High life
Hard work
Taki
Ifind it rather funny that Peter McKay, the Sunday Times hack, always refers to me as a playboy. Play I do, but I've also Worked most of my life, especially of late. It s even funnier when I think that McKay writes one short column every seven days, Whereas hereas I write three a week and also run a business and go out and get wasted every night.
, Which is the only thing to do after the °oredom of sitting in interminable meet- !flgs all day, or after the pressures of writ- lng. The trouble is, the clubs I used to go to to relax ain't what they used to be. In the
Big Bagel and the Big Olive, that is. Lon- don is still OK. The Big Bagel's nightspots are now full of blacks and gays, the former armed and selling drugs, the latter billing and cooing. In the Big Olive, all clubs are full of young people, most of them staring mutely into space, their expressions as vacant as Dimitra Papandreou's bank account before she married Ali Baba. I guess it is a sign of getting old when one can't decide what's worse, armed blacks and militant gays or the young.
And speaking of the young, I read in the Mail on Sunday of the actor Hugh Grant and how he turned down a chance to meet Madonna. Although I'm not as lucky as he is to have the stunning young beauty Eliza- beth Hurley as a girlfriend, I too would have turned that slob Madonna down. Mind you, it would have been a first for me — turning down a woman, that is. But even I have standards. What is even funnier is that I knew Hugh Grant when he was sun- Ply Hughie and used to come to Professor Johannes Goulandris's house north of the Big Olive during the summer. Although he
as a polite young man, I always suspected him of being a terrific poofter. Now I see I was wrong, and Elizabeth Hurley proves how wrong.
But not as wrong as that ghastly woman from the Independent, Maggie Brown, who wrote an open letter to another of her sex ;flaking fun of Marmaduke Hussey's false leg. As Bill Deedes very correctly pointed out, Hussey lost his leg fighting with the Grenadier Guards in Italy, and flip refer- ences to war wounds used to be out of bounds, But isn't it par for the course? Fighting for one's country is no longer a cool thing t0 do, in fact it's cooler to betray it. Philby is almost a cult figure, and they even made agreat film about Burgess. But Brown is a Pig to make fun of a soldier's wounds, and I wonder how she'd like it if she ever had a mastectomy and I referred to her as 'One- tit Brown'. It is bad enough making fun of handicapped people, as Private Eye used to do, but it's keel-hauling time when they start on brave men.
And while I'm on the subject of brave men, the Fortes have done us all a favour ,a_nd. rescued the Aga Khan, whose hotel ustness is crippled with debts of £500 mil- lion, I say this because the Forte group is buying tlYing some fantastic properties, grand hotels like the Danielli in Venice and the Grand in Rome. Even before the Aga, when Volpi owned the shares, there was no real direction and on-hand management. Roth Volpi and the Aga are basically Playboys like Taki — except that they don't u,° any work. Forte will do great things with these great hotels, and I'm looking forward Alive, Seeing the Grande Bretagne, here in the u live, prosper (this one has really gone down Swanee). As a mark of respect, I've just sold mine, the Caravel, for peanuts. It's all going into my magazines. Now that's
what I call brave.
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