Charles Glass

Thursday

24 Jul 2014
Charles Glass

John Wayne, accidental cowboy

I’m not making a picture [The Green Berets] about Vietnam, I’m making a picture about good against bad. I happen to think that’s true about Vietnam, but even if it isn’t as clear as all that, that’s what you have to do to make a picture. It’s all right, because we’re in the business of selling tickets. It’s the same thing as the Indians. Maybe we shouldn’t have destroyed all those Indians, I don’t know, but when you’re making a picture, the Indians are the bad guys. — Mike Wayne, producer of The Green Berets, starring his father, John Wayne The words above appeared in a 1968 issue of Esquire magazine above a colour drawing of Wayne’s father in blue cavalry uniform and green beret, astride a stagecoach. A tiny Ho Chi Minh is shooting arrows at him from horseback.

John Wayne, accidental cowboy

Saturday

18 Aug 2012
Charles Glass

A hostage’s daydream

Twenty-five years ago, in a windowless Levantine oubliette, my wrist and ankle were bound with chains, but my imagination soared. Among my many daydreams was a reunion a quarter-century hence. The guests at this illusory affair were to have been my captors. There were times when I envisaged our encounter as real, and others as a piece of theatre. Either way, 25 years on, it hasn’t happened. Nor has anything else I expected before I escaped from Hezbollah in Beirut in August 1987. The rendezvous was to take place at the Grand Hotel Kadri in Zahle, a Christian village where the foothills of Mount Lebanon descend into the Bekaa Valley. At that time, the United States government declared Bekaa the ‘world capital of terror’, an attribution subsequently transferred to Iraq, Afghanistan and, latterly, northwest Pakistan.

A hostage’s daydream

Saturday

3 Mar 2012
Charles Glass

Man with a mission | 3 March 2012

He was a Persian aristocrat who struggled to make his country a democracy. Given to mood swings and sulks worthy of Achilles, Mohammed Mossadegh was born in June 1882 just a month before Britain bombarded and occupied Egypt. His formidable mother, Najm al-Saltaneh, belonged to the family of Qajar Shahs who ruled Iran from 1794 to 1925 and instilled in him a strong noblesse oblige that matured into genuine dedication to democratic and constitutional government. During his childhood, the country barely governed itself, yielding important decisions to the Russian and British empires that held it in joint subjugation.Mossadegh’s father, Mira Hedayatullah Vazir-Daftar, had been a minister of finance and was 40 years older than his wife.

Friday

16 Dec 2011
Charles Glass

Hitch never pulled his punches

One night in pre-gentrified Notting Hill, circa 1979 or 1980, Christopher Hitchens was walking home from dinner at our house when he saw a man beating up a woman. Never one to back away from battle, physical or verbal, Christopher took a swing at the woman's attacker. He was pleased to have spared her further savagery from the brute, until the woman told him to mind his own business and offered succour to her boyfriend. I think Christopher ended up with a black eye, but I forget which of the pair administered it. The neighbourhood lost a vital element when he moved to New York (and later Washington) not long afterwards. He'd have hated the new Notting Hill anyway, and London wasn't big enough to contain his wit, his ambition and his interest in the great globe.

Hitch never pulled his punches

Saturday

3 Dec 2011
Charles Glass

The original special relationship

Of all the cities in all the world, Paris dominates the American imagination more than any other. Although Americans may admire Rome or London, more have enjoyed a love affair with the French capital since Benjamin Franklin represented the 13 rebellious colonies at the court of Louis XVI. Josephine Baker captured that sentiment with her theme song, ‘J’ai deux amours/Mon pays et Paris.’ And more Americans than Rick Blaine in Casablanca have mused from afar, ‘We’ll always have Paris.’Just how many Americans had Paris before Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris crowd becomes clear in David McCullough’s delightful panorama of American life in Paris during the 19th century. Allen’s film posited that each American has his Paris, as the central character Gil Pender succumbs to the allure of the Jazz Age city of Hemingway (who called it ‘the city I love best in all the world’), Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Cole Porter.

The original special relationship

Wednesday

12 Mar 2008
Charles Glass

Farewell, my father: the sun sets on my horizon

When the sun lowers itself into the Pacific Ocean, west of California, it has a way of lingering on the horizon that makes you imagine it will stay for ever. It is perhaps less bright than at its zenith, but more beautiful. You don’t want to let it go. Then, just as you are sure it won’t disappear, it does.The other day, my older son and I walked along the beach near my father’s house between Los Angeles and San Diego. We did not talk much, and I forgot to tell him that in that same briney wash north of us my father taught me to body-surf and to fish. My son is 30 years old, a year older than my father was when I was born. My father was always the measure. He finished school at 17, as did I. I studied philosophy at university, as he did.

Saturday

7 Oct 2006
Charles Glass

Death of a billionaire PM

Rafik Hariri was Lebanon’s bulldozer. A buccaneer. A bruiser. Built like a heavyweight boxer, he looked more butcher than billionaire. His father was a dirt-poor, Sunni Muslim tenant farmer, who worked land near the south Lebanese port of Sidon.The French architects of the Maronite Catholic-led Grand Liban had reluctantly granted Lebanon its independence in 1943, a year before Rafik Hariri was born. The formula under which the Maronites agreed to relinquish their French protection and the Sunni Muslims to refuse union with Syria would succumb repeatedly during Hariri’s life to strains from outside. In 1948, Israel expelled over 100,000 Palestinians, most of them Sunni Muslims, to Lebanon. If granted citizenship, they would have upset the country’s sectarian population balance.

Saturday

22 Jan 2005
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