“Hanky-panky” is American slang for doing what comes naturally. On this Valentine’s Day week, I offer you Swoon, a book about great seducers—and why women love them—one I knocked off in an afternoon. It is author Betsy Prioleau’s third book about hanky-panky. (Her book Seductress examined history’s most powerful sirens.) Betsy Prioleau is the wife of probably the nicest doctor I’ve ever had, a New York gentleman ...
GSTAAD—Sir Roger Moore told the Sunday Telegraph that he enjoys the slow pace of life in Switzerland. As do I. One cannot have too much of a snowy peak under a blue sky any more than one can have too much of Schubert. Looking out from my bedroom window all I can see are pine forests, rock cliffs, and snow. Not a bad scene for the winter blues. Yes, nature has been degraded, with chalets being built ever higher in the ...
Clive James is weak on health but very strong on intellect, and it’s good to read his pithy television criticism for the Telegraph. Clive recently praised Richard E. Grant for pointing out in his program on the Riviera’s history of pictures that not many people nowadays know how good a painter Gerald Murphy was. Murphy was the model for Dick Diver in Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. He was the owner of Mark Cross, a ...
In a tiny hamlet next to where I live high up in the Swiss Alps, two gay friends of mine have set up house, and a beautiful old chalet it is. One man, a German, looks like a Panzer commander straight out of central casting; the other is an Englishman, more P. G. Wodehouse than John Bull. Both are very nice, very good-looking, generous, and amusing. I recently asked them if they planned to marry. They looked at me as if I had ...
PARIS—Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the Latin Quarter still evoke the verbose sophistry of Sartre, although the tourism and jewelry trades have replaced the rendez-vous des intellectuels. Yet the sheer stunning beauty of the 7eme reminds one why Paris is still the most romantic capital of Europe, the city Papa Hemingway called a fine place to be young in, the city that’s a necessary part of a man’s education. Late at night ...
On the brilliant summer's morning of June 8, 1967, the USS Liberty, a technical research ship lying in international waters about 25 miles north of the Sinai Peninsula, was suddenly attacked by Israeli fighter jets and Israeli Navy torpedo boats. The Liberty's captain, immediately realizing that an ally was attacking his ship, frantically signaled his coordinates to the diving jets and the surrounding torpedo boats firing at ...
GSTAAD—The subprimate level of conversation, as prevalent as the snow up here in the Alps, took a turn for the better last week when a select few celebrated Prince Nicolas Romanoff’s ninetieth birthday at the yacht club. Yes, most people who live up here are illiterate, but they sure know how to count—some even up to ten billion. None of the counters were present at the birthday, just many old friends that included some ...
New Year's resolutions work only for bores and ambulance-chasing, money-grubbing lawyers. Normal people do not and cannot stick to them. Hence I will list for you my irritants of 2013, hoping against hope that they"ll disappear, but I don"t advise any Taki's Mag reader to hold his breath. Bill Maher. His political correctness aside, he has a repulsive face, a nose that closely resembles a penis, and a mind so fine that ...
GSTAAD—Friends who were among the last to leave Chalet Palataki on New Year’s tell me there were stragglers waiting to be admitted, and this was as the sun was coming up on January 1. My chalet has become the last refuge of the desperate, or among those with twice as much serotonin in their blood who never give up. All I can remember is being on the top floor and at my advanced age not using glasses, but drinking straight ...
It began late in the afternoon of March 13, 1954. The great Battle of Dien Bien Phu had finally begun. 105mm and 75mm howitzers and 120mm mortars rained down from above. Ten thousand French troops were defending a valley ringed by hills crawling with close to 30,000 Vietnamese. The French commander was Christian de Castries, the flamboyant general who had named the nine outposts after his various mistresses: Beatrice, Huguette, ...
Lanza is a noble Sicilian name which I believe appears in Il Gattopardo, Lampedusa’s immortal tale of changing times in Sicily during the 1860s. Prince Raimondo Lanza was one of Gianni Agnelli’s best friends until he threw himself off a Roman balcony while suffering a cocaine overdose. I knew him slightly. His brother Galvano, whom I knew better, lived a long life (some might say a useless one), remaining in his family’s ...
The horror at Newtown, Connecticut put a damper on the unending end-of-year parties. That includes my own Christmas blast at the Boom Boom Room in honor of Lindsay Lohan and some of the Big Bagel’s prettiest girls. At times I think I missed my vocation: Protector-Confessor of fallen women or those about to take the plunge. My only salvation lies in good old Helvetia, where the mother of my children will whip me back into ...
Is America exceptional? Once upon a time, hardly anyone dissented from the idea that the USA was different from all other nations. The "exceptional" sobriquet made the rounds when it became obvious that hereditary status and class distinctions did not count in America, leaving individuals free to be judged on their merits alone. I write this partly in shock, as I had driven by the bucolic village of Newtown, ...
Religion is in decline, tradition takes a backseat to fashion, and same-sex marriage is now looked upon as normal. What were previously taboos—swearing on television, watching films of flesh-eating zombies and blood-sucking vampires feasting amidst car crashes and explosions, and nonstop onscreen violence—are all now accepted, if not outright encouraged. How to balance the ethical with entertainment seems to have been lost ...
Saudi Arabia will not have Uncle Sam to kick around much longer. This is the best news I"ve heard since both the Governor of New York State and a Congressman from the depraved City of New York had to resign because of sex scandals. The bad news is that the kicking won"t stop until 2030, when the US will finally become self-sufficient in black gold and will be able to say sayonara to probably the most disgusting, ...
Why do so many respectable newspapers and magazines go weak at the knees the moment an unreadable autobiography of some illiterate rock star is published? I guess no hack, however literate, can resist dropped names, or perhaps it is simple hero worship—tout court, as the French say. I’ve never read a single one, only some reviews, and they leave me absolutely cold. So they took a lot of dope, slept with lotsa groupies, and ...
