THE POOR LITTLE GREEK BOY GREW UP
“The Child,” Wordsworth wrote, “is father of the Man.” This apparently oxymoronic truth explains much about Taki Theodoracopulos. As a schoolchild in America after the war, and while his fellow pupils were preparing for life at university, Taki was reading for the university of life, learning and by heart. “As soon as school was over, I headed for Paris, the south of France and the Alps in hot pursuit of Dick Diver and Papa Hemingway,” he says. Thus it was at an American prep school that he plotted the coordinates of one of the most colourful voyages through life of the last 60 or so years, during which time he has become both Hemingway and Fitzgerald while remaining very much himself: war correspondent, convicted drug smuggler, Davis Cup tennis player, ladies’ man, karate champ, raconteur, and friend to Agnelli, Onassis, Sachs, Rubirosa, … a survivor and celebrant of the generation often celebrated in the pages of
