NEW YORK—It’s a black-and-white 1939 oldie starring Barbara Stanwyck and William Holden in his first credited film role. She is thin, ballsy, bawdy, beautiful, and talks with a Brooklyn accent. He’s tall, good-looking, and a professional boxer whose real love is playing the violin. He gives up the beak-busting business after he kills the Chocolate Drop Kid in the ring. His name is Joe Bonaparte. Joe and Babs are on the ...
Bernie Ecclestone is a gnomish Brit ex-grease monkey. He is my neighbor in Gstaad, the small alpine Swiss village which once upon a time was the Mecca of the old rich and titled but is now slowly turning into the playground of the nouveaux riches and vulgar. I"ve often written about Bernie because for a very short man, he has a very long reach. About ten years or so ago he bought a beautiful old inn, a Gstaad landmark used ...
“Your future is in Hollywood—I can make you the next Bela Lugosi,” said James Toback looking at me straight in the eye. Jimmy Toback is a hell of a fellow. An obsessive with an encyclopedic knowledge of sports and other data, he directed such great films as The Gambler, Fingers (which made Harvey Keitel into a star), wrote the screenplay for Bugsy, and has just wrapped Seduced & Abandoned, starring Taki and Alec ...
I don’t know who was the dumber of the two: the Greek banker who was in a hurry to spend 100 million big ones for a London pad or the American woman who accidentally walked off a cliff in Alaska while texting. Both dummies survived, which goes to show the Almighty must have a weakness for the desperate. All I know is that the Alaskan broke some bones after falling 60 feet off a cliff while texting. Apparently she had ...
NEW YORK—Ten years ago this week I put my money down and The American Conservative magazine was born. They say that owning a yacht is like sitting under a shower tearing up hundred-dollar bills. Owning an opinion magazine based in Washington, DC is like sitting in a dull hotel room throwing thousand-dollar bills to the fire. A boat will at least get you some attention from the fairer sex—if it’s large and vulgar enough, ...
I stopped reading novels long ago. When those arch-phonies writing magic realism became household words, I dropped out quicker than you can say, "Raymond Chandler." Now that's what I call a novel"the stuff Chandler churned out about old El Lay, everyone gulping booze and puffing away like steam engines, and only exercising between the sheets. Crime writers have always had an inferiority complex about their work, but ...
NUEVA YORK–The dateline is in Spanish because I have yet to hear any English spoken here in the Bagel, and I landed in some style more than 24 hours ago. Never mind. Flying at 47,000 feet at close to 500 knots per hour on a G550 is as close to perfection in traveling as it gets. The G550 is the Mozart / Beethoven / Schubert / Schumann / Edward Hopper / Degas / William Holden / Burt Lancaster / John Wayne / Papa Hemingway / F. ...
GSTAAD—It was far, far worse than the Rodney King El Lay riots of twenty years ago, and it made the London summer fires of 2011 look like a kindergarten’s Guy Fawkes party. This was our Kristallnacht, and then some. They had hard faces, harder than a hedge-fund manager’s when told a good corner table is unavailable. They came early and there were lots of them. They were squat and dark, tall and wide, their fists at the ...
Forty-five years ago two Greek shipowners and the most famous diva of her time squared off in a British High Court over a financial dispute. Panaghis Vergottis, a gentleman and philanthropist, had sued Aristotle Socrates Onassis and Maria Callas over the ownership of a tanker the two men had bought for la Callas back when they were best friends. I suspect Vergottis had fallen in love with the fiery coloratura, and once Onassis ...
Here we go again! Scary sofa samurai Robert Kagan, a neocon so-called foreign-policy scholar, is also an expert on war, having watched a lot of Hollywood movies. Kagan says that if Obama were to use force against Iran, the election is over and he would win overwhelmingly. Kagan and his brother are inside-the-Beltway hucksters, always hustling and doing Israel's bidding, although not necessarily for cash. Zionists have countless ...
GSTAAD—Now is the time of sultry August days and nights, with the gift of privacy an added bonus. In summer the village contains the die-hards, the locals, and a few tourists. Bucolic freedom, fresh air, and sunshine were once anathema—foul-smelling, airless dives such as New Jimmy’s were the real McCoy—but now the sound of bells on roaming cows means instant happiness. It’s called old age. I can now walk from my ...
So the miracle has happened. A generation has been inspired and millions of children have been driven away from their televisions and handheld devices and have gone out on the track, running, jumping, throwing. Faster, higher, stronger. Thank you, Olympic Games, and see you down in Rio. And now back to reality. Yes, for once the Brits got it right and proved the gloom gluttons wrong. No, the rains did not come, just a few ...
With the exception of the French Academy immortals Michel Déon and Jean d’Ormesson, two wonderful writers and both the epitome of charm and graciousness, the French can be a pretty silly lot. They weren’t always. They got that way sometime between the two great wars. They turned even sillier during the German occupation and following their liberation from Eisenhower & Co. They were humiliated by Prussia in 1871, saved ...
GSTAAD—My chalet lies far above the village of Gstaad, but I happened to be en ville when I heard the pleasant sounds of an Oom-pah band and saw the Swiss burghers dressed up in their finest lederhosen marching through. It was a magnificent morning, the mountains glistening in the sun, the air fresh and clean, the kind of day Papa Hemingway could describe like no other. An elderly but very friendly American man jokingly asked ...
GSTAAD—If the London Olympics do not go down in history as The Crying Games, I will perform a sex act on a Mae West hologram in Times Square as the clock strikes 12 on New Year’s Eve. What’s most confusing is that winners cried much more than losers. Their tears made the place look like Niagara Falls at times. What is happening to the Brits? Take the lightweight women’s double skulls. The event was won convincingly by ...
Thucydides carefully structured his Peloponnesian War history as a cautionary tale about the moral decay that accompanies abuses of imperial power. “It is a general and necessary law of nature to rule whatever one can,” said the Athenians blandly to the denizens of Melos before slaughtering them. (The tiny island of Melos, a Spartan colony, had refused to join an alliance with Athens in 416 BC, so the civilized Athenians ...
