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Cannes has changed dramatically since I first stepped ashore with my parents back in 1952. Tennis courts have disappeared and are now ugly apartment houses for retired folk. Playing fields, ditto. Glitzy and expensive restaurants that serve so-so food line the shore. Sex has no meaning in Cannes, especially during the Festival, unless the fat producer gets it up without pharmaceutical help. What Dante called “the intelligence of love” works inversely to what he meant. In Cannes, one loves whom you screw, mainly financially but seldom sexually. Love for family, teachers, or friends is meant for suckers or the “little people.”

Charity also works the opposite way. You have charity for those to whom you owe money. The uncontrollable urge that must be satisfied at all costs is the one that makes you pull a fast one over others. As Gore Vidal famously remarked about a starlet who never made it, “She was so dumb that she screwed the writer.” That’s what the Cannes Film Festival is all about: Screwing someone important. Purity in Cannes undermines and sullies the industry. But I’m being too tough on the fat little men who run the show. There are some talented people around, but the big men who get things done are mostly in the shadows, or in deep hiding in the Hôtel du Cap, the resort that has replaced the Crimea and is full of Russians the rest of the year.

We all know that society has splintered and old standards no longer apply. But that’s not my problem. What I have to deal with is the Pugs’ regatta from June 2nd to June 4th. Can a major movie star get the right handicap by Commodore Tim Hoare, or will he try and bring me down a peg or two? Only he knows, but as I am in between boats, I will be showing up with a chartered speedster skippered by my son J. T. that will make my fellow Pugs turn as green with envy as those broken-down movie stars who asked for my autograph as I arrived in Cannes Airport.