GSTAAD—Mountains in summer have a faraway astral beauty, snowy and shrouded in cloud peaks like old men wearing spats. Danger lurks in such mountains. Colin Thubron wrote about Tibet’s Mount Kailas, where locals offered sacrifices to Yama, the Buddhist god of death. Only last week eleven people lost their lives on Mont Blanc, and the numbers will likely reach close to one hundred by summer’s end. Mystics see icy mountain ...
What has happened to Wimbledon? A public crying jag would surely have embarrassed Baron von Cramm, a three-time losing finalist, as well as Rod Laver, Roy Emerson, and John Newcombe, all multiple crown winners. Back in my time, Lew Hoad won it and I took him to Les Ambassadeurs nightclub. No one recognized him, which was fine with Lew. So he repeated in 1957, murdering Ashley Cooper in the process, and once again we went out ...
The Spectator lost one of its most loyal readers when Alistair, 9th Marquess of Londonderry, died recently of that most dreaded pancreatic cancer, the very same that had killed his brother-in-law Jimmy Goldsmith fifteen years ago. Alistair would have been 75 in September, an age that Jimmy never came near. Sir James once told me that Alistair had the best brain of anyone he knew, with almost encyclopedic knowledge about ...
Back in September of 1970 I found myself in the charming ancient city of Damascus. The natives were friendly and helpful, especially as I was suffering from food poisoning thanks to a Lebanese kebab I"d eaten two days previously. My stay in the city was interrupted by the sudden death of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian strongman who had been twice defeated by the Israelis yet remained a great hero to the Egyptian public. ...
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 ...
