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.