There are no real playboys any more, says Taki in The Daily Telegraph. They disappeared during the late 1960s, "when the word playboy' was considered a badge of honour among those of us who preferred playing rather than working". Nowadays, in "the ravages of what has become our sick celebrity culture our favourite watering holes [are] overrun by grotesque Russian crooks, with their flashy hookers and ill-gotten billions".
To qualify as a playboy back then, says Giles Hattersley in The Sunday Times, you needed "limitless funds, an international property portfolio, sporting skill, a cultured brain, a robust liver to say nothing of being total social Viagra". The greatest playboy of all was the Dominican diplomat and sportsman, Porfirio Rubirosa. At parties thrown by Rubi' and Gunther Sachs (who died last week), says Taki, there were always beautiful women, and there was usually an orchestra. "No freaks, no hookers, very few film people, and even fewer gays. There were absolutely no drugs."
For a while, Taki lived with Rubi (and his fifth wife, Odile) in Paris. A typical day would mean: wake around 9am, breakfast in the garden, half an hour of boxing, a visit to the polo club in the Bois de Boulogne to "work the ponies", then lunch with wives or girlfriends. After lunch the men, "more often than not", would go over to Madam Claude's, "the most elegant and exclusive brothel in the City of Light". Dinner time usually meant an impromptu party followed by a de rigueur visit to Jimmy's, the Boulevard Montparnasse nightclub that was the "school for budding playboys". Next morning it would start all over again.
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It may sound like an empty life, says Taki, but it had an aesthetic appeal as well as an element of depravity. "Unlike today's Arab kleptocrats and vulgar Russian oligarchs, no one escorted hookers, no one employed bodyguards or PR assistants. Many of the 1960s playboys died young, often in car accidents; few reached the awkward age of 60, let alone the "ridiculously old age" of 78 (Sachs' age when he died). Unlike the "upwardly mobile, socially inept" types around now, the elegant playboys of the 1960s added to the glamour and gaiety of the times.
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