When Tom Wolfe harpooned Leonard Bernstein in his famous 60s essay, he did it by directly quoting from those attending the infamous cocktail party Lenny gave for the Black Panthers. Wolfe had finagled an invite to Bernstein’s grand 5th Avenue pad and was taking notes throughout the evening. The ...

New York. I missed a very good friend’s sixtieth birthday party in the shires, but thus avoided the disgraceful anti- Pontiff showing off by the cheap publicity seeking and repellent poseurs that signed up to the orchestrated campaign against the wonderful Pope Benedict. Mind you, all these ...

The new look requires a new, improved Taki. No more mentions of jet-setters, no French Riviera shenanigans, nothing but constant classical themes and references to Horace, Racine, Rilke, Marlowe, and Milton. And if you believe this it’s time for the men in white coats to come and take you. Eight ...

Gstaad. “Had someone suggested that one day I’d be sleeping in Taki’s bed …….” the person writing this hints that he or she would have bet the farm against it. Funny he or she mentions it, but so would I, and yet it happened and I’m delighted it did. Now for some of you sports fans ...

Spetses. I was filled with unbearable nostalgia. There I was again, boating, swimming, sunning, wine drinking with good friends, feeling the ecstasy that only a Mediterranean afternoon can arouse in me. Transforming one’s feelings into language is difficult. One has to avoid sounding corny. Byron ...

Gstaad. It was a balmy June day, Pentecoste Sunday, a major holiday in France. The Casino de la Corniche was a chic and popular establishment on a rocky spur between Saint-Eugene and Pointe Pescade. The beach was the finest in the area, and the young French lieutenant, scion of a ducal family, went ...

Gstaad. An article in Vanity Fair about a man I knew for over forty years has turned me into Orlando Furioso. Oleg Cassini died in 2006 well into his nineties.  We met in 1956 on an airplane going to Bermuda to play a tennis tournament. Cassini was a good club player and a so-so skier, back in ...

On board S/Y Bushido. Sailing down the eastern coast of the Peloponnese I thought I spotted some anti-Semites adrift, but they turned out to be Norwegians, flying a British flag. Although becalmed they needed nothing but a breeze, so we wished them good day and motored off. Ever since Shimon Peres ...

On board s/y Bushido. “ Trimming the Jib”  is a short story by Ernest Hemingway and it has to do with the sea. And love. And passion. He wrote it shortly before “The Old Man and the Sea,” which helped land him the Nobel Prize for literature. Here it is in its entirety: “He ran aground ...

Athens. As everyone knows, Sigmund Freud was a fraud, and like many frauds he thought the Parthenon might also be one. But he summoned his nerve and visited the sacred sight and was delighted as well as shocked at what he saw. This was 1904. Like other visitors Freud dreaded that the real thing ...