The Last Casbah

By  CHRISTOPHER PETKANAS

The French took pity on their cooks and stopped serving cheese soufflés 30 years ago, but not Jonathan Dawson, a
British journalist in his 60s who turned in his press card to become a voluptuary in Tangier, a full-time job in this
Moroccan city within winking distance of Spain. When I phoned Dawson to introduce myself and invite him for a drink,
he cut me off, insisting, “But you’re coming to me today!” — a perfect example of how Tangier society and its famous
grapevine works. I had had dinner the night before with the retired antiques dealer Christopher Gibbs, whose clients-
slash-chums have included everyone from Jaggers to Rothschilds, and before the last morsel had been downed, a big
lunch party at Dawson’s was already in the works.
In Tangier, you are only as grand as your rooftop terrace. Dawson’s tops off an apartment house that’s a little more
distinguished than most buildings in the scrappy Ville Nouvelle, the architecturally neutral (and that’s being kind)
“New City,” much of which went up after Morocco became a French and Spanish protectorate in 1912. Smothered in
bougainvillea, Dawson’s terrace has jaw-dropping views of the port, Gibralter and Spain, not 10 miles across the strait.
The table service at lunch was French, expertly executed by my host’s majordomo, a dwarf in a fez whom he rescued
from a hard life on the streets, so it was difficult to be blasé.
In the guise of a centerpiece, an uncaged parrot was fed grapes by Dawson as he stroked a pet rooster in his lap. The
gossip, meanwhile, was fresh and unsparing. At a dinner a few nights before, the French consulate general had told
delightedly of a meeting with the American ambassador to Morocco, where the ambassador revealed that he had no
idea who Paul Bowles was. As I had attended the dinner, given by one of the casbah’s reigning hostesses, Laure
Welfling, I was happy to confirm the story and earn my second scoop of soufflé. Lunch ended with some not very skilled
acrobats throwing each other in the air. Cigars were passed, the latest international auction catalogs drowsily thumbed
as guests lingered in squishy upholstery waiting for the claret to wear off. Later we trickled off to the Gran Cafe de Paris
for tea, past the homeless boys sniffing glue and the spontaneous eruptions of garbage that pock even the poshest
neighborhoods.
Boho holdouts that roll out the carpet for libertines and eccentrics are falling like flies these days — think of Sayulita in
Mexico, or José Ignacio in Uruguay — but not, inshallah, Tangier. The city’s contradictory charms, as they are wryly
termed, its fabled mix of savoir-vivre and absolute crumminess, remain in good supply. While Marrakesh has turned
into Miami in a caftan, with traveling “Sex and the City” hen parties, good old-fashioned decadence hangs on in
Tangier, where the louche life is cultivated by its poster boy Dawson and a vast, colorful community of socially
ferocious expats. (Bowles, of course, led the way for his generation, arriving in 1947 and never looking back.)
If you are passing through Tangier and have anything at all to offer and make your presence known, the foreign set will
adopt you in less time than it takes to stuff a sardine. Bored, starved for amusement and news of the outside world, the
city’s fraternity of non-natives is always looking for fresh meat for its croquet parties, color-themed parties and Easter-
hat parties. Any excuse for a party. At the top of the pyramid in an eye-bending matrix that would require 10 pages of
footnotes are the interior designers Jean-Louis Riccardi, Stuart Church and François Gilles; the painters Claudio
Bravo, Lawrence Mynott and “Gipi” de Richemont Salvy, Welfling’s husband; the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy and
his wife, Arielle Dombasle; the photographer Tessa Codrington and her husband, Stuart Wheeler, the immensely
wealthy tycoon and UK Independent Party treasurer; the garden designers Madison Cox and Umberto Pasti; Pierre
Bergé. . . .
Minus the gentleman’s sport of pig sticking and the white gloves women wore even in the depths of the summer,
Tangier society today is a hangover from the one that first took root in 1923, when France agreed to run the city with
other colonial powers. Thus began Tangier’s “golden years” — the drugs, the smuggling, the Chinese menu of sex — as a
free port and international zone governed by European delegations. By the time Morocco was handed back to the
Moroccans, in 1956, the beau monde was made up mostly of the diplomatic corps. Which explains how the Mayfair
peeress who asked me for cocktails one day has a villa packed with Vieux Paris silver-plate and Louis XVI armchairs
covered in needlepoint scenes from La Fontaine’s “Fables.”
“In London, if you want to get rid of something, you send it over to Christie’s or Sotheby’s and you’re done with it, you
never see it again,” Gibbs told me over a nightcap on the Vieille Montagne, where he has reconstituted an ancient
Portuguese chapel as a home for himself, and where Pasti, who’s a close friend, is doing the garden. “But the crazy way
antiques are recycled here, your lovely old possessions turn up in somebody’s filthy stall in the Casa Barata flea market.
You can never escape them.”
The consulate crowd lived side by side with spies, money changers, grifters, gold dealers, the black sheep of good
families, what Paul Morand described as “Nordic mill owners with morals as movable as their yachts” and men who
chose Tangier simply because they liked sleeping with other men. Moroccans are naturally indulgent, Tangier natives
even more so. Set in Tangier in the 1920s, Morand’s “Hecate and Her Dogs,” an erotic novella about a French banker
and his mistress, both pedophiles, sketches this wonderfully: “If a tradesman called on one of us and got no answer, he
would take his goods to the other’s house, with that calm composure which makes the manners of the Orient so
accommodating.” In fact, if you were from some stuck-up little tittle-tattle place like Philadelphia, the climate of
forbearance could make you delirious.
With its druggy profile and fleshy sins, Tangier had no fan in King Hassan II, who assumed the Moroccan throne in
1961, five years after independence. Flyblown Tangier was his blind spot — a stain, an embarrassment. So he held back
development money, leaving it for dead. Bowles remembered how in 1989 thousands of people waited in vain along the
waterfront to see the king’s ship come in: “Last night . . . the king was spirited aboard his train for Rabat. Neither he
nor anyone in the government trusts the people of Tangier, and so he makes a point of not ever coming here if he can
help it. I’ve never understood the official antipathy. . . .”
In a way, Hassan’s inattention suited the tourists and blow-ins. For take the edge off Tangier and what have you got?
Welfling, whose flamboyant caftans — one part Saint Laurent to two parts Lacroix — are sold at her namesake gallery in
the medina, vows to leave it if it becomes like Marrakesh, drained of Moroccans. “There are times when I could die of
boredom,” she said at home at Dar Cherif Ben Sadek, a trippy, willfully baroque palace jammed with a patchwork of
Victorian, Moorish and Neo-Classical booty. “But with a 360-degree view of the Bay of Tangier, from the Atlantic to the
Mediterranean, you see why we put up with it. Until the middle of the 15th century, the known world ended below our
windows. Nec plus ultra!”
With 50 rooms, more or less, Dar Cherif is the largest single-family dwelling in the old city. Built in the late 18th
century as Spain’s first legation in Tangier, it went on to become a madras, a weapons arsenal and, just before Welfling
took over, home to 10 households. “Delacroix visited in around 1830 when he was traveling through Morocco,” she
said, “and 50 years later the French consul in Tangier wooed the daughter of his Spanish counterpart here. The
unbelievable coincidence is that the Frenchman was Vicomte Roger de Richemont — my husband’s great-grandfather.”
People don’t move to Tangier in the deliberate, targeted way they move, say, to Miami. With a vague program of escape
or reinvention, they tend to just wash up, estranged or at loose ends. Pierre Le-Tan, the New Yorker artist and longtime
connoisseur of Tangier, observed that everyone in the city gives the impression of having ended up there for reasons
that are unknown even to themselves, or else “inavouables.”
Pasti started out in 1985 on the Nouvelle Montagne with two ravishing little 1920s pavilions, then commissioned a third
that he “hammered, scratched, scrapped and tortured” until it was indistinguishable from its older neighbors. He is
known in Tangier as a great host and an even greater demagogue: “The government has destroyed everything!” he
raved. “What’s been done to the Forêt Diplomatique, it’s like if you razed Central Park or the Bois de Boulogne! Tangier
had the largest concentration of white flowers in the Mediterranean, and we’re losing three to four species a year. All
the construction money is dirty money. Hashish money. And there’s a total lack of urban planning. They put everything
in the same place: factories, office blocks, rental villas. The expats try to ignore it all. They’d rather gossip. For a lot of
people it’s still the old Tangier: servants are cheap. Hashish is cheap. Boys are cheap.”
But the expat colony’s worst fears came true this winter when the events convulsing the Middle East reached its
doorstep. Most of the real power in Morocco resides with Mohammed VI, who was all of 35 when he succeeded his
father on Hassan’s death in 1999. The mostly peaceful demonstrations in Tangier and Marrakesh called for remedies
that would restrict the king’s authority and create a more legitimate democracy: a constitutional monarchy, like
Britain’s, with a parliament with teeth. But while Hassan was often characterized as a brutal despot, his son, “M6,” is
seen as an advocate of the poor and of social reform — and he’s just crazy about Tangier. He wants to transform the city
into a slick, up-to-the-minute, full-service resort appealing to vacationers, home buyers and yacht owners with more
traditional appetites: Morocco’s answer to Dubai.
Many, like Codrington, the photographer, strain to see the glass as half full. Her family has been sunning here for four
generations, and as an 11-year-old in 1955 she watched her sisters wash their petticoats in a sugar bath so they would be
properly stiff for dinner at their grandfather’s with Juan Carlos, the future king of Spain. In her 20s, Codrington went
on to have an affair with Rachid Alaoui, the grandson of Mohammed ben Moulay Arafa, the deposed sultan.
From the new king’s first day in power the change was tangible, she writes in “Spirits of Tangier,” a kind of road map to
Everyone Who Matters in the city. “Used to centuries of neglect by all the sultans,” the people were suddenly “treated to
the sight of the young King driving himself to the mosque, going swimming and jet-skiing in the sea. The people were
amazed.” Westerners stand by, mostly appalled by the viral building boom under way. “You must understand,” a top
official told Pasti when he raged against the pillorying of nature, “everything you Europeans love, we Moroccans
despise, and everything we love, you detest.”
You don’t have to be an adept of the souk to notice that the brass workers and tailors are being squeezed out by
teleboutiques offering Internet hookups. Or that the pagoda roofs attacking the countryside are not vernacular. Gilles,
the interior designer, and I did the flea market one Sunday, returning to his villa down the street from Malcolm
Forbes’s old compound for aperitifs on the terrace. One end has views across the tops of umbrella pines and the Emir of
Qatar’s palace to the strait of Gibralter; the other end looks down on a mountain of building parts and putrefying junk.
Gilles said that it had always been there.
Oh, well, he shrugged. On to the next party.
Essentials: Tangier, Morocco
Hotels
Dar Sultan When you can’t spring for the Nord-Pinus or get into the Tangerina. 49, rue Touila, Kasbah; 011-212-5-39-
33-60-61; doubles from about $130. Hôtel Nord-Pinus Tanger Sister hotel to the Nord-Pinus in the South of France, and
even more stylish. 11, rue du Riad Sultan, Kasbah; 011-212-6-61-22-81-40; doubles from $275. La Tangerina Hotel
Excellent value and beautifully appointed, with knockout views of the Strait of Gibraltar. 19, rue du Riad Sultan,
Kasbah; 011-212-5-39-94-77-31; doubles from $80.
Restaurants
Casa d’Italia The gratin of Tangier’s canteen for good-to-slightly-better-than-good Italian food. Palais des Institutions
Italiennes; 011-212-5-39-93-63-48; entrees from $7 to $20. Chez Abdou Paella and fish you choose yourself amid a
deliriously kitschy décor on the beach 20 minutes outside of town. Forêt Diplomatique, route de Rabat; 011-212-6-42-
33-66-01; entrees from $7 to $25. El Dorado A been-around-forever, roll-up-your-sleeves Ville Nouvelle joint,
specializing in whole fish grilled over a wood fire. 21, rue Allal Ben Abdellah; 011-212-5-39-94-33-53; entrees from $4 to
$25. Le Salon Bleu Charming multilevel tea salon overlooking the Place de la Kasbah, with the same owners as the Dar
Nour hotel. 71, rue Amrah; 011-212-6-54-32-76-18; mint tea and pastry $6. Marhaba Palace Restaurant Ho-hum (if that)
couscous and tagines, but oh, the decorating, an eye-bending Arabic-Andalusian cocktail. 69, rue de la Kasbah; 011-212-
5-39-93-79-27; entrees from $11 to $25.
Shopping
Bazar Tindouf An archaeological retail experience when you can’t face the Casa Barta flea market. 64, Rue de la
Liberté; 011-212-5-39-93-15-25. Boutique Majid Exhaustive selection of antique textiles and Berber bijoux. 66, rue les
Almouhades; 011-212-5-39-93-88-92. Galerie Laure Welfling With YSL no longer around to run up a couture caftan, Ms.
Welfling to the rescue. 3, Place de la Kasbah; 011-212-5-39-94-97-89. Galerie Tindouf Super-high-end antiques, from
Imari vases and Orientalist paintings to metallic-embroidered silk caftans. 72, rue de la Liberté; 011-212-5-39-93-86-00.
Madini No No. 5 here; the perfumery sells only its own encyclopedic range. 5, boulevard Pasteur; 011-212-5-39-93-43-
88.
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Sales of Home Safes Surge, Driven by the Recession and Recent Disasters
By KATE MURPHY
THE engineer in Danbury, Conn., is feeling more secure now that he has an 875-pound safe bolted to the floor of his den. The 52-year-old,
who is a skeet shooter, wanted the 19.2-cubic-foot safe to lock up his seven shotguns, some of which are family heirlooms. But he also
stores his wife’s jewelry in there, as well as a stash of emergency cash and a backup hard drive for his computer.
“You know how women used to get hope chests?” said the man, who insisted on anonymity for fear of tipping off thieves. “Well, this is a
man chest for my man cave.”
His $2,700 safe, which was installed in March, was a custom job: it has a high-gloss, hunter green exterior finish, brass hardware and a
fawn-colored velour interior.
“It was kind of like ordering a new car,” he said. “It looks great and gives me peace of mind.”
Manufacturers of residential safes — companies like Liberty Safe, Sentry Group, Allied Safe and Vault and Brown Safe Manufacturing —
report an increase in sales to customers like the Danbury engineer. Recent events, including the mortgage crisis, the
recession, tornadoes in the South and the earthquake in Japan, they say, are prompting more people to keep their valuables at home.
“We’re hearing a lot of people say they are closing their safety deposit boxes and bringing their valuables and important papers closer to
home, where they can get their hands on them quickly,” said James Skousen, a spokesman for Liberty Safe, adding that his company had
seen a surge in people buying safes to store gold and silver bullion bought as a hedge against the dollar.
In fact, sales of residential safes at Liberty, he said, have increased 40 percent since 2009, and spiked 25 percent in the first three months
of this year. Other manufacturers and retailers of residential safes report similar trends: AtBrown Safe Manufacturing, for instance, sales
have risen 30 percent annually over the last three years, and sales of “luxury,” or very high-end safes, which make up 20 percent of the
company’s business, have gone up 30 percent in the last year as well.
Indeed, customers have an expanding range of products from which to choose. Safes are no longer just gunmetal gray boxes with locks —
they have a host of customizable features to satisfy owners’ aesthetic desires as well as their security needs. There are also more safes that
look like ordinary household items but have secret compartments, (or diversion safes, as they are known in the trade): not just the
standard hollowed-out book, but less expected items like a fake head of lettuce or a can of soda, with space to hide that gold watch or
diamond bracelet.
FOR many, the primary appeal of home safes is easy access. Two years ago, a 38-year-old office manager in Columbus, N.J., bought a 175-
pound safe not because she feared economic Armageddon, but because she wanted a convenient place to lock up her jewelry.
“I didn’t want to have to drive to the bank to get my jewelry out of a safety deposit box every time I dressed up to go somewhere,” she said.
Her burgundy-colored safe, which has a gray, carpetlike interior and a capacity of two cubic feet, is bolted to the floor of her closet.
Although her home already had an alarm system, she said, having a safe “makes me feel more secure.”
“You can’t just pick up that thing and walk out with it,” she added.
Others are less concerned about burglars than the sticky fingers of those they know, including housekeepers and greedy relatives.
As Lynel Brown Berryhill, vice president of Brown Safe, in San Marcos, Calif., noted, “Customers increasingly have been telling us they
want a safe to prevent petty theft of jewelry and cash by their help,” who may feel strapped these days because of the higher cost of gas and
food.
Prices for residential safes start at about $20 for a basic fire-resistant lockbox about the size of a loaf of bread. But so-called luxury or
estate safes might be as big as an armoire and cost as much as $100,000. Such a safe often has an upholstered interior, exotic hardwood
shelving and a custom exterior finish.
“We just installed a safe in a guy’s living room who wanted it to exactly match the color of his MacBook Air,” Ms. Berryhill said.
Some of these safes also have biometric locks (which read fingerprints or irises), GPS antitheft systems (LoJack-like devices, in case
someone manages to carry the safe away) and automatic watch winders (so expensive watches stored in the safe keep perfect time).
MOST people, however, are more concerned with basic security: how well does the safe protect their belongings from theft and fire?
Some manufacturers use standard industry ratings to communicate this to consumers. A safe can be rated B, C or E, for example,
depending on how thick its doors and walls are; a safe with the lowest rating, B, has a door that is a half-inch thick and walls a quarter-inch
thick. There is no third-party authority, however, that verifies these ratings.
But a safe can also bear a UL symbol, like a toaster or a coffee maker, meaning it was independently tested by Underwriters Laboratories.
UL has dozens of ratings that indicate varying levels of theft and fire resistance. The designation RSC, or Residential Storage Container, for
instance, signifies that the safe can withstand a five-minute attack with basic tools like crowbars and screwdrivers. A TXTL-60x6 safe, on
the other hand, can withstand an hourlong attack with manual and power tools, blowtorches and eight ounces of nitroglycerin.
“Generally, the more letters and numbers in the rating, the more expensive the safe,” said Mark Brasfield, owner and president of the Safe
House in Nashville, which sells safes and moves them for people who are relocating.
When it comes to fire resistance, there are three UL ratings: 350 (as in degrees), for safes that get no hotter than that inside, and will
protect paper documents; 150, for those that will protect film and magnetic tape; and 125, for those that will protect computer hardware,
drives and disks. A time rating, ranging from 30 minutes to four hours, indicates how long the inside of the safe can maintain the
designated temperature while the exterior is engulfed in flames. So a Class 125/1 hour safe, for example, will keep most belongings in fine
condition for an hour in a raging fire.
A 59-year-old project manager for Motorola in San Diego knows the importance of fire-resistance. Everything he owned was destroyed in a
wildfire in 2007, except for the contents of his 25-cubic-foot safe, which was guaranteed to keep the interior at 350 degrees for 90 minutes.
When he returned to the charred rubble that was once his house and opened the safe, he said, “It was a very emotional moment,” because
the safe held “personal items — the photos, diploma and so on. A little of our prefire history had survived.” All the important identification
and financial papers he had stored inside were intact as well, as was his wife’s jewelry and a computer backup (although some of the disks
had melted).
D IVERSION safes, of course, are not fire resistant and do not even have locks. Their strength is pretense. They cost $5 to $100, and are
designed to look like various household objects: a head of iceberg lettuce, a can of soda and a can of shaving cream. Cans, jars and aerosol
containers found in pantries and bathroom cabinets are typical. These stealth safes also come disguised as other kinds of things, like surge
protectors and clocks.
“They are great for hiding stuff like money and jewelry,” said Annie Blanco, marketing coordinator for homesecuritystore.com, an online
retailer of home security systems, based in Riverside, Calif.
But Paul Cromwell, a professor of criminology at the University of South Florida Polytechnic in Lakeland, who has interviewed scores of
professional burglars in his research, said he is skeptical about their value. “Burglars are looking online at these kinds of safes, too,” he
said. “So they know what to look for.”
Hiding valuables in coat pockets or shoeboxes, in the freezer or buried in the dirt of potted plants, he added, isn’t any better. “You may
think you’re being clever, but these are the first places burglars look.”
Criminologists and law enforcement officials also advise against putting things inside toilet tanks and cereal boxes (where addicts tend to
hide illegal drugs) and inside medicine cabinets (where thieves look for prescription drugs with resale value). So the last place you want to
hide your diamond necklace or a roll of bills is inside an empty bottle of Oxycontinor Adderall.
Apart from a steel-clad safe, he said, the best place to store valuables is one that would take a thief considerable time and effort to find.
“Burglars want to spend as little time as possible in your home,” he said. “The average time a professional burglar will spend there is five
minutes.”
Good options might include putting what you want to protect in a nondescript box surrounded by a pile of junk in the attic, or tucking it
into the stuffing of one of a group of stuffed animals.
Or you could make your own diversion safe, by cutting pages of a book and stashing your treasures inside. Just make sure you put it on a
shelf crowded with other books, and perhaps choose a title that wouldn’t appeal to a thief — say, “Crime and Punishment.”
 
Gems on the Bookshelf
SAFES disguised as books cost $15 to $45 ready-made, but you can make one yourself for less. And because the D.I.Y. variety is made out
of a real book, it tends to look more authentic than a fake one. To hide your stash of emergency cash and jewelry, follow these steps:
Choose a hardcover book with a title that a thief (or anyone else) is unlikely to pull from your bookshelf. An outdated almanac, for example,
is probably a safer bet than “The Joy of Sex.” And consider how many pages the book has. The thicker the book, the more work it is to
hollow out, but the more you can hide in it.
Other supplies you’ll need include a box cutter, a ruler, a pencil, a sponge paintbrush and glue (pH-neutral is best).
Fold a piece of waxed paper over the front and back of the book (sort of like a dust jacket) to keep the covers clean. Then, with the sponge
paintbrush, liberally apply glue around the edges of the book to make the pages stick. Leave a few pages in the front unglued to conceal the
cavity. Put a heavy object on top of the book to compress the pages while the glue dries. Wait a couple of hours, or overnight.
Mark the area you wish to hollow out, using the pencil and ruler. Leave a border of at least a half-inch to an inch around the compartment.
Start cutting, but be patient: the box cutter will slice through only a few pages at a time, and pushing the blade through too many layers will
leave you with messy, ragged edges. If you own a scroll saw or have a friend who does, the process will go more quickly.
Finally, brush glue on the interior edges of the cut pages and let the book dry for a couple of hours.
A version of this article appeared in print on May 5, 2011, on page D1 of