Athens
The first gold medal goes to The Spectator for last week’s leader ‘First gold to Greece’. My country had been unfairly maligned by Western hacks —those pure sportsmen who gracefully hurdle over bar stools while busy filing phony expense accounts — but (with fingers crossed) Hellas has been vindicated. Whoever wrote the leader will feel Taki’s teak deck under his feet sooner rather than later. Before I go on about the Games taking place under the Acropolis and in Olympia, a brief parenthesis about the Mexico City Olympics of 1968.
My good friend Jean-Claude Sauer and I had ended up in Los Angeles on our way back from Vietnam. JC was the top Paris- Match photographer at the time and had left Saigon having got a little too close to Air-Marshal Cao-Ky’s wife, or so rumour had it. My first wife, in the meantime, had dropped me like the proverbial hot potato and had gone to live in Mexico City. Both of us decided to watch the Games from the safety of Hollywood and Vine. We had a good buddy living there, Pierre de la Salle, Pitou, as everyone called him, husband of that divine model Suzy Parker.
Welcoming us, Pitou hand-delivered an enormous chocolate cake to the bungalow JC and I had rented for the fortnight, forgetting to mention that it was made mostly out of very strong hashish. Our daily was a very jolly and very large black lady who easily weighed 300lbs. She would arrive around 10 in the morning, scold us for having left whiskey bottles all over the place, and shoo us out of the house so she could make herself a cup of coffee before starting to clean.
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