High life
Thanks for the memories
Taki
Gstaad hishis is as good as it gets. It's the year 2000, I'm up in the Swiss Alps, and I'm writing my first column in the new century. Mind you, if someone had told me that I'd still be around and writing for the Speccie in the year 2000, I would have suspected him of flattery or wishful thinking. Yet here I am, for the 42nd year in a row, in Gstaad, a place I once said was full of young people with old money (as opposed to St Moritz being full of old people with young money).
The trouble is, of course, that I am no longer young, nor are my friends, and sud- denly Gstaad is full of old people with old money. There are also a hell of a lot of people with extremely new moolah, extremely bad manners and extremely blonde wives. The new moolah drives enor- mous estate cars, has bodyguards and is buying every chalet that's available and even some which are not. (A mysterious actually not very — explosion did away with the historic Alpina hotel, and now five chalets are being built in its place.) The good news is that Gstaad's zoning laws are the strictest in Europe, ergo, although the place has been overbuilt, it still looks like The Sound of Music. The bad is that the Swiss are as greedy as the rest of us, and the root of all envy reigns supreme. To be poor in Gstaad is to be slightly ridiculous. Not that there are any poor people around. I imagine the poorest man I've ever seen living at the Palace hotel was David Mellor, when he was still an MP. He acted very arrogantly until he saw Nigel Dempster and myself taking down notes about his tennis game. I have seldom seen a worse player. After 42 winters the place is, of course, full of memories. The 1958 Eagle Club moonlight party and the cake and fist fight that followed stands out, as does the joke I played in these here pages when I wrote that Madame Saddam Hussein was staying in the Palace during the Gulf war. (Myriad hacks arrived overnight.) Also, my prob- lems with the pocket-Pole Roman Polanski (I threw one light punch, c'est tout), fol- lowed by the arrival of the legendary Bruce Lee summoned by Polanski to beat me up. (Lee decided I was a good little boy, and we trained together instead.) The cactus I sent to my friend Aleko Goulandris when he had the ex-King of Greece, the present King of Spain and the future King of Eng- land (Charles, not Tony) staying with him, and signed it Marie-Christine of Kent, adding that I was dropping in for dinner. (The royals took off up the mountain on skins, followed by their irate security men.) Only King Constantine got it right. 'This is a Taki joke,' he told his host, but most of them wouldn't risk it and fled.
The Buckley family ski-races during the Sixties also stand out, as does my friend Christopher Buckley's editing and re-writ- ing my copy before I handed it in to his father William. (Christopher was 14 and I was 34.) The hockey game between Gstaad and St Moritz when my best buddy Yanni Zographos played goalie for us, but avoid- ed the puck as if it were Ebola, allowing something like 24 goals before half-time. (Yanni didn't care for sport, only for sta- tion de sport d'hiver, so he chose to be goal- keeper in order not to skate, something he never learned to do.) The riot that took place in the Palace bar when Johnny Halli- day, the French pop star, sent a flunkey up to my first wife to ask her to dance, to which she responded that she didn't dance 'avec les domestiques' — yes, before PC, we actually did say things like that — and, needless to say, we had the crap knocked out of us by Halliday and his enormous entourage. Alistair Home skiing with Bill Buckley and myself and insisting he was monogamous, and falling into an enormous hole just as he said it. My nominating speech of Sir Jocelyn Stevens for the com- mittee of the Eagle Club, in which I com- pared him to the great Erwin Rommel, which had his lady friend Vivien Duffield muttering, 'Couldn't he pick an English general .. . ' (Of course not, they were much too pusillanimous.) Watching my 14- year-old boy racing down for Le Rosey and keeping the tuck at the fastest part of the course, and almost blubbing. My little girl suddenly taking her first steps in our then tiny chalet, and her mother crying with joy. Returning from Pentonville and the staff of the Palace lining up to shake my hand, as if I had done something heroic.
Oh yes, the place is full of wonderful memories, some of them bittersweet because of those friends who have gone to that better ski resort up above. But most of them are still around, older, skiing less and less, now drinking in moderation. When I had my heart attack in 1987, I gave myself until the year 2000. I did not change my ways, and here I am, feeling quite chipper going into the next millennium. The new chalet — enormous even for Gstaad which I will name after General Pinochet, will begin to be built after the season, sometime in April. It should be ready in May 2001. This is my next target. After that everything will be gravy. And the best room is reserved for Paul Johnson.
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