TALIM Director's Blog

Colloque à Tanger: Francophones Cut Up the Town

Tangier, since last Thursday, has been the haunt of people haunted by the spirits of The Beats, in particular Brion Gysin and William Burroughs, artists and writers who made Tangier their temporary home in the 1950s, fleeing an America - especially true for Burroughs - that was definitely not quite ready for their iconoclastic lifestyle.

Moussem à Sidi Ali Harazem, Brion Gysin, 1968, Tangier American Legation museum (loaned to the Galerie Delacroix Brion Gysin expo through 4 May 2013)

Organized by the Marseille Centre International de Poésie (CIPM), the colloque brought together poets, translators, scholars, and performance artists.  The latter included Americans Patti Smith and Anne Waldman, both connected with Beat artists and writers.  Anne Waldman makes a career of it at Naropa University's "Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics." 

Obviously, these are people whose idea of the written, spoken, or sung word is not bound by things like punctuation - Kerouac's famous scroll manuscript for On The Road was written without such frills as "chapters" or even "pages."  Several of the sessions were devoted to the "Cut up" school of poetry of Brion Gysin fame, and it was fun to hear (though the Académie Française would cringe) such Frenchifications as the infinitive "cutupiser" - perhaps découpage is too American, too artsy-craftsy ("how to decoupage," for example).  Cut up appears to be to poetry - a random collage of words - what monkeys-with-darts is to investing in Wall Street.

Speaking of On the Road, Walter Salles' film was shown with the Cinémathèque's new Sony 4K digital cinema projector - wow.  The timing - on the eve of the Colloque - helped us learn a bit more about Beat lore, and especially William Burroughs' back story: Viggo Mortensen's enigmatic portrayal of the oddball character who represents Burroughs gives an eerie premonition of WB's "William Tell" shooting of his wife Joan.  Then again, as Burroughs tells it, had he not shot his wife, he wouldn't have started writing, and thanks to his writing, we now have the term Interzone, not only the title of a book but the best one-word summary of how to describe Tangier in its wild years as the International Zone bolt-hole for Beats.

Organizers felt it necessary to bring forth, for the n^th time, Tangier Beats/Bowles perennial Mohamed Mrabet, whose stories were told in translation, with the storyteller referring to himself in the third person - "Mrabet then said...".  Putting it kindly, it is not clear whether his meaning is lost in translation, or whether there is no there, there.  Like Chauncey Gardener in Being There, as Roger Ebert put it: "simplicity is mistaken for profundity." Mrabet continues to tell the same "stories" to polite applause, even though much of the audience - including those who share Mrabet's native Moroccan Arabic - is left utterly puzzled as to what he has just uttered.

But I digress.  The Colloque à Tanger was a worthy effort by people who wanted to recreate what Burroughs and Gysin did in their 1975 Colloque de Tanger, which was actually held in Geneva.  Books were published, concerts were held (we were happy to "discover" Patti Smith, a dynamo performer with a poet's sensibility), and works were read.

The Colloque provided us an impetus to mount a Gysin - Burroughs exhibit of art works and photos that we already had, scattered around TALIM's museum and library.  And like the little - just published for the Colloque - Khbar Bladna book of Gysin works, photos, and memorabilia, we leave you with Ira Cohen's photo of the artist in a mask, reproduced for the book from a photo at TALIM's museum.

Colloque Facebook page.

Vanessa Paloma & the Spirit of Moroccan Jews

Vanessa Paloma is a singer, performer, scholar and writer specializing in Judeo-Spanish women’s songs and their role in Sephardic communities.  Internationally known for this repertoire, she has performed and lectured on five continents.  A current Research Associate of the Hadassah Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University, Paloma was a Senior Fulbright Research Scholar in Morocco during 2007-2008.

From her bio.  Official website, and blog.

You don't just get a solo concert, voice and harp, when Vanessa Paloma comes to Tangier.  Vanessa, who spent her Fulbright year here, just around the corner from the Legation, comes home to Tangier, and her loyal following in this city reciprocates by coming in numbers to her concert.  Last Thursday was no exception, despite several other competing cultural events.

Photo by Nathan Evans

Vanessa Paloma's homecoming is more than just revisting her old haunts.  It's a matter of roots: her mother's family, the Colombian side of this very international family, came to Latin America via Tetouan, Tangier's neighbor at the edge of the Rif Mountains.  In other words, Vanessa's work on the music of Morocco's Jewish diaspora is personal.  One of her stories, La Mantilla, traces the story of a shawl brought from Tetouan to Bogotà by her great-great-grandmother.

 

Her latest book, "The Mountain, the Desert, and the Pomegranate: Stories from Morocco and Beyond" (Gaon Books), provided material for her readings, which bracketed her renditions of often soulful Sephardic songs.  We see that an image of Drouj Merican (the American Steps leading up to the Legation) features in one of her Tangier-based stories.

Vanessa Paloma is not your typical academic, but she is nevertheless a serious scholar of the rich musical tradition of the Jews of Andalusia and the Sephardic diaspora, especially the centuries spent in Morocco, where Jews expelled from Reconquista Spain found refuge.  Here's her introduction to a 2009 paper on the Judeo-Spanish musical tradition in Morocco:

The Judeo-Spanish Romancero song tradition found a hospitable dwelling in
the Jewish communities of Northern Morocco.  The proximity between Spain and
Morocco led to a constant cultural, economic and political exchange across the Strait of Gibraltar.  This maritime frontier, which today is experienced as a formidable barrier for those Moroccans without a visa, was confronted with much more ease and openness in centuries past.  The very fact that each population establishes almost daily visual contact with the land across the Strait determines the continuous presence in the imaginary realm as well as the palpable reality of their contiguity.  A sustained exchange of music and ideas migrated along with commercial goods and diplomatic missions earlier than the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.  I like to think of this aqueous frontier as a fluid and live center of intercultural, interreligious and interlingual encounters.

Vanessa's family traversed this aqueous frontier on several occasions (fleeing Spain, emigrating to the New World, then her own "return" to Morocco for her studies and now, as the wife and mother of Jews born in Morocco).  She knows of what she writes - and sings.  It's hard to get more authentic scholarship than that.

Legation Courtyard Cookoff: Moroccan Street Food

For a brief moment last Friday night, our stately 19th century courtyard, entrance for generations of tricorner or top-hatted diplomats, had more the look of Jemaa el-Fna, with bissara and caliente aromas wafting around the fountain.  It was the perfect way to top off Abdelkrim Raddadi's lively presentation of his "coffee table" book, Morocco's Street Foods, published by MARSAM Edition and Exchanges, Morocco's English-language book specialists (actually, the book is in English, Arabic, and French, as was Raddadi's rapid-fire delivery).

In cooperation with the American Language Center of Tangier, we hosted a full house of foodies, people of all ages and backgrounds whose love of Moroccan delicacies was not deterred by a stormy debut to the evening.

"Delicacies," Abdelkrim Raddadi would tell us, are not the only thing that street food is about in Morocco.  Why people eat street food, its infinite variety in a country that has Arab, Berber, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and English antecedents (Tangier, for a brief couple of decades in the late 1600s, was British) - the sociology of street food is Mr. Raddadi's passion.  His excitement for his subject was evident to us, and to National Geographic TV, which features his work in their show on Street Food Around the World.

And not just sociology; geography too.  Raddadi tells of how caliente started in Tangier, with its large Spanish population during the International Zone years, made its way to inland Fez, and can be found in the eastern border town of Oujda, across from Algeria.  But then the Spanish of Oran had their own version, carantica.  The wonders of chick peas...

Actually, that Abdelkrim and the Exchanges team were with us at all last weekend in Tangier was a signal honor: he should have been in Paris at the Food Television Festival, where his book was one of a dozen chosen among thousands for the final competition.

So, what is the book?  Not a cookbook; there are no recipes.  There are lots of great color action shots, and even poetry in translation - well, maybe rimes is more like it - on the subject:

They say that the mechoui of Bougmaz

Kindles a desire for more.

Food of dinners and receptions,

It is even found in the souk.

Its irresistible aroma delights the senses,

One may even sell one's clothes

For a few slivers of mechoui.

A whole sheep including its head,

This alone is worthy of a party

For it is both regal and it goes far.

It has more of a ring in the original Arabic.

That Mr. Raddadi isn't a poster boy for Weight Watchers® is a tribute to his self control after four years of research - starting in Tangier with its trademark caliente (chick pea and egg savory flan) - that took him to street corners all across the kingdom.  "Bad but tasty" isn't his judgment on a particular dish, it's more his description of the allure of the illicit: Moroccan Moms Against Street Food continue to rail against their competitors - "why are you eating that greasy stuff when I've made you this delicious tajine?"

Despite mothers' concerns, at least street food is not fast food - Raddadi is a believer in the virtues of Slow Food.  But the increasing specialization of vendors in Morocco - "you can even get ready-crushed garlic!" - means that consumers here can outsource some of the more time-consuming parts of meals and just go out and buy their hergma (roasted calves' feet).  Don't worry: much of Moroccan street food would pass the vegetarian test.

Morocco's Street Foods is on to something: this food is theatre.  Just like fish-n-chips is best out of vinegar-doused newspaper, caliente needs to be eaten on a piece of paper torn off by the street vendor.  None of this knife-and-fork stuff.

Street food in Morocco is lots of things to lots of people, and serves, as Abdelkrim Raddadi says, as a kind of GPS: "turn left at the beboush (snails) cart, then go straight 'til you get to the bissara (pea soup) stand."

We wish all book presentations could be as much fun as Abdelkrim Raddadi's, though we may have set our own bar too high by serving up the real thing.  But a good time was had by all.

Photos by Christiane Delongueville. 

Kidnap Scrapbook: Letters on the Perdicaris Affair

Ellen Perdicaris by Ion Perdicaris, n.d., featured in Enchantment: Pictures from the Tangier American Legation Museum

Thanks to an alert reader, we've been made aware of a rare book on sale: "Archive of letters sent to his wife during the period of his capture: Ion Perdicaris."  Only $5,802 to the right bidder.  "Approximately 300 items, most autograph letters, mounted or inlaid in an album, folio (457 × 324 mm). Original full dark green roan, green watered silk doublures and endpapers, turn-ins with decorative roll all around in blind, all edges gilt. Hinges weak, spine rather worn. Very good.  Bookseller Inventory # 30719."

 

The notes accompanying the book advertisement provide a very nice summary of the Perdicaris Affair:

A contemporary assemblage of more than 300 letters of sympathy and eventually congratulation, addressed to Ellen (formerly Varley, née Rouse), wife of the Greek-born hostage Ion Hanford Perdicaris (1840–1925), the central figure in a notable kidnapping known as the Perdicaris incident. Perdicaris's Greek father had emigrated from Athens to the United States, becoming a US citizen and making a fortune as one of the organizers of the Trenton Gas Company in New Jersey. Ion lived the easy life of a playboy until the American Civil War, when the family's property in South Carolina was threatened with confiscation by the government of the Confederate States of America. In order to forestall any confiscation, Ion Perdicaris travelled to Greece to renounce his United States citizenship and acquire Greek nationality. He subsequently moved to Tangier, and fell in love with an Englishwoman, Ellen Varley, wife of the eminent telegraph engineer C. F. Varley. The Varleys divorced in 1873 and Ellen and her four children settled with Perdicaris in Tangier, in a house full of exotic animals. Fascinated by Moroccan culture, Perdicaris wrote several books on the country and became the unofficial head of Tangier's foreign community.

On 18 May 1904, Perdicaris and Ellen's elder son Cromwell were kidnapped from their home by bandits under the control of Mulai Ahmed er Raisuli, an outlaw considered by many to be the rightful heir to the throne of Morocco. Several of Perdicaris's servants were injured by Raisuli's men, and Ellen was left behind alone. Shortly after leaving Tangier, Perdicaris broke his leg in a horse fall. Raisuli demanded of Sultan Abdelaziz of Morocco $70,000 ransom, safe conduct, and control of two of Morocco's wealthiest districts. During his captivity Perdicaris came to admire and befriend Raisuli, an early example of what has since become known as Stockholm syndrome. US president Theodore Roosevelt, who had succeeded to the presidency upon the assassination of William McKinley, responded to the apparent kidnap of a US citizen with a classic display of gunboat diplomacy. He quickly dispatched several warships and Marine companies, though with little idea of what US forces could achieve on such hostile foreign soil.

Secretly advised that Perdicaris had relinquished American citizenship 40 years earlier, Roosevelt brushed that aside, pointing out that Raisuli had believed Perdicaris to be a US citizen when he kidnapped him. Roosevelt succeeded in getting Britain and France to put pressure on the sultan to accept Raisuli's demands, which he agreed to do on 21 June 1904. Roosevelt's "big stick" diplomacy and his reported demand for "Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead" helped him secure the presidency in his own right in a landslide victory in the election of November that year. Perdicaris and his family moved to England shortly after the incident, eventually settling in Tunbridge Wells. He died in London in 1925. The story was loosely adapted to film in the 1975 motion picture The Wind and the Lion, with Sean Connery in the role of Raisuli.

Here's a recent film (12 min. by Abdelkader Salah Haddouch) showing Raisuli's palace in  Tazrout, near Chefchaouen, where Perdicaris was held hostage.  We are fond of telling the Perdicaris story to visitors, and the Library of Congress deems the Perdicaris Affair important enough to dedicate a Chronicling America page to it.  Plenty of links to period news stories, where we learn that

The English housekeeper [phoned] the operator to inform the American Consulate... and Consul General Gummere, accompanied by guards, hastened to the scene.  Long before they arrived, the band had fled, carrying their prisoners into the mountain region...

That gives us another perspective on Mr. Gummere, galloping off to save an Amcit.

Now, does anyone want to get us this book? 

Zohra, As She Was: Photos From the Fifties

Zohra in 1952, posing at El Foulk for James McBey (photo courtesy John Dickson Photography)

Ah, don't we love the infinite possibilities of linking up with people offered by TALIMblog.  The most recent example:

I am one of James and Marguerite McBey's nieces. I happened on your blog about Zohra. It is lovely.  My mother, two sisters and I spent the summer of 1956 living next door to Marguerite and James in Gazebo, Marguerite's mother's house.  As you can imagine, it was a memorable experience. We knew Zohra and her family. I am most interested to learn that Zohra has children living in the US. Can you by any chance put us in touch with them?

Fast forward, and the McBey nieces have been in touch with Zohra's US family, thanks to relatives here in Morocco.  Small world, getting smaller.

Here are the girls, pictured with Zohra (in the flowered dress) at El Foulk, the McBey home on the Old Mountain outside Tangier, in 1956.  Again, many thanks to the McBey nieces Barbara, Joan, and Katie, and to John Dickson, whose Morocco portfolio contains many beautiful images of Tangier and some rarely seen interiors of El Foulk.

Horsemen of an Apocalypse: les Chevaux de Dieu

Poster: Cinebel.be

BBC News, May 16 2003:

At least 41 people have been killed and about 100 injured in suicide bomb attacks in Morocco's largest city, Casablanca, local officials say.

Ten years ago, the news of Morocco's first taste of post 9/11 terror hit the country hard, and exposed the dangers of religious extremism grafted on to extreme poverty.

Nabil Ayouch, in his film Les Chevaux de Dieu (Horses of God, official trilingual site) which had its Moroccan debut this week at Tangier's 14th annual National Film Festival, provides a searing portrait of some of the young suicide bombers and their trajectory from street urchin to urban shahid.

One of the strengths of this remarkable film is the way we come to know the group of kids who start out on the mean streets (no, mud alleys) of Sidi Moumen.

Terrorists, you will please note, were once kids, and not necessarily from those spooky madrassas in Pakistan or Afghanistan where they spend all day reciting scripture.  No, kids who play pickup football (okay, soccer).  Whose parents come from a variety of low-or-no-income situations (single mother prostitute, senile father, soldier brother, just to name a few).

Some future terrorists, through luck and/or skill, can wind up kicking the ball with Bayern Munich, and maybe avoid terrorism altogether.  Others, not quite so lucky, can get picked up by the brothers, whether in the prison recruiting grounds or when the bros "help" them get out of trouble with the police.  But this social work sometimes has a deadly mission, as in the case of the Casablanca Fourteen.  Maybe they will have to repay the favor someday with their lives.

Nabil Ayouch opened the film premiere by saying that he wanted to give a non-Hollywoodian treatment to the suicide bombers: instead of anonymous, dehumanized robots, he "provides a human face" to people who have to be counted among the victims.  Their jihadist masterminds send these poor lost souls off to their deaths with a smile, having built up their self-esteem for the one - first and last - time of their lives.

A clue to the sensibility that informs this film is the book on which it is based, Mahi BineBine's "Les etoiles de Sidi Moumen."

"In Sidi Moumen, I discovered a Morocco that I did not know, which shocked me, a sort of Calcutta,'' said the writer, who took five years ''of pain and difficult writing to put an urban nightmare into black and white." (Reading Morocco, April 25 2010).

Mahi BineBine has given the highest praise to Nabil Ayouch for his film, which doesn't reproduce the book but transforms its spirit to film.

Tahir Shah, who lives amidst another bidonville or shantytown on the fringes of Casablanca, writes of urban redevelopment plans to raze the ramshackle neighborhoods:

For six months the engineers have been toiling, building a series of plush apartment blocks... homes for the wealthy that will — soon — overlook our lives. It’s not the high rise apartments for a new wave of Casa Trash [nouveau riche] that worry me, so much as what’s going to happen to the hundreds of ordinary people who live in the bidonville.
Our maid Zenab just told me that a man with a clipboard came round and asked her questions…. how much she earns, how many people in her family have jobs, and whether she has relatives elsewhere in town. She came to work this morning and broke down sobbing, damping her eyes with the corner of her headscarf.  ’They said we will have to leave in a few months,’ she said. ‘But where will we go?’

That's a question best answered by talents such as Nabil Ayouch and Mahi BineBine.

Free at Last

We got an early start in marking Martin Luther King day this year.  There was great interest in our 2011 screening of Freedom Riders, so we decided that an encore was due for those who missed Stanley Nelson's award-winning documentary.

Our monthly "Movie Night" had an added come-on: distribution of the excellent State Department publication "Free at Last," along with its Arabic and French translations.

We would have wanted more young Moroccans to show up, but as it was, we had an appreciative audience, some of whom said that this should become an annual event.  That's fine with us.

There is great interest in Morocco in this chapter of American history, and some participants noted that Morocco has far to go in its treatment of, for example, sub-Saharan Africans who wind up in Morocco in their attempt to cross the Strait of Gibraltar.

We plan to carry other stories that touch on the African American experience, especially as it concerns Morocco.  The Prince Among Slaves continues to fascinate, and we will soon post a piece about black American soldiers in Operation Torch, the Allied landings in North Africa in 1942.  And of course, maybe America's first African American President might be persuaded to head the US delegation to Tangier in 2021 for the bicentennial of the Legation!  We'll keep trying to plant the idea...

Tahar Ben Jelloun at the Legation

Tahar Ben Jelloun (official website) came to live in Tangier as a boy in 1955, but last night was his first time visiting TALIM's museum and research library. Gallimard has just published his latest novel, Le Bonheur Conjugal (listen to an excerpt), and Ben Jelloun discussed his work with our audience - we were packed to overflowing, and had to turn people away, much against our instincts.

Probably Morocco's best known writer in French (alternately, France's best known Maghrebi-born novelist), Tahar Ben Jelloun divides his time between Paris and Tangier.  This 2006 Guardian interview provides a nice biographical sketch, and this Paris Review conversation reveals his literary and cinematic inspirations:

What is important is to invent a story and to make the spectators believe it—what is important is that sitting in a dark movie theater one is transported to another universe in imagination. This is what I try to do in my books.

Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Faulkner, but especially Joyce, are among the anglophone writers Ben Jelloun cites as literary references, and he knew Alan Ginsberg and William Burroughs as well, recalling the latter as he strolled through our Paul Bowles exhibit.  No fan of Bowles, he did admit that "he wrote a few good books," and was particularly interested in our museum's focus on Bowles as a composer and musicologist.

Tahar Ben Jelloun by Eric Martinez, Librairie des Colonnes

Ben Jelloun read us a few excerpts from the ironically-titled Le Bonheur Conjugal, but he was mostly extemporaneous, and the audience remained riveted for a good hour.  At one point referring to his latest novel as "a science friction," he said that he certainly doesn't have the magic formula for Marital Bliss.  Questions of love and loss have long preoccupied Ben Jelloun, from his time as a psychotherapist among North African immigrant workers in France in the Seventies. 

Ever the astute observer of the Moroccan scene, Ben Jelloun weaves social criticism into his fictional situations.  Typical Moroccan boys spoiled as "princes" by doting mothers and female relatives, having to then live with another woman who may not quite appreciate their exalted status.  In Morocco, you not only marry a spouse, but you get the extended family too, for better or for worse.  And Ben Jelloun recalled the unease with which extending marriage rights to women was greeted, even in the left-leaning circles of liberal, educated males.

Le Bonheur Conjugal is his first Moroccan-themed novel which takes place somewhere other than Tangier - in this case, Casablanca.

There are plenty of venues in Tangier where the Librairie des Colonnes could have held this event, so we were honored that this tower of French literature presented his work at TALIM.

Lords & Loafers at the Hotel Continental

"The Continental Hotel, alone in Tangier stands both witness and heiress to that age of soignée aristocratic refinement which, for a half a century, made the White City a very real rival to Monte Carlo and Nice, and a mecca for Princes and Potentates, Lords and loafers, artists and officers, couriters and courtesans.  It is a vanished world, a social Atlantis, drowned in a sea of blood of two World Wars, a civilisation we glimpse in faded sepia photographs..."

So writes Dr. Terence MacCarthy in his latest in a series of social histories of Tangier's Grand Hotels, who saw their heyday in the late 19th through mid twentieth century.

MacCarthy finds his raw material largely in period publications, primarily our collection of the Tangier Gazette, or as it was known earlier, Al-Moghreb Al-Aksa.  If there is a discipline of the archeology of guest registers, Terence MacCarthy should be considered its professor emeritus.

The Continental's friendly staff and setting continue to leave favorable impressions on the many travelers who choose it over more luxurious or modern hotels in Tangier, perhaps agreeing with American travel writer Burton Holmes, who wrote of the Continental in 1901: "It appears like a huge grin upon the frowning face of the walled city..."

With his ear for gossip, MacCarthy's latest book is again replete with anecdotes, nicely put in their historical context.  So we have a nephew of President Theodore Roosevelt at the hotel, in the wake of the Perdicaris affair (where TR exercised some of his trademark sabre rattling), on a goodwill mission to smooth ruffled feathers.

Here's how Adrian Mourby described the hotel a few years ago in The Independent:

The Hotel Continental above the harbour looked exactly the same as when Bertolucci used it. The fireplace was smoke-stained, a wind-up gramophone sat in the dining room next to a 1930s telephone switchboard, and a note in reception advised customers that no credit cards would be accepted for payment of bills. Of course not - it is still the 1930s inside the Continental.

Though it might be frustrating if you're trying to get calls through, there's something utterly captivating about a 1930 vintage switchboard still in use.  It's part of what MacCarthy calls "the singular charm of the Continental, the first, last, and grandest of Tangier's Grand Hotels!"

Link - Hotel Continental website.

Lord Bute's Palace: Historic Minzah Hotel

Once again, Dr. Terence MacCarthy has mined the holdings of TALIM's research library - especially our much-appreciated collection of the historic Tangier Gazette - to produce another of his social histories of notable Tangier edifices.  The 1930s vintage travel poster on the cover of Lord Bute's Palace: A History of the Hotel El Minzah nicely captures the historical allure that continues to attract clients to this hotel and to this city.

The building began as the city home of the wealthy American expatriate Ion Perdicaris, he of "Wind and the Lion" kidnapping fame.  MacCarthy provides numerous gossip-column tidbits from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  One example:

January 28th, 1899: The week has been a gay one, and the ball given by Mr. and Mrs. Perdicaris was the event therein. Over two hundred persons responded to the El Minzah’s invitations among them the officers of the German warships “Stosch” and
“Charlotte”, and even Gibraltar sent its contingent. The magnificent ballroom with the array of beauty and colour presented by the  ladies, and their costumes, dazzled the eye with kaleidoscopic effect.  The animation was intense, and dancing was brought to an end by lingering couples at an early hour of the morning. A band from the German men-of-war and the small orchestra led by Mr. Gomez showered enchanting strains to sympathetic dancers, both equally inspiring and inspired. None of those who had the good fortune to share El Minzah’s hospitality will readily forget the brilliant gathering of last Tuesday evening.”

Terence MacCarthy goes on to chronicle the comings and goings of statesmen (Winston Churchill), movie stars (Rita Hayworth, Rex Harrison, Douglas Fairbanks), and the very wealthy (Barbara Hutton, who wound up buying a home in Tangier).  There are the trademark MacCarthy tidbits on eccentric Tanjawis, like the Caïd MacLean.  A Scottish soldier of fortune, he served the Sultan, and also suffered the fate of Perdicaris at the hands of the same kidnapper.  There's the story of the $40,000 bulldog with gold-capped teeth...  Who says the Victorian era was straightlaced?