THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Taki Theodoracopulos mourns the passing of Gunther Sachs – and an era when gentlemen played hard and died young
The cliché “end of an era” is always used when a stalwart of a period passes away. I read it in most reports about Gunther Sachs’s suicide last week. The trouble is that Gunther’s era ended long ago, during the late Sixties, when the word “playboy” was considered a badge of honour among those of us who preferred playing rather than working.
It was a sleepy, unhurried, bygone age, yet most of the famous playboys died violently: Alfonso de Portago, a Spanish marquis of impeccable credentials, died at 27 driving his Ferrari in the Miglia Mille race in May 1957 in Italy. Prince Aly Khan, son of the Aga Khan, a diplomat, second husband of Rita Hayworth, and a fabled seducer, died aged 49, driving his Lancia to a Paris party when he hit an oncoming car and was given le coup du lapin by his chauffeur, whom Aly had placed in the back seat.
The greatest playboy of them all, the Dominican diplomat and sportsman Porfirio Rubirosa, five-times married, husband of three of the world’s richest women and two of the most beautiful, died in the park of St Cloud near Paris, returning from a party following a polo game in which I had played. It was 5am and Rubi was driving a Ferrari at full speed. The date was July 6 1965 and he was 56 years old.
Juan Capuro, a South American diplomat perennially posted in Paris and a Don Juan sans pareil, as well as the best-looking man of his generation, died in 1966 driving a Porsche, after an all‑nighter, needless to say. Prince Raimondo Lanza, a nephew of the great Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, and the model for Prince Tancredi in Lampedusa’s elegiac lament for a lost Sicilian world, The Leopard, threw himself out of an Excelsior Hotel window in Rome in 1958, having ingested too much Bolivian marching powder. » | Taki Theodoracopulos | Friday, May 13, 2011
My comment:
Excellent article! Thank you, Sir! It makes a great change from politics, religion, and all the problems of the world. You are obviously a man who appreciates style and class! You, Sir, describe a life most charming. Would that I could have sampled such an enchanting life, if only for a short time. We have degenerated so much as a civilization that people now regard those with tattoos and piercings as “style icons,” the more tattoos, the more piercings the merrier! You, by contrast, describe a very different life. You describe la belle vie pour ceux qui ont apprécié la beauté dans la vie et l'esthétique. Hélas, pour nous aujourd'hui, c’est une epoch passé. – Mark
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