High life
The cruel sea
Taki
New York
As everyone who has been to Beverly Hills knows, the balder and shorter the tycoon, the flashier, blonder and taller his companion. The same principle applies to yacht owners. Take my case, for exam- Pie. All my life I've had small boats while People like Khashoggi and other such vulgarians have had tall and beautiful Women. When I was 12 years old, my father decided that an American education was the lesser of three evils. Despite the fact that he was an anglophile, he knew that his little hoY might pick up certain habits while at- tending English public school that my ancestors had practised during the golden age of Athens. A Greek education was out because there was a civil war raging in Greece at the time, thus an American school it had to be.
It turned out to be a posh prep school near what the natives call Long Island Sound. My first thought upon viewing the sea was to get a boat. I had just been through the facts of life and even at that tender age, I knew enough to know that a man without a boat is a man without a woman. That summer 1 was given an eight- foot rowing boat, and despite the fact that I had a strange Germano-Greek accent, wore double-breasted suits with short trousers, and used a foul-smelling hair tonic, I was by far the most popular 12-year-old with the nubile young things that congregate around the beaches of Long Island.
My love affair with boats began that summer. It has stayed with me ever since. When I was taken to the South of France three years later, my worst suspicions about girls and boats were confirmed. I watched, but learned nothing. There were people like Errol Flynn, Gianni Agnelli and the dreadful Ali Khan around. Flynn had the fabled schooner Zacca and Agnelli the Tomahawk, one of the most beautiful 12-metre craft ever built. Ali Khan had a house near the water and that was all. Agnelli and Flynn had two things in com- mon. They loved sailing, boats and tarts. The trouble was that their taste in boats and girls was contradictory. Both boats were a sailor's dream but a tart's nightmare. The kind of women that they fancied — fast, mercenary and not to the manor born hate sailing boats and will only step on board a floating gin palace if it is absolutely necessary to cross waterways. Ali Khan, who is as oleaginous as his name, in the meantime, had all the girls. Ironically, he didn't like tarts. Being an Iranian, or Pakistani, he wanted to climb. But the kind of girls he wanted to climb with, as well as climb into bed with, hated his Arab poten- tate way of livilig and wanted to go sailing with Agnelli and Flynn. They were, I'm afraid, to the manor born.
Despite my youth, I took all that in. And as I said before, I learned nothing. I, too, have always loved tarts. So what did I do the moment I met Agnelli and some other Greeks who had gin palaces? I beeame the Sancho Panza to the Quixotic Gianni. Thus I spent ten years of my life watching other people's boats full of girls while I sailed around the Med with Agnelli, David Somerset and an older lady called Erica Nielsen. It was enough to drive one to perversion. In the meantime, my father, who is as tart-crazy as Flynn and Agnelli `Looks like a full house.' combined, was not to prove much smarter than me. He bought himself a 107-foot yawl in 1959 and spent the next 15 years trying to get bikini-clad tarts with stiletto heels to come on board. All in vain.
In 1971, 1 bought myself the most beautiful sloop of all, the 72-footer Bushido. My bad luck continued, however, and 1 realised what a monumental mistake I was making when I went to Sardinia and saw the son of Ali Khan on board an environmental-raping, petroleum-swilling gin palace that would give any ecologist a catatonic seizure. Oh, yes, the Aga's boat was filled to the rim with tarts. Soon after, Gianni Agnelli saw the red light and sold his sailing boat. So did my father. Last year I came to terms with my life-long obsession with girls of easy virtue. I put my beloved Bushido up for sale, and bought myself one of the most comfortable and disgusting looking boats an Arab would ever hope to own. This summer, I will prove my theory once and for all. If you like women in general and tarts in particular, forget about sailing boats. Now that I'm fat and old, I'll have more girls during the coming month of August than all of those 22 wasted summers put together. I've just seen the Boat Show over here and believe me, the bigger the boat, the flashier the tart. The proof is in the pudding. Khashoggi, after all, is five feet tall and his boat is 280 feet longer than him. His tarts, however, are as beautiful as he is ghastly. I hope mine will be too.
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