None of this would have happened had I accepted my neighbor’s invite to dine with a Swiss billionaire banker, or bb. He’s an old friend, the bb, and untypically Swiss: He boozes, schnoofs, and chases women, or AFABs, as the absurd youth of today call them. Booze, alas, now goes to my head, and as the song says, it lingers like a haunting refrain for at least a couple of days. I had kickboxing early the next day so I chose ...
GSTAAD—A fin de saison feeling around here, but the restaurants are still full, the sons of the desert still moping around, building is going on nonstop, and the cows are down from the mountains making the village a friendlier and more civilized place. Something of a twilight mood has crept in, especially when I compare the cows to the people. Reclaiming vanished days is a sucker’s game, but it’s irresistible. I was up at ...
Eighty-two years ago, when Mussolini attacked Greece, the people—deeply offended—simply fought back. Their response followed Plato’s definition of a situation whereby the desire to win a fight is fueled by the desire to have one’s honor restored. Plato called it “philotimo,” the literal translation being “love of honor.” I remember the word and the war quite clearly, my mother’s four brothers and my father ...
GSTAAD—Nostalgia barged in like gangbusters. What brought it on was a brief article about the most charming and enchanting of young women, Nancy Olson. Seventy-two years ago she was in that rare gem of a movie, Sunset Boulevard, playing the rosy-cheeked screenwriter who was the love interest of William Holden, the handsome but entrapped writer by Norma Desmond, a.k.a. Gloria Swanson. Nancy’s blue eyes shimmered, and her ...
GSTAAD—As the great Yogi Berra explained, “It’s déjà vu all over again.” The great one also contributed the following wisdom: “You can observe a lot by watching.” Yogi came to mind as high inflation and a recession loom, and merry old England’s trade unions are reverting to type and are blackmailing the government. And where is Margaret Thatcher now that she’s needed? Gone with the wind, that’s where. I ...
CORONIS—I suppose there’s always a first time, and looking back it was bound to happen. I scrambled off a sailing boat and took the coward’s way out after being bashed about by an angry Poseidon and a furious Aeolus. Actually it was the wife who couldn’t take it anymore and I simply went along. Sixty years of being thrown around while giving the middle finger to Aeolus and Poseidon, and during the week of another ...
An F. Scott Fitzgerald biographer by the name of David Brown refers to America’s promotion of deviancy (my words) as “the great post Appomattox launch toward materialism.” I liked that line and was thinking about it as I left the boat early morning and walked into an almost perfect Greek village square for a coffee. There were some French people blabbering away with their usual hand gestures, Greeks discussing politics in ...
PATMOS—Judging by the news, the world is finally coming apart: Chinese lab escapee Covid is still going strong, the monkeypox plague is targeting gays, record heat waves are crippling Europe and America, mass shootings are becoming a way of life in the U.S., there’s a war of attrition in the Ukraine, Taiwan is being threatened by China, and gloom and doom are everywhere but here in the holy island of Patmos, where Saint ...
I now find resorts more fun out of season. Civilized tourists are as rare as an intelligent Hollywood movie, so local talent will do nicely, and to hell with the vulgar jet set. Gstaad is perfect in June and July, March and April, as are St. Moritz, the Ionian Islands, and Patmos, my next destination. Once upon a time the French Riviera was a must, but now it’s a sweaty hellhole, a shabby place for not-so-sunny ...
Michael Beloff QC and past president of Trinity College Oxford has just had his memoir reviewed in The Spectator, and it brought back memories. Here’s this really good man, the type who does the work, believes in the system, plays by the rules, and subscribes to the old graces of courtesy and politeness, but the sort we never read about. Instead, what is shoved down our throats are today’s politicians selling their snake ...
Now that the weakest Wimbledon since 1973—the year of the boycott—is over, a few thoughts about Pam Shriver’s recent revelations that her coach Don Candy, deceased, was also her lover. Candy was 50 at the time, while Pam was 17, which in my book made Candy a lucky guy, if it was legal. The age of consent varies in places, and the only time I had to defend myself was when an irate father whose daughter I had dated and was ...
Looking back and trying to choose which among all the incomparably bewitching ones of my youth can be tricky. Giselle was definitely one of them—blond, French, mesmeric, an Aryan apparition—but so was Kiki, very white-skinned, also French, patrician, and very sexy. They were friends, those two, but fell out after they both chose the same boyfriend. And they were also married to men who knew and liked the boyfriend, but back ...
As speaker at a posh dinner given by Jonathan and Jake Goedhuis, the best U.K. wine merchants by far, and attended by many swells including Anthony Mangnall MP, I somehow managed to finish the speech despite having tasted some very good wines beforehand. I nevertheless got lots of mileage from the fact that we Greeks were responsible for inventing the strike—Lysistrata—an act the British unions later on perfected. Ancient ...
It’s nice to be back in the old continent again, especially after getting within a couple hundred yards of the phoniest bunch of Hollywood East types, fakes with names like Pelosi, Schumer, Schiff, and their ilk. It made me fly out from the Bagel without mixed feelings for a change. America has become unrecognizable, a violent land where a Democratic Congress winks at riots and intimidation by the left, where career criminals ...
He is a rich English lord with a very large house and his wife is a beautiful American with a mid-Atlantic accent. The lord is portrayed by Herbert Marshall, a screen idol of the ’30s and ’40s, his wife by Norma Shearer, a Hollywood superstar whose eyes alone enslaved men and whose figure caused me sleepless nights as a schoolboy, if you know what I mean. Then there is a suitor, Robert Montgomery, the patrician American ...
SOUTHAMPTON, L.I.—These are peripatetic times for the poor little Greek boy, out in the Hamptons for some sun-seeking among WASP types, and then down to the nation’s capital for the memorial service of that wonderful humorist P.J. O’Rourke. And do take the following with a grain of salt, but even 800 million years ago, when only microorganisms slithered around the beaches, belonging to a private club was all-important, ...
