NEW YORK—It’s party time in the Bagel, at least private party time, yours truly being an extra man nowadays as my wife and I have been separated by pandemic restrictions for six months. Alexandra is in London, quarantined after visiting two little blond things in Austria for my fourth grandchild Theodora’s first birthday. I am doing dinner parties nonstop in the Bagel as if I were a gay walker back in the ...
I remember being in the minority in school with my dark brown hair, the majority of kids having light brown or blond hair. Americans back then looked like a mixture of Anglo-Irish, German, and Scandinavian, as opposed to now, where the Bagel looks like downtown Caracas, better yet, Karachi. Nothing wrong with that, I guess, but real blondes seem to have disappeared, replaced by peroxide ones where the weaker sex is concerned. ...
Back in 1967, during the Six-Day War, I was living in Paris, and such was my pro-Israel ardor, I actually went to some dump and put my name down as a volunteer in case the state of Israel ran out of soldiers. I was asked by the man in charge if I was Jewish, I answered in the negative, and he jumped up and shook my hand. As everyone knows, my services were not needed that June 54 years ago, and the war was over while I was ...
NEW YORK—The Big Bagel is getting so bad, even the baddies are demanding the fuzz do something. As the body count rises, it is obvious that the victims of violence are predominantly poor and minority. Last week, a woman killed in a drive-by shooting had been attending a vigil for a friend who was shot dead after stepping on a gunman’s shoe. A man mortally slashed on a Manhattan subway platform had recently been paroled for ...
Already in your idiot box via Netflix is a miniseries about a man who also used one name, but burned out rather early due to an outsize ego and too much coke. His name was Halston, and his fame was based on the fact he designed a pillbox hat that Jackie Kennedy Onassis wore at her hubby’s inauguration. Yes, fame is tricky, especially in America, where self-creation was invented, and where superciliousness and sleekness pass ...
NEW YORK—Orthodox Easter Sunday came late in May this year, and I spent it at an old friend’s Fifth Avenue home chatting with his young relatives. During a great lunch I thought of those calendar pages one sees furiously turning while denoting the passing years in old black-and-white flicks. Basically it was the three generations present that brought on these reflections. My host George Livanos and I have been friends since ...
NEW YORK—With the Karamazovian hangover now only a weekly occurrence, the healthy life rules supreme. Well, most of the time. Up early, I go for a brisk thirty-minute walk before breakfast in the park that stretches out two blocks away. I finish off with two sets of twenty push-ups on a park bench, a few kicks and punches against leaves as targets, then cross Fifth Avenue going east. (Karate is now a three-night-per-week ...
NEW YORK—What follows has been covered ad nauseam, but I wonder why people were surprised at the planned football breakaway Super League. Professional sports in Europe now follow the American way, which means money comes before tradition, hometown loyalty, and lastly the fans, the schmucks who live and die for their teams. The bottom line in American sports is what it’s all about, and European football has a lot to learn ...
Writing in the London Spectator quite a long time ago—I’ve been a columnist there since 1977—I listed some great Americans, among them General Robert E. Lee, Charles Lindbergh, and Ernest Hemingway. Needless to say, if one were to mention some of these names today in an American publication, or dare bring them up on a news program, all hell would break loose and the writer would instantly become a nonperson. The ...
NEW YORK—The high life has gone with the wind due to you-know-what—the last time I went to a glittering ball Marie Antoinette still had a head on her shoulders, or so it seems—while sweats and leggings are now ubiquitous during intimate dinner parties. Here in the Bagel, fashion has followed the street for a long time, making high fashion seem as irrelevant and obscene as Anna Wintour being paid millions to kiss the asses ...
NEW YORK CITY—Ha, ha! What London turned down, the Bagel accepted with alacrity, namely the poor little Greek boy. And it took ten minutes max after disembarking to go through customs and collect my luggage. Kennedy had less people than a gay wedding in Saudi, and then some. Mind you, the Upper East Side where I live is also quiet as a grave, the only sound the occasional ambulance siren racing for a tea break. Central Park, ...
It takes a very good writer to produce prose that prompts emotions a reader has experienced in an unconnected past. It also takes a good writer to subtly tip off the reader of the change in the character of the American people, one in which toughness has been replaced by weakness. Talleyrand once remarked that no one who had been born after the French Revolution could know how sweet life could be. Larry McMurtry wrote about ...
CHELSEA, LONDON, U.K.—Oh, to be in England, but let’s start at the beginning. I challenge any reader to claim they are more technologically disadvantaged than yours truly, or anyone not suffering from Alzheimer’s in fact. I resisted getting a mobile telephone until my days on board a sailing boat became a nightmare. I missed get-togethers and lost friends, and finally gave in around ten years ago. More trouble followed. ...
This is for you writers out there: If you’re not canceled, you’re no good. The good Dr. Seuss is out, as is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, but Adolf Hitler is still in, although I can’t say the same for William Shakespeare. Everyone who’s anyone is getting canceled, so I was glad to see Captain Cook also gone, because BLM said so for his “invasion” of Australia. Never mind that Cook discovered that beautiful ...
GSTAAD—I have not experienced such a long, continuous blizzard ever, and I’ve been coming here for 63 years. The ski lifts are closed, as are the hotels, and it’s been dumping for a week nonstop. My Portuguese handyman Fernando now lives on his snow plow, clearing the private road that leads to the house, as useless a task as trying to bail out the Titanic. By now I should be in London, enjoying my new rented house in ...
GSTAAD—Some of you may have noticed I have not commented at all about the running soap opera and latest brouhaha concerning the Halfwit and Meghan Macbeth. That’s because I decided long ago the best way to counter their publicity machine is to never mention them. But I’ve also done something most of the hacks writing about the couple have not: I’ve been a guest on Oprah’s show twice, once by my little old self for a ...
