‘Jeremy! Jeremy! I can’t believe it! There’s no bloody booze!’ I’d walked into the music room where Elgar and Fauré were lavishly entertained by their sponsor, the flamboyant arts patron Leo Frank Schuster, whose townhouse 22 Old Queen Street once was. Our magazine was holding its annual ‘Meet the Readers’ afternoon tea party. And there he was, standing close to the door: the tanned, immaculate, cheerful figure of the great Taki. A sight to gladden every heart. It seemed too good to be true. That tan, those easy good manners, that lightness on the feet, that devotion to fun epitomise my romantic notion of what The Spectator is. Before every Spectator event, one idly wonders, or even goes as far as to ask, whether Taki will be there. And here he was unexpectedly. The man. Surrounded by 200 polite Spectator readers with fine porcelain cups of tea in their hands. I felt like dancing. He has that effect.
He had flown in from Gstaad by private jet. I’d come straight from a beach in north Cornwall shouldering a cheap rucksack. I was dressed for the beach. Short-sleeved red-and-white shirt with a lively cross of St George theme. Taki was in his usual so immaculately tailored suit you don’t even notice it.
This lack of booze had come as a heart-stopping shock to him, in spite of the event being quite clearly an afternoon tea party, with sandwiches, cakes, teapots, sugar tongs, and what have you. It was a coup de grâce after what he’d been through that day. He had left the warm sunshine of Gstaad only to find himself here under this grimly overcast London sky threatening rain. We looked up and balefully eyed the slate grey, and a large lone raindrop fell out of it and just missed him.
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