Jet Set: Memoir of an International Playboy - Hardcover

Gargia, Massimo; Starke, Allan; Starkie, Allan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1569801509 ISBN 13: 9781569801505

Publisher: UNKNO, 1999

Synopsis

The true story of Massimo Garcia & his adventures in the rarefied world of Kings, Dukes, Hollywood superstars, fashion designers & billionaires.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

A paean to hedonism would be a better subtitle for this terminally trivial autobiography. That righteous prologue aside, this is a volume of bedtime stories and yacht-basin scandal that no gossip aficionado could resist. Its about the wealthy socialites who moved in regular sequence from St. Moritz to Acapulco, from Seville to Sardinia, from Monte Carlo to Capri, with occasional respites in Paris, London, and New York. In the early 1960s, when tabloid tales of the Jet Set were gathering steam, Gargia determined to break into ``a society . . . with a polite, but resolute snobbery that kept it hermetically sealed.'' His recipe: Italian good looks, a reputation for performing well in bed, a patron, persistence, and patience. Members of the Agnelli and Rothschild families were early patrons, leading to sexual liaisons with Greta Garbo, Franoise Sagan, and evenas his funds began to run lowwith the 80-year-old widow of a founder of Shell Oil, ``one of the richest women in the world.'' Gargia abandoned his elderly lover (after accepting apartments in Paris and Monte Carlo from her) for the arms of a younger, prettier baroness, launching an extravagant if ``pointless and superficial'' lifestyle. No name goes undropped in this account, ranging from obscure party girls to former empresses, and including Princess Grace, Aristotle and Jackie Onassis, Jack Nicholson, Gianni Versace, Dodi Fayed and Princess Diana, and Sarah Ferguson's toe-sucking lover, John Bryan. Bryan's friend Allan Starkie, a US Army intelligence office turned high-life biographer (Fergie: Her Secret Life, not reviewed), is co-author of this book. After enduring arrest as a suspect in a casino-fixing investigation, the exonerated Gargia, who publishes a magazine called The Best, wants to turn over a new (gold) leaf, urging the so-called beautiful people to do good instead of doing each other. Best of luck to them from all whose insatiable appetites for picayune scandal and vicarious socializing will be at least momentarily appeased by this book. (photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

"To me," the author of this glitzy, fitfully amusing memoir confesses, "there is nothing quite so sexy as deep cleavage filled with enormous diamonds." That statement epitomizes the values embraced by the gaudy parade of titled Europeans and their hangers-on in whose orbits the author has traveled. Gargia recounts at length his affair with Greta Garbo, the "hermit-about-town" whose legendary reclusiveness and sexual reserve he claims to have overcome. He finds Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis a snob, her pretentious conversation unable to engage him or his then-mistress Francoise Sagan. Although the memoirist makes token apologies for the shallowness of his lifestyle, the book mostly chronicles the appetites of a man who finds shopping sexually stimulating and whose central occupationAhis law degree or publishing of The Best magazine notwithstandingAis collecting wealthy mistresses. He nearly wed the wealthy widow Lady Deterding, an octogenarian 50 years his senior and "one of the richest women in the world"Auntil she bragged of a liaison with Adolf Hitler: "One can accuse me of oversensitivity, but I found it a turnoff to learn that my girlfriend had fucked the F?hrer." While Gargia believes that the "jet set" perpetually attempts to create "a fleeting aesthetic of sublime social beauty," this seems to involve little more than gleeful ostentation, promiscuity and idleness. His attempts to elevate himself, as in the claim that he and coauthor Starkie (Fergie: Her Secret Life) uncovered secret KGB files that characterize the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed as an assassination, only italicizes the venality on display in these lurid pages. Photos not seen by PW. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: UNKNO
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1569801509
• ISBN 13: 9781569801505
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336