ONBOARD S/Y BUSHIDO OFF CORSICA—For the last three days I’ve been watching people 110 years old prancing around bareheaded under a sun so fierce that no Taliban warrior would emerge from under his camel to face it. I tried to speak to the captain of one of these mega-ships, but he mistook me for a reporter and looked nervous until I pointed toward Bushido and told him I was the owner. He remained suspicious, as I had no ...
I"ve just had the worst time in my life rubbing shoulders"actually masts"with ghastly ex-Soviet Union gangsters, now called "oligarchs" by the gutter press and the New York Times/Washington Post Camorra. There are also towel-wearing Ay-rabs with obscene boats further polluting the French Riviera, but it's the oligarchs playing Commodore Vanderbilt who make the fabled south of France stink of necrosis. Never ...
It is very still as I sit down to write, the atmosphere heavy and oppressive. They say time flies, but less so if one looks backward. Nearly a thousand years before Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453, Emperor Justinian was embarrassed to discover that his Greek subjects were not paying their taxes. Cheating the authorities has become a trademark of modern Greece and is often attributed by philhellenes to the 400-year ...
ONBOARD S/Y BUSHIDO—I made a resolution long ago never to mention the Olympics, but resolutions are made to be broken. My uncle competed in Los Angeles in 1932 and Berlin in 1936, and my father ran the relay for Greece in Berlin. Reading about American rappers and Indian steel tycoons carrying the Olympic torch reminds me how much commerce has hijacked sport. I’m leaving London the day after the Spectator summer party in ...
ONBOARD S/Y BUSHIDO—However you cut it, Greek demagogues are bluffing that the faceless suits of Brussels will give in to the blackmail and fold their hand. Greeks are born gamblers. The tragedy is that the same criminals who ruined the country to begin with are about to be reelected on June 17th. The criminals led by Antonis Samaras currently have 26%; the left-wing bluffer and con man Alexis Tsipras has 20%. Talk about ...
ONBOARD S/Y BUSHIDO—My moment of glory came and went in a jiffy. It was actually a whole afternoon of filming onboard without a single retake, temper tantrum, or even the planned fight between Alec Baldwin and yours truly. The name of the movie is Seduced & Abandoned, and it has nothing to do with the Italian golden oldie of long ago. It is an original nonfiction story—the great Greek thespian Taki plays himself—of ...
"Sorry, I"m in makeup; if it's something important, call my agent, Israel Goldfarb." This is how I"ve been fending off the myriad calls from eager females trying to reach me now that I"m about to become a major movie star. Michael Mailer, son of Norman and a very close buddy, is producing a movie directed by James Toback and starring Alec Baldwin. It's about a movie producer trying to finance a film during ...
MIAMI BEACH—I thought it a good time to visit, no Spring Break debauchery nor fashionista pretense. So I signed up yet again for the judo championships, trained very hard, and flew down with four buddies hoping to stay in a family hotel near the water, a bit like Bogie stopping at a place in the film Key Largo and running into a bitter old crime czar named Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson). In that wonderful golden oldie, ...
So Sarko and Bruni are out, Hollande is in, and I’m off to the Actor’s Studio to brush up on my acting lessons. (Stanley Kowalski is reborn. Stel-LAAA!) My friend Edward Jay Epstein has written a quickie book about Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s little problem last year here in the Bagel. Epstein reiterates the disgraced ex-IMF chief’s suspicions that his political enemies set him up. Epstein does not agree; he simply states ...
NEW YORK—I have settled into my Big Bagel routine as if I never went away: up early, a 25-minute walk through the park, one hour of judo working with three opponents, walk back, have breakfast, and collapse with the newspapers. In the evening it is karate with Richard Amos and a couple of other black belts, then dinner at home. Three times per week I go out and get hammered in case I get too healthy, more often than not with ...
In John Guare's play Six Degrees of Separation, a young black con man traduces his way into a white, rich, liberal family's midst by posing as Sidney Poitier's son, who had just happened to lose his wallet. The guilt-ridden rich folk put him up"with predictable results. The family is almost torn apart as the con man brings in a gay lover and steals them blind. The Broadway show was a success, as was the movie, which ...
The first friend I made at Lawrenceville School was Reuben Batista, eldest son of the Cuban strongman. Being foreigners gave us something in common, the rest of the school being mostly WASPS with a smattering of Catholics. By the time I met Reuben in 1949 his father Fulgencio had been in power either directly or indirectly for nearly two decades. Havana was a paradise if one was rich and liked easy women, rum drinks, flashy ...
My friend Mark Brennan and I were talking about class warfare. "It's cyclical," Mark said as he executed a perfect uchi mata during judo practice. "Perhaps over here," I answered, "but in Europe it's a way of life." "Just look at the 1890s, followed by the crash of 1907, then the Roaring Twenties before the Great Depression, and then the 80s and 90s followed by the crash of 2008," Mark ...
NEW YORK—Seeing Manhattan rising from the distance is always a treat. I am not sure it’s possible for anyone brought up around these parts to appreciate entirely what New York—the idea of New York—meant to us who came from the Old Continent. I was eleven years old and had seen only war and devastation: dead, stinking bodies in the city parks, bullet-scarred buildings, and people starving on the sidewalks, too weak to ...
Papa Hemingway’s recently published letter to an Italian male friend purportedly revealed the “human side” of which his admirers were already well aware. (Like Bogie, he was tough on the outside, jelly on the inside.) Until lately, Papa’s haters had a good long run. Soon after Carlos Baker’s matchless biography appeared in 1972, 11 years after Hemingway’s suicide, the naysayers started to gnaw away at Papa. The rats ...
Dr. David Starkey is a great man, a Tudor historian, and one of the few academics who tells it like it is. Openly gay, he has no time for prancing queens and other such clown minorities trying to steal a bigger slice of the freebie pie. After England’s riots last summer—while politically correct policy-makers were hand-wringing about inequality and other such urban-deprivation myths—he had the courage to mention “black ...
