The Art of the Playboy

'For it's a subtle craft, the art of the playboy--the creation of a life of tasteful public and private pleasure--and it's one that is completely lost on the rich of today. Many men think they're playboys, but they invariably land wide of the mark. Surrounding yourself with champagne, fast friends, and paid escorts is the very definition of the word "loser." (It's the same with men who purchase high-tech boats, private planes, and tall Russian women. They think they're Bond, but really, they're Blofeld). True playboys love women--they love being around them, and they especially love the chase. [Gunter] Sach's pursuit of Bardot, then the most sought-after woman in the world, included flying over her house in St. Tropez in a helicopter and dropping thousands of red roses down to her.'

'Potemkin Playboys,' Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair, July 2011

A Code of One's Own

Minouche Le Blanc and Taki Theodoracopulos,
Palace Hotel, Gstaad, 1975

'The veteran Riviera man and journalist Taki Theodoracopulos, who first met Gunter [Sachs] onboard the late shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos’s yacht Creole, once described Sachs to me as “a great gambler, a good skier, and bobsleigher.” I was questioning Theodoracopulos for a film I was trying to make at the time about playboys. One of the themes that emerged in our conversation was the playboy’s capacity to savor life’s pleasures in an unqualified way. Theodoracopulos explained that for these men life was purely about living for the delight of good times without distraction. That achievement became the highlight of a satisfying existence.

I was reminded of that exchange with Theodoracopulos when I learned of Sachs’s death. Life was of a piece for men of his type, where things like grace under pressure, for better or worse, were more than old-fashioned notions. They became values that evolved from what Theodoracopulos called the rules of being a gentleman. “You had to be a gent,” he told me. “You had to treat a lady as a lady should be treated. Manners were very formal...nobody came in and started spilling secrets you would tell a shrink. We didn’t know about shrinks.” The essential thing for these men was always to be true to their own code, and the accounts of Sachs’s final chapter suggest that he was faithful until the end.'

- Death of a Riviera Playboy: Gunter Sachs Departs the Party, by Jamie Johnson, VF Daily, 10 March 2011

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2011/05/death-of-a-riviera-playboy-gunter-sachs-departs-the-party.html

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