Duchess of Windsor

The trouble of having been around a long time is that one knows most of the secrets, and vice versa. Since the 1960s there have been rumors galore about certain French society ladies who used to work for the most famous Madame of all time, Claude. I hate to disappoint my gossip-column buddies, but I knew every single Madame Claude girl and not one made the big time except a pair I introduced to two Indonesian generals who represented Pertamina (the national oil company) back in 1965 and chose to leave Paris to go back with them. Old dad was doing business with Pertamina and had asked me to find some debs for them while a contract was being negotiated in the City of Light. I went to Claude, dad was amazed, the contract was signed, and when my father returned to Athens he told my mother: “The little one isn’t as big an idiot as he acts; he has beautiful and very willing young friends.”

My great buddy Porfirio Rubirosa was, unlike the Windsor man, hung like a mule. He at least married rich women—three of them—took their money and divorced them, and then married beautiful but impoverished youngsters. He was a sexual Robin Hood, or so I like to think. That ghastly Roussel fellow who took Christina Onassis’s millions is an exception where earning one’s ill-gotten gains is concerned. He mistreated the poor little rich girl something awful and now lives in Switzerland, enjoying moolah that should never have gone to him. The irony is that many of the men I’ve known who married for money were or are gay. Before all these erectile-dysfunction drugs came along I was too reluctant to ask them how they managed their conjugal duties, but now the question is academic. “VV,” as in Viva Viagra, should be embossed in the wedding rings of gay men who marry rich women, but then who am I, a poor little Greek boy, to try and set a fashion? I leave this to a fashion maven such Daphne Guinness, who mauvaise langues say could be Gaddafi in disguise.