Claude Littner: ‘I went skiing in my swimming trunks in the Alps'

Times

14-05-2025

Claude Littner moved with his American mother and Austrian Jewish father (who had fled Nazi-occupied Paris) from New York to London in the 1950s and, at 25, set up a menswear concession on Oxford Street. In the 1980s he became a turnaround specialist, helping failing businesses, and was a boss at Amstrad International under Alan Sugar, and chief executive of Tottenham Hotspur. Littner, 76, who is known for his confrontational interviewing style on The Apprentice, is estimated to be worth £34 million.
Mexican boat men strike a hard bargain. I discovered this in 2002 on a solo sailing trip on the Riviera Maya. My single-sail boat had capsized and I was swimming next to it with a cut leg, hearing the drumbeat of the Jaws theme tune in my ears. It was only my wife Thelma's quick action that saved me: she saw from the shore that my sail had disappeared beneath the water and had sent these two young Mexican fellows out to get me.
'Do you want to be rescued? It's $200,' one of the young men said, gruffly. Frankly, I was in a weak bargaining position, gripping onto my capsized hull with a bleeding leg, but I argued them down to $100. That was the end of my holiday sailing hobby.
I've always been an adventurous traveller. Aged 22 my best friend Leonard and I borrowed his mother's old family saloon car and drove to the south of France with a two-man canvas tent and a Bunsen burner, which we planned to use to prepare hot chocolates next to the campfires. Stopping off in Paris, we had the bright idea of getting together the ingredients for toffee apples and having a go at the recipe in our hotel room. We put our Bunsen flame to the sugar and butter mixture, set off the hotel alarm and were summarily kicked out of the old-fashioned Parisian hotel, red-faced.
In my teens I caught the tennis bug from my gung-ho Czech aunt Draha, who encouraged me to skip my homework and play tennis in London parks. By the time Thelma and I married [in 1976] our holidays revolved around when and how I could get to a tennis club: I'd find myself catching buses or hitchhiking to tennis clubs in rural France.
But skiing is my true love. My first time on the slopes was in 1961, in Club Med Leysin in Switzerland, and through the 1960s my parents and I went skiing most winters. We'd alternate between Davos, which was all very formal with bands in suits playing over dinner; Courchevel, which has always been for proper skiers; and Isola, a ski resort in the southern French Alps where there's a photo of me skiing in my swimming trunks it was so unseasonably hot. These days, we go to the Sierra Nevada in Spain and Thelma and I enjoy the après-ski as my kids and five grandkids, who are all terrific skiers, take to the slopes.
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I've travelled to some fabulous places in my decades as a businessman: the US, where I'd hang out on oil rigs and on ranches with big-talking men with Stetsons and guns that they would shoot at anything; and on the road with Tottenham Hotspur, including a memorable tour of Asia. On that tour I basked in the team's reflected fame: I played football in Hong Kong Stadium with Jürgen Klinsmann and we stayed at these futuristic five-star hotels, but you would see old Chinese guys riding horses along the motorway as if it was the 1800s. China was exhilarating: a country where several centuries seemed to be happening at once.
Thelma and I have taken to cruising in our later years. We had a memorable trip to Alaska in 2013 where we went on a husky-sledding adventure through these pristine, snowy landscapes with looming icebergs and disporting whales. In 2015 we took a cruise through India and Vietnam, visiting the Taj Mahal in Agra, and the Cu Chi Tunnels, the Viet Cong's defensive network near Ho Chi Minh City, which was set with traps to catch and maim American servicemen. That was quite moving for me as I was born in the US and many of my contemporaries were drafted into that bloody war.
I may have an uncompromising persona on The Apprentice, but in real life I'm nothing like that. When I travel I make a point of being polite to waiters and hotel staff: that's the way you get the best service, I've found, not by throwing your weight around.
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The place I return to again and again is Marbella. I first visited in 1964 when it was a deserted kind of place: just a few hotels, unpaved roads and nothing around. I came of age in a 1970s Marbella nightclub called Pepe Moreno. It attracted stars such as Elizabeth Taylor and Aristotle Onassis in its heyday and there would be sangria on tap. Today I have an apartment in a quiet neighbourhood of Marbella and our extended family gathers there whenever we can. The first thing I do when I arrive is go to Dalli's Pasta Factory. It's an Italian-owned pasta joint that I used to go to with my parents and where the owners greet me like family. It's the same order every time: spaghetti napoletana grande, and muchisimo on the cheese. I am on holiday, after all.