I began thinking about this column one week before I noticed that Craig Brown had pinched it. He had actually written what I meant to write one week before I decided to write it, which I guess cannot be called plagiarism merely because I had thought of it first. (If I had, that is.) It’s about the man who wrote Downton Abbey, the greatest and most popular soap opera since Upstairs, Downstairs. It was during a von Bülow lunch ...
Throughout his life my friend Porfirio Rubirosa made about five to ten million dollars by romancing women, and he married three of the world’s richest: Flor de Oro Trujillo, the Dominican strongman’s only daughter; Doris Duke, the tobacco heiress; and Barbara Hutton, the original “Poor Little Rich Girl.” Rubi spent money he’d earned in the bedroom on the good things in life: mostly other women, strings of polo ponies, ...
NEW YORK—It’s open season against whites over here. Couple of weeks ago, an 18-year-old Rutgers University freshman jumped off the George Washington Bridge after his roommate, also 18, and a female student accomplice used a webcam to surreptitiously film him in a gay sexual encounter and sent the link to Ravi’s 150 Twitter followers. Tyler Clementi’s body was fished out a week later, after the cheap laughs had subsided. ...
NEW YORK—My first copy of The Great Gatsby cost me $2. It was 1953, the cover was dark blue with city lights in the background and a pair of mournful green eyes looking at nothing in particular. I had just finished Tender is the Night, so I took Gatsby home in exhilaration, not unlike going home with the girl of your dreams—well, almost. I was not to be disappointed. Although I never related to Jay Gatsby the way I did to ...
Some of our readers may be aware that the sainted editor’s wife of The Spectator is Swedish—and she has a sister—but I swear on the Koran that my story has nothing to do with it. In The Spectator only two weeks ago, the Sainted One wrote about how the Swedes bucked recession by lowering taxes. What I will tell you is about the fun I’ve had with that country’s hyperborean beauties, starting with my first great love, ...
When Tom Wolfe harpooned Leonard Bernstein in his famous 60s essay, he did it by directly quoting from those attending the infamous cocktail party Lenny gave for the Black Panthers. Wolfe had finagled an invite to Bernstein’s grand 5th Avenue pad and was taking notes throughout the evening. The end result was devastating. In fact, it killed radical chic once and for all. The rich and famous stopped giving dinners for cop ...
New York. I missed a very good friend’s sixtieth birthday party in the shires, but thus avoided the disgraceful anti- Pontiff showing off by the cheap publicity seeking and repellent poseurs that signed up to the orchestrated campaign against the wonderful Pope Benedict. Mind you, all these grotesque losers have a point, against God, that is. If I looked like Polly Toynbee or Claire Rayner, or Stephen Fry for that matter, I ...
The new look requires a new, improved Taki. No more mentions of jet-setters, no French Riviera shenanigans, nothing but constant classical themes and references to Horace, Racine, Rilke, Marlowe, and Milton. And if you believe this it’s time for the men in white coats to come and take you. Eight years ago Pat Buchanan and I founded The American Conservative, an American national biweekly whose purpose was to expose what ...
Gstaad. “Had someone suggested that one day I’d be sleeping in Taki’s bed …….” the person writing this hints that he or she would have bet the farm against it. Funny he or she mentions it, but so would I, and yet it happened and I’m delighted it did. Now for some of you sports fans out there, who could this person be? Here’s a hint. He’s a man, and an openly gay man to boot. And he spent more than one night in ...
Spetses. I was filled with unbearable nostalgia. There I was again, boating, swimming, sunning, wine drinking with good friends, feeling the ecstasy that only a Mediterranean afternoon can arouse in me. Transforming one’s feelings into language is difficult. One has to avoid sounding corny. Byron wrote about the Isles of Greece, and the sea that murmurs softly to “Come again, and again.” I, too, have heard such voices, ...
Gstaad. It was a balmy June day, Pentecoste Sunday, a major holiday in France. The Casino de la Corniche was a chic and popular establishment on a rocky spur between Saint-Eugene and Pointe Pescade. The beach was the finest in the area, and the young French lieutenant, scion of a ducal family, went for a swim with a friend. After he walked up the hill, with its plush gardens surrounding the casino, where from 4.00 to 8.00 there ...
Gstaad. An article in Vanity Fair about a man I knew for over forty years has turned me into Orlando Furioso. Oleg Cassini died in 2006 well into his nineties. We met in 1956 on an airplane going to Bermuda to play a tennis tournament. Cassini was a good club player and a so-so skier, back in the days few people skied. He was a heterosexual dress designer who designed very ugly clothes for women and even worse ones for ...
On board S/Y Bushido. Sailing down the eastern coast of the Peloponnese I thought I spotted some anti-Semites adrift, but they turned out to be Norwegians, flying a British flag. Although becalmed they needed nothing but a breeze, so we wished them good day and motored off. Ever since Shimon Peres accused the UK of anti-Semitism, I’ve been very careful to whom I offer help on the high seas. Peres, who once upon a time made ...
On board s/y Bushido. “ Trimming the Jib” is a short story by Ernest Hemingway and it has to do with the sea. And love. And passion. He wrote it shortly before “The Old Man and the Sea,” which helped land him the Nobel Prize for literature. Here it is in its entirety: “He ran aground on the same reef as before. Pablo was drunk and dreaming of Conchita. He was always dreaming of Conchita. When he wasn’t dreaming ...
Athens. As everyone knows, Sigmund Freud was a fraud, and like many frauds he thought the Parthenon might also be one. But he summoned his nerve and visited the sacred sight and was delighted as well as shocked at what he saw. This was 1904. Like other visitors Freud dreaded that the real thing might not live up to his expectations, but it did and continues to do so today. Unlike other cultural icons—the Mona Lisa, the ...
Which evokes a romantic memory better, a fragrance or a melody? The latter, I am sure, despite the times I’ve felt a tug at my heart when some sweet young thing breezed by me followed by the aroma of Chanel no 5, the favorite scent of my first great love back in the fifties. Music and lyrics are a hell of a combination for nostalgia nuts like myself. In fact they are as lethal as a left-right combination from the great Ray ...
