Reading about the break-up of the 19-year marriage of Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban, I was interested in some comments from our old mate ‘A. Source’ about the possible cause. According to the Sun: ‘Keith put a brave face on Nicole’s raunchy screen roles and all the comments she’d make about her sexuality. But he didn’t react well when people teased him about Nicole getting it on with hunky younger guys, albeit only on camera, and it was a sensitive topic that became a real issue as time wore on.’
It’s true that Kidman – 58 – has made a speciality in recent years of getting her kit off in order to engage in mutual mauling with men young enough to be her fourth husband – specifically in Babygirl in which she got up to all sorts with the gorgeous 29-year-old Harris Dickinson. It can’t have done the 57-year-old Urban any favours to hear his wife protesting too much by saying stuff like: ‘There were times when we were shooting where I was like, “I don’t want to orgasm any more”.’ Because we all say that after a hard day’s work, don’t we?
Whatever the ins and outs (oops) of the situation, the phrase ‘Nice work if you can get it’ comes inevitably to mind. I recall a story that boys at my comp used to tell about the mythical Fake Kissing James Bond: that there was actually a man who was paid for the arduous task of snogging the Bond girls to make sure the lighting was right, Connery/Moore being too special to hang about for hours. I’m pretty sure it was an urban myth, but it was believed because of the way film stars are seen to have the jammiest lives imaginable. Not only do they get paid a fortune for playing Let’s Pretend, but a lot of the time this entails being paid a fortune to simulate sex with the most attractive people on the planet.
This being the case, I think we should actually congratulate our film star community on not being even more promiscuous than they are. Yes, there’s the old thespian get-out clause that unfaithfulness to a primary partner D.C.O.L (Doesn’t Count On Location) but, regrettably, one gets the feeling that this was a much bigger thing in the past. These days, with a far more po-faced attitude to doing the dirty deed prevalent among the young generation, the film stars among them are still likely to take up with their co-star at the drop of a non-binary knicker – but as they’re dreary serial monogamists, they tend not to have much of the thrilling ‘overlap’ that made old Hollywood couplings and sunderings so sleazily sexy. Angelina (‘I don’t sleep with my co-stars’) Jolie was once an outrageous outlier in this department (Laura Dern said of Jolie’s second marriage to Billy Bob Thornton: ‘I left our home to work on a movie, and while I was away, my boyfriend got married, and I’ve never heard from him again’), but now that she’s retired from the sexual battlefield – like a nectarous Napoleon being packed off to Elba – the newcomers just aren’t the same. I can’t get excited about Sabrina Carpenter nicking somebody called ‘Joshua Bassett’ off Olivia Rodrigo, or about Taylor Swift being bowled a googly by Denise Welch’s son – mind you, as I’m 66, it would be weird and pervy if I did.
But I’m pretty sure it isn’t just my superannuated state which leads me to feel dismay at the tame sexual shenanigans of the new generation of stars; as with brilliant pop music, I really was blessed to live through a golden age of showbiz frolics. Liz Hurley ordering a new bed and very publicly and solemnly overseeing its delivery after Hugh Grant’s capers in his car! Pam and Tommy acting like they’d invented sex! Madonna getting up to goodness knows what with practically every famous man around! Somehow, Robert Pattinson being ‘kind of engaged’ to FKA Twigs for three years doesn’t have the ‘erotic vagrancy’ the Vatican condemned the eight-times-married Elizabeth Taylor for.
Somehow, Robert Pattinson being ‘kind of engaged’ to FKA Twigs for three years doesn’t have the ‘erotic vagrancy’ the Vatican condemned the eight-times-married Elizabeth Taylor for
It’s not just me: celebrity couples are just far less interesting than they used to be. There are now so many of them, and they all seem to meet, date and eventually hate in the same way and with increasingly dizzying speed. These days couples meet on set; date, mate and possibly spawn; have tattoos of each other’s names; get sick of each other – and then the lies start, not so much to each other as to the public who were previously sold every soppy, sickening detail of their private lives. We will be told that there is ‘no third party involved’ (especially not their sexy current co-star); that the suspect co-respondent is also a ‘dear friend’ of the dupe as well as the adulterer; that all three have the ‘utmost respect’ for each other – and then, after a solid six months or more of this arrant offal, come the first photos of the adulterers on a boat. Then the lawyers arrive, the tattoos come off and so do the gloves, and all merry hell breaks loose. And you just wonder why they bothered denying it for so long.
Because of the timid times we live in, no one’s willing to out themselves as a sex fiend any more (see Liz Taylor saying to a gossip columnist ‘What do you expect me to do – sleep alone?’ after she nabbed a married man off of his wife immediately after being widowed). J-Lo can always be counted on to wear her heart on her sleeve, but her grandiosity (Taylor could be down-to-earth) and her lack of humour (Taylor could be witty) makes her a figure of fun rather than envy. The massive failure of what Variety dubbed ‘a self-financed $20 million three-part multimedia project examining Lopez’s life as a serial romantic’ with Ben Affleck was the cherry on the sickening sundae of self-promotion – especially when their long-delayed union went bust.
Should we sympathise? Is it really harder to find and keep true love when you’re surrounded by ‘worldies’ stripping off and climbing all over you? No one ever said that beauty was a guarantee of good sex (Marilyn: ‘I don’t think I do it properly’), yet somehow we can’t help assuming that it is. When I was young, I asked a smart boy of my acquaintance whether he would choose as a sex partner a beauty who wasn’t impressed in bed or a plain girl who went wild with joy. He didn’t miss a beat choosing the former.
With the raising of the Hollywood sign, for the first time there was a place which acted as a magnet for millions of the most physically attractive people in the world – and Mexico, where a marriage could be ended just by waving a fistful of dollars, was just across the border. Hollywood razed monogamy, made it a museum piece, with the allowance of a level of promiscuity that would have got an alley cat stoned to death outside the city walls.
Such a shame that changed. Now it’s all got to be Problematic or you’re not a Good Person. As Kidman bleated about being paid to romp with hot boys: ‘There were parts that are now not in the film… it was exhausting, but it was also just emotionally disturbing to my body and my psyche, because I couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t.’ Phwoar! So next time you’re tempted to dismiss film stars as a bunch of flibbertigibbets, imagine for a moment that you are blessed with that level of physical beauty, and surrounded by it also – and quake at the depths of your own narrowly-avoided depravity.
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