The Social World

Category: High Life

The decadence of seafood towers

Whether or not it is your intention to see and be seen, you cannot avoid the latter when you order a seafood tower. I can say this definitively, having experienced one side more than the other – the mere glimpse of a spire of glistening seafood floating through the brasserie will not only draw the attention of fellow diners, but stir up burning envy in their hearts.

The seafood tower takes the experience of eating an oyster and scales it up tenfold into an exercise in excess, sometimes three or more tiers high.

The oyster has her rightful place on the ice, of course, but we find her alongside her sisters: a bevy of clams, scallops en masse, a bowl of jewel-bright tuna, an army of shrimps cocktail, a collection of mussels and the pièce de résistance, a lovely whole lobster or crab complete with all its tasty garnishes – warm butter, creamy mayonnaise, yellow lemons cut like stars.

The responsibility of cracking open a crab leg is left to a gallant sir or madam

Without compromise or apology, the seafood tower invites you and your dining companions to partake with no guilt, and all others to look on with envy. How many times have I sufficed myself alone at the bar with a bowl of shoestring fries, comforting myself with tales of the joy of simplicity when my true craving lay with copious friends and a bounty of fish?

A friend remarked to me recently that Americans have been craving simple, traditional foods after the rise and sustained dominance of experimental fusion cuisine and the relative austerity of the pandemic years (see the recent popularity of New York institutions such as Bemelmans Bar and the Chelsea Hotel).

She suggested there is a particular interest in the kind of uncomplicated and aesthetically pleasing food and drink that sustains a patio culture: think of afternoons spent lounging with friends in front of a sunlit body of water, sipping some fizzy beverage and chatting about nothing of consequence. The seafood tower is neither uncomplicated nor humble; it is by definition a showstopper with a price point to match. But in many ways, it is the pinnacle of this renewed social ideal; a surfeit of undersea riches strewn about in picture-perfect array – always consumed among friends – and thus a perfect representation of abundance on every level.

The American cioppino, Provençal bouillabaisse and Italian insalata di mare also offer a cornucopia of fish in a dish, but none carry the same punch as the tower. The seafood tower is elevated from its parboiled and braised brethren by pure concentrated decadence. The conceit of the presentation is almost too much – as if every shellfish in the sea came from afar, pried themselves open and offered themselves up for consumption.

It’s as if every shellfish in the sea came from afar, pried themselves open and offered themselves up for consumption

In some cases, accoutrements are offered alongside and the responsibility of cracking open a crab leg is left to a gallant sir or madam. But these functions take on the veneer of perfunctory performance rather than anything real. Most of the labor behind the composition is artfully hidden – the shellfish selected, ideally, hours earlier and the corporal labor of shucking, deveining and claw-cracking performed far from view.

Hands-on shellfish work is left to the setting of more rustic fare like the summer crab boil. And only the summer crab boil can compete with the tower, containing roughly all the main elements and retaining the communal aspect while remaining wholly unpretentious. One imagines dropping three whole platters into a pot and boiling them down, before scattering mussels and langoustines across old newspaper and tearing them apart with a beer in one hand and cracked shells in the other. Much messier and much more fun.

Still, these sorts of dishes are not for everyone. For some, the seafood tower is a gauche, nouveau riche display, closer to gold-leafed foie gras than a clambake. For others, the variety of either the seafood boil or tower is simply too much. “Maybe it’s a little too real,” said a friend, an experienced fisherman. “Sort of feels like, ‘let’s just dump the bucket in the pot and dust it with Old Bay.’ I prefer weird food items to be singled out and left unmolested.”

In Paris recently, on a mission to find an illustrative example for this piece, I suggested to my friends the buzzy seafood spot Clamato (chic green decor, tie-dye-shirt waitstaff, and a line out the door – don’t miss it) and ordered a plateau de fruits de mer without consultation as I knew my companions were raw-food-averse.

I hoped and trusted that the head-turning presentation and the ambiance of the city of love would do enough to assuage their fears and convince them to try – at bare minimum – a little clam.

When the platter came out, crab sawn in half and displayed guts-side out, I knew I would not be successful. But in any case, the wine and bread were very good, I enjoyed more clams than I deserved to have on my own and my friends ate accordingly. C’est la mer qu’on voit danser.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2025 World edition.

June 3, 2025
What Jesus taught me

This is the forty-seventh year in a row that I have written a column for The Spectator’s Christmas issue. It began when I was a young forty-year-old, and is at present being written by an eighty-seven-year-old vet. The years have passed in an eye-blink. Recently I asked myself why do bad things happen to good people? (Well, not very good people, but well-intentioned.) This question has occupied thinkers throughout the ages. People who do not believe in a good God should logically have no problem with the existence of evil. In my case, I very much believe in God and it has served me well during a very long and very happy life.

Recently, however, something bad happened to me in a Swiss village court of law, which led me to suspend writing my regular column. Then something extraordinary took place. My wife Alexandra, a devout Catholic whom I married fifty-two years ago when she was young and didn’t know what she was doing, quoted the Bible to me: “Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.” She also reminded me of the book of Job. God must have had a reason to punish Job so cruelly, yet poor old Job was innocent. God did it to illustrate his unquestionable power and that his ways are never understood by mortals. “We have two beautiful children and four even more beautiful grandchildren,” she said. “You’re healthy and well-off. What else do you want?”

I very much believe in God and it has served me well during a very long and very happy life

She was hard to argue with — she was not born a Serene Highness for nothing — and she has convinced me not to hate or ask why. Mind you, I’m appealing but it takes a long time.

Now let’s get back to Christmas. We live in a world where people exaggerate the value of entertainers and professional athletes while neglecting spiritual heroes. Sometimes I think anti-Christian forces take Jesus more seriously than most nominal Christians do. People in the western world — including many who consider themselves Christians — have turned Christmas into a bland holiday of mere niceness. Ironically, the natural reaction to Jesus is to reject him and he said so himself. He predicted his own death and told his followers they must expect persecution too. Jesus preached love and mercy, but also warned of eternal damnation, insulted the Pharisees, and rebuked people who adored him in words that can still make us cringe.

He was no con man. He accompanied his words with miracles, and the forces ranged against him disputed his words rather than the miracles. Now his modern enemies don’t even try to dispute whether or not the miracles happened — but simply assume that they didn’t. The fact that large crowds witnessed the blind seeing, the deaf hearing and the cripples walking convinces those of us who believe in his truth.

And yet there is a growing army of unbelievers, who say — as sceptics have done for centuries — that this is all kids’ stuff. Some go further: a benevolent God, they maintain, would never allow things like war and the premature deaths of millions. How could a loving God permit such gratuitous ruin? Surely any rational human being is bound to think that natural disasters which kill innocents are proof of the non-existence of a good God.

And yet, the miracle of birth alone proves otherwise. As does the satisfaction derived from doing something good for others, a very rare thing these days. Mindless violence is now part of western culture, as are anti-Christian beliefs.

Crusading atheism has become the banner under which many so-called thinking people march. It separates the men from foolish boys and so on. Articulate secularists, however, have a problem: the Enlightenment story does not add up. As religion gave way to science, parochialism and tribal allegiance were replaced by cosmopolitanism and individualism. Top-down command systems were out, separation of church and state was in. And what did that bring us? Millions and millions of dead from wars, especially during the twentieth century. And the big causes of these wars had little to do with religion and a lot to do with secularism.

Science is a blessing, but has not managed to replace religion where spirituality is concerned — and the great scientists are among the greatest of believers. Many churches are empty in Britain because of the secular teachings of the Church of England. Try getting into a Czech church on Christmas Eve, or a Greek village one. From Plato and Aristotle to Darwin and Einstein, God was a reality. The West — and America in particular — is suffering from a culture of self-absorption and self-promotion.

And now it’s time. After forty-seven years, I am taking a break. I want to wish every Spectator reader a very happy Christmas, but I have run out of room to mention all the kind messages I’ve received. I will only mention a very few whose kindnesses I shall not soon forget: Leopold and Debbie Bismarck, Willy Shawcross, Melissa Kite, Charles Moore, Douglas Murray, Bruce Anderson, Charlie Glass, Rosie Chomondeley, Robin Birley and Rachel Johnson — thank you all and see you soon.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.

December 18, 2023
How to train like Taki

Here’s a tip for you young whippersnappers: don’t get old, but if you do, you can fool Father Time by training the smart way. By this I don’t mean you should follow all that bull that floats around online. I don’t use social media, but I’m told that a system exists, which reaches millions across multiple platforms, that spreads misinformation about health, and then some. The wellness industry means big moolah, and is as phony as Hollywood morality.

Take it from Taki: all you need to feel good and be able to enjoy yourself is a little exercise before breakfast, and some semi-hard training in the afternoon. C’est tout, mes amis, as they say in gay Paree. Then you can drink all you want, eat within reason and chase the opposite sex to your heart’s content. During lockdown, exercise became more important than ever, and I was lucky to be stuck in Gstaad because the place was empty, the mountain paths emptier, and the only living things one ran into while climbing the verdant hills were the cows.

So, how should an oldie start the day? What the poor little Greek boy does, with or without a hangover, is stretch. After a couple of minutes of stretching — all this is done outdoors no matter the weather — a two-minute stationary bike at full tilt is in order. This gets the heart rate up, and then it’s time for forty push-ups, twenty with the hands close together, and another twenty with the hands far apart. Isometrics follow, pushing against a wall while standing, and sitting on an imaginary stool against a wall for one minute. Then it’s front kicks and reverse punches for speed and accuracy using a bag and a makiwara. By now twenty minutes have gone by and it’s time for breakfast. In the afternoon a session of kickboxing or karate with an opponent and a brisk walk before dinner mean you are ready for anything the night might suddenly offer.

I’ve been following this routine since giving up the tennis that I coupled with karate throughout my youth and middle age. I still ski, mostly cross-country, but no longer ride, as I gave up polo long ago. Martial arts have kept me hungry and fit, and they help when some loudmouth bully starts throwing his weight around. Not that it happens very often, especially here in Gstaad where young men are not known to carry knives or guns in nightclubs.

Which brings me to a parenthesis on how to stay young and healthy. Gstaad is not a violent place, but neither is it what it used to be. When I first came here back in 1958 no one, but no one, locked their doors in the hotels or the few chalets that existed back then. There was one policeman and the joke was that he was the laziest man in town. There was absolutely no crime, no theft and no violence of any sort except that of drunken farmers taking it out on their poor wives from time to time. Now things are different. Chalets built by the newly rich are a dime a dozen, including those with swimming pools and auditoriums. Once the nouveaux riches arrived, crime was bound to follow. Jewelry stores have been held up at gunpoint and chalets have been broken into and robbed. The Alpina hotel’s concierge was recently tied up by an armed gang who took twenty minutes to break into a jewelry shop. The fuzz was asleep.

The reason I cannot state exactly how many robberies have taken place is that the commune refuses to acknowledge that any- thing out of the ordinary is happening. It’s the Swiss way: don’t rock the boat and deny everything. There are strong rumors that Slavica Ecclestone, the giant ex-wife of billionaire Bernie, got roughed up by bandits in her rather posh chalet. Apparently there have been around twenty robberies this season, although the fuzz denies everything.

Here’s the scoop: there was a vote some time ago for more cops, but the locals voted against it. This made sense. Thieves don’t steal from the locals but from rich foreigners, so why should the locals get stuck with higher taxes to pay for more fuzz? My own security people, whom I hired once I moved to an area outside the village in a private road, explained it very well: “It comes from inside information, from disgruntled staff who pass vital info to professional crooks lurking around Switzerland.”

Saudis and Gulfers are notorious for the way they treat servants, especially staff from the Philippines. The servants, in turn, know where the bullies keep their jewels and moolah, as well as the hours they keep. It becomes elementary, my dear Watsons. Most of the bandits, I suspect, are from the Balkans, and very few have been caught. So, be nice to staff, do not leave jewelry and gold watches lying around, keep your cash in the bank, and you’re pretty safe. When I asked my security man man whether one should fight or hand it over, he said that Gstaad crooks are not violent and one should not look for confrontation. My advice is do your exercises, take up martial arts, keep a low profile, be kind to your staff, and if the bandits come in and are not carrying guns or knives, what the hell, have a go.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 2023 World edition.

October 20, 2023
The West needs Richard Nixon

Gstaad

The Speccie arrived just in time for me to read about the rudeness of one Lyndon Johnson, then vice-president, toward Lady Antonia Fraser. A later occupant of the White House, Jimmy Carter, was not as discourteous as the Texan, but in somewhat similar circumstances he left the poor little Greek boy standing alone surrounded by secret service heavies.

This took place at a grand New York dinner party given in Carter’s honor by a real-estate lady, and I was seated with Norman Mailer who was busy trying to make whoopee with my ex sister-in-law, Betsy Kaiser. Norman and I had talked about democracy at the start of the dinner, and whether someone who had contributed nothing to the betterment of his fellow man deserved to have an equal vote to that of someone who had contributed a hell of a lot. Trying to provoke the novelist, I proposed a 10:1 ratio in the case of, say, a scientist who develops a cure for cancer versus a drug dealer. “Why don’t you ask Jimmy what he thinks about this?” said Norman, pointing at Carter, in an attempt to get rid of me and concentrate on my ex sister-in-law. After dinner, and well into my cups, I approached the peanut farmer and posed my question. Carter heard me out, smiled, and said, “It’s an interesting ahdea,” while simultaneously giving a discreet sign with his eyes. I found myself being moved, without anyone laying a hand on me, from where I’d been standing with the ex-president to the next room. I have no idea how they did it, but they did it: end of story.

The man who preceded Carter by one wrote the most wonderfully encouraging and flattering letter to me when I was doing graduate work at Pentonville, and had me to dinner a couple of times at his New Jersey home. Richard Nixon was and remains the most underrated and unappreciated president, a man whom the media and the swamp hated because they knew he knew what they were all about. Nixon ended the Vietnam War, opened up the Soviet Union and China and won forty-nine states in 1972, but the same media lefties who run DC today and control the country got him in the end. Nixon was never openly bitter and I remember his unique insight into the then Soviet Union and how he dealt with the Soviet leaders. “Whenever Leonid Brezhnev brought up the Middle East, I’d fake being a bit drunk, and warn him not to even think about it. We’ll end up nuking each other over that place…”

With the present war of attrition — because that’s what it is, and with no end in sight — I wish Nixon were around with a solution. Every decent human being except for those profiting from the war knows that an armistice offers the best hope for peace in Ukraine. Neither side seems likely to deliver a knockout blow on the battlefield, and even less likely is a desire on the part of Ukraine to pursue a comprehensive peace deal. Hence it’s up to the gaga in the White House, although any twelve-year-old might be a better choice at this point. Our own Owen Matthews said it all a couple of weeks ago: Ukraine cannot succeed without US support.

However unpopular it may sound, and I’m quoting Foreign Affairs: “It is Zelensky who fears any concession could affect his future electoral prospects.” And although some Republican leaders think that continuous support for Kyiv is wasteful and reckless, Zelensky continues to insist Donbas and Crimea are his. The old cliché about truth being the first casualty in war has never been truer, but the Ukrainians are running out of men whereas the Russkies are not. In fact, the latter have some 700,000 ready to enter the fray.

What is as frustrating as hell is the inability, or unwillingness, of Uncle Sam to stop the slaughter. Speaking to a Polish friend who knows that the Poles and Hungarians are my two favorite people, I reminded him that Poland had defeated the Soviets back in 1921, and would again if there were ever another incursion. That’s when my anti-Putin friend admitted that NATO did not need to go as far as it did to provoke the Bear, which it certainly did.

The trouble with our side is that we never, but never, admit to being wrong. Not that our adversaries do, but then why do we pretend to be the good guys? To quote Foreign Affairs again: “Russia may be resolved to outlast the US and NATO.” Which means that a lot of very bad people will make a hell of a lot of money and thousands upon thousands of innocent young men will die in vain. Almost as sad is the fact that few in the West before the war understood the extent to which Russians saw Ukraine as central to their destiny.

The great military expert Taki believes that Russia is losing 800 men per day, while Ukraine’s losses are 500 over the same period. Do the maths. When my Polish friend asked why I love Russia and now loathe America, I answered that the former was the birthplace of Pushkin, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, whereas the latter no longer has men like David Crockett in the Alamo, Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg or Charles Lindbergh over the Atlantic. They’ve even canceled Hemingway and they have only sleaze and crime to show for it. This isn’t Nixon’s America.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.

October 2, 2023
Pre-traumatic Uncle Sam-induced stress disorder and Chino-melancholia below deck

She was built in 1921, a beautiful wooden ketch that is as graceful to look at as she’s uncomfortable for fat cats accustomed to gin palaces. I’ve sailed her over many years, the last time giving her to my children, as I was in plaster having fallen from a balcony in Gstaad. This time it was worse. In fact it was the greatest no-show since Edward VIII skipped his coronation and showed up on the French Riviera instead. Michael Mailer had hinted that some Hollywood floozies were eager to sail around the Greek isles, but arrived empty-handed.

The absent floozies were missed, but were immediately replaced by my son and his son, and off we went, four males looking for mates down the Peloponnese coast. Young Taki, aged seventeen, won hands down, romancing the most beautiful sixteen-year-old in the whole of Greece, whose grandfather was a friend of mine and whose great-grandfather was a crony of my father. Such are the joys of old age.

Aello’s crew of five was eager, willing and able — there is nothing worse than reluctant, pusillanimous sailors — and there was a surprise right off the bat. The steward Fraser Richardson, a Scot, is a handsome young man who has written a very good screenplay, according to Michael Mailer. He told me that his grandmother, Moira Macfadyen, is a loyal and longtime reader of The Spectator. “So what else is new?” answered yours truly. “Everyone whose brain hasn’t turned to cheese reads The Speccie.”

With family on board, I decided to act responsibly and in a dignified manner. Once upon a time wild scenes of drunkenness and women-chasing were par for the course. No longer. Our first port of call was Prince Pavlos’s and Princess Marie-Chantal’s villa high up on the island of Spetses, where the Greek royal couple was giving lunch to their five children and their friends. A great breeze, fifteen youngsters, very good wine and some beautiful girls made me quickly forget any resolution I had made. Especially after being greeted by Poppy Delevingne as though I were a returning Odysseus. Poppy is among the nicest girls around, and she’s high-stepping it with Pavlos’s Constantine-Alexios, a Greek prince with old-style Hollywood looks.

Well-oiled after a lunch that lasted almost until dark, off we sailed across the bay to pay a brief visit to Peter and Lara Livanos, whose two great boats were anchored in front of their seaside mansion. More wine and more stimulating conversation followed. Peter Livanos, the King of LNG, is a very wise businessman who reads history.

The subject we discussed was — duh — China versus the U S of A. Peter does not think that China will use violence to take Taiwan. The latter will fall into Chinese hands like a ripe apple sometime over the next fifty years. Unlike the hamburger eaters who have four, or possibly eight, years to make things happen, the undemocratic Chinese have time on their side.

The irony of all this is that even five years ago, all of us would have been on Uncle Sam’s side, dismissing the Chinese as robotic slaves of a dictatorship that threatens the world with its ideology. “No más,” as the boxer Roberto Durán announced when he quit during a fight with Sugar Ray Leonard. Uncle Sam has turned into an intolerant, stoned, cop-hating, woke-loving slob that promotes a culture where thieves and other miscreants are not viewed as criminals, and honest people are deemed to be deserving of being robbed.

But why am I writing about pre-traumatic Uncle Sam-induced stress disorder and Chino-melancholia when on my last night in Spetse I discovered the greatest bar-dive packed with friends? Pavlos and M.C. were with someone whose parents first befriended the poor little Greek boy in Paris very long ago.

The night of their wedding we went to Maxim’s, just the three of us, and it looked like a marriage made in that nice place up above. Alas, it didn’t last. But they had Arki Busson, the smartest boy of his generation, a terrific skier and Romeo, now in his fifties and a self-made tycoon. We talked about the good old days and health and, as Pavlos now trains hard in karate, the conversation turned to the Musk v. Zuckerberg so-called upcoming fight. I’m not the Delphic Oracle, but it ain’t gonna happen. Take it from Taki: Arki would make short work of them both; my money’s on him.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 2023 World edition.

September 13, 2023
The death of glorious Paris

A reader’s inquiry as to why I think Paris belongs to yesterday (August 12) has me remembering times past. When did the party end? According to many night owls it was when the “Queen of the Night,” Regine, shut down her club New Jimmy’z and moved to London in the 1970s, where she flopped. Others believe it was les événements de soixante-huit, the student-worker revolt against De Gaulle that did Paris in. Certainly, any way one looks at it, the events of 1968 did signal that the party was over; and it has stayed over ever since.

Mind you, the high jinks had been waning for some time. I first arrived in Paris as a tennis player in 1957, but moved permanently to the City of Light on the eleventh of November of 1958, Poppy Day. The place was jumping. It was rich and brightly lit, and the people were prosperous.

Sure, the Frogs were Frogs: xenophobic, ungenerous, suspicious and intellectually superior. But the city was also full of foreigners, rich foreigners out to enjoy themselves. Everyone gravitated to Montparnasse where Le Dôme, La Rotonde and Le Sélect were open all night, their ceiling-to-floor mirrors and bordello red interiors a welcome sight after boozing all night at very dark New Jimmy’z a block down the street.

The unreliability of memory screens out the boring and pedestrian, and only the jolly and delightful remain. But Paris back then really suited; its sensual atmosphere was perfection, the Parisian women’s sexuality even more so. And there’s another thing: when one is young, the ordinariness of people one encounters does not register as it does later on. What youth rates as exceptional, maturity denigrates to mediocre.

Everyone knew each other and anyone with good manners and better looks was welcome

Back then, the rowdy orgy of late capitalism didn’t exist. Nor did the hostility one feels in today’s nightclubs, mainly in the Bagel. Paris sizzled immediately after World War One. Thousands of Americans arrived in order to have a good time for very little money, including Papa Hemingway, the Murphys, the Fitzgeralds, Cole Porter, Josephine Baker and so on.

After World War Two, although the city was not blown up thanks to General von Choltitz ignoring the Führer’s orders, there was not much food or heat in the city until the early 1950s. Real high life began in the mid-1950s and went on until 1968.

The cultural cocktail that worked its Parisian magic included American expatriates such as James (From Here to Eternity) Jones, Irwin (The Young Lions) Shaw, tennis great Budge Patty, and aesthete Jimmy Douglas. Also there were Dominican playboy and diplomat Porfirio Rubirosa, Greek ship owners Stavros Niarchos and Ari Onassis, South American tycoons and art patrons Arturo Lopez and Antenor Patino, and Jimmy Goldsmith along with a myriad of Chilean and Argentine polo players.

I was lucky to be almost instantly befriended by Rubirosa, known then as the greatest playboy of all time. His house just west of Saint-Cloud was a marvel of luxury and good taste and a ten-minute ride to the polo club of Bagatelle. Rubi, as everybody called him, had such a compelling personality that half the polo players and playboys in Paris spoke and acted like him. In the spring of 1959 he asked me to move into the house he shared with his fifth wife Odile. The reason was sport and fun. We’d box in the ring he had upstairs before breakfast — Rubi decreed no hitting him in the nose or mouth — then breakfast beside the vast lawn and drive to Bagatelle where we’d work the ponies and stick and ball. Next we’d lunch at Le Relais, on Avenue Montaigne and I’d go to the Racing Club in the Bois de Bologne and play tennis with various French Davis Cuppers. Rubi would either visit Madame Claude on Rue de Marignan, or catch a flick on the Champs-Élysées. He’d pick me up from the tennis and after a good dinner at home with his many guests, we’d hit New Jimmy’z.

French society back then had opened up. Everyone knew each other and anyone with good manners and better looks was welcome. André Dubonnet (from that Dubonnet family), once told me that to beguile and to be mischievous was more important than one’s ancestry. I was twenty-two years old and took it all in.

The nightly visits to New Jimmy’z were the highlights. Behind a shiny black door on Boulevard du Montparnasse, Regine’s sister would look through a spyhole and click you in. One would pass a second inspection from the left, where Françoise Sagan, author of the bestseller Bonjour Tristesse at the age of eighteen, would sit surrounded by gay American men and young French lesbians. The rest was straight out of a German film of the 1930s: dark, shadowy, and smoky. The only thing missing was Peter Lorre.

Young French aristocrats like the Montesquieu sisters, the Ganay boys, the Francombe girls, Christina de Caraman and her racing-driver boyfriend François Cévert were regulars. And then there were the balls, great affairs to which only la crème de la crème were invited: the Rochambeau ball at their chateau, the Agnelli one at the Bois de Boulogne, the Rothschild one at Ferrières, and the Rede blast on the Île Saint-Louis.

Then came 1968, the streets turned into battlegrounds, and Irwin Shaw told me if I wished to write to head for Vietnam or the Middle East. I followed his advice. I’ve been back to the city many times since, but Paris really was yesterday.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.

September 5, 2023
The changing face of the Eternal City

To the Eternal City for the saddest of occasions, the funeral of the mother of Taki, seventeen, and Maria, fifteen, two of my four grandchildren. Assia was of noble birth and met my son John Taki at the Rosey school in Switzerland, where they both studied skiing and other such useful pursuits. They had a grand wedding at her ancestral home near Rome and went off on their honeymoon on my boat with twelve of their friends. After the two children were born they separated, but remained closer than they ever were while married. She fought for two years the ghastly leukemia that finally killed her at forty-one years of age.

Their friends from school were all there, some having flown over from America to say their last goodbyes. The death of someone so young and attractive is hard to put into words without sounding doleful; suffice it to say that we Greeks had it right long ago when we preached that whom the gods love they take early. The beautiful old church, the Catholic ceremony and a perceptive speech by a very learned man of God helped ease the pain one feels over the unfairness of it all. My boy asked me not to dwell on it, hence I will not. Suffice to say how much I love the Catholic church, its rituals and its ceremony. Hymns sung by a small choir were of heartbreaking grace and beauty, leaving no dry eyes anywhere.

Rome itself is one vast museum, desecrated by long lines of tourists marching up and down its narrow pavements looking at their phones and speaking mostly in Chinese and American. To describe the city as eternal and beautiful is a crude cliché, like calling Lily James enchanting, because Rome is Rome, unique but no illusion. It is without order or propriety, a lazy beauty that doesn’t take care of itself, a city fixated on romance and broken hearts.

Rome is the voice and spirit of Italy, a place where unspeakable crimes and cruelties have taken place throughout the ages, where unimagined splendors have been constructed and where Catholicism reigns supreme. Rome is seductive and mesmerizing, her spirit is Eros; she’s not fragile like Florence and Venice, not raw and carnal like Naples.

I walked down the Via del Corso early in the morning, turned right on Via Condotti to the Piazza di Spagna. All the old shops I used to know are gone, replaced by multinational stores and labels. History and culture now take second place to giant Dior and Prada signs that overshadow and, in a way, desecrate the surroundings. As if subliminally acknowledging this vulgarism, Keats’s house is empty of visitors and its windows only half-open. I stood there for about ten minutes and not a single person looked at the poet’s last dwelling; in fact, the crowds seemed to see the place but not take it in. I walked back to the Piazza Venezia, where the Austrian embassy was located back in 1914, and where my father-in-law was born in the very same edifice Mussolini used to address the mob.

My daughter gave a lunch after the burial at a wonderful restaurant with the quaint name of “Two Thieves.” We were about twenty and I sat with my old friend Leopoldo, a Napolitan nobleman whose father was a good friend of Galeazzo Ciano, the Duce’s son-in-law and foreign minister. History has not been kind to Ciano, and I find that puzzling. He did not want Italy to blindly follow Hitler, and paid for it with his life. Today, if I had stopped 1,000 or even 10,000 tourists in Rome, not a single one would have heard of Galeazzo Ciano.

But then very few would have heard of Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Tacitus, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Bernini, Caravaggio or others of their kind. They would have heard of Mark Antony because Richard Burton played him in Cleopatra, although they would be confused about the Greek Queen Cleopatra because the crude Americans now show her to have been black, whereas Elizabeth Taylor’s agents claim that the actress was white. See how confusing it all gets? And yet, when I asked some gawkers if they had heard of Hadrian and Antinous, they had encyclopedic knowledge of the Roman emperor and his catamite. Ironically, the last time I used the word catamite it cost me a couple of hundred thousand pounds because the person I had called that sued me and I had to pay up. Antinous drowned in the Nile a couple of thousand years ago, so this time no cigar.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 2023 World edition.

August 18, 2023
A party on the Greek island of Patmos

Greece

While green Rhodes and greener Corfu burn away, arid Patmos remains fireproof because rock and soil do not a bonfire make. The Almighty granted some islands plenty of water, and other ones no H2O whatsoever. Most of the Cycladic isles lug in drinking water from the mainland, and make do with treated unsalted seawater for planting. The Ionian isles have springs and rivers and also fires, some of them started by firebugs who hope to gain — I have never figured this one out — from the blaze. It’s all very confusing, especially as the temperatures are rising and the energy to party diminishes by the hour.

The Greeks have always been obsessed with fire. We worshipped Hephaistos, god of fire, and his temple northwest of the Acropolis was the scene of ferocious fighting between nationalists and commies back in 1944. I was eight years old at the time, but members of my family, including old Dad, made up for it. If anyone is interested, the good guys won with help from the Brits, and the bad ones retired to the mountains up north and eventually went over to the Soviet Union where they learned to speak Russian fluently. The winners chose capitalism and you can guess the rest. As a famous wit once remarked, had the commies won, he didn’t think Aristotle Socrates Onassis would have chosen the widow Khrushchev for a bride.

Never mind the witticisms, Patmos is as hot as it gets without the Hephaistian orgies that took place on Rhodes. However scary a fire can be, it is somehow less frightening when on an island: one can always plunge into the blue Mediterranean and give the god of fire an old-fashioned middle-finger salute.

I first came to Patmos when visitors — all on their boats, naturally — had names like Guinness, Guest and Goulandris. The town was made up of whitewashed stone houses clustered underneath the great St. John monastery way up high, where the baddies could not reach. This was and still is called Hora, while the port below goes by the name of Skala. Hora and Skala were small in those days, with a few tavernas and people who all knew each other. Fifty-odd years later, as with middle-age spread, both H. and S. have grown exponentially, but the locals have somehow managed not to go Mykonian and greedy.

Patmos used to be visited by a lucky few because it’s much closer to Turkey than to the Greek mainland. That was then, however, and now daily overnight ferry services from Athens disgorge their cargoes and you can guess the rest. Still, Plateia is the main square and meeting place up in Hora, where the elite meet to eat and exchange gossip. Plateia is round, with a great outdoor bar on the higher end run by George and Maria, the two nicest people on the island, who are helped by Michael, equally gentle. That is where the tongue-tied so-called golden youths hang out, while the rest of the place has Mister Manolis as King, dispensing dinner tables like a benevolent pharaoh. Needless to say, George, Maria, Michael and Manolis are good friends and take great care of the poor little Greek boy when he’s under the influence.

And speaking of influence, Christos Zampounis, my Greek editor, has been given the credit, by those in the know, for a pro-royal swing of at least 10 percent of the population after his pro-royal coverage on TV debates following the death of King Constantine earlier this year. As laconic as a Spartan, Zampounis asked the anti-royalists only one question: “Was he or was he not head of state?” “Yes, but…” were the answers. In spite of this, the king was refused a state funeral. I told my friend and editor something he knows quite well: we Greeks can be the tops at times, but also among the pettiest.

Otherwise everything was hunky-dory until my daughter decided to give a party in my house, rather than hers, for about twenty of her friends. Word got out and my fifteen-year-old granddaughter Maria asked me whether she could have a few youngsters drop by after dinner. While we oldies were dining in the garden, the youngsters came in and kept coming in and then they all disappeared. When the wife was going up to bed around 2 a.m. she noticed a long line of very young people coming through an opening and very politely saying thank you and goodbye. She counted around fifty of them. The young had all gone up to the terrace, taken bottles of vodka lined up for senior consumption, and whatever other liquor they could find, downed it, and then politely left thanking the wife. I never saw them as I was under the weather in the garden, but everyone got home safe, according to my granddaughter who has a telephone implanted in her ear. The only two to miss the festivities were Antonius and Theodora, aged four and two, my other two grandchildren who were sleeping at their mother’s.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.

August 10, 2023
The Oprah-fication of Wimbledon

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 fifty at the time, while Pam was seventeen, which in my book made Candy a lucky guy, assuming it was legal. The age of consent varies from place to place, and the only time I had to defend myself was when an irate father, whose twenty-eight-year-old daughter I had dated, rang me early in the morning and complained about me being seventy-two. “There is no age limit as far as being too old,” I told him. He rudely hung up on me.

But before I go on about Pam Shriver and her oldie coach, a few comments are in order about how Oprah has taken over tennis and even Wimbledon. Once upon a time Wimbledon was, well, Wimbledon. Players bowed to the royal box, McEnroe’s “You cannot be serious?” was as bad as it got, and Bitsy Grant’s question, “Did the chalk get in your eye, buddy?,” to a linesman who had called his ball out, encapsulated the wit of the men and women who competed in SW19. I haven’t set foot in Wimbledon for years because the grounds are now all corporate, and I no longer know anyone there. But watching on the idiot box, some of the players’ entourages are straight out of Hollywood’s Murder, Inc. films. Novak Djokovic’s box in particular could be “Lucky Luciano and his gang come to SW19.”

Never mind. What bothers me is all that kissing and embracing between competitors, and the tears. Everyone is always either crying or kissing someone. And the banality of the post-match on-court interviews makes Oprah sound like Lord Clark of Civilisation. The Wimbledon crowds are, of course, different now from in my day. They applaud mistakes, a real no-no in the past. But the real difference is that they’re brainwashed by celebrity. Take the opening match between Serena and Harmony Tan. The former looks twice Tan’s size, has $250 million in the bank, has won twenty-three Grand Slams, and is known to bully opponents and umpires in order to get her way. Tan is an unknown with a very low ranking. She has no money, and her heritage is Vietnamese and Cambodian, so her parents or grandparents obviously had a very rough time. But she’s beating the hell out of Serena by soft-balling her to death, in the manner of Arthur Ashe versus Jimmy Connors in the 1975 final. Yet the crowd is cheering for the rich and powerful bully rather than the shy and poor unknown. It even applauds when the tiny one double faults. Tan won, of course, which shows that the majority of fans are always wrong, at least as far as I’m concerned. The commentators, however, are even worse than the fans. They act and talk like groupies waiting for their idols outside a seedy drug den, Clare Balding being the groupies’ groupie.

Iga Swiatek, the Polish looker who is ranked number one in the world, also has the best legs among the ladies, feminine ones, with Ajla Tomljanovic coming in second where pins are concerned.

And now to Pam Shriver, who also had good legs. According to her, her trusted coach exploited her, which I’m sure he did, and now Pammy baby wants to warn current players of the danger. Don Candy was my first-round opponent in the first international tournament I ever played in Düsseldorf, July 1956. He beat me easily, then lectured me on how devastating his serve was. I was nineteen and inexperienced and sort of agreed. But Candy was not a nice guy like the rest of the Aussies — Newcome, Emerson, Anderson and Fraser. The next year he arrived with a new, very pretty wife, Sandy Candy, in tow. I hung around like a dumb dog waiting for a handout. Then something happened.

My closest friend on the circuit was a player by the name of Guillermo Zuleta, a copper-colored, Roman-nosed Ecuadorian with a terrific forehand. Zuleta had picked up a beautiful blonde somewhere in Germany and we traveled to the various tournaments as a happy trio. One day, while Sandy Candy and her female friends and I were watching a Zuleta match, one of them remarked how awful it was that this blonde beauty was with my buddy Zuleta, a racist remark back in the days when such remarks were common. I answered in a loud voice to no one in particular that if anyone really needed to find out why, all they had to do was sneak into the men’s locker room while Guillermo was taking a shower. “That would answer your question,” I told them.

Shock horror ensued. It got back to Don Candy, who asked me about it. He played the toughie but by then I was boxing a lot and answered him in kind. Zuleta and I stayed friends and he and another Ecuadorian beat the mighty USA in the Davis Cup later on. What is the point of the story? There isn’t one, except that Don Candy and company pretended to be shocked at the poor little Greek boy’s remarks about his buddy’s anatomy, but when it came down to the nitty-gritty with Pammy… well, that was OK. Or something like that.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.

July 21, 2023
The lost magic of the Hamptons

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: wicker chairs, yellow and white umbrellas and long green lawns.

I used to own a house like that, with a swimming pool, tennis court and a cellar full of wine, but I sold it because of its proximity to a relative of mine. My daughter was heartbroken at the sale, especially after I bought a large piece of land in northern Connecticut and made plans to build a Yankee palace. She moved to England and her mother, brother and reluctant father followed.

As everyone who has not built a glass atrocity on Dune Road knows, artists and writers descended on the land now called the Hamptons around the late 1800s. When people such as Walt Whitman praised the place as magical, the rich burst in like gangbusters. Back then the rich copied their betters, and their good taste in building their summer “cottages” is evident today. The recent dot-com crowd, alas, believed only in themselves, and ended up constructing monster houses that would scare away Frankenstein. Their imprimatur will one day be seen as proof of why AI decided to do away with humanity.

Never mind. The coup de grâce for the Hamptons came some time ago, when Paris Hilton, Puff Daddy, Busta Rhymes, Gwyneth Paltrow and other such rich undesirables (to me, anyway) discovered the place. I now visit once a year, stay at my private club, and rush back to the city after two nights. Even the club has changed, with many famous old WASP names gone to a higher-ranked club above. The only person I knew at breakfast was the club president, who came over to say hi and who was asked by a rude me who the hell all these new members were. This is the type of club where the white-painted exterior resembles the membership. For a moment I contemplated going to Graydon Carter’s party in the Hotel du Cap, but I decided to stay with the memories of my youth and stick to the Hamptons.

I’ve been a bit off Carter for some time. A few years ago he filmed Reinaldo Herrera and me talking about the good old days when manners were all-important and society dames were not on Twitter discussing their periods. He told me he was happy with the finished product but then #MeToo began. I reckon that what we filmed would have been awarded the Palme d’Or by #MeTooers. All we did was praise the gals for their beauty and elegance, and so on. But when Michael Mailer asked to see it and exhibit it, Carter refused. I’ve never seen it. We spent days filming and I was told that everything was hunky-dory. Then silence.

I like both Graydon’s current and ex-wife and all his children, but he’s on my blacklist until he exhibits the greatest documentary ever made. Would Leo attend his publisher’s party after War and Peace had been turned down? Would Gustave go to his agent’s for drinks after the latter had convinced him Madame Bovary was a loser? If My Dinner with André put some people to sleep, the one with Reinaldo will make them feel as though they’ve been injected with ketamine, whatever that means (I’ve never taken it).

And now for more things that are verboten: Djokovic dared to speak about Kosovo, and some human-rights woman called him a fascist and demanded he be punished. What the hell is this? There is nothing in the rulebook that prohibits a player from making political statements. Athletes today might be as thick as polo ponies but they have the God-given ability to speak — most of them, anyway — so why deprive them of the only advantage they have over dogs and horses?

Otherwise it’s time for a hasty migration from the Bagel. Alyssa, whom I recently wrote about, complained that I misspelled her Christian name, but I have complaints of my own: why, oh why, must she be so attractive and her skin so soft and porcelain? I’ll tell you why, because she’s fifty years younger than I am and she’s half-Swedish, half- Norwegian, that’s why. It’s a well-deserved comeuppance for a serial philanderer, but one never knows. Stranger things have happened, and I remain confident.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s August 2023 World edition.

July 17, 2023