{"id":215575,"date":"2023-07-18T16:52:42","date_gmt":"2023-07-18T13:52:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/transatlantic-taki\/"},"modified":"2023-07-18T16:56:48","modified_gmt":"2023-07-18T13:56:48","slug":"transatlantic-taki","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/en\/transatlantic-taki\/","title":{"rendered":"Transatlantic Taki"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Sir Taki Theodoracopulos<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhy, oh why, do the wrong people travel?\u201d sang Noel Coward back in the \u201930s. Lucky Sir Noel, he never met the present bunch. Just like the Bolsheviks deemed the aristocracy and the intelligentsia as enemies of the people back in 1917, good manners and conservative dress today are viewed\u2014at least in the Bagel\u2014as false and affected. But I\u2019m getting away from the subject at hand. I just bought Masquerade, a doorstop biography of Sir Noel, but I remember the song from way back, before the one time I met him. It was June 21, 1969, in Vevey, Switzerland, and Charlie Chaplin\u2019s daughter Josephine was getting married to a Greek friend of mine, Nicky Sistovaris. I was the only journalist invited and allowed to take pictures for Paris Match. Chaplin was gracious and eager to talk, whereas Oona, his wife, was very guarded. After the wedding Noel Coward arrived and we were introduced. \u201cI\u2019m no paparazzo,\u201d I ventured. \u201cI can see the Via Veneto rising up behind you,\u201d answered the great one.<\/p>\n

Needless to say, it\u2019s good to be back in London again. Two encounters took place, both totally unexpected. I took an early flight from the Bagel, checked into the hotel, and went to Sloane Square for a bite to eat. As bad luck would have it, I drank a bottle of red on an empty stomach\u2014when flying, the trick is never to eat\u2014and when I walked out for a cigarette, my head was spinning and I had to lean against the wall in order not to look even more ridiculous. That is when a young man approached me. \u201cOh, oh,\u201d I thought, \u201che probably thinks the old boy is easy pickings.\u201d It shows how good a judge I am of human nature. The polite and handsome young man\u2019s name is Anthony and he\u2019s in banking\u2014and has been reading Takimag all his life. \u201cPlease keep writing,\u201d he said and disappeared into the night. \u201cIf I keep this up it\u2019s going to be curtains,\u201d I said to no one in particular.<\/p>\n

What is it about good things coming in pairs? The next day, outside Sandoe\u2019s bookstore, another young man stopped me and asked if I was who I am. His name? Jack Gallagher, and he\u2019s a reader of you-know-what. However silly all this sounds, I am not only flattered but also amazed. I don\u2019t use social media, so how does anyone recognize an old man hanging around Belgravia and its environs? Perhaps it is the bump on my forehead thanks to the last karate session in the Bagel.<\/p>\n

Never mind. The difference coming from New York to a sunny London is the women. In the Bagel they\u2019re loud and brash, in London they\u2019re demure, prettier, younger, and much more feminine. Actually Londoners are much friendlier than Bagelites, but that\u2019s a clich\u00e9, like saying some sports team is owned by Saudi Arabia. Mind you, London might one day belong outright to the Saudis, or the Qataris, but I don\u2019t see it becoming third-world like New York has, and that\u2019s because of the people. Londoners will never flee like Bagelites have in order to escape high taxes, out-of-control crime, and a homeless population that is violent and ubiquitous.<\/p>\n

As the beautiful, talented, and allergic-to-Greek-charms British editor of The Spectator Mary Wakefield wrote, \u201cIt takes a Brit to enter into the inner life and social standing of a floorboard.\u201d But I prefer the Brit contemplating a floorboard to a black American chewing on a triple-decker hamburger and announcing to the rest of us how good and tasty it is. Mary very kindly had paid a bill I owed in London as I had no checkbook with me in America, so early in the morning I stuffed the moola into an envelope and arrived at her office, planning to give it to her and announce that it was for services rendered. But I\u2019ve been in America too long. A joke can land you in the clink over there. So I meekly gave it to the beautiful Mary, whom I first met at her house on Camden Hill Road when her father Sir Humphrey had me to lunch. That was around 1994 or -5, and\u2014as she correctly wrote\u2014like many little girls, she was a tomboy. Tomboys now are encouraged to change sex, which means in the future there will be no more women in America.<\/p>\n

Never mind. Simon, Tinus, and Fasie are three wonderful white South Africans, and the latter took us out to dinner at Robin Birley\u2019s Hertford Street. The subject of conversation was women and the tragedy of South Africa. All four of us are happily married but with a roving you-know-what. They roved, alright, but that\u2019s about all. Next day, under a brilliant sun, it was down to Seymour Walk, in a country house right in the middle of London, where Richard Northcott had all his buddies celebrating his son George\u2019s birthday. Fine ros\u00e9 wine and champagne, beautiful women in their summer dresses, no two guesses necessary: Greek boy very drunk and in love with Vanessa, who has not had a drink in twenty years. In the middle of all this I thought of the difference between a Bagel party and this one: There were no transactions taking place here, at least not business ones.<\/p>\n

The high point of the day was when an old friend addressed a crowd of youngsters and told them that if they read Takimag they would all get lucky in the evening. The garden emptied out as they all raced for their computers trying to read the best website this side of paradise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Sir Taki Theodoracopulos \u201cWhy, oh why, do the wrong people travel?\u201d sang Noel Coward back in the \u201930s. Lucky Sir Noel, he never met the present bunch. Just like the Bolsheviks deemed the aristocracy and the intelligentsia as enemies of the people back in 1917, good manners and conservative dress today are viewed\u2014at least […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":215541,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18496],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-215575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinions-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215575"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215575\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":215576,"href":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215575\/revisions\/215576"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/215541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}