It’s always a delight to read a fresh Taki (one name is sufficient) column, especially now that the wealthy raconteur/rapscallion is 89, yet remains one of the funniest and no-holds barred politically incorrect commentators working today. Some might say Taki’s allowed to get away with sentences that might “cancel” other journalists, but his style, and scabrous opinions about worldwide events, and beautiful women, hasn’t changed since he began writing the “High Life” column for the UK Spectator in 1977. I’ve been a faithful reader since the early-1980s, and was fortunate to have Taki and his friends contribute to “Taki’s Top Drawer” for New York Press in the late-1990s, as well as dining with him at restaurants like The Odeon and the comfortable but overrated Four Seasons. (Ever the gentleman, Taki insisted on paying the writers’ fees for his two-page NYP spread.)
His latest, published in The American Conservative (a magazine he co-founded in 2002), was a story he could’ve written 30 years ago (and maybe partially did), but it’s spruced up with contemporary musing on American culture. The column, headlined “Taki’s Dinner Date” is a killer right out of the chute: “When browsing the sports pages of the New York Post, a tabloid hard to find nowadays at even harder to locate newsstands, I always read up on the tail end of some sports hero’s interview. I said the tail end because the rest is too embarrassingly banal even for my 7-year-old grandson.” I was happy that my Splice Today essay last Wednesday, minus the louche asides, touched on the same subject: how contemporary sportswriting is all but dead.
Taki took the silliness from a Post story about the “dream dinner” companions a sports superstar would choose given the chance. He quickly dismissed their choices and named three picks for his own shindig. His no-locale-given table included no surprises if you’re familiar with Taki, but would give other writers heartburn: Robert E. Lee, Charles Lindbergh and Ernest Hemingway. Taki’s admiration for Hemingway is embedded in his collection of thousands of columns (and, by the way, I still don’t believe that as a young man he gained access to the New York Yankees dugout and jawboned with Mickey Mantle, but it was a hilarious hallucination, or maybe just embellishment), but it’s the inclusion and “High Praise” of Lee that would get him tossed out of restaurants populated by journalists that he wouldn’t frequent anyway. And, not that I’d know for sure, but I doubt there are any journalist clubhouses left, on the order of Elaine’s or The Lion’s Head.
He writes: “Photos of [Lee] remind one of the dignified heads of Roman emperors. Lee owned slaves but thought slavery a great evil that damaged whites more than blacks… I believe that Lee might have won that tragic conflict early but for the fact that Lincoln was able to run a centralized government that amounted to a virtual dictatorship.” I was a little surprised Taki didn’t refer to Lincoln as a “fancy man” or “ponce,” but that barb apparently wasn’t on the menu for his dream dinner.
One more: “Today Lindbergh’s name has been sullied by know-nothings who have slandered and libeled him as an anti-Semite… His unpopularity among the jealous ones increased when it was revealed that by some Judas that the great aviator had great success in the skies as well as in the boudoir of some beautiful women.”
I ask, in sincerity, why hasn’t The New York Times—in the past 30 years, but especially today—hired Taki to liven up its dry, humorless and often maudlin editorial pages? It would entice conservative intellectuals, far more than Ross Douthat, who isn’t 89 like Taki, but writes as if he’s in a living mausoleum.
The photo above is of my mother and grandmother in their “swimming costumes,” perhaps in Northport or Coney Island. It’s pre-Pearl Harbor and my mom, who voted against FDR the two times she was of age, likely was a Lindbergh fan, although she didn’t fool around with “dream dinner” fantasies. My grandparents, as far as I know, were Republicans.
Take a look at the clues to figure out the year: The California Golden Bears win the Rose Bowl; Daffy Duck & Egghead is released by Merrie Melodies; Leo McCarey wins Best Director Oscar; Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant star in Bringing Up Baby; Superman makes his first appearance in Action Comics #1; Wrong Way Corrigan accidentally lands in Ireland instead of California; production of the Jefferson nickel begins; Freddie Hubbard is born and Clarence Darrow dies; Pearl Buck wins the Literature Nobel Prize; Thornton Wilder takes home the Drama Pulitzer; George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, and John O’Hara’s Hope of Heaven are published; Benny Goodman plays his first concert at Carnegie Hall; and Fats Waller’s “Two Sleep People” is a big hit.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023