Categories
art Rant

Hell is: Other People

Forgive me for rambling….

Rather lovely day yesterday.

Had lunch with Daniel Darling and his adorable girlfriend (?) in Cross Creek.

We were joined by Toby Mott and his friend Elizabeth.  Daniel went surfing and we drove to Malibou Lake where we sailed and then had a wonderful dinner at The Old Place on Mulholland.

Excellent food and service.  Charming!

A bird just hopped into the house and is now flying around.  We have just been for a five-mile walk so the dogs are strangely disinterested.

Willie is here visiting and we are all getting on like a house on fire.

I am going back to NYC next week.  I have people to see.  I think my Navy Seal may visit soon.

It has been fun having Toby visiting.  I sort of fall in love with my house all over again when he is here.  I am proud of the mountains, the house and the garden.

I see that my nemesis Amanda Eliasch and her truly talented friend Lyall Watson (whoring himself out to artifice) have written and performed in a ‘play’ called As I Like It.

Apparently it is rather ‘whiney’.  Apparently Amanda’s son Charles serves the actress who plays his mother as a weird, incestuous acolyte.  He has a huge head.  Apparently there is an opera singer with real talent who barely gets to sing.  Apparently the writer refers to ‘hairy legged lesbians’.  As we know, at her core, she is a homophobe.

Apparently this ‘play’ is crap.

It really isn’t any wonder, Amanda can scarcely string a sentence together.   It’s worth quoting the theatre programme notes:

This is a play what I wrote for my Father several years ago which he asked me to do after he had died. I turned it into a play with the help of Lyall Watson who had taught me at RADA in 1989. There are only a few plays for women and I wanted to contribute and increase the material available. It is a modern restoration comedy.

Yes.  You are going to do wonders for women with this pile of  tripe.  Wonders.

I once played Mr Puff at The Edinburgh Festival in Sheridan’s The Critic.   Have you seen that play?  A comedy of manners.  A real one.

Like Mrs Eliasch Mr Puff, the author of a terrible play, invites critics Sneer and Dangle to a dress rehearsal.

Puff explains to Sneer that he is ‘‘a Professor of the Art of Puffing’’: an author who has taught newspaper men and advertisers how to inflate their diction so they may ‘‘enlay their phraseology with variegated chips of exotic metaphor’’ and ‘‘crowd their advertisements with panegyrical superlatives.’’

Break a leg Amanda.  Read the review here.

By the way.  I was a terrible actor.  Terrible.

OK.  Next!!

What’s going on?  What’s really going on in the UK?

This ousting of the Murdoch family is well over due, applauded by the regime, the chattering classes, the aristocracy.

The public are baying for blood, hollering at the beastly Murdochs, “Get back on the boat like your criminal Australian ancestors.  Good riddance to bad rubbish.  Take your newspaper with you”

Hold on.

The British relish tittle-tattle.  We love it!  We love gossip!  The steamier the better.  Surely we didn’t lose our appetite for rooting through other people’s dirty washing?

Now The New of The World has gone…and the other news media get more cautious…

What, in heaven’s name, will replace it?

Are we witnessing the changing of the guard?  Has the internet (Google, Facebook etc.) and on-line news outlets like the Huffington Post trumped traditional media?

Apparently people don’t read The Huffington Post for the news..they read it for the gossip.

Was Murdoch simply too old, too complacent, too rich to have a grasp on our changing world?

Is this coup de grace being played out in the British press a pantomime we will see in the not too distant future in the USA?

One of the most telling quotes of the entire debacle:

The BBC’s business editor Robert Peston points out, the News of The World phone hacking scandal has hurt the entire UK newspaper industry, making News International less attractive to potential buyers if, as is now being posited, the British arm of News Corp is amputated and sold.

Does real, forward thinking money sees a future for print media?

Controlling the British has always been a huge problem for any invader and Murdoch will end up like all the rest.  Chucked out on his ear.  Romans, Saxons (initially invited), Norsemen, Murdoch.

The British public don’t a give a fuck about Jude Law having his phone hacked, that was just par for the course.  He deserved it.  They only started giving a damn when they realised that the police (who they loathe) were benefiting financially.

They only started caring when ordinary people just like them were proved to be abused, their ordinary stories sold, their phone messages ransacked.

Until Milly Dowler they didn’t give a flying fuck.  Then, rather amazingly, for an usually inert general public…they did.  And when the public speaks (remember Diana’s death) the establishment listens.

Remember the Queen of England reading/performing that excruciating statement televised by the palace at the behest of Tony Blair before Diana’s funeral?

The British let their leaders get away with much until they take too much.  A prudent leader will know when to stop.  Murdoch, his son and cohorts became too..how shall I say this without provoking your ire…they became too American.

It is obvious that American politicians are bought and sold by The Corporation.   They live huge lives with fantastic wealth and are applauded for doing so.

What baffles me is why a regular British MP with nothing much to gain should ideologically side with those who seek to do us, their constituents, harm?

During this entire scandal as heads began to roll I wondered again and again how British politicians benefitted financially from New Corp.  Unlike the paid for politician here in the USA it is unlikely that anyone in Parliament could benefit financially from anything…ever.

There are simply too many prying eyes.  Unless I am being absurdly naive.  Am I?

Is it simply the acquisition of power that our MP’s crave?

Categories
Rant

Les Hinton

At the risk of having my site hacked I am going to write about Les Hinton, his wife Kath, their friend Sharon Marshall and my relationship with The News of The World.

After I made The Method with Elizabeth Hurley I was a boiling bag of resentment…not unlike I was after I received Jake’s vile email last August.   I had been bullied, mistreated and maligned by Elizabeth and my only revenge was to sell my story to the highest bidder.

I had been on the front cover of the NOTW myself after I was found guilty of spending too much on my credit card and not paying the bill.  I rather enjoyed the attention.

It is quite easy to sell ones story if the celebrity you are pissing on is famous enough.

My agent contacted all of the relevant tabloid British newspapers and we negotiated the best price with News Corp.  I was offered The Daily Mail for the same price.  I was assured that The Daily Mail was a more ‘classy’ decision but I was not interested in ‘classy’.  I was interested in, as I said, revenge.

I was on vacation in Sydney at the time, Sharon Marshal was assigned to interview me.  We met in a smart hotel in Wooloomooloo.  Sharon is an attractive brunette who became, after the event, a great friend.  The NOTW flew me to London from Sydney for the weekend.  I told my story, they paid me the money.

Justice was served.

Elizabeth wrote to me.  She said, “I hope you enjoyed your thirty pieces of silver.”  I replied, “Actually, I really enjoyed my sixty thousand pieces of silver.”

When I returned from Australia Sharon invited me to stay at her home.

Sharon lived in Vauxhall at the time with Kath Raymond who was dating Les Hinton and would later marry him.  The entire cast of this current controversy were at their wedding reception:  Rebekah Wade and Andy Coulson.

Kath worked for Gordon Brown as a ‘special advisor’ whilst dating Les Hinton.  One didn’t need underworld contacts to get information with Kath working so closely with Gordon.  Also, however outraged Gordon and Sarah are now their links to News Corp are just as suspect as anyone elses.

Sharon now works with and for soap operas which is ironic given what she used to do.

I texted Sharon after the Milly Dowler scandal hit offering condolences, she texted back, ‘terrible times.’   Her loyalty obviously and quite rightly remains with her friend Kath and she must be torn between her old life and her new.

Sharon long ago turned her back on the NOTW, she ended up disgruntled enough to write a book called Tabloid Girl which was her way of stuffing her ex bosses.  Read it, it’s fun and insightful.

The NOTW is no more…until risen again as The Sunday Sun.

The establishment is dancing the streets.  They are free of the tyrannical Murdoch, the ocker scoundrel.   The dirty old man.  Prince William cheered, threw his hands in the air, when he heard the news I am told by very good sources.

It amuses me to see Jarvis Cocker wipe his ass on the freshly murdered newspaper.  Our relationship (the British) with this widely sold and read ‘newspaper’ is confused.  I am sure that, like most other celebrities, Jarvis has benefited from the newspaper as well as suffered.  I don’t believe that he hasn’t ever bought a copy or read a copy when salacious details of people he doesn’t know were made public.

Les Hinton may very well cop some jail time for his erstwhile ex-boss.  Kath may lose their upper east side apartment.  Wade et el are being hounded as they hounded, their drawn faces peering incredulously from chauffeur driven cars.

Karmageddon has arrived at News Corp.

Hinton’s profile is about to get a lot higher over his role in the scandal that brought down Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World. As a Murdoch staffer for more than half a century, Hinton spent a dozen years running News International, the British unit of Murdoch’s global company, including while the phone hacking was taking place at News of the World. And it was Hinton who told a parliamentary committee in 2007 that he was “absolutely convinced” that the illegal accessing of phones was limited to a single rogue reporter.