Tang­ier is an orphan city, aban­doned by the thou­sands of Euro­pean and Amer­i­can expa­tri­ates who once flocked to the city for its air of eco­nomic and moral license, ignored by the Moroc­can gov­ern­ment for its past asso­ci­a­tion with those same way­ward West­ern­ers. Its pop­u­la­tion has fallen, its land­marks are decay­ing, and its very streets seem to be in dan­ger of tum­bling down its white hills, back into the Mediter­ranean. Only it’s pecu­liar geog­ra­phy, at the very north­ern tip of Africa, per­ilously close to mate­r­ial riches of Europe, insures that it’ll always exist. Only the port and the roads lead­ing from it to the inte­rior of the coun­try, both so vital to the Moroc­can econ­omy, seem to merit any expen­di­ture on the part of the gov­ern­ment. But then Tang­ier has always seemed to be in an advanced state of decay, a vic­tim of inter­mit­tent offi­cial neglect and a sur­plus of foreigners.

Her­cules, who formed the Straits of Gibral­tar by push­ing apart Europe and North Africa, at the request of the pre­his­toric Tan­gawis, fathered a son with Tingé, the over­sized widow of the slain giant Anteaus. What brought the leg­endary mus­cle man to North Africa were the golden apples in the Gar­den of Hes­perides, which was said to be near the site of the town later founded and named by his son, Sophax, in honor of that giant mother. To hear the talk, it’s been all down­hill since then. Actu­ally prob­a­bly founded by Phoeni­cian traders some­time around 1500 BC, Tang­ier is one of the old­est cities in North Africa. It’s seen Carthagini­ans, Romans, Van­dals, Byzan­tines, Arabs and a suc­ces­sion of Euro­pean pow­ers con­trol it. Yet it’s always thought itself to be less than what it once was, always look­ing back on a myth­i­cal golden age. In 38 BC, Romans made it a free city and it’s peo­ple Roman cit­i­zens, but then later aban­doned it as the empire’s cen­tral power declined. The Van­dals took it in 429 AD, but lost it to the Byzan­tines in 533, who in turn gave it to the Visig­oths in 621. The Arabs arrived in 706, as Islam swept through North Africa, and then into Spain. For the next 765 years, the same Mus­lim fac­tions that fought for con­trol of Spain and North Africa – the Ummayads of al-Andalus, the Idris­sis of Morocco, the Almo­had and Almoravid reli­gious war­riors, and even the Fatamids of Egypt – all cap­tured and even­tu­ally lost the city. Dur­ing this period of the mid­dle ages, Tang­ier was known in cul­tur­ally and mate­ri­ally back­wards Europe as a rich but irre­deemably wicked city, and in the thir­teenth cen­tury, St. Fran­cis denounced it as a cen­ter of mad­ness and illusion.

In 1471, a score of years before the final Mus­lim state was elim­i­nated from the Iber­ian penin­sula, the Por­tuguese, dur­ing their brief period of world power, cap­tured Tang­ier, mak­ing it the head­quar­ters of their colo­nial pos­ses­sions in Morocco. Nearly two hun­dred years later, in 1661, they would hand it to the Eng­lish as part of Cather­ine of Braganza’s dowry to Charles II. The Por­tuguese had done much to change the char­ac­ter of the city, build­ing beau­ti­ful res­i­dences, chapels, monas­ter­ies and a new cathe­dral, but the Eng­lish, by installing a series of cor­rupt and inept gov­er­nors, drove away both the Por­tuguese colonists and the siz­able and eco­nom­i­cally impor­tant Jew­ish com­mu­nity. In 1680, the Moroc­can Sul­tan Moulay Ismail, deter­mined to regain con­trol of the Tang­ier, harassed the city and refused it to be pro­vi­sioned from the inte­rior of Morocco. As the Sul­tan cap­tured out­ly­ing towns, sup­ply­ing fresh water became a prob­lem. When they gave up the city in 1661, the Por­tuguese had left detailed plans to all the springs, wells and con­duits, but the Eng­lish gar­ri­son com­man­der had promptly lost the book, and water had to be hauled over­land from sev­eral miles away.

Finally, under presure from the Sul­tan, the Eng­lish decided to aban­don the city. The famous diary­ist and Sec­re­tary of the Admi­ralty, Samuel Pepys was sent to help over­see the with­drawal. What he found shocked him. “Never surely was any town gov­erned in all mat­ters both pub­lic and pri­vate as this place has been.…Nothing but vice in the whole place of all sorts, for swear­ing, curs­ing, drink­ing and whor­ing.” The final Eng­lish gov­er­nor, Colonel Percy Kirke, was wildly, pub­licly wicked. He openly mocked towns­men who demanded the repay­ment of a large per­sonal debt, kept a harem of con­cu­bines, and impreg­nated his wife’s sis­ter. As a joke he taught devout Mus­lims to say Eng­lish phrases that were blas­phe­mous to their own reli­gion. He deported Jews to Spain, where they would face cer­tain death at the hands of the Inqui­si­tion, and had even mur­dered one of his own men. His troops read­ily adopted his exam­ple, and rape, drunk­en­ness and debauch­ery were the order of the day. Cit­i­zens were beaten and robbed in the streets by the very men who were charged with pro­tect­ing them. For Pepys, the destruc­tion of Tang­ier, which he likened to a mod­ern day Sodom, couldn’t come quickly enough. As a final act of wan­ton­ness, the Eng­lish blew up the Mole, a lengthy sea­wall they had built to pro­tect the har­bor, about the only pub­lic works they had under­taken in the entire 20 years.

After the Eng­lish left, Tang­ier fell back to native Moroc­can rule and was repop­u­lated with Berbers and Arabs from the coun­try­side. The British, who in 1704 cap­tured Gibral­tar, still a took an inter­est in Tang­ier, giv­ing the cit­i­zens guns and ammu­ni­tion in exchange for sup­plies for the Rock, and in order to keep other Euro­pean pow­ers, espe­cially the French and Span­ish, out of the strate­gi­cally impor­tant city. The British would con­tinue this sup­port for Moroc­can inde­pen­dence and the power of the Sul­tan well into the nine­teenth cen­tury, using it as a coun­ter­bal­ance to inter­na­tional rivals. Mean­while, Tang­ier grad­u­ally took on the char­ac­ter of an inter­na­tional city, an enclave where Euro­pean diplo­mats and mer­chants could estab­lish bases close to Europe. This gen­er­ally also served the needs of a series of Sul­tans who were deter­mined to keep Euro­pean con­t­a­m­i­na­tion away from the royal city of Fez and the pious Mus­lims of the inte­rior. By the end of the nine­teenth cen­tury, as native Moroc­can power waned, the con­test for con­trol of Tang­ier heated up. The French, Span­ish, Ital­ians and Ger­mans all tried to exert power over the city. The British, who could have made a his­toric claim based upon their ear­lier pos­ses­sion, were con­tent with main­tain­ing con­trol of Gibral­tar across the Straits, while pre­vent­ing any sin­gle coun­try from con­trol­ling Tangier.

In late 1904, fol­low­ing his kid­nap­ping of both Times cor­re­spon­dent Wal­ter Har­ris and promi­nent American-born, Greek mer­chant Ion Perdi­caris, the Rif­fian ban­dit Ahmad ibn Muham­mad er-Raisuli was appointed Pasha of Tang­ier by a greatly weak­ened Sul­tan. Raisuli responded to the threat of law­less­ness, much of which had been caused by him or his agents, by tak­ing direct action against those Moroc­cans who opposed his rule. Fatal flog­gings were car­ried out in the Grand Socco, within sight of the French and Ger­man lega­tions, and the sev­ered heads of his ene­mies were hung from the city’s gates. Within three years, the Euro­peans were out­raged enough by Raisuli’s bru­tal behav­ior to com­pel the Sul­tan to attack him. Unable to get rid of the ban­dit, the Sul­tan finally agreed, in 1909, to give him the governor-ship of every-thing in north-west Morocco, except Tang­ier. He would con-tinue to be a thorn in the side of both Moroc-can and Span­ish author­i­ties, sid­ing with the Ger­mans dur­ing World War I, and con­tin­u­ing to exert influ­ence in the coun­try­side of the Rif, right up until his death in 1925.

In 1912, fol­low­ing a decade-long series of con­fer­ences and treaties, the entire coun­try was placed under a colo­nial “pro­tec­torate” sys­tem; France was given con­trol of south­ern Morocco, Spain given north­ern Morocco, and Tang­ier was accorded sta­tus as a “spe­cial zone,” whose sys­tem of gov­ern­ment was to be decided later. How­ever, before that sys­tem could be deter­mined World War One inter­vened. It wasn’t until 1925 that the Statute of Tang­ier, a doc­u­ment drawn up by the major pow­ers, for­mal­ized Tangier’s sta­tus as a per­ma­nently neu­tral, demil­i­ta­rized Inter­na­tional Zone, and estab­lished a com­plex, Rube-Goldberg sys­tem of gov­er­nance. Offi­cials from 12 Euro­pean coun­tries and the United States com­bined with native Tan­gawis (Moroc­can natives are “Tan­gawis”, Euro­pean res­i­dents are “Tan­geri­nos”), both Jews and Mus­lims, to make up a 26-member Leg­isla­tive Assem­bly. Over­see­ing the activ­i­ties of the Assem­bly, and with veto power over their deci­sions, was a group of eight west­ern con­suls known col­lec­tively as the Com­mit­tee of Con­trol. This entire bureau­cratic struc­ture proved to be vir­tu­ally unwork­able, and thus Tang­ier began its 31-year run as a wild, wide-open city of unpun­ished vice, no taxes, and dubi­ous finan­cial deal­ings. The city expanded rapidly in the pre­war years, and much of the ville nou­velle, with its wide streets and European-style build­ings dates from this period. By 1934, there were an esti­mated 50,000 res­i­dents, a quar­ter of whom were Tan­geri­nos of var­i­ous nationalities.

The only prac­ti­cal break in the inter-national non-governance of the zone oc-curred dur­ing World War II. In June of 1940, using the pre­text of main­tain­ing neu­tral inter­na­tional con­trol, troops from Franco’s fas­cist Spain marched into the city from the Span­ish zone and took power. In an arrange­ment that seems as curi­ous today as it did then, Franco guar­an­teed access to every­one. Amer­i­cans, British, French, both Free and Vichy, Ger­mans, and Ital­ians, many in uni­form, cir­cu­lated freely in the city. Espi­onage became the biggest growth indus­try in town. Secret mes­sages were passed in the Petit Socco or the Place de France and Arabs, Berbers, Por­tuguese and other neu­trals, at all lev­els of soci­ety from shoe-shine boy to minor aris­toc­ract, were recruited to pro­vide infor­ma­tion on the enemy, who­ever he might be. Ger­mans and Ital­ians sat in the same cafés as Eng­lish­men and Amer­i­cans, although nat­u­rally at dif­fer­ent tables. Dur­ing the entire course of the war, Tang­ier was never attacked, never bombed, and it never ceased to be open to all com­ers. By the end of 1943, as Amer­i­can and British armies suc­ceeded in push­ing the Ger­mans out of North Africa, Spain made moves to restore true neu­tral inter-national con­trol to the city. And by the war’s end, Span­ish troops had com­pletely with­drawn and the Com­mit­tee of Con­trol resumed admin­is­tra­tion of the city, with the obvi­ous lack of a Ger­man member.

It was the dozen years imme­di­ately fol­low­ing the end of the war that sealed Tangier’s rep­u­ta­tion among Amer­i­cans as a cen­ter of vice and free­dom. Amer­i­can artists, homo­sex­u­als, tax-dodgers, non-conformists and degen­er­ates were all drawn to the city because of its inex­pen­sive stan­dard of liv­ing, its lack of legal restric­tions, and the abil­ity to acquire any­thing for a price. These were the fever­ish, boom­town years of William Bur­roughs’ fic­tion­al­ized Inter­zone. Paul Bowles, the most famous Amer­i­can expa­tri­ate, and one of the few to still remain in the city, wrote of the period: “It was one of the charms of the Inter­na­tional Zones that you could get any­thing you wanted if you paid for it. Do any­thing, too, for that mat­ter – there were no incor­rupt­ibles. It was only a ques­tion of money.” In his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, The World, the Flesh and Myself, British expa­tri­ate Michael Davi­son was more spe­cific, “almost any thirst could be assuaged; boys or pubes­cent girls of half-a-dozen races were two-a-penny, guilty manip­u­la­tors of for­eign cur­ren­cies and the pro­cur­ers of ille­gal com­modi­ties lurked at every café table; and the som­brely sin­ful streets behind the Petit Socco were full of car­a­vanserai with evoca­tive names like Hotel Satan or Pen­sion Delirium.”

Antidrug laws didn’t exist, so kif and ma-joun, a kind of cannabis paste, were sold openly in the streets. There were no cor­po­rate or per­sonal taxes, and it was ridicu­lously easy to estab­lish a cor­po­ra­tion, so hun­dreds of inter­na­tional com­pa­nies and indi­vid­ual tax-dodgers based them­selves in Tang­ier. There were no restric­tions on cur­rency exchanges and few bank­ing laws, so money­lend­ing and cur­rency spec­u­la­tion flour­ished. There were no cen­sor­ship laws, so book­stores actively traded in all sorts of pornog­ra­phy. There were no vice or moral­ity laws, so homo­sex­u­als and ped­erasts flocked to the city. Import duties were low and Europe was close, so Tang­ier became a major mid­dle­man in inter­na­tional smug­gling and its port filled with fast cig­a­rette boats and con­verted war-surplus PT boats. With its wide-open, lib­er­tar­ian advan­tages, and blessed with Los Angeles-style weather, the city grew. By 1952 it held nearly 180,000 peo­ple, almost a half of whom were foreign.

For many Amer­i­cans, chaf­ing under the con­formist restric­tions of McCarthy’s Amer­ica, Tang­ier seemed like an ideal place. Paul and Jane Bowles were the most vis­i­ble mem­bers of an expa­tri­ate com­mu­nity that included, at var­i­ous times, writ­ers William Bur­roughs, Jack Ker­ouac, Allen Gins­berg, Tru­man Capote, Ten­nessee Williams, painter Robert Rauschen­berg, and drug guru Tim­o­thy Leary, among many oth­ers. Bowles had orig­i­nally come to Tang­ier with com­poser Aaron Cop­land in 1931, at the urg­ing of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Tolkas, who had spent three sum­mers there in the late Twen­ties. Cop­land would even­tu­ally leave Morocco, unable to com­pose music in its lan­guid hot­house atmos­phere, call­ing Tang­ier itself a “mad­house.” Bowles would leave for long peri­ods, but always returned, set­tling there per­ma­nently in 1947, and even­tu­ally mov­ing to the shabby apart­ment he cur­rently occupies.

One Amer­i­can expa­tri­ate who did not take a shabby apart­ment in Tang­ier was Wool­worth heiress, and one-time “poor lit­tle rich girl,” Bar­bara Hut­ton. in 1947, Hut­ton pur­chased Sidi Hosni, a mag­nif­i­cent man­sion in the med­ina con­structed from seven sep­a­rate homes, that had once been the prop­erty of both a Moroc­can saint and Wal­ter Har­ris. Hut­ton styled her­self a princess of Tan­gerino soci­ety, and tried to live up to it by throw­ing lav­ish fan­tasy par­ties. (In her favor, she did wear a dia­mond tiara, and three of her seven hus­bands actu­ally had been princes, even if she had to spend $50,000 to buy num­ber seven his own Laot­ian prince­ship. In fact the only one of her hus­bands not to hold a title had been Cary Grant.) The three-time princess by mar­riage was so impor­tant that the mayor of Tang­ier had the ancient city gates widened so that her Rolls Royce could pass through them. Hut­ton pulled out of Tang­ier for good in 1975, although the par­ties had ended five years ear­lier. Not until 1989, when cap­i­tal­ist icon Mal­colm Forbes threw his sev­en­ti­eth birth­day party at his man­sion, the Men­doubia, which had orig­i­nally a palace for the Sultan’s gov­er­nor, would any­thing as lav­ish been seen again. The party was exces­sively opu­lent. Over 700 guests were flown in on char­tered 747s and Con­cords, includ­ing such lumi­nar­ies as Eliz­a­beth Tay­lor, Henry Kissinger, Don­ald Trump, Robert Maxwell, Rupert Mur­doch, King Con­stan­tine of Greece, Bar­bara Wal­ters, Julio Igle­sias, and more, all of whom were treated to an evening of oriental-themed excess, that report­edly set Forbes back three-million dol­lars (con­sid­ered tax-deductable busi­ness enter­tain­ment for the Forbes pub­lish­ing empire). Forbes, who had long main­tained a home in Tang­ier, came to the city for the same rea­sons so many other Amer­i­cans did: sex. Fol­low­ing his death in 1990, it was revealed that he had been a secret bi-sexual, thus con­firm­ing some of the wild gos­sip that had raced through the Tan­ger­ine demi-world.

A decade before Hutton’s par­ties stopped, and a two before Forbes held his pricey blow-out, Tang­ier had under­gone a more rad­i­cal change. In 1957 con­trol of the city was returned to Moroc­cans. A year ear­lier, a pop­u­lar revolt against for­eign rule had returned the exiled King Mohammed V to the coun­try and to power, and dri­ven the French and Span­ish out. Mohammed V, who was both extremely pop­u­lar and quite nation­al­is­tic, worked hard to regain con­trol of all Morocco, includ­ing Tang­ier. And in 1957, after hav­ing given spe­cial assur­ances that he would not inter­fere with the unre­stricted flow of cap­i­tal that Tang­ier had long enjoyed, he took pos­ses­sion of the city. Within a year, Moroc­can author­i­ties began mak­ing seri­ous efforts to clean up the town. Con-men, tax dodgers, homo­sex­u­als and Mus­lims who pub­licly drank alco­hol all became tar­gets for the newly installed Moroc­can munic­i­pal police; import duties soared, rais­ing the cost of liv­ing for expa­tri­ates; and the press, once lively and out­spo­ken, now had to deal with gov­ern­ment cen­sor­ship. The Span­ish were a par­tic­u­lar tar­get in the city, mainly because Franco refused to relin­quish con­trol of Ceuta and Melilla, two for­ti­fied enclaves on the Straits of Gibral­tar they’ve occu­pied for the past 500 years, and con­tinue to occupy. Many Spanish-owned busi­nesses in Tang­ier were con­fis­cated and sold to Moroc­cans. One Span­ish vic­tim whose long term lease was bro­ken by the new gov­ern­ment in favor of a Moroc­can was the owner of the Café Cen­tral, a favorite Beat hang­out in the Petit Socco. Overnight the famous café ceased to sell wine, replac­ing it with the ubiq­ui­tous mint tea.

For the expa­tri­ates, the bloom had gone off the wild Tan­ger­ine rose, and they fled, in droves, as quickly as they had arrived. Today, the pop­u­la­tion of Tang­ier has grown to nearly 400,000, but there are only 2,000 expa­tri­ates left, less than 100 of whom are American.

Spring, 1998