New York
A busy ten days, or nights rather, with some heroic drinking thrown in for good measure. Hangovers discriminate against the old nowadays, but no one is doing anything about it — not in Washington, not in New York, not in London. Our former chairman Algy Cluff’s dinner party at a gentleman’s club, followed by an extremely funny speech given by him, started me boozing and things didn’t let up. One drinks to enhance an enjoyable evening, never to relieve boredom. Also one drinks when one can’t hear, as in extremely noisy New York restaurants. I made a big mistake recently, when I had Prince and Princess Pavlos of Greece and Michael and Victoria Wolff for dinner at Avra, a Greek restaurant on the Upper East Side that I thought might be a quiet tavern like the ones you find below the Acropolis back home. The place turned out to be larger than Grand Central and noisier than when Krupp’s Big Bertha was firing off shells against the allies. When my wife rang to make the reservation, they took down my name and assured her that the best table would be available for little ole me ‘and my important guests’. Great, I thought, they must have heard of me, and prepared in my mind the questions I had for Michael Wolff, whose book on Trump was a runaway bestseller. Nothing could have been further from the truth. It was an old Bagel trick — to make people feel important so that you get their custom. I didn’t mind because the food, wine and service were excellent, but I couldn’t hear a word that Michael and the prince were saying, so I chose to go non-stop liquid. Funny how the Bagel is crawling with restaurants, but a good intimate place to eat is hard to find. Minetta Tavern, owned by my old buddy Keith McNally, a Brit, is such a place, but it’s a long way downtown and the traffic is horrific. Robin Birley is opening a place uptown, though, and that should solve my dining problems. Minetta Tavern, in the meat-packing district, was a hangout for Papa Hemingway when he was slumming downtown. e.e.cummings and Ezra Pound used to join him and reminisce about the old days in Paris. Papa would be appalled with downtown today. The place is full of tourists looking to make a statement, dressed in the contrived dishevelment they think is cool. Back in Hem’s time, downtown was reserved for real hustlers, real druggies and real artists. The place was ruined when people from Vogue moved in. Yep, the place changes at a dizzying pace, which makes any longstanding literary spot all the more precious. Norman Mailer used to go downtown to smoke pot and get into a fight. Woody Allen went there to play the clarinet, but I don’t know if he still does so since les girls went after him. Allen is a great film-maker but he had the bad luck to get involved with the Medea-like avenger Mia Farrow. Her ghastly son Ronan is continuing her tradition of ruining men’s lives. The latest casualty in the girls-going-after-boys war is the billionaire money manager Kenneth Fisher, who said that wooing a wealthy client is like wooing a woman in a bar. Well, I think he’s right: one puts one’s best foot forward (although I’ve never wooed a client, I’ve wooed lotsa women in bars). Close to $3 billion have fled his company because he dared to say that. Big investors are running from him faster than the Kuwaiti ruling family ran from Saddam’s tanks. Probably quicker than the Saudi rulers would flee if, say, the Americans or Israelis looked away while an Iranian contingent landed in the sands. Otherwise, everything’s hunky-dory, and I have a bit of advice for les
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