A smacker with a spook
Taki Ikissed a top FBI agent flush in the mouth while in my cups at Elaine's last week, and lived to write about it. And it was a stolen kiss, at that. They're the best kind, now that I'm old enough to see how corny a prelude to a kiss is at my age. I was on my way to the loo when I saw Elaine, the proprietor, talking to the agent. I was introduced and I used a variation of the old Mae West joke, 'Is that a gun you're carrying, or do you like my girlfriend?' Then I grabbed the G-man and kissed her. Special agent Anne Beagan was startled, but did not reach for her gun. Instead, she asked me to sit down and we had a bottle of wine together. Elaine thought we should get married but, even drunk, the Taki rules took effect: when under the influence, take three off. If she's a ten, in reality she's a seven. The agent was at best a six or five, so after subtracting three I was left with little to play with.
Never mind. Rules are made to be broken and all that, and I was rather thrilled to kiss a lady who arrests and shoots people for a living. It beats going out with a hedge-fund manager. I once dated a CIA agent in Athens, back in the days when CIA agents were very unpopular in the birthplace of electrolysis. She was very scared — it was 1975 — and she was having problems with her husband, to boot. I had returned from the Yom Kippur war and had met her at the house of my friend Karolos Fix. During the party I had mixed with some Soviet diplomats and we had discussed the Law wire-guided anti-tank missiles which the Egyptians had used with great success against Israeli tanks. One night, after my CIA gal had finished having a nervous breakdown — every time a car passed my cabana by the beach at Vouliagmeni she was certain the bad guys were about to get her — she accused me of being the finger man against her. 'I saw you talking to those commies . . . have you told them where I live? You bastard!'
It was Graham Greene time, end of the affair. I should have known better. Secret services are not conducive to secret affairs. Too much distrust and paranoia. There were more misfits coming out of Langley than there are untalented logo creators at Wolff Olins. Mind you, women are supposed to make great spies, but in reality they are only there to entrap men. The KGB always used hairy men to entrap British diplomats for the obvious reasons. They used women for the rest. The CIA should have been using my ex-gal as a honeytrap, the way Mossad does when they want to catch an Ayrab. Instead, they had her trying to recruit Greeks, leaving her in an extremely vulnerable position. Incidentally, her marriage went down the Swanee, and she's now living in retirement somewhere in the good old US of A. Actually I took over her duties for six short months and recruited just one man, a Russian exile. All my Greek friends, starting with my closest, publisher John Bastias, got up and walked away the moment I began my spiel. No one, and I mean no one, wanted to know, except for the Russkie who was broke and had been dropped by his rich Greek girlfriend. He, too, survives, and is retired somewhere in polluted Athens.
And speaking of law enforcement, I thought the inmates of the El Lay lockup deserved better than getting the ghastly Paris Hilton back in their midst. Her recall to pay her debt to society turned into a Californian media circus not seen since the O.J. Simpson absurdity. The hacks and paparazzi were running after the vehicle taking her to jail as if it were the last transport out of Saigon back in April '75. What absolute rubbish our culture has become. Fifteen years ago we had Princess Diana manipulating the press and planting stories. But she had something to plant, however one-sided.
But by letting the genie out of the bottle, making that Faustian pact, she was pursued to her death by those she thought she was manipulating. This is not the case with La Hilton. With her, it was go from the very minute her white-trash parents began to exhibit her in New York nightclubs. Her vulgarity and crassness aside, Paris is butt ugly, tout court. She has neither charm nor looks, lives in a drugsand alcohol-induced haze and disguises her emptiness with impudence and nudity. The media love it.
And as this is all about the law, for once I have been proved right about my friend Claus von Bulow. A new book, Insulin Murders by Professor Vincent Marks and Caroline Richmond, totally exonerates him, as the courts had already done. Claus's case has been milked by the media — so what else is new? This book proves that the unlucky Sunny von Bulow had not a scintilla of insulin in her system when she died, and then enumerates the innocent causes of her coma. It was a tragedy, and would have been a double one if an innocent man had been convicted for it.
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