Southampton, New York
I received a gift necktie from the King of Greece at the lunch I threw in his honour here in the Bagel. The design on the tie gave me food for thought. There were tiny white rocking chairs against the skyblue background. The message was clear. It’s time to hang it up. King Constantine is a valued friend who had advised me against competing in martial arts at my age. When he heard of my victory down south he figured I had lucked out — which I had — so in order for me not to press lady luck he went out and bought me the Brooks Brothers tie.
Pushing the envelope, whether in gambling or in sport, is what makes life exciting and so unpredictable. Do you ride good fortune and double up on the bets, or do you play it safe and go home a winner? If I knew the answer I’d be the richest man in the world, not that this interests me one bit. Take, for example, the stock market. The Dow is over 13,000, whereas only 25 years ago, it hit an all-time high at 1,050. A lady in Southampton told me today’s rollercoaster reminded her of the Roaring Twenties. We all know how they finished up: people throwing themselves from their Wall Street windows, bread queues, and a depression which only ended with the second world war. The smart ones, needless to say, made money, depression or no depression. Jimmy Goldsmith got out just before the 1987 crash, laughing all the way to the bank. His later bets were not as successful. Jimmy was convinced that stocks were overvalued, so he had gone into gold big time. He was way ahead of his time. Gold is now very high, but so is the market. Go figure, as they say in the lower echelons of café society.
Further out west, in Chicago, my old boss and friend Conrad Black was terribly let down by the ghastly Marie-Josée Kravis and former ambassador Richard Burt. I almost came to blows with Burt at that infamous party for Barbara Black’s 60th birthday in La Grenouille. Sitting across from me he was so condescending that I told him that after the party I would drag him outside and teach him some manners. He changed course immediately and became almost obsequious. The Kravis woman I don’t know and never wish to meet. Her midget husband, a multi-billionaire, once threatened a friend of mine, Billy Norwich, with violence over something Billy had written. Oh, how I wish I had been there. (Billy is too nice a man to fight.) And, oh, how I wish Conrad did not have fishy friends like Mercedes Bass, la Kravis and Burt. All that woman needed to say was that she had perhaps been negligent in missing seeing the critical references to the controversial non-compete payments, but that there was no intent by Conrad to deceive. But, no, the low-life Kravis woman blamed her ex-friend and ran for cover. It almost serves the Blacks right for having such lunch-bucket pilferers for friends.
Which is not the kind of people the greatest Turk, Ahmet Ertegün, called cronies, and I will tell you all about who they were next week. In the meantime, I have to decide whether to rest on my laurels and go out a winner, or be squished by some gorilla down in Brazil in July.
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