctly nowadays makes one really stand out, like a giraffe among penguins. But in my case: nothing. Old age makes one invisible, which is fine if you’re a criminal, but not so fine if you have even the tiniest of egos.