Gstaad
It’s been very sunny and hot, with the bluest of blue skies above and the greenest of green mountains around me; in fact, it does not get any better than this. The farmers have cut their grass and packed it for the winter’s feed, soon the cows will be coming down from the hills, and the Swiss franc will continue going through the roof. Life is now so expensive in Switzerland that even the rich are starting to complain. Forty pounds for a grilled cheese on the terrace of a top hotel is a bit steep, unless one has access to the Gaddafi sovereign wealth fund, which some Swiss bankers I am sure do. Still, I know worse places to be, such as the Hamptons during Labor Day weekend; in Tripoli, while the mongrel dog and his eight perverted children are still on the loose; and if one’s really unlucky on the Carlton Hotel terrace in Cannes, watching rich Russians guzzle warm champagne in the afternoon sun.
So, for the moment I’m sitting pretty on my lawn, trying to make some mischief. Which I failed to do last week by announcing Saif Gaddafi’s arrival at the Palace hotel; no one in their right mind took it seriously, not even the hacks, who 20 years ago believed me when I wrote in these here pages that Mrs Saddam Hussein had moved in for the duration. Journalists arrived and began snooping around. The owner, Ernst Scherz, a very old friend, found it amusing and refused to deny it. The hacks drank copiously at the bar and everything was hunky-dory until the powers back home froze their expense accounts. Gildo, the greatest maître d’ ever, still talks about it when he’s not singing arias from Don Giovanni, which he knows by heart.
Which brings me to a Don Giovanni wannabe, the Frog DSK, newly free to seduce more good-lookers from Africa and its environs. There’s not much I’ve found in Stephen Glover’s writings to disagree with, except for his recent description of that phoney socialist pig’s wife as a tolerant French woman because ‘her class and background’ require it. Actually, it is she who wants the top prize even more than the short fat man with bulging eyes and an oversized ego. Let’s not forget that DSK’s first wife got him connected with the right people in les Grandes Ecoles which landed him his first good job as a lecturer. He then used his second wife to get him in tight with the civil servants, who steered him and recommended him to become minister of finance, and now, his third one, a billionaire, was and is financing his bid for the top spot. Anne Sinclair is no babe in the woods. She resigned her popular TV chat show when the pig was appointed a minister, claiming it might be a conflict of interest. It was nothing of the sort. She had inside info that the show was about to be cancelled, so she bailed out.
Of course, Glover is right in calling DSK a chauvinist sexual predator, untrustworthy, greedy and unscrupulous. He is all that and more. His wife’s billion dollar fortune, incidentally, derives from her grandfather Rosenberg’s dodgy art dealership.
Rosenberg’s deals were as shady as Wildenstein’s, but unlike the latter he never got caught. Daniel Wildenstein I knew quite well from my El Morocco nights during the Fifties in the Bagel. He was an awful man, always complaining about the waiters or not having the right table. Back then we used to get into fights quite regularly over women. Nothing serious: if one went down that was the end of it. Wildenstein I never hit because he was so skinny, ugly and miserable, although if anyone deserved a knuckle sandwich it was him. There were rumours galore about his dishonesty, but the French covered things up, as they tend to do. He is now dead, and his son Guy is being investigated for a massive fraud, which obviously I cannot possibly comment upon, although I expect that he’s guilty as hell on the basis of like father like son.
I used to play a lot of polo with Guy Wildenstein in Paris and he was perfectly behaved and very well mounted but none of us liked him. I cannot put my finger on it, but he was extremely dislikable, just like his old man. I hope he goes down but it’s ten to one against. The French protect the rich and powerful, just look at DSK. That other arch phoney, the pseudo-philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, would have been laughed off the campus of a school for retarded 12-year-olds, yet he regularly appears on French TV as an adviser to Sarkozy and as a well-informed source. Source for self-promotion and bull-shit, says Greece’s greatest philosopher since Plato. DSK, BHL, Rosenberg, Wildenstein, what did the French people do wrong to deserve such people? Is it punishment for collapsing so quickly against the Wehrmacht? Or for collaborating so eagerly with the conquerors? (After General Weygand’s collapse, a wit wrote Veni Vidi Vichy!) It could also be that because the French have such a beautiful country, with Paris the most beautiful city on earth, God made sure the French people have DSK and BHL and Rosenberg and Wildenstein to balance things out.
And as I write this sitting among the lavender and rosemary in my garden, I see a large limo pulling up at the Palace and a short, disgusting fat man with bulging eyes getting out followed by his rich-looking wife. Oh, my God, say it ain’t so.
Comments