Crooks & Buffoons: Warren Beatty's in the Crosshairs

I read that Town & Country has overtaken Ishtar and Love Affair as the biggest flop in Hollywood history. Town & Country is reported to have cost $90 million, and has taken in $7 million total across America. The real disaster, I am told, is Warren Beatty, frazzled and irritating, capping a career of duds such as?come to think of it?Ishtar, Love Affair, Bulworth. Beatty is the kiss of death where making money in movies is concerned, yet the money men don't get it. Forty years ago, under the direction of great men like Elia Kazan, Beatty just passed as a thespian. Later on, in films like Shampoo, light comedies that didn't exactly tax the viewer, ditto.

Now, trying to hide the bald patches with imaginative hairdos, Beatty is a monument to man's incapability to see himself as absurd. Almost as absurd as the notion that he was a credible presidential contender in the year 2000. (Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington wrote a glowing account of what his presidency would be like.)

Heaven should not wait, but should help us. Beatty is a great self-promoter, knows how to play the culture and has been a man of the left ever since he smelled which way the wind was blowing?at least in Hollywood. When "advising" George McGovern in 1972, Beatty advocated that no one should have the right to leave more than $500,000 to his heirs. I met him a couple of times during the very early 60s when we were both circling Lee Radziwill. He was pleasant enough, but I always smelled something phony about him. Well, why not? Hollywood eats real people for breakfast.

What amazes me is his ability to get the money men to back his unwatchable movies. He is an old man playing philanderers and it simply won't wash. He's been fooling the people long enough, but now he looks like a male version of Norma Desmond. Give it up, Norma, it's time for the slippers and a hot toddy.

...I'm in one of my moods, so I might as well let Roger Clinton have it, too. Roger the Dodger should not reach for his slippers?the feds should reach for the handcuffs. Roger Clinton now makes Billy Carter look like Milton Eisenhower. A convicted drug dealer?pardoned by the Draft Dodger, natch?a lowlife, a friend of gangsters like the Gambinos, Roger Clinton should have been warned off by his sleazy older brother on Jan. 20, 1993. None of us is responsible for unfortunate relatives, but as president Bill Clinton should have known better.

Roger Clinton led the Gambino family to think the fix was in. Roger Clinton probably thought it was?after all, he knew his brother?but he also was counting on the fact that even the Mafia does not murder an ex-president's younger brother. I'm not so sure. Rosario Gambino, jailed for 45 years for heroin dealing, claims he's not related to the late Carlo Gambino, the boss of the crime family that bears his name. So if the Carlo Gambino family decides to teach Roger Clinton a lesson, Rosario Gambino cannot be held responsible. It's all very confusing to me, but I'll tell you one thing: I'd trust a Gambino more than Roger Clinton any day.

...The most egregious, hypocritical and corrupt figure of European politics is one Louis Michel, the Belgian foreign minister. He is the clown who demanded the European Union suspend Austria when Jorg Haider's Freedom Party was included in the coalition that rules that small Alpine paradise. Michel is a terrible demagogue who was among those who compared Haider to Hitler and unashamedly bullied the polite Austrian delegation to Brussels.

Now the chickens have come home to roost, as they say in Salzburg. Belgium took over the rotating European Union presidency for the next six months last Sunday, but in order not to overshadow this presidency, Louis Michel ordered a cover-up of corruption charges on a monumental scale. Belgian diplomats in Bulgaria have been selling entry visas to members of Balkan and Russian gangs, as well as to large numbers of immigrants. A senior Belgian diplomat, Myrianne Coen, has come forward and filed a lawsuit against the Belgian Foreign Ministry. She has also filed a suit against Louis Michel, alleging that he withheld documents. In a separate scandal, Belgian diplomatic status "red cards" have been sold to Russian criminals.

Belgians are used to scandals. After the Dutroux pedophile affair and eventual cover-up, nothing will surprise me. What is unheard of is the nonchalance exhibited by the rest of the European Union's mandarins. Had Louis Michel exhibited the slightest conservative tinge, he would right now most likely be under arrest. But being a socialist and in cahoots with the rest of the unelected bureaucrooks who run the EU, he is not only given the benefit of the doubt, he will most likely survive and prosper.

The philosophy of world domination, best known as socialism, has never been excised from its original home, Europe. Yesterday's communists, now claiming to be "new" socialists, are in power in France and Germany, the EU's biggest and richest countries. Louis Michel makes Bill and Roger Clinton seem almost honest.

...The arrival this month of the high-speed Paris-Marseille TGV train fills me with excitement. One leaves the Gare de Lyon at, say, 9 a.m. and is in the Riviera in three hours and 16 minutes. One swims, lunches, inspects the girls in St.-Tropez, and can be back in the City of Light for dinner. Five hundred miles in three hours is damn good, and the TGV runs on time. No stress, no metal detectors, no waiting for hours strapped to a seat for air traffic to clear. The future is high-speed trains, at least on the old continent. You should try it.