High life
Wheel of fortune
Taki
Every 12 years or so I make rather a large contribution to my favourite London charity, John Aspinall. The charity involves me getting dead drunk in Annabel's or Christopher's and then trying to recover past charity donations by playing roulette at very high stakes. This year was no excep- tion. I got off at Heathrow from the Big Bagel, dined with Christopher Gilmour at his eponymous restaurant and proceeded to Aspinall's via Annabel's and Tramps.
Oh yes, I almost forgot. Twelve years ago I had to sell my freehold house near the Boltons in order not to lose face. This time there was no question of losing face, just money. Which I did with a vengeance. The next evening, at a glittering dinner thrown by Aspers, I was seated next to Lady Sarah Aspinall, on her right, in fact, which meant I had really gone and done it, for a change.
It was even confirmed that I had gone overboard by that well-known racing figure and friend to the rich and powerful, Charles Benson. The very pink and very round Benson cannot help blubbing when someone is foolish enough to lose money to others than himself, and on that particu- lar night he was sobbing. The fact that I've paid for everything he lives in — houses, clothes, sheets, even the flowers he sends his various birds (and some are an exotic lot) — does not seem to matter to dear old Charles. I had never seen him in a worse state, not since Robert Sangster lost the Derby last June. (Sangster very generously used to keep Benson and is now putting his daughter through the most expensive school in the land.)
So, in order to cheer him up we told him stories of ingratitude. The first is the best, and it took place last November on board the Rosenkavalier, the ex-Guinness floating palace. Chartered by Jimmy Goldsmith and with Aspinall, Joe Dwek and Sharia Bakh- tiar on board, the Rosenkavalier was cap- tained by an Englishman with a Filipino crew. On a dark and stormy night, with Jimmy heading for Crete and his private jet, a Mayday call was received. It seems a boat 140 miles away was in trouble and the intrepid Englishman at the helm advised Jimmy he was heading to the rescue.
`Surely there must be someone closer than we are,' said Sir James to the captain, Jimmy not being very anxious to battle high seas at ten knots on a very dark night. 'Yes, but the Greeks won't pick them up,' came the answer. So they made a 180-degree turn and headed into the storm.
But before I go on, I should point out that the Greeks, a maritime race if ever there was one, do help their fellow mariners, but very reluctantly when it comes to sporting sailors who have ignored warnings to stay in port and who have in the past sued the owners of ships which had saved them but on which they were inadvertently injured during rescue.
In this particular case, after a harrowing 14-hour trip, the Rosenkavalier did find and pick up eight men on a tiny life raft, Austri- an sailors, as it turned out, whose boat had gone down off Nomikos island. The Austri- ans came on board, were put in cabins they hadn't dreamed of in their wildest wet dreams and fed in a manner they were not accustomed to. Then they were dropped off at Santorini and driven to the airport by an honour guard. There was only one thing wrong. Not once did any of the eight Aus- trians say the magic word to Jimmy, the captain or the crew. In fact they looked downright glum when they were handed some freshly pressed drachmas by Sir James to tide them over. Goldsmith has been in shock ever since. He just keeps repeating the same thing over and over again: 'The Greeks knew better, the Greeks knew better. . . . '
'Invoice them,' was what Joe Dwek said to the tycoon, and he should know. He once saved an old man from drowning in Villefranche and it turned out to be Bar- tolomeo Marsch, Spain's richest man. Years later he ran into the old porker in Antibes and heard the Spaniard ask his tart, 'Isn't that Joe Dwek, the backgammon player?' No,' said Joe, 'it's the man who saved your life, you miserable c—.'
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