High life
Please come clean
Taki
Gstaad Brilliant sunshine during the day, crisp evenings, starlit nights, this was Gstaad over the bank holiday weekend. Yet, despite the glories of the weather and the beauty of the place, insider trading has been uppermost in my mind. The Jeffrey Archer case, to be specific. But before I go on about his lordship, a brief anecdote about yours truly. . A little more than ten years ago, I stood in front of a magistrate having pleaded guilty of possessing a small amount of cocaine. My lawyer tried to get me a lenient sentence by saying `In America cocaine is used in the same way as we use wine.' The magistrate was aghast, and rightly so. When he gave me four months in the pokey he said one of the reasons for it was the hope that England would not become like America. I agreed wholeheart- edly, although I wasn't over-joyed at the prospect of gaol. If England does become like America, I for one will move quicker than you can say Boesky. Now back to Lord Archer.
He may be a Conservative, a multi-mil- lionaire and a Thatcherite, but he's giving a capitalist like me a bad name. The irony is that at first I was furious at Michael Hesel- tine, thinking that he had sunk poor Jeffrey out of spite. Now it's the other way around. The DoT has a hard job, as insider trading is very hard to prove, but it's not helping its case by the manner it handled the whole thing.
Which brings me to the point I wish to make: in America, many of the large and gaudy fortunes we read about, are a result of insider trading. No ifs or buts about it. Libel laws prevent me from naming those I suspect, but Ivan Boesky was hardly alone. All those Wall Street sharks cheated like hell, and amassed great fortunes by break- ing the law. It was not always that way. A friend of mine, Howard Cushing, once told me of a dinner with his brother Freddy, when the name of a stock popped up. Their father immediately pointed out that rival brokers could not discuss such matters. It was the end of the conversation. But then that was America in the Fifties, run by wasps who are now known as being dumb enough not to cheat.
Ironically, I've always rooted for Archer, especially during the infamous case of the prostitute. When I was married to my first wife and living in Paris, Porfirio Rubirosa and I would lunch with our wives and then he and I would spend the afternoon at Madame Claude's, the most wonderful brothel of Paris, with the best beauties in town. It was like going into a sauna after a cold shower. My marriage did not last, but my whoring had nothing to do with it. (It had to do with getting involved with non- whores.) Friends tell me that Archer likes living dangerously, which is a good thing, but I also hear he bullies people that cannot answer back. Now, however, his time has come. Either he puts his cards on the table or the Conservative party should declare him PNG. Better yet, his fragrant wife should say something. Insider trading is boesky, boesky being the lowest of the lows.
And on the subject of low lifers, I see that America's richest man, Ron Perelman, has pulled the Revlon advertising from Esquire magazine because it published a so-so profile of his Hollywood moll, Pat Duff. (The bimbo raises money for the draft-dodger in Hollywood.) Perelman's ex- wife, Claudia Cohen, replaced me in an ABC Big Bagel television show when I used the word tits on the air. She's a nice woman. Perelman is a bully, of course, but the one time I met him — having savaged him in print — he was almost obsequious. Trop poll pour etre honnete, as the French say. And Archer's a polite man.
Previous page
