High life | 4 April 2019

New York

  It was 51 years ago, in the Hôtel du Cap d’Antibes, that I first met the man whose opioid product has, along with other prescription opioids, killed more than 200,000 Americans. Mortimer Sackler looked old even back then. He had a Noo Yawk accent and, even though we’d never been introduced, approached me after a tennis match I had just lost with some unsolicited advice: ‘You need to calm down. Take a tranquilizer’ — or words to that effect. (I had been feuding throughout the match over atrocious line calls with a French ref who was being intimidated by the pro-French crowd.) Although I do not gladly take advice from strangers, I thanked him nevertheless and told him that pills were not the answer but good refereeing was. Then a funny thing happened. A couple of weeks later, his Austrian wife Gheri, his second, suddenly left him and he had a sort of breakdown in the hotel. When I saw him being taken to the hospital, I remember thinking that he must have taken his own advice and had overdosed. I got to know Mortimer better later on when he married a very nice Catholic girl, Theresa, who was studying to become a nun. They married and had children and she eventually became his widow. They moved to Gstaad, built two chalets near the Palace hotel and joined the so-called chic crowd. (Chic, my arse.) Mortimer always invited me to his backgammon game, but over 30 or 40 years I think I played once, perhaps twice. He kept the stakes very low, and in those days I was looking for action, not distraction. Sackler was always friendly, but like a typical New Yorker was too familiar and handed out advice like paper hankies during a flu epidemic. I was particularly appalled when I ran into him and his older brother once in front of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and heard them call Alexander Solzhenitsyn a psychopath.