High life:My first Egyptian coup

I remember it well. It was August 1952, and I was dining with my parents on the Palm Beach casino’s patio in Cannes, when my father got up and went inside to gamble. He came back rather excited and told us that a friend of his, a Greek ship owner by the name of George Coumantaros, had passed eight hands without garage at baccarat and had won a fortune. (He bought a beautiful sailing boat and named her, what else, Baccarat.)

The next day we went out sailing on the Vagrant and news came over the wireless that King Farouk of Egypt had been deposed by the military. General Naguib led the coup, and was himself overthrown two years later by Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose pan-Arab dreams ended in tears with his death in 1970. Farouk was a hell of a king — for the 18th century, that is. He gambled and whored and lived in grand palaces, and woe to one’s woman if he spotted her in a nightclub and asked her over.