Eagle-eyed
Taki
Gstaad The sine qua non of survival among snobs is — naturally — exclusivity. In the rarefied atmosphere of the Alps this clannishness takes the form of the private lunch club. It was created for the express purpose of protecting members from rubbing elbows with fellow skiers during lunch-time ingestion. There are only two such clubs in Europe, or in the European Alps rather: the Corviglia in St. Moritz, and the Eagle Club in Gstaad.
As both St. Moritz and Gstaad began crawling with people rich on cash and poor on ancestry, a semblance of respectability was needed to bolster their unique creations. A search for snobs was initiated. The younger Eagle Club was lucky. It found a stray English lord and made him its first president. The much older Corviglia had to content itself with Italian titled folk, or worse, Greeks on its committee, and as both are a dime-a-dozen, the club — understandably — assumed a much snobbier pose.
The Earl of Warwick, Fulke to his friends, was the Eagle's lucky catch in 1957. Warwick used to be a St. Moritz habitué until he clashed with some very rich but horribly vulgar late arrivals in the Grisons. Moving to Gstaad, he built a chalet and accepted the presidency. With him came Le Vicomte Benoist d'Azy, a French nobleman who used to run the Corviglia Club.
Being less of a climber than most Greeks, I chose Gstaad as my winter base of operations after graduating from school twentytwo years ago. I was invited to join the Eagle Club the year it opened by the Earl of Warwick himself. It was a riotous all-night party which probably had something to do with his decision. After thirty-three whisky sours he was convinced I was English and had been to Eton with him. The Vicomte was also in favour of my election. I was the first Greek he had ever met who spoke foreign languages. Soon after I joined the Eagle Club someone had the bright idea to hold a moonlight party. This consists of revellers taking a chairlift up the mountain around eight in the evening, imbibing, or rather decimating the Eagle's wine cellar, and finally skiing down by torchlight.
On my first moonlight party my friend Yanni Zographos, the nephew of the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo, had one of his usual brilliant ideas. He ordered a Palace Hotel chef to make three enormous cakes consisting only of cream. The plan was to use the chef's creations as projectiles. Our target was Karim Aga Khan, recently enthroned as Aga and taking himself extremely seriously. Unknown to us, the Aga was accompanied at the party by a British diplomat attached to the United Nations in Geneva; he was a rather common-looking chap and we mistook him for one of the Aga's relatives. After a few drinks we attacked: in a matter of seconds both august gentlemen were covered in cream.
The Aga, a prudent man, said nothing. The diplomat took umbrage, came over to our table and yelled for us to stop. I threw another cake at him point blank, but he grabbed my arm and flipped me over the table in a classically executed judo throw. As I was going down, however, and despite my surprise at his very undiplomatic knowledge of that particular sport, I hooked his leg and brought him down with me. That is when the trouble started. Zographos, running over to separate us, struck the Englishman's eye with his ski boot. It looked simply awful. Two foreign bullies against a poor diplomat. His eye looked even worse. Warwick and the Vicomte were crestfallen.
After a lot of shouting and long hours of committee meetings, the president and the Vicomte took pity on us and suspended us for one season. Fulke Warwick retired soon after that. The Vicomte became president but he is retiring next month and there are elections. I am a candidate against a French duke and a Swiss banker. I am sure to get two votes, the other one from Zographos.
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