GSTAAD—Tom Sizemore, the American character actor who recently died broke and homeless at 61, was a hell of a thespian. In films such as Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down, and Heat, he played tough soldiers and gangsters whose actions obscured a soft heart. Acting is not mugging à la Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino. It’s what Sizemore conveyed subliminally. I never met him, but he once rang me from L.A. with a ...
GSTAAD—The man in the white suit is not exactly a matinee idol around these parts. The mauvaises langues have it that the rich fear him more than the poor because they have more to lose. I’m not so sure, although it does make sense. It did not in the past: Spartan kings were on the first line of battle, unflinchingly eager to show their troops how to die. Samurais worshipped a heroic death, shunned opulence, but were ...
GSTAAD—Okay, sports fans, it’s time to spill the beans. Sometime last year I wrote about rich man’s kickboxing, the art of punching and kicking at someone holding up pads, the best conditioner I know if done correctly and nonstop. I also call it the most Christian of sports because there’s a lot of outgoing and receiving nothing in return. It goes something like this: left jab, right cross, then left jab and right cross ...
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a property in the Swiss Alps is in no need of a house in New York City. With apologies to old Jane, I am seriously contemplating giving up living in the Big Bagel after close to seventy years. It’s elementary, dear readers, the place simply ain’t what it used to be; in fact it’s the lack of glamour and chic, the utter coarseness of everyday life, and the ...
GSTAAD—They’re whispering that it was the biggest haul since the Brink’s-Mat gold bullion robbery of 1983. Others say that compared with the Graff swag of last week, the Great Train Robbery was a mere bagatelle. Nobody knows nuthin’, and while the fuzz remains schtum, the on-dit is that it was the greatest robbery since the Louisiana Purchase, the trouble being those who say such things think the Louisiana Purchase is a ...
Attendees listened intently and cheered her to the rafters. She got a cool million for an hour-long speech, which is more than Boris or Blair could ever hope for. And it wasn’t even her specialty—she’s an ecdysiast—but during the recent Hedge Fund Week in Miami, Kim Kardashian was the star speaker. It tells me all I want to know about hedge fund managers, as I had a good teacher long ago, one John Bryan of toe-sucking ...
GSTAAD—As everyone knows, snobbery is nothing but bad manners passing itself off as good taste. Past American society dames were terrible snobs, until they met their French and British counterparts who put them in their place. I’m not going to mention any names because most of them are dead, but looking around me up here in the Alps I’ve seen some new horrors, money snobs who make the older type look like nuns. Mind you, ...
GSTAAD—There is nothing much I can add to what Daniel Johnson and Charles Moore wrote about the great Paul Johnson, except that I shall miss his annual summer visits to Gstaad, where we walked for hours on mountain trails and I had the opportunity to take in some of his best bons mots. He knew everything and could tell a story like no one. The times Lady Carla was with us—she is Italian and never draws a breath—Paul would ...
Norman Mailer was born on January 31, 1923, and as his hundredth birthday approaches there is a major revival of interest among those who can still read. Norman died in 2007, aged 84, and his first-born son, Michael, a talented film director who has since become my closest friend, came over to my house that day in a slight state of shock. I was his father’s friend and admirer, so we sat down and drank the day and night away. ...
Shot in the once upon a time city of dreams, now of nightmares, the sweeping solipsism expressed made paranoia a kind of totalizing faith. Behind the nauseating self-promotion a so-called prince and his Hollywood moll hogged the headlines. Far, far east from there lay a dead man, one who had absolutely nothing in common with the self-absorbed, egoistic, and narcissistic Englishman; to the contrary, King Constantine II went to ...
GSTAAD—Living my life in person is not a redundancy of expression, but it actually means living without social media. Why have I chosen the unplugged life? That’s an easy one to answer, but first a little history: I think I was the last one to switch to writing on a word processor when I founded the precursor of Takimag as an insert in a New York weekly called Taki’s Top Drawer. The Bagel weekly was the N.Y. Press, and it ...
Talismans from the past are rare but are still around, especially at the old Post Hotel: Faded bleached photographs of horse-drawn sleds on Main Street, long-bearded peasants chopping wood on the Eggli, even skiers walking up mountains in knee-deep snow before ski lifts were invented. Is there anything more precious than old photographs? Killjoy contemporary conversation subjects like the size of indoor chalet swimming pools, ...
It’s nice to be back in good old Helvetia again, but as the holiest of holy days approaches, I cannot help but think of my friend Jeremy Clarke and his struggles. Philosophers have dealt with life’s problems starting with the Greeks, yet not one of them was able to pin down man’s ultimate defeat: death, that is. The one who did manage it was no philosopher, just a simple carpenter, and his take on it has given more ...
If I had one wish to be fulfilled this Christmas it would not even be Lily James and Keira Knightley abducting me for a 24-hour love session, but for every U.S. Marine guarding our nation’s embassies to put down their guns and declare a 48-hour strike against the rotten regime in D.C. that chose a black lesbian drug smuggler over an American ex-Marine rotting in a Russian jail since 2018. The black lesbian basketball player ...
NEW YORK—It’s party time in the Bagel, and also the last week I’ll be spending in this unrefined place. The Bagel has lost its je ne sais quoi for me. It is now as subtle as a knocked-out Russian T-72 stuck in the mud. There’s as much wit around here as there used to be virgins in Hollywood, when the great Oscar Levant referred to Elizabeth Taylor’s numerous marriages as “Always a bride, never a bridesmaid.” Or as ...
Why bother with something true to life, dignified, and classy when you can create something untrue, cheap, and vulgar? While surfing through some channels looking for a black-and-white oldie, I watched something that I think is called Rogue Heroes. I’m not sure of the title because the TV film annoyed me so, I turned it off after watching it for less than ten minutes. And it took as long as that because the trash was based on ...
