Taki
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Well, I appreciate Roger’s concern very much, but he had to go on the false info I had fed him. Once the cameras were installed and Alec, Jimmy, Michael and I sat down to lunch on deck, the penny finally dropped and I began to relax. Actually, the wine flowed and I began jabbering away as I have a tendency to do, and the cameras rolled and rolled and now the only question that remains is how much of Taki will end up on the cutting-room floor. Alec Baldwin turned out to be as nice and polite a person as he’s handsome and well read. The exact opposite of a disgusting low life by the name of Brett Ratner, a so-called director whose manners are as ugly as he is, and he’s very, very ugly. (Ratner, I believe, was the one who was bounced from the Oscar presenters for bragging about how many women he’d bedded, which goes to prove to what depths the weaker sex will go when they need to feed their children.)
Bushido has never looked better and her classical looks stuck out even more when surrounded by ghastly-looking fridges on steroids, which are today’s superyachts, many of which are Russian-owned and anchored in the bay of Cannes. Life is strange. Instead of being behind bars back home, these people are doing a Taki, flaunting it and looking like Bond villains on their quarterdecks. Still, the weather held up for the shooting of the greatest saga since Gone with the Wind, and as soon as it was ‘cut and print’, the heavens opened and it’s been pouring ever since. The Almighty is no fool. He shows his disapproval by raining on people like Paris Hilton’s parade, as the blonde flew in for some desperate attention-seeking.
Two days after the celluloid landmark of Taki-cum-Onassis caught on camera, it was Vanity Fair time, Graydon Carter’s annual extravaganza for those of us who bring so much happiness and joy to the great unwashed who purchase tickets to watch us on screen. To say that I was mobbed on the way to the dinner might be an exaggeration of sorts, but I certainly felt as if I had been mugged when I fell getting into the dinghy after four hours of rather hard drinking. ‘You look like an upturned turtle,’ said my rude son J.T., who did manage to pull me upright with my dignity intact and before the crew could see me. VF is a hell of a publication and they pull out all the stops come Cannes. The presents alone are great, and the food and drinks the best on the Riviera.
And speaking of the sunny place for shady people, as Somerset Maugham put it, the south of France reminds me of a beautiful woman who has used too much Botox and wears too much make-up and far too long false eyelashes and goes out with a much too short and much too fat producer. This was once the magic place of F. Scott Fitzgerald and of Picasso and of Gerald Murphy — even of Taki — but it is now inhabited by rich gangsters, criminals and elderly retirees who believe they are escaping from Vichy France. The nicest parts are towards the mountains, Grasse and Saint-Paul-de-Vence, where the writers and painters used to live and still do. The great houses of the Agnellis and Normans and Dubonnets are now in the hands of the new rich, vulgarised beyond recognition, and apparently even the greatest of them all, La Fiorentina, has been ‘improved’ and modernised.
Mind you, I’m seeing all this from afar. I only leave the boat to train on shore, be it on the Croisette in Cannes or outside the Hotel du Cap in Antibes. When I first visited Cannes with my parents in 1952, the three great hotels, The Carlton, Le Majestic and Le Martinez, lorded it over a long stretch of beach and green. Now the whole croisette is lined with yellow-white Art Deco apartment buildings, not a disaster by a long way, but the tennis courts and gardens and small cafés are gone for ever. As the man said, ‘What else is new?’ Nothing but an Oscar for Taki, and I’m ready for my close up, Mr De Mille.
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