Somerset Maughan described the French Riviera as ‘a sunny place for shady people’, and Tangier, Morocco, is like that too, except there’s more rain in Tangier.
That’s because it’s between two seas, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and so the weather is actually quite cold and wet, at least during winter and early spring.
Rainy or not, Tangier has attracted some of the world’s most glamourous, wealthy and talented, including Matisse, Cecil Beaton, Marlene Dietrich, Francis Bacon, Patricia Highsmith, Yves St Laurent, Jean Genet, Jane & Paul Bowles, Tennesse Williams, Barbara Hutton, Mick Jagger, Tahar Ben Jelloun, and Anthony Bourdain.
Beat Generation icon and heroin addict William Burroughs lived there for 6 years. (It’s the setting for his nightmarishly ghastly novel, Naked Lunch). And Forbes Magazine dynast, Malcolm Forbes (pictured below in his kilt) co-hosted his vastly lavish 70th birthday party with Elizabeth Taylor in Tangier. (Their guests included Robert Maxwell – father of Ghislane – which hooks us distastefully into current global events, all very ‘now’ ).
But it wasn’t its high-heels-and-low-life reputation that first took me to Tangier. I went because I needed a new project and I’d become dulled by a few months in the village of Tarifa, right down at the southernmost tip of Spain.
From there at night I could see the thrillingly foreign Arabic script الله أكبر, allahu akbar, illuminated gigantically on a hill near Tangier, siren-like, and only a few miles across the Straits of Gibralter.
Also, I’d just read an article in the New York Times called The Aesthetes (with the subtitle For the legendary expats of Tangier, a life devoted to beauty reaches full flower in this North African hothouse of history and hedonism ), which fascinated me enough to tie up my little life in Tarifa and get the next ferry across.
Out There & In Here 