High life
Swell party
Taki
AAthens
ecko Papamarkou, the Greek-born American stockbroker who seems to have both the Greek and British royal families at his beck and call, is something of a mystery to me. Last week he hit the headlines with his hoedown party in Kensington for 550 swells, including the king of Greece, Lady Helen Windsor, the Gloucesters and the ubiquitous Prince and Princess Michael of Kent. (According to Nigel Dempster, the latter loves to stay at home and rarely goes to shindigs, which is a bit like calling Jeff Bernard and myself teetotallers.) The very first time I met Papamarkou, at Mortimer's in the Big Bagel, he had quite a unique approach. It was about 15 years ago and his line was that my book, The Greek Upheaval, was so riveting he hadn't had any sleep for two days. Not being exactly over- confident about my writing, I reached new
lows of grovelling. But I gave him no busi- ness, as I had nothing to do business with. Where Taki failed to come up with the goods, Getty, say, didn't. Papamarkou became a confidant and adviser to Anne Getty, plus many other bored wives of bil- lionaires. Soon he was hitting the headlines of New York as a socialite nonpareil, and he has never looked back.
My problems with him are all my fault. I've made fun of most of his friends for having been lifted and for egregious social climbing and, alas, once, in Mortimer's, committed the worse faux pas of my life. Alecko came in in a flurry, and I had the bad taste to ask my two male companions to rise and lift our glasses 'to the queen of Greece'. This we all did, but then, to my horror, I saw the beautiful and wonderful real queen of the Hellenes looking at me rather strangely (she was sitting with my friend Alecko Goulandris). The place roared with laughter, and that was the last time Mr Papamarkou ever spoke to me. Oh yes, I almost forgot: I also listed him once in a Big Bagel magazine as social mountaineer numero uno.
Needless to say, I was a bully, bibulous and belligerent and downright nasty to someone on his way up. Papamarkou was not born rich, which is to his great credit, and my spies at Anderson and Sheppard, my tailors, tell me that he's as nice to poor working people as he is to the Gettys and Goulandrises. My behaviour towards him was like that of a sultan: touching new bot- toms every day. Unlike the ghastly Jerry Zipkin, the Bagelite who treats people who cannot defend themselves the way I treated Papamarkou, Alecko is apparently a nice man, but he has an unfortunate way of speaking that brought out the bully in me.
And what a success he has become. I read in the newspapers that the Maribor- oughs, Thyssens, Hansons and Wyatts (from Texas not Weeford) were dressed to the teeth for him, plus half the royal fami- lies of Britain and Denmark. For some strange reason my invitation got lost in the post, but I was happy for him. Then some- body told me that they had been invited to one of Alecko's Los Angeles dinners and placed next to the son of Andreas Papan- dreou, and I began screaming against both Papas all over again. So I'm off to Mykonos to try and forget.
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