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 ...
The gossip is that the Washington Post is in bad trouble and losing money like only Tina Brown can. Not that Brown has anything to do with the Post. Tina wastes zillions of dollars for Barry Diller, who loses ten million greenbacks yearly at The Daily Beast and is closing the thirty-million-per-annum loser Newsweek. It’s not even Diller’s money, it’s that of those who invest with him. If I’m confusing you, don’t blame ...
Why is it that adultery can ruin a man’s career but rarely a woman’s, at least in so-called civilized countries? (In Saudi Arabia an adulterous woman is stoned to death.) An American diplomat slated to become the next ambassador to Iraq, Brett McGurk, lost his chance because of an affair with a reporter who is now his wife. Why is it suddenly criminal to sleep with the opposite sex? Gays the world over must be over the ...
It was 1948, and the great Joe DiMaggio was injured most of the season. Tommy Henrich and Charlie Keller were in the outfield and a young Yogi Berra was behind the plate. But even with pitchers such as Allie Reynolds and Vic Raschi the Bronx Bombers could not catch the Cleveland Indians, led by playing manager-shortstop Lou Boudreau and two future Hall of Famers on the mound: Bob Feller and Bob Lemon. I write these names ...
MIAMI BEACH—To the Mecca of brutalism, a place that rivals Marbella for vulgarity, with sprawling, marble-clad palaces, boxy condo blocks, and concrete lumps replacing Old World wrought iron and glass canopies. Clubs down here mean strippers and dancing poles, none of that all-white tennis garb and polite applause after a passing shot down the line. People order jumbo daiquiris in giant glasses and swallow them quicker than ...
By the time you read this, the longest run-up ever to an election will be over, thank God, and the usual bores will be pontificating over the results. The irony is that for the first time ever I couldn’t care less who won. Nothing will change in the Land of the Depraved, and Big Business will continue to call the tune in DC. I watched all three debates between Obama and Romney and counted the word Israel mentioned 35 times, ...
Back in 1840, an Englishman by the name of Alexander Walker wrote a manual by the name of Woman, in which he quoted David Hume and from which I quote: Among the inferior creatures, nature herself, being the supreme legislator, prescribes all the laws which regulate their marriages, and varies those laws according to the different circumstances of the creature. So far, so good. Nature is the supreme arbiter, and unnatural ...
NEW YORK—Trains and buses have shut down, people have been evacuated from eastern New Jersey and the southern tip of Manhattan, and as of this writing Hurricane Sandy has hit and hit hard. Sixty-five million residents in the Northeast have been affected, hospital generators have failed, and skeleton crews have carried out seriously ill patients in the middle of the night. Supermarkets are empty, their shelves stripped by ...
A Greek football team has been warned it will be kicked off the field if its players wear uniforms advertising its two new sponsors. The shirts have been bright pink since the team was founded and bear the names of local brothels, “Villa Erotica” and “Soula’s House of History.” The hypocrisy involved is mind-boggling. Football in Greece has been as corrupt an institution as Greek politics, with referees known to have ...
