Gstaad The sub-primate level of conversation, as prevalent as the snow up here in the Alps, took a turn for the better last week while a select few celebrated Prince Nicolas Romanoff’s 90th birthday. Yes, most people who live up here are illiterate, but they sure know how to count, some even up to ten
Friends who were among the last to leave Palataki at New Year tell me there were stragglers waiting to be admitted, and this was as the sun was coming up on the first day of the year. My chalet, in other words, has become the last refuge of the desperate, or among those with twice
Lanza is a noble Sicilian name which I believe appears in Il Gattopardo, Lampedusa’s immortal tale of changing times in Sicily during the 1850s. Prince Raimondo Lanza was one of Gianni Agnelli’s best friends, until he threw himself off a Roman balcony while suffering a cocaine overdose. I knew him slightly. His brother Galvano, whom
The horror at Newtown, Connecticut put a damper on the unending rounds of end-of-year parties. And that includes my own Christmas blast at the Boom-Boom room in honour of Lindsay Lohan and some of the prettiest girls in the Big Bagel. At times I think I missed my vocation: Protector-Confessor of fallen women or those
Religion is in decline, tradition takes a back seat to fashion, and same-sex marriage is now looked upon as normal. Previous taboos are accepted, such as swearing on television, and watching films about flesh-eating zombies and blood-sucking vampires feasting amidst car crashes and explosions, not to mention non-stop violence on screen. How to balance ethics
Why do so many respectable newspapers and magazines go weak at the knees the moment an unreadable autobiography of some illiterate rock star is published? I guess no hack, however literate, can resist dropped names, or perhaps it is simple hero worship, tout court, as they say in French. I’ve never read a single one,
The gossip is that the Washington Post is in bad trouble and losing money as only Tina Brown can. Not that Brown has anything to do with the Post. Tina loses zillions for Barry Diller, who finances the Daily Beast at about 10 million greenbacks a year, and is closing the 40 million per annum
Why is it that adultery can ruin a man’s career but rarely a woman’s? In so-called civilised countries, that is. (In Saudi Arabia an adulterous woman is stoned to death.) An American diplomat slated to become the next ambassador to Iraq, Brett McGurk, lost his chance because of an affair with a reporter, who is
Miami Beach To the Mecca of brutalism, a place that rivals Marbella for vulgarity, with sprawling marble-clad palaces, boxy condo blocks and concrete lumps in the place of old world, clubby wrought-iron and glass canopies. Clubs down here mean strippers and dancing poles, none of that all-white tennis garb and polite applause after a passing
By the time you read this, the longest run-up to an election will be over, thank God, and the usual bores will be pontificating over the results. The irony is that for the first time ever I couldn’t care less who won. Nothing will change in the Land of the Depraved, and Big Business will
New York Trains and buses have shut down, people have been evacuated from eastern New Jersey and the southern tip of Manhattan, and as of writing Hurricane Sandy has hit and hit hard: 65 million residents on the north-east of America have been affected, New York Hospital’s main power has blown up and seriously ill
A Greek football team has been warned it will be kicked off the field if its players wear uniforms advertising its two new sponsors. The shirts have been bright pink since the team was founded, and bear the names of local brothels ‘Villa Erotica’ and ‘Soula’s House of History’. The hypocrisy involved is mind-boggling. Football
New York It’s a black-and-white 1939 oldie starring Barbara Stanwyck and William Holden, in his first film. She is thin, ballsy, bawdy and beautiful, and talks with a Brooklyn accent. He’s tall, very good-looking, a professional boxer whose real love is playing the violin. His name is Joe Bonaparte. Joe and Babs are on the
‘Your future is in Hollywood. I can make you the next Bela Lugosi,’ said James Toback, looking me straight in the eye. Jimmy Toback is a hell of a fellow. An obsessive with an encyclopedic knowledge of sport and other data, he directed such great films as The Gambler, Fingers (it made Harvey Keitel into
I don’t know who was the dumber of the two: the Greek banker apparently rushing to spend 100 million big ones on a London pad, or the American woman who fell off a cliff in Alaska while busy texting? Both dummies survived, which goes to show that the Almighty must have a weakness for the
New York Ten years ago this week I put my money down and the American Conservative magazine was born. They say that owning a yacht is like sitting under a shower tearing up $100 bills. Owning an opinion magazine based in Washington DC is like sitting in a dull hotel room throwing $1,000 bills into
Nueva York The dateline is in Spanish because I have yet to hear any English spoken here in the Bagel, and I landed in some style more than 24 hours ago. Never mind. Flying at 47,000 feet at close to 500 knots per hour on a G550 is as close as it gets to perfection
Gstaad It was far, far worse than the Rodney King El Lay riots of 20 years ago, and it made last year’s London summer fires look like a kindergarten’s Guy Fawkes party. This was our Kristallnacht, and then some. They had hard faces, harder than a hedge fund manager’s when told a good corner table
Forty years or so ago, two Greek ship owners and the most famous diva of her time squared off in the British High Court over a financial dispute. Panaghis (I think) Vergottis, a gentleman and philanthropist, had sued Aristotle Socrates Onassis and Maria Callas over the ownership of a tanker, bought for la Callas by
With the exception of the French Academy immortals Michel Déon and Jean d’Ormesson, two wonderful writers and both the epitome of charm and graciousness, the French can be a pretty silly lot. They weren’t always. They got that way sometime between the two great wars, and turned even sillier during the German occupation and following