ELIAS BEN-AVI, his name be praised, promised our meeting would be memorable. 'You're not going to get your average interview,' he announced grandly. 'You won't have to pull teeth to get interesting things out of me. Media-wise, I'm an intriguing thing.' He certainly appears everywhere, in his many roles as designer, hat-maker and man about town, most recently in the Hong Kong Tatler 'Society' issue, in a fashion feature called The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Alas, Ben-Avi, clad in Thai tribal headgear, fell into The Ugly category, but did this faze him? It did not. 'I took it as a hell of a compliment,' he cried, perusing the piece lovingly. 'It's hilarious, I looked awfully chic in that hat. I'm invited continuously to these very fancy events but most of them I gracefully decline. It's not that I'm playing hard to get - I'm travelling.' At the end of next month, he plans to travel out of Hong Kong forever, so he wanted this to be his last interview. 'This should be a eulogy to Hong Kong and - what is the opposite of a eulogy?' A damning? I suggested.
'You forked-tongue creature, you!' exclaimed Ben-Avi, laughing. He is the sort of clever, restless, barbed individual who needs amusement and likes to manipulate circumstances; tall, lean, clad entirely in black, he resembles a diabolical puppet-master. Did he intend to direct this interview? 'Possibly. To make sure there is a certain coherence to your writing of this piece.' Fine, I said meekly. So what are you going to do after Hong Kong? 'That I will tell you in one sentence when you leave.' In fact, I knew what he was planning to do but I let this slide for the moment, so we chatted about his background. He was born in Marrakech 39 years ago, in what is now the grand Mamounia Hotel, the seventh of nine children ('I excuse my father wholeheartedly: the television system was not as developed'), he left Morocco at six, wandered with his diplomatic-corps parents around a variety of countries, picked up Hebrew, Spanish, Arabic, French, Italian 'and a little English', and became an art student, first in Paris, then in Venice, where he hung out with Peggy Guggenheim, eccentric patron of artists.
'You have to take off your hat to my authority,' commanded Ben-Avi. 'People know me as a hat designer, but that's not the half of it, darling.' He was also a partner in a restaurant outside Venice called The Happy Celery, where he used to stand at the door and assess patrons' desirability. 'They would arrive in their private jets, with reservations months in advance, but if I didn't like their manner they didn't come in. I was the bulldog, with gorgeous curly hair and an angelic face.' How could he afford to part-own a restaurant? 'Let's make this interesting. I was a prostitute. Well, nearly. A prostitute in my mind.' In other words, he sold his artistic integrity and became a designer. 'I called the products, dot, dot, dot - write down the dots - and then: 'Touched By Elias'. Do you think I'm arrogant?' Well, I murmured, not entirely modest.
'It's in your face! I have no intention of calling it some flowery name.' Then he went to New York and married Karolina, an American jewellery designer. They have a son, Adam, 10, whose photograph occurs with great frequency in Ben-Avi's vivid flat. When I started cooing how lovely he was, his father snapped: 'I don't have lovely children. He's a character because he has his own interests, he's sharp, well-travelled.' Adam lives in New York because his parents' marriage ended; the divorce came through last month. Somebody had told me about seeing Ben-Avi bonding with a baby all evening at a party recently, and when I reminded him of this he said, 'I pay a high price, don't get me wrong. I love children, I have a magic touch with them. A crying baby, when I hold it, easily relaxes.' So he came to Hong Kong seven years ago, opened his hat shops and instituted the Mad Hatter's Ball. What has he learned here? Ben-Avi, who was sitting stroking my shawl ('We share it, darling - I listen to it, I feel it, it gives me a message, this is a trigger for me') with his singularly beautiful hands, contemplated this question for about three seconds and replied, 'I learned that I'm talented and that I can convert my talent into business ventures. For the customers, there are lots of broken hearts out there. But - done that, been there, let's go.' At this point, he launched into a sort of rap which began: 'Of all the things I would not regret, I wouldn't miss crossing Pedder Street and Queen's Road in rush-hour during a rainstorm, I wouldn't miss the idiotic idea of stainless steel seats on the subway, I wouldn't miss that dainty voice announcing the next stop . . .', which went on for such a long time that I had to go to a lunch in the middle. Two hours later, we reconvened and Ben-Avi immediately said, 'And I wouldn't miss people standing on the left side of the escalator', and rapped on for another 10 minutes.
Okay, I interrupted, what happens next? 'My next project is to rehabilitate a resort. I've been looking for two or three years, and I found one. In Phuket. It's a haven, a sanctuary for people who do not want to stay in these large hotel chains. Right now, it has these German and Swedish beer-belly lobster people going there, but it will attract its own natural clientele.' Who would, I'd heard, be gay. Ben-Avi, who'd been sitting next to me, leaped to his feet crying, 'Who told you that? Who told you that?' and parked himself on the other side of the room, smoking furiously and wagging his foot.
'It's not an exclusively gay resort. Put that in the paper. It will be highly gay-friendly, it will welcome people with life choices as long as they are not bigots of any kind. It's allowing anybody to be themselves in a small, intimate place.' He grinned. 'I'm gonna say this interview was done under duress.' Nobody would believe you, I said. Ben-Avi continued to ponder the concept of his resort, which will be financed by a consortium. He described his design dreams for it. He seemed, you will not be surprised to hear, highly confident about his future. 'The resort has a restaurant now that is absolutely fabulous, with a view to kill for,' he announced. 'It is doing very well at the moment. So imagine what I am able to do with it.'
