I’m a one-woman man

There’s a fin de saison feeling around here, but the restaurants are still full and the sons of the desert are still moping around. Building is going on non-stop and the cows are down from the mountains, making the village a friendlier and more civilised place. Something of a twilight mood has crept in, especially when I compare the cows with the people. Reclaiming vanished days is a sucker’s game, but it’s irresistible. I was up at my friend Mick Flick’s chalet the other afternoon, talking with Gstaad regulars about how much fun the place used to be. I tried the reverse of an old Woody Allen joke, announcing that taxis nowadays are so expensive I couldn’t keep my eyes on the lovely legs of the lady riding next to me. It went down like the proverbial lead balloon, but then we were all drunk to begin with.

Never mind. The fairer sex in Gstaad is mostly represented by ladies whose chief resource has always been their beaux. Some of them who haven’t received the seal of marriage can look a bit desperate, with bags under their eyes and a boozy roll at their waists. Their meters, in other words, are running, and we know that men keep their eyes firmly on those meters, in taxis or elsewhere. Until I got old, older women attracted me. They still do, and up at Mick’s the other afternoon, when asked by an old maiden whose youth had been a wild one where my wife Alexandra was, I told her that she was nine months pregnant and in bed. Bravo, Taki, was her response.

I suppose attraction to older women was inevitable after a little romance at 21 with the French wife of a Greek ship owner led to my banishment to Paris.