Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [207]
“It’s not a restaurant, it’s a place. He wants you to join him for dinner in Saint-Tropez, France. Do you know where it is?”
Yes, I knew where it was, of course, and had been there often, mostly with my Uncle Alex, on his yacht. Did I have a place to stay there? the secretary wanted to know. Mr. Bluhdorn and his party were staying at the Byblos, which was one of the more glamorous hotels in the South of France, I remembered. Would I like her to book me a room there?
I was momentarily tempted—the last time I had stayed at the Byblos had been with my Uncle Alex and Orson Welles, after Welles had performed the astonishing feat, at La Mère Teraille’s restaurant, in La Napoule, of eating two whole roast chickens before devouring a pot of her famous bouillabaisse that would normally have served four persons, with plenty left over for seconds—but then it occurred to me that by staying in the same hotel as Bluhdorn I would automatically become part of his entourage, and might find it difficult to escape. No, I said, I would look after myself, and called Larry Collins, who, together with Dominique Lapierre, was the real object of Bluhdorn’s visit, and asked for a bed—at the time Collins and Lapierre had houses close by each other in the hills above Saint-Tropez. If experience had taught me anything, it was to make sure of your own accommodation and rent your own car.
I booked myself on the Concorde, then from Paris to Nice, where I would rent a car for the drive to Saint-Tropez—covering ground that was familiar to me from my childhood and youth. It promised to be a splendid trip, at once full of nostalgia and free—and, as Snyder pointed out, chargeable to the G+W corporate budget, rather than S&S’s. I decided to rent a Mercedes at Nice—there was no point in economizing on comfort, I reasoned.
My trip was uneventful but punctuated by constant communications from Bluhdorn’s staff: At both airports I was paged relentlessly. Mr. Bluhdorn was over the Atlantic now, together with Mr. Diller, and they would touch down at London, where I should join them for the flight to Nice. Then: They would land in Paris, not London. Then: They were no longer going to land in Paris but had decided to fly on to Amsterdam, instead, where I should meet them.
I ignored all these messages, turned a deaf ear to the loudspeakers calling out my name at the Nice airport, and drove on to Saint-Tropez, arriving at Larry Collins’s house with hours to spare before dinner.
Collins had received no word from the Bluhdorn party, so I went down to the hotel Bluhdorn was to stay at—prudently taking a book with me—and waited until finally, after several hours, there was a bustle of limousines outside in the courtyard and Bluhdorn arrived at last. He burst into the suite like a rocket, apparently unfatigued by nearly twenty-four hours of travel on a small airplane.
He immediately made for the nearest telephone in the suite, one of those futuristic, streamlined ones that the French are so fond of, and struggled with it for a few moments, stabbing at the buttons and cursing—Bluhdorn was one of those men who seem unable to deal with any mechanical device. I put him out of his misery and placed a call to New York for him. Whoever was on the other end, Bluhdorn did not waste time on amenities. He simply started talking, asking for the prices of various shares, giving orders to buy or sell, and unloaded enough sugar futures to fill God only knew how many trains and ships, his eyes bright despite the time change, a fresh cigar held delicately between his blunt, well-manicured fingers.
Bluhdorn’s two traveling companions were considerably less full of life than their mercurial chief. Barry Diller, the head of Paramount, looked so tired that his eyes seemed to have rolled up in their sockets, exposing only the whites, like two hard-boiled eggs. I asked him how the trip had been. Diller groaned. Bluhdorn, he said, had never stopped talking all the way across the Atlantic—even when he went to