The irony is such that the word itself loses meaning. The ultimate Afghan con man, an oxymoron if there ever was one, is someone Hollywood couldn’t make up. A catch-him-if-you-can type of script wouldn’t make it past the first rewrite. Even “based on a true story” wouldn’t help. If it ...
NEW YORK—Actor Harvey Keitel and I are good friends and we go way back. For any of you who hate movies and Hollywood as I do, Keitel is your man. He was on Broadway for ten years and then made Mean Streets, the first of many gritty films with Robert De Niro depicting young Italian toughs around ...
NEW YORK—Tony Judt was a very clever and learned Brit who taught in the Big Bagel and died last August from that dreaded Lou Gehrig’s disease. He was extremely brave until the end, writing and lecturing from his wheelchair—so convincingly that some nice guys banned him from speaking just ...
NEW YORK—This is a good time to be in the Bagel. Walking briskly under changing autumn skies amid colors that still carry their summer clothes is inspiring. Heaven knows I need it. Early morning means judo training—hangover or not—and in foggy days I walk as if in a trance through the park, ...
I began thinking about this column one week before I noticed that Craig Brown had pinched it. He had actually written what I meant to write one week before I decided to write it, which I guess cannot be called plagiarism merely because I had thought of it first. (If I had, that is.) It’s about ...
Throughout his life my friend Porfirio Rubirosa made about five to ten million dollars by romancing women, and he married three of the world’s richest: Flor de Oro Trujillo, the Dominican strongman’s only daughter; Doris Duke, the tobacco heiress; and Barbara Hutton, the original “Poor Little ...
NEW YORK—It’s open season against whites over here. Couple of weeks ago, an 18-year-old Rutgers University freshman jumped off the George Washington Bridge after his roommate, also 18, and a female student accomplice used a webcam to surreptitiously film him in a gay sexual encounter and sent ...
NEW YORK—My first copy of The Great Gatsby cost me $2. It was 1953, the cover was dark blue with city lights in the background and a pair of mournful green eyes looking at nothing in particular. I had just finished Tender is the Night, so I took Gatsby home in exhilaration, not unlike going home ...
Some of our readers may be aware that the sainted editor’s wife of The Spectator is Swedish—and she has a sister—but I swear on the Koran that my story has nothing to do with it. In The Spectator only two weeks ago, the Sainted One wrote about how the Swedes bucked recession by lowering ...
When Tom Wolfe harpooned Leonard Bernstein in his famous 60s essay, he did it by directly quoting from those attending the infamous cocktail party Lenny gave for the Black Panthers. Wolfe had finagled an invite to Bernstein’s grand 5th Avenue pad and was taking notes throughout the evening. The ...
