MIAMI BEACH—I thought it a good time to visit, no Spring Break debauchery nor fashionista pretense. So I signed up yet again for the judo championships, trained very hard, and flew down with four buddies hoping to stay in a family hotel near the water, a bit like Bogie stopping at a place in the ...
So Sarko and Bruni are out, Hollande is in, and I’m off to the Actor’s Studio to brush up on my acting lessons. (Stanley Kowalski is reborn. Stel-LAAA!) My friend Edward Jay Epstein has written a quickie book about Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s little problem last year here in the Bagel. Epstein ...
NEW YORK—I have settled into my Big Bagel routine as if I never went away: up early, a 25-minute walk through the park, one hour of judo working with three opponents, walk back, have breakfast, and collapse with the newspapers. In the evening it is karate with Richard Amos and a couple of other ...
In John Guare's play Six Degrees of Separation, a young black con man traduces his way into a white, rich, liberal family's midst by posing as Sidney Poitier's son, who had just happened to lose his wallet. The guilt-ridden rich folk put him up"with predictable results. The family is almost ...
The first friend I made at Lawrenceville School was Reuben Batista, eldest son of the Cuban strongman. Being foreigners gave us something in common, the rest of the school being mostly WASPS with a smattering of Catholics. By the time I met Reuben in 1949 his father Fulgencio had been in power ...
My friend Mark Brennan and I were talking about class warfare. "It's cyclical," Mark said as he executed a perfect uchi mata during judo practice. "Perhaps over here," I answered, "but in Europe it's a way of life." "Just look at the 1890s, followed by the crash of ...
NEW YORK—Seeing Manhattan rising from the distance is always a treat. I am not sure it’s possible for anyone brought up around these parts to appreciate entirely what New York—the idea of New York—meant to us who came from the Old Continent. I was eleven years old and had seen only war and ...
Papa Hemingway’s recently published letter to an Italian male friend purportedly revealed the “human side” of which his admirers were already well aware. (Like Bogie, he was tough on the outside, jelly on the inside.) Until lately, Papa’s haters had a good long run. Soon after Carlos ...
Dr. David Starkey is a great man, a Tudor historian, and one of the few academics who tells it like it is. Openly gay, he has no time for prancing queens and other such clown minorities trying to steal a bigger slice of the freebie pie. After England’s riots last summer—while politically ...
In the February 18 issue of the world’s greatest weekly I wrote that I had fallen madly in love with Jessica Raine, the actress who portrays nurse Jenny in the Sunday-night BBC show Call the Midwife. In the throes of demonic, erotic exhilaration, I may have piled it on a bit thick. So what? If ...
