Like the late Christopher Hitchens, who only discovered his Jewish roots once he had moved to New York in the late Seventies, Donald Sterling has also had a revelation and is advertising the fact that he’s a Jew. For any of you who might not be aware who Sterling is, he was born Tokowitz 81 years ago but changed his name to Sterling to sound ritzier. He is a slum landlord who evicts poor women and orphans, began his career ...
For some of you younger readers the name Schmuel Gelbfisz will not ring a bell. Yet back in the 30s, Schmuel Gelbfisz’s identity was a dinner party quiz, and the one who guessed correctly would receive a kiss from Mary Pickford—America’s sweetheart—if he happened to be a man, or an expensive trinket if a lady got it right. Schmuel was born in Warsaw, Poland, in July 1879, a Hasidic Jew, but later allegedly falsified his ...
The vicissitudes of getting old are linked to the mystical innocence of childhood as one daydreams the precious time away. I’m a daydreamer par excellence, and lately I’ve been thinking nonstop about my daughter. She’s getting married this week and I’m off to London for the festivities. Solipsist that I am, it’s nice to think of others for a change. It’s the nature of prestidigitation to mix one’s self and one’s ...
NEW YORK — The poet was right, April is the cruelest month. We at the Spectator lost Clarissa Tan, my good friend Bob Geldof’s 25-year-old daughter Peaches died, and my oldest friend from prep school buried his son, one of the greatest athletes of his time, at age 42. There is something obscene about surviving the young, something only politicians like Tony Blair can do and still smile, and A.E. Housman got it right in his ...
Back in 1961 a CIA agent and I approached Thomas Lejus, who won the 1959 boys" singles championship for the Soviet Union at Wimbledon. We took him to Café Royal, where Oscar Wilde and Whistler and other such swells used to hang their top hats. The agent spoke first. "Thomas, if you decide to stay in the West, we will give you a Ford car with an automatic reclining roof and a large electric fridge, and make sure your ...
This is a tale of two unpunished crimes in one city. Let’s start with my old friend the Rev. Al Sharpton. I call him an old buddy because about fifteen years ago, in a downtown restaurant, a boxer friend asked the strutting Sharpton if he wanted to meet yours truly. The reverend did not miss a beat: “Man, I got better things to do than meet Taki,” he snorted. I burst into laughter, so he stopped and shook my hand and I ...
America and Western Europe sure have their priorities right, with newsworthy items blanketing newspapers and magazines while the airwaves reflect our culture. For example, it seems that the April cover of Vogue Magazine, featuring a rap thug and a porn tart, has been covered as extensively as the sinking of the Titanic was back in 1912, except that those were pre-TV and pre-Internet times, and only ink-stained wretches invaded ...
New York—Back to the mythic city, dreamed into existence by the movies long ago and instantly memorable, a visually stunning place built for action and adventure, a city of broad avenues and narrow side streets, of soaring towers and grubby tenements all giving an air of what Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon growled dreams are made of. But what’s happened to the gritty stoops of Harlem, the waterfront filled with gleaming ...
GSTAAD—Except for the hovering of helicopters overhead carrying great slabs of rock or timber, the constant whirring of cranes and cement mixers, and the roar of trucks, the building site that Gstaad becomes the moment the last billionaire departs for places closer to sea level takes on a dreamlike visual vignette of an alpine village. So faint is my memory of the village I first came to love back in the 1950s, I sometimes ...
On July 1, 1961, a beautiful 17-year-old girl appeared on the cover of Paris Match, back then in its heyday: “C’est une deb,” announced the cover, the once-upon-a-time annual British ritual having passed the Channel to the land of cheese. Her name was Cristina de Caraman, daughter of the Duke de Caraman, and she was so pretty and angelic-looking that even my mother, who was always after me to marry Greek, told ...
GSTAAD—The American newspaper that prints only news it sees fit to poison good things with recently published an article that dared to ask, “The End of Snow?” “The planet has warmed 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1800s,” it declared, “and as a result, snow is melting.” Bring on the Pulitzers—snow melts! The Big Bagel Times also thundered that “Europe has lost half its Alpine glacial ice since ...
For some fifty years now it seems that God has played a great joke on mankind, granting the best fuel reserves to undeserving desert places run by crooked camel drivers: places such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Libya, Turkmenistan, and other such hellholes. Mind you, God plays fair, and he also blessed places such as the United States and Norway with black gold, and in order to show his favorite, he made Texas the oiliest of all. ...
Damn, damn, damn! It has to be me, and here all these years I thought it was Hollywood. By the time you read this the Oscars will all be over (like the Olympics), but I had someone play 12 Years a Slave on my television set—it’s called Apple TV, but I’m incapable of making it work on my own—and could only watch for ten minutes. Then I had the nice woman who assists me change the film. To me it was like watching ...
One of life’s safest bets is that following a visit by a Japanese premier to the Yasukuni Shrine, which honors the nation’s war dead, a lot of Chinese mega-crooks and inheritors of the greatest murderer of all time will cry foul, and lots of buffoons of the neocon and liberal persuasion over here will echo them. A particularly mendacious fraud, one Daniel Sneider, who is described as an “associate director of ...
GSTAAD—Walking into a dinner party for fifty chic and some not-so-chic people in a nearby village last week, I was confronted by a tall man with horn-rimmed glasses who called me his neighbor but then added, “No, you’re not my neighbor—what’s your name?” No cunning linguist I, nor used to being barked at by nouveau-riche whippersnappers, I turned my back to him and told him to “Look it up in ...
In the movie business, conventional wisdom has it that to succeed at the box office a film must include profanity, obscenity, blood, gore, blasphemy, and, of course, lots of sex. There’s only one little problem with this theory. Empirical data illustrates that the opposite is true. Clean, wholesome family affairs generally do much better at the till. Yet motiveless violence and crimes committed at random continue to be ...
