“I was 12 when I first got laid.” “Where was that?” “In Middlesbrough.” “How the hell did you get lucky at 12 in Middlesbrough, when I only managed it at 15 and on my father’s boat off Cannes in 1952?” “It was a dark and stormy night.” This was no tortured confession by some doomed poet or a gender-confused feminist, just party banter between the great Rod Liddle—who went Bulwer-Lytton on me—and the ...
“Why, oh why, do the wrong people travel?” sang Noel Coward back in the ’30s. Lucky Sir Noel, he never met the present bunch. Just like the Bolsheviks deemed the aristocracy and the intelligentsia as enemies of the people back in 1917, good manners and conservative dress today are viewed—at least in the Bagel—as false and affected. But I’m getting away from the subject at hand. I just bought Masquerade, a doorstop ...
SOUTHAMPTON, L.I.—They’ve honed the skill of attracting attention by building some of the largest and ugliest houses this side of the Russian-owned Riviera ones, yet the luminous little village still retains signs of a bygone civilized era. A few grand houses built a long time ago are proof that not all Americans are nouveaux riches, and some even have good taste in decoration—you know the kind, with wicker chairs, yellow ...
NEW YORK—He’s oilier than Molière’s Tartuffe but gets away with more. His latest con involves the martial art of jiujitsu, where he managed to get a referee to reverse his decision. I’ve been competing in martial arts for close to sixty years now and have rarely—in fact, never—witnessed a ref reverse his or her decision, but I’m no con man like Zuckerberg. Some of you old-timers may even remember something ...
Were it not for my age, I’d be worried, but at this stage of the game I couldn’t give a flying you-know-what. Mind you, I have two children—a daughter and a son—both in their early 30s, and four grandchildren—two boys and two girls—some still in diapers, and that does keep me up at night. And it should also worry anyone whose brain hasn’t been fried by too many hamburgers, asinine TV commercials, or Hollywood ...
His death was front-page news in every newspaper in America, starting with The New York Times, and his demise also led the news on television. Long glowing tributes poured in, starting with Barack Obama confirming the man’s greatness. The commissioner of pro football, Roger Goodell, said that Jim Brown was the ultimate role model. As did LeBron James, the basketball player who shills for China when not busy calling America a ...
NEW YORK—At a chic dinner party for some very beautiful young women, your correspondent shocked, shocked the attendees by quoting an even greater writer than the greatest Greek writer since Homer—Rod Liddle, a Spectator magazine columnist—with his explanation of why royalty matters: because it is “anachronistic and undemocratic.” Hear, hear! A particularly attractive young woman, Alissa—on a par with Lily ...
NEW YORK—Tennessee Williams wrote Baby Doll, his only screenplay, with her in mind, and she was considered the sexiest blonde bombshell ever, much sexier than Jean Harlow, whom she portrayed on film. She was great in The Carpetbaggers, The Great Divide, Harlow, Giant, and countless other ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s hits. Carroll Baker is now 91, still very much compos mentis, and without makeup a lively dinner companion as I, ...
NEW YORK—The concept of creativity and invention can be a doubled-edged sword: It can be fresh, uplifting, and original, like the Off Broadway play directed by Michael Mailer I’ve just seen, or it can be a phony rip-off of a Shakespeare classic, a terrible modern take on Hamlet, blackness, and homosexuality that I have not seen and do not plan to. What makes me laugh is the reviewer of the Bagel Times who gave a good one to ...
Despite the catcalls and boos from some friends and even my wife, I was tickled to death on that November night of 2016 when The Donald was proclaimed America’s 45th president. It had a lot to do with my dislike for Hillary and Bill, as well as my Republican Party sentiments, something I lived to slightly regret once I sat and broke bread with ex-president Clinton two years later. It was a cousin by marriage, princess Maya ...
NEW YORK—The most likely place to be injured, even killed, in the Bagel is the sidewalk, any sidewalk, where bikes and scooters run free to mow down the old, the infirm, and those unable to perform lifesaving, matador-like avoidance moves. Yep, marauding bikers use the sidewalks of New York to beat the traffic and intimidate people, and have managed to impose their illegal presence on sidewalks as a beleaguered police force ...
NEW YORK—The fact that a sailor on leave cannot whistle at a pretty girl’s legs is scientific proof that America is beyond help and finished for good. That also goes for hard hats, who along with sailors were among the whistlers back in the good old days before woke ruined men, women, and the country in general. Already radical activists have destroyed the notion of womanhood as well as that of biology by using words such ...
Just as I finished complaining last week of the inability of Americans to string together a complete sentence, I realized they make up for it by being the worst-dressed people this side of the Ukraine. J.Crew has been in the news lately because the company has yet again changed hands, with hacks waxing nostalgically about preppy style and all that ’60s stuff. All I can say is, how can they tell? Hacks wouldn’t know what ...
NEW YORK—Is it poor little ol’ me imagining things, or are Americans becoming stupider by the minute? I’ve been traveling and running into the species, and I swear that the most intelligent thing I’ve heard recently from a New Yorker is “Like, you know, like, uh, you know, uh, like, uh...” This moron was talking in a loud voice and did not give the impression of having been hit rather hard over the head with a ...
Never paraphrasing the classics was a given until woke sensibilities became a must. It was brought to mind by the BBC’s adaptation of Great Expectations, with the convict Magwitch knocking the Empire, and Miss Havisham taking opium on the side. What they should have done is have Pip hustling coke for a fellow Magwitch convict named Escobarian, bringing it daily to the addicted old lady, and Estella sniffing—no pun ...
GSTAAD—As everyone knows, the balder, shorter, and more repellent the seducer, the more lavish the lunch he produces for the dumb blonde. Lunch is that symptom of decadence and dalliance for which there is no longer room in today’s functional world. In today’s rare civilized lunch, there are only two purposes: the seduction of a lady or the exchange of serious ideas. The latter was achieved last week in an outdoor lunch ...
