High life
Not so super
Taki
New York The Super Bowl, America's equivalent of the Cup Final, occupied most people's minds throughout last week. If any of you haven't heard of the Super Bowl, don't worry, you're not missing much. It is yet another excuse for the TV networks to charge a quarter of a million dollars for one minute of air time to such sponsors as General Motors, IBM and Xerox; for men to sit around a television set, drink beer and shout encouragement to the behemoths who play the game; and, finally, for women to feel left out of American mainstream life once again (women's libbers, that is).
Personally, I find the Super Bowl offen- sive. The hoopla that surrounds it is self- congratulatory, phony, bloated and tending to speak with a forked tongue. Now that American football owners have decided to play the game indoors, under what they call astrodomes and on artificial turf, the game, too, has lost most of its glamour for me. The artificial turf rankles the most. It's like skiing on man-made snow, or climbing the outside of a large tower-block instead of a mountain. A friend of mine suggested that the reason the owners insist on artificial turf is so that the players won't graze on the field after the games. Perhaps. All I know is that if I see one more black player using tri- pie negatives (`you don't know nutting and nobody, man') and waving his finger at the camera in order to signal he's the best (`number one, man, number one') I think I'll get on a plane and fly to Gstaad and risk running into Polanski, the pocket Pole paedophile and well reviewed 'author' of an autobiography (reviewed in the Spectator this week) that would not be out of place being hawked, say, around Super Bowl time.
Now don't panic. I will not tell you any more tales about Polanski. He's one of the few Poles I find repulsive, and I think very little of Edward Behr, the man who ghosted his book and is suing the Daily Mail. I loathe all people who sue, but journalists who sue deserve Khomeini-like punish- ment. What did Behr expect? Write a book about someone like Polanski and it comes out as a pretty filthy life however you serialise it. I always regretted that Polanski chose Gstaad as his hunting ground. In fact I remember well the first season he came to the Bernese Oberland, and some groupie brought him into the Eagle Club and got him a month's membership. Our president at the time was a marvellous French gentleman by the name of Benoist d'Azy. Le Vicomte, as the staff and some nouveaux called him, had a granddaughter who was old enough to ski but not to do much else. Polanski was soon in hot pur-
suit. In no time, however, he was thrown out of the Eagle Club because of his ardour and has been banned ever since.
Now, as I said last week, people in glass houses should not throw stones, but liking young girls who are old enough to drink and vote, and liking young girls who can't get a driving licence in the state of Florida, are two different things — even In Hollywood, as Polanski found out. Anyway, what do you expect from a man who has an altercation with a nice, polite, civilised man like myself, and when the go- ing gets tough he calls in „ . Bruce Lee (I wrote the story in the Spectator five years ago) to beat up the nice young Greek gentleman. Bruce Lee, if any of you are not versed in the martial arts movies of the time, was the hero of a long list of Chinese westerns about karate. He was also a damn good karateka, and was summoned by Polanski to Gstaad to settle an argument Nothing, of course, happened. Lee was too well-known to fight, and I was too weak, although eager to engage him. We became friends instead, and soon afterwards he died mysteriously in Hong Kong. But enough of Poles who live in Paris. What I am really upset about is that rrlY friend Jeffrey Bernard is having problerns at the Turf Club. How could that be? Grace, the hall porter, and Jeffrey, if they let him in, are probably the only two gents, there. All right, there is also our sainted deputy editor, Harry Somerset and the club's president, but that's all. Anyway, I shall definitely use my influence as one of the Turf's oldest and most respectable members to get him in. After all, I imagine Grace has lent money to people far worse off than Jeff, and it would be nice to have old Jeff pass out in Carlton House Terrace instead of the awful places he passes out 1!1 when he's in Soho. All I can say is that if he's blackballed I will put up Polanski, and if he, too, is banned, then I will propose Mr Ed Behr.
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