Beverly Hills
There is a global village, but the bad news for the environmentalists is that it is bound together by hatred of rising fuel prices. My cabby in London says exactly the same as the driver who takes me from LAX to my hotel: £1 a litre, or $3 a gallon, the outrage respects no borders. We are the world, as the song says — and we demand cheap gas.
To the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Elton John and David Furnish are throwing a party for Dylan Jones, editor of GQ. It is a beautiful balmy night and the guests spill out into the hotel’s famous gardens, where the scent of orange blossom and bougainvillea mingles with spicy Hollywood gossip. Inside the candle-lit Polo Lounge private dining-room, the hosts mingle attentively: David says that Elton misses the cold weather in England, and that one of the few fixed points in their itinerant life (Vancouver tomorrow, then New York) is room service.
The Osbourne family, sans Ozzy, is gathered in a corner: Kelly, bubbly and blonde, insists that she is now a child of Maida Vale, not Beverly Hills, but that she wants to get into movies. Sharon, justly proud of her state-of-the-art makeover, says she is a fan of The Spectator: I bet she says that to all the boys, but it’s still nice of her. Aimee — the one who refused to appear in the family reality show — looks on at the crowd of film folk with amused detachment. She wants to know if the British political world is as crazy. Well, yes, but in a different way. Has she read her mother’s autobiography? I ask. She snorts in derision: ‘Way too much information.’
One of the party’s stars is David Morrissey, well-established in Britain as a television actor but now heading for the Hollywood stratosphere after his lead role in Basic Instinct 2, which he is following up this summer as co-star to Hilary Swank in The Reaping. He seems impressively grounded for someone in his position. In fact, he is hoping to play Gordon Brown again, a role in which he shone three years ago in Stephen Frears’s The Deal. David tells me that the Chancellor let him know — via ‘friends’, of course — that he had never talked to anyone about the famous Granita pact with Tony Blair, and (following reports that David had piled on the pounds to play the part) that he was most definitely not fat. Somehow, this glimpse of human weakness in Gordon is endearing.
Gossip blogs are bringing fresh fizz, and fresh fear, to the film world. The must-read website of the moment is deadlinehollywooddaily.com by the splendidly named Nikki Finke. There is no shortage of rumour buzzing in the air as night falls over the hotel’s palm trees: a Very Famous Actor is said to have acquired a heroin habit. A Less Famous Actor, appropriately, has a less serious addiction. There is much discussion of who has and who hasn’t been invited to the Eminem party. Then there is a ripple of excitement as the new Superman, Brandon Routh, arrives (though not in costume). I call it a night.
Twelve hours later, and — what do you know? — I am at the mall buying small plastic versions of Brandon Routh (in costume this time) for my sons. As a consequence, I also have to buy a bag to carry all the Superman Returns merchandise home. Then it’s off to Toast, one of LA’s best hangouts — effectively a sandwich bar with valet parking — for lunch with Dylan. He pulls up in a red Bentley, somewhat outclassing my Shanks’s pony. Salads, turkey wraps and Oreo puddings polished off, we head for Book Soup on Sunset Boulevard, one of those distinctively American independent bookstores where you can linger all afternoon. And — of course — the store stocks The Spectator, for the discerning Angeleno reader.
I have an uncomplicated love of the States — it is a fix, really — and every trip delivers fresh oddities that make me look forward to the next one. The early morning televangelists are selling ‘miracle olive-oil soap’ and the pastor warns, ‘Don’t you dare change that channel! Don’t tie God’s hands!’ I learn that 26 April is ‘Administrative Professionals Day’, the equivalent of Mothers’ Day for those who treat the office as home. There is now a show on MTV called Yo Momma in which scary teenagers in hoodies compete to insult one another’s mothers in front of a jury of their peers. During my stay a man is on trial for trying to sell his toddler daughter for $7,000 so that he could pay for home improvements. Only in America.
On my last evening I go to see Al Pacino play Herod Antipas in Wilde’s Salome. Pacino, who is obsessed by the role, was first inspired by his friend Steven Berkoff’s definitive staging of the play at the National in 1989. After repeated exploration, he has made the part his own, and the performance is mesmerising, rightly rewarded with a standing ovation. The actor perfectly captures the effete impotence of the Tetrarch, an impotence punctuated by outbursts of tyrannous rage. ‘Let no king swear an oath,’ he says, ‘if he keep it not, it is terrible, and if he keep it, it is terrible also.’ That savage political maxim still echoes in my mind as I catch my flight home and wonder what has been going on at Westminster.
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