Princes, Playboys, & High-Class Tarts

...As a decorator he hired the well-regarded Mario Buatta whom, with an astonishing lapse into discretion, he does not name in print and describes the process thus: "Then I hired an Italian homosexual who reeked of garlic and spoke Brooklynese ('You wanta boid in da wall, I getcha a boid...

...But Taki's Greekness should not be ignored...

...Most of the persons present undoubtedly had other troughs into which they could have dipped their glossy muzzles had they so chosen...

...Britain is so much more than hedgerows and downs, tea and crumpets, harrumphing lords and tiara'ed ladies, and if I hadn't taken the trouble to find out as much, then I could expect whatever curved balls came my way...

...Those taking part were Susskind himself, Taki, and a trio of females, one of whom was New York's admirable Liz Smith...

...The back cover of Princes, etc...

...No matter...

...Does this train of thought make 100 percent logical sense...

...He has skied and played tennis for Greece, still captains the Greek karate team, and reached a level of proficiency in boxing and polo (we will pass his backgammon and table tennis by in silence...

...It is more the way that he does it...

...It is not so much what Taki does that makes the difference...

...So, too, in other fields, do, say, such drama critics as John Simon, or the scribes of the National Enquirer...

...Taki admires the British, but little resembles the writers on the Londonbased weeklies...

...The stuff was his own life...

...the United Kingdom may be the only foreign nation Americans really like and trust, but this imposes no responsibility on the British to return the favor, and in fact many of them do not...

...Such the high noon of my passion...

...It was held at Mortimer's...

...Perhaps...

...For some time after that I refused to set foot in their country, and would pointedly snub British visitors to the United States...

...In spite of its small size, it manages to convey an astonishing range of information about British society--not merely things we should know but things we thought we knew and things we didn't even know we needed to know--along with a full discussion of the more arcane aspects of the honors system, the aristocracy, life in the House of Commons, elections, the civil service, and the monarchy...

...Is he an American conservative...

...A party was given for the book, for instance...

...The Civil War of 1943-49 bred its own Furies, and furnished material in abundance that would rankle in countless hearts forever...

...He considers himself a conservative, but he is not a British conservative, not even, I think, in the Thatcherite mold...

...He looks pensive, almost somber...

...Nor, I think, can the presence of so many of Taki's past, present, and (unquestionably) future gun fodder at his table (actually, tables) simply be attributed to the deeply felt need of so many to keep in with the press...

...He almost immediately began a column in Esquire at the behest of the then editor, Clay Felker, and it cannot be denied that he hit the American ground running...

...This was especially the case along the Boston-Washington corridor, where Anglomania rages more fiercely than anywhere else on earth with the possible exception of Portugal or Chile...

...Taki's pieces can barely be considered "gossip columns" in any real sense of that insubstantial genre at all...

...The talk was unfocused...

...What right, after all, did I have to assume that an entire civilization could be resumed in Wuthering Heights, Sherlock Holmes movies, and Agatha Christie...

...The point is that critics and tabloid writers take good care, by and large, not to consort overmuch with their prey (neglect of this rule of self-defense famously earned John Simon a dish of spaghetti atop his head in Elaine's) whereas the people about whom Taki writes are just the people whose paths he is most likeTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1984 35 ly to cross...

...Not merely the remarks themselves (which were bad enough) but their very tone and intensity provoked considerable surprise in the United States...

...T h a t said, how do the pieces stand up...

...They raised the nagging question of how well we Americans really know Britain, as opposed to how deeply we feel about it...

...He is at his best, like Hunter Thompson, when his reporting is pervaded by a fictive sense (he never attended Steve Rubell's birthday, nor had he met Buatta, who happens to be a native of Staten Island...

...It would be disingenuous to pretend that this is an entirely objective book review (I know the man well, a fact which, as the reader of this collection will observe, gained me no immunity), but they have, for the most part, stood up very well indeed...

...This book is truly one of a kind...

...The foes, the (very few) idols...

...True, politicians, placemen, and social strivers of every stripe do tend to congregate when media folk entertain, but that's all to do with ambition, and this had nothing to do with ambition...

...For as a matter of fact, our information about that country runs far behind our sentiment...

...He is thinner-skinned, for one thing, and subject to flashes of wild prejudice of a sort uncommon in a country where antagonisms of race, creed, and color are subsumed in the universal absorption with class...

...On this subject, Taki, for whom consistency has never been a watchword, shifts ground now and again...

...Later in the same tirade he manages at the same time to attempt a demystification of fascism as "an Italian economic system" and a disembowelling of New York clubland yahoos, observing "they won't even be shot--they'll die of alcoholism by the time they're thirty-five...

...And this, of course, is inextricably bound up with the why...

...In truth, Taki's work really does differ from that of his co-guests, and not merely because he himself has always inhabited the world about which he chooses to write...

...I was, of course, wrong...

...It purports to show the author, Taki Theodoracopulos...

...As a matter of fact, I rather like your accent...

...But I have finally decided, after much reflection and a second visit, that the fault was my own...

...Targets include a bevy of individuals such as Karim Aga Khan, Roman Polanski, and just about any Kennedy...

...PRINCES, PLAYBOYS, & HIGH-CLASS TARTS Taki/Karz-Cohl/$14.95 Anthony Haden-Guest Buatta (who brought along a clove of garlic...

...It also manfully attempts to explain the pervasive contradictions of British life-class consciousness together with increasing opportunities for "new men...

...How well ~lo these two new books provide it...

...Greeks, like Irishmen, have an exceptional talent for what they call mnesikakia, the remembrance of ancient wrongs, and always have had, as the Oresteiea, with its dreadful pursuing Furies, eloquently testifies...

...I love yer pitchers, I tink dat's an E! Greco') and he manages to do a house which i s . . . cosy, warm, and in perfect taste...

...landings in Grenada...

...His mouth is closed...

...Believe me, in this area the British have not lost their winning edge...

...so--before hard experience, which included expatriate academics, the New Statesman, Alexander Cockburn and Christopher Hitchens, and finally, the sheer horror of being an American visitor to British university communities, where I experienced the blunt edge of English rudeness, and some peculiarly subtle forms of social cruelty...

...the cult of privacy and the urge toward 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1984...

...T a k i is the younger of two sons of John Theodoracopulos, a successful Greek shipowner...

...Literary folk were commendably thin on the ground...

...And he is at his very best when he mocks...

...Steve Rubell had meant to go, but couldn't make it...

...It reached its wooziest point when one of the female columnists--she hailed, I believe, from a mountain state--was describing the time a prince came to tea and she had to give him a tea bag...

...Oh no sir," I gushed, "not at all...

...The central problem for Americans is that their view of Britain is largely fantastic or nostalgic, or a combination of the two...

...It is by one Bruce Weber, better-known in the trade for his pictures of bronzed young males wearing Calvin Klein underwear...

...Moods, actions, opinions, relating to anything from the Fate of the West to much more important things like a favor done by Mr...

...Does this anecdote have whiskers...

...I, a close friend, though, in certain respects, miles apart, suggest that you part with your $t4.95...

...WE, THE BRITISH Ivor Richard/Doubleday/$16.95 THE KINGDOM BY THE SEA: A JOURNEY AROUND GREAT BRITAIN Paul Theroux/Houghton Mifflin/S16.95 Mark Falcoff Not long ago Encounter magazine ran some excerpts from the debates .in the British House of Lords in the wake of U.S...

...New Yorkers frequently find themselves excoriated as follows: "And then of course, in New York I seek to avoid the social-climbing Interview magazine and its prime mover, Bob Colacello (better known among us Francophiles as Bob Culacello...

...Bianca Jagger was there, as was Mario Anthony Haden-Guest is a contributing editor o f New York...

...I saw no Kennedys, though George Plimpton made an acceptable substitute, nor did I notice Halston, Marisa Berenson, or the Aga Khan, but there was absolutely no shortage of such other bOtes noirs of the Taki columns as homosexuals, demimondaines, and Wets (this writer included), whose degree of undryness ranged from the merely moist to the wholly sopping...

...This would have been a superfluous question at a run-of-the-mill book launch party--one of the most dangerous places in the world to stand is between a book person and a free drink--but a run-of-the-mill book party this wasn't...

...The thought-provoking thing here is not that Taki takes on such reasonably powerful targets...

...A bit later, under pressure, he denied that he was a gossip columnist 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1984 at all, and led the brain trust into a heated, entirely irrelevant discussion of the situation in Lebanon, or was it Central America...

...Greek history is both violent and vehement, as Taki makes plain in his first book, The Greek Upheaval (a title he chose after sensibly rejecting his first idea, Chicken Colonels...

...Taki is able to harness his energies in the service of social comedy, fortunately for us, or for those of us who do not attract his scrutiny...

...A tall, florid gentleman, impeccably dressed and shod, he spoke in an accent which did not--to my acute disappointment-resemble the BBC...

...his fortes not being the polished, ironic paragraph, the subtle barb, self-deprecatory humor, the dying fall...

...I have hacked these sentences from the hundred-and-two columns which have now been republished in hardcover under the title Princes, Playboys, & High-Class Tarts...

...He was forty-one, and already a columnist for the (British, and no relation) Spectator...

...He dashes on, hooting, frothing, and viewhallooing, and the reader, willy-nilly, dashes along after him...

...In other moods, Taki feels differently...

...Taki, on the other hand, writes the way that letter writers and diarists are supposed to write...

...At first, I was willing to believe that the principal emotion of Taki's targets at seeing these pieces like so many revenants, hurrying back into live print from those morgues where old magazines go to die, would have been a distinct frisson of angst...

...While a few members bravely supported that action--notably Lord Thomas of Swynnerton and Lord Home of the Hirsel--most of the comments were of a type one would normally expect to hear in the parliament of a nation with whom we were at war, soon would be, or jolly well should be...

...Actually, he fits better than he imagines into America, a culture where the native voices include overstatement and aggressive humor...

...Another described the birthday party of Steve Rubell, the then owner of Studio 54, where the party was held, in the following terms: "A seven-foot cake in the shape of a Quaalude was wheeled in while thousands of streamers and confetti rained down...

...Peter Green, in reviewing Nicolas Gage's Eleni in the Times Literary Supplement, had this to say of the conservative Greek politician, Constantine Karamanlis: The oblivion (lethe) for which he called was never remotely in sight...

...He was an executive of the Cadbury Candy Company who had "come over," as the expression had it, to promote the sale of his products in the United States...

...is decorated with a photograph...

...Is he repeating himself...

...The first is by Ivor Richard, the former British ambassador at the United Nations, now an official of the European Community in Brussels...

...This is readily comprehensible...

...Just because all men are created equal does not mean some junkie down the street should have the same vote as a Harvard professor...

...Tom Wolfe, who contributes a debonair foreword, compares Taki's slangy urgency to Ce'line, but goes on to point out that C~line labored endlessly to achieve the effect of spontaneity...

...Which is to say that reading him is rather like watching somebody paint himself into corner after corner, then scaling the wall with that one, proverbial bound...

...Frank Costello and a piethrowing in the Eagle Club, Gstaad...

...What it had to do with, I think, was a certain sense of--well, not unpleasurable danger...

...If, inadvertently, I happen to read Interview, I am forced to stay home for at least a fortnight, such is my disgust with Culacello's blatant brown-nosing of such archaic monuments of nontalent as Diane von Furstenberg, Ahmet Ertegun, and Jerry ('The Social Moth') Zipkin...

...Just why were they all there...

...And what is it that he mocks...

...One early column, for instance, described the interior of the newly fashionable restaurant, Mortimer's, as resembling "the inside of a fireplace" and related a spicy anecdote about the owner, Glenn Bernbaum, who "made his fortune selling polyester shirts...

...In a lengthy, and, of course, deliberately provocative, interview with Bob Colacello in Interview magazine (yes, the same), he lambasts democracy as follows: "I think all men should have equal opportunity but that's where it stops...

...She described it as though it were at once the zenith and nadir of her career--I mean, gosh, it was a real prince, but, uhhhh, a tea bag--and Taki who grunted that the fellow in question was "a friend" was looking manifestly pent-up, ill at ease with the prattle...

...This, clearly, is not the man we know...

...One of the weaker pieces in the book is entitled "In Defense of Gossip" and quotes the French novelist, Michel D6on ("Mitchel IMon," according to a rare typo in this excellently produced and designed volume) to the effect that "when one writes history or biography, one cannot build a character without gossip...

...Taki speaks his mind, in print, and this is no mean thing...

...But Taki has targets other than those he considers improperly celebrated, and these include a whole slew of beliefs that we Wets have been brought up to regard as entirely sacrosanct...

...All of which is merely to reiterate that Taki is not necessarily consistent...

...Taki did not start to write in a personal vein until his early middle age, and clearly this was not because he had become a Born-Again Artist, but because he was a-bubble with stuff to impart...

...Many of my fellow citizens, it would appear, are in need of similar instruction...

...Poor Little Greek Boy," the longest section in the current oeuvre, is good-humored stuff...

...When Taki lashes out--at some respectable opinion or esteemed individual--be does so with a savage hilarity which is frightfully convincing...

...One last cautionary note, though...

...He is at his least interesting when he addresses a subject --usually, one imagines, at the suggestion of an editor--that doesn't get him lathered up...

...Even Homer is dragged in as an ur-gossip...

...This came out very clearly in a discussion of "gossip" on "The David Susskind Show," which is a televison talk show originating in Manhattan...

...He was educated in the United States, and entered the world of amateur sports with zeal...

...In 1981, Taki acquired a Manhattan town house on the Upper East Side...

...It is not dealt with here...

...Certainly better than most gossip columns or, come to that, most journalism...

...This is like observing that Michelangelo and Hugh Hefner share an interest in the nude figure...

...I expect you think I talk oddly because I come from the other country," he volunteered...

...It is true that most professional gossips only get cheek-byjowl with their subjects by reason of their jobs, but there have always been certain exceptions to this rule of thumb (Cholly Knickerbocker and his successor, Suzy, namely Aileen Mehle, in the United States and a whole pack of scurrilous noblemen in Europe and the British Isles...

...It subsequently cooledwand glacially Mark Falcoff is resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute...

...Fifteen hundred gay voices sang 'happy birthday to Steve' and t h e n . . , pop went the giant cake-pill and out popped a half-naked Negro woman who, at closer inspection, turned out to he Bianca Jagger...

...Primarily, of course, he is Greek...

...Well do I recall meeting my fh'st Englishman at the age of 10 in 1951...

...True enough, so far as it goes, which is rather less far than necessary...

...I even sympathized with Argentine aspirations to recover those islands which I, too, persisted in calling the Malvinas...

...Back to your camera, Weber...