High life | 12 May 2012

New York

So, Sarko and Bruni are out, Hollande is in and I’m off to the Actor’s Studio to brush up on my acting lessons. (Stanley Kowalski is reborn. Stella!) I wonder whether DSK is thinking: ‘There but for an African maid go I.’ My friend Edward Jay Epstein has written a quickie book about Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s little problem of last year here in the Bagel, one in which Epstein reiterates the disgraced ex-IMF chief’s suspicions that he was set up by his political enemies. Epstein does not agree, he simply states Dominique’s case.

Personally, I was delighted when the frog was busted, and it wasn’t simple schadenfreude either. (I am neither English nor that Greek.) DSK was simply a man wearing a suicide vest waiting to explode. The word had been out for years. The last thing he needed was the Sarkozy camp to set him up. He was such an arrogant man it never entered his mind that teaming up with a global prostitution ring would ever get out. But as a hooker-stripper named Jade testified, ‘I did not sleep with DSK simply for pleasure…He is old and stout.’ Now I wonder. Was DSK arrogant enough to believe those girls were sleeping with him for his looks? Did he fail to look in the mirror some days? Are there men deluded enough to think they’re princes rather than frogs? I’ll tell you one thing, not poor little Taki. I used hookers non-stop when I was young and OK-looking, but I wouldn’t go near any of them now. I feel too sorry for the girls having to put up with my old bones.

Nah, DSK is too intelligent to fool himself to such a degree, but not smart enough to stay away from the one thing he never managed to attract with his mental skills: women.