Bernie Ecclestone is a gnomish Brit ex-grease monkey. He is my neighbor in Gstaad, the small alpine Swiss village which once upon a time was the Mecca of the old rich and titled but is now slowly turning into the playground of the nouveaux riches and vulgar. I"ve often written about Bernie ...
“Your future is in Hollywood—I can make you the next Bela Lugosi,” said James Toback looking at me straight in the eye. Jimmy Toback is a hell of a fellow. An obsessive with an encyclopedic knowledge of sports and other data, he directed such great films as The Gambler, Fingers (which made ...
I don’t know who was the dumber of the two: the Greek banker who was in a hurry to spend 100 million big ones for a London pad or the American woman who accidentally walked off a cliff in Alaska while texting. Both dummies survived, which goes to show the Almighty must have a weakness for the ...
NEW YORK—Ten years ago this week I put my money down and The American Conservative magazine was born. They say that owning a yacht is like sitting under a shower tearing up hundred-dollar bills. Owning an opinion magazine based in Washington, DC is like sitting in a dull hotel room throwing ...
I stopped reading novels long ago. When those arch-phonies writing magic realism became household words, I dropped out quicker than you can say, "Raymond Chandler." Now that's what I call a novel"the stuff Chandler churned out about old El Lay, everyone gulping booze and puffing away ...
NUEVA YORK–The dateline is in Spanish because I have yet to hear any English spoken here in the Bagel, and I landed in some style more than 24 hours ago. Never mind. Flying at 47,000 feet at close to 500 knots per hour on a G550 is as close to perfection in traveling as it gets. The G550 is the ...
GSTAAD—It was far, far worse than the Rodney King El Lay riots of twenty years ago, and it made the London summer fires of 2011 look like a kindergarten’s Guy Fawkes party. This was our Kristallnacht, and then some. They had hard faces, harder than a hedge-fund manager’s when told a good ...
Forty-five years ago two Greek shipowners and the most famous diva of her time squared off in a British High Court over a financial dispute. Panaghis Vergottis, a gentleman and philanthropist, had sued Aristotle Socrates Onassis and Maria Callas over the ownership of a tanker the two men had bought ...
Here we go again! Scary sofa samurai Robert Kagan, a neocon so-called foreign-policy scholar, is also an expert on war, having watched a lot of Hollywood movies. Kagan says that if Obama were to use force against Iran, the election is over and he would win overwhelmingly. Kagan and his brother are ...
GSTAAD—Now is the time of sultry August days and nights, with the gift of privacy an added bonus. In summer the village contains the die-hards, the locals, and a few tourists. Bucolic freedom, fresh air, and sunshine were once anathema—foul-smelling, airless dives such as New Jimmy’s were the ...
