I am about to leave for karate camp in Thun, Switzerland: four days of double sessions lasting one hour and forty-five minutes each, with three hundred black belts from all over Europe and North America attending. I’ll give you all the details next week once I’m safely back home and on my way to the Greek islands. I know, I know—it’s a tough life, but I deserve it. After all, as a self-made man it is right and proper ...

I remember it well. It was July 1952, and I was dining with my parents at the Palm Beach Casino’s patio in Cannes when my father got up and went inside to gamble. He came back rather excited and told us that a friend of his, Greek ship owner George Coumantaros, had passed eight hands at baccarat and won a fortune. (Coumantaros bought a beautiful sailing boat and named her—what else?— Baccarat.) The next day we went out ...

The long lazy summer is upon us, and as I walk the Swiss hills below the mountain ranges my thoughts are always of the past. I think of long hot summers of long ago: girls in their pretty dresses and my father in his whites sailing around the Saronic Bay with a ball-and-chain standard flying from his main mast. It meant “Wife Onboard,” which really meant that when he dropped anchor on some nearby port, local talent should ...

What was that quote about London and being tired of life? Or that flickering ecstasy of a long-ago memory of being drunk at dawn and watching people going to work? Surely not at my age and in the year 2013, but there you have it. You can go home again; Thomas Wolfe had it all wrong. I felt at home all last week, both at Loulou’s at 5 Hertford Street and on Gerald Road in deep Oxfordshire. Let’s start with Gerald Road, where ...

Why is it that summers used to last so much longer back then? School would be out in early June and by the time the horrid month of September rolled around, it seemed as if three years had passed. What fun it was to be young during summer. No homework, no need to stay in shape, no starving oneself to make weight for wrestling, girls galore at the country club and on the beach, softball on the public lawns of Greenwich, CT, and ...

A first-round loser at Wimbledon this year will receive $35,000 for showing up even if he defaults before the first ball is struck. Back in 1957 I got close to 200 dollars for losing in the singles qualifying draw and getting into the draws for the men's doubles and mixed. Call it inflation if you"€™d like, but today's pros outside the top 100 need the moolah more than we did back then. I traveled with two Cubans (the Garrido ...

When a draft-dodging con man such as Bill Clinton begins to sound like General George Patton, most intelligent people realize that the fix is in. Clinton recently remonstrated with Obama over the latter’s inaction in Syria. Like a true politician, Barack obliged and ordered small arms to be delivered to the rebels three days after the draft dodger had read him the riot act. Clinton is a sleazeball who has never done a thing ...

SAINT-TROPEZ—To the once-upon-a-time sleepy fishing village, now the focal point for Russian oligarch excess, outrageously ugly super-yachts, and what is commonly known as the scum of the Earth, the nouveaux riche of the 21st century. A tiny but perfect airport for small planes and jets means the 747s the camel drivers prefer are too big to land and thus have to use Nice or Marseille. I am here for the annual Pugs Club ...

“Sexist Mores of Super-Rich Hurt Us All,” sobs an American female columnist in The Holocaust Update, AKA The New York Times. I don’t usually follow this kind of drivel—the “sexist” stuff, I mean—but a familiar name caught my bloodshot eye, so I read further. Apparently the sexist mores of the super-rich were manifested by the hedge-fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones, a man who once approached me in the GreenGo ...

Do any of you still like the dreaded word “diversity,” which is proudly flung around by those who squirm when the great Enoch Powell’s name comes up? If anything, Powell was a prophet, and after the latest London outrage, his so-called “Rivers of Blood” speech sure comes to mind. He got it right while midgets such as Heath and Howe sold and keep on selling the country out to diversity. Can any of you imagine a time ...

The only man I know who belonged to more gentlemen's clubs than Eddie Ulmann was the late Bobby Sweeny of amateur golf fame, who once pleaded poverty to me while signing checks to something like twenty clubs spread around the Western world. Eddie was the quintessential clubman. He cherished his clubs, took part in club activities until the very end, and was as popular with the members as he was with the staff of the various ...

CANNES—It’s raining, the stars are hiding, the hacks and paparazzi are waterlogged and frustrated, and the shimmering images of the beautiful people walking up the red carpet are just that—images of glories long gone. The Cannes Film Festival used to be a glamorous affair when I was a young man. I remember the brouhaha when a French wannabe starlet ripped off her bra and showed her assets to Robert Mitchum, reputedly the ...

At an art shindig on Park Avenue, I spotted Baz Luhrmann, the director of the latest and very noisy version of The Great Gatsby. I found him a charming man before I was shocked—shocked à la Captain Renault—to hear the dwarfish mayor of the Big Bagel suggest an honorary American citizenship for that Russian son-of-a-bitch Roman Abramovich. Too bad I didn’t have my American passport with me, because I would have thrown it ...

NEW YORK—Life is definitely beautiful…as long as one can see, that is, which for two miserable days last week I couldn’t. Having had a glaucoma operation on my eyes two months ago, I needed to use drops for a while but didn’t pay attention—too many girls in their summer dresses, and things like that. The next thing I knew, a pain started in one eye, I ignored it and went out and smoked and drank, then woke up the next ...

Which is the most infamous bite in history? Surely Adam’s, but the one Steve Rubell took off Halston’s leg was far more expensive. Let me explain for you whippersnappers who’ve probably never heard of these men. Both died of AIDS in the early 1990s. I was reminded the time Rubell bit Halston by the story of Luis Suárez, no stranger to controversy in Britain but a hero in his homeland of Uruguay, where biting is the ...

I write this during the weekend that finally saw the end of those two dreadful Chechens who were described by many newspapers"€”starting with the Times, of course"€”as typical American teenagers. Why is it that after every outrage, family members and friends of the perpetrators are given space to air their sick views here in the United States? I can"€™t remember British newspapers, or even the grotesquely lefty BBC, ...