You Had Me at Hello

by Mhairi McFarlane

  As she stands patiently while wardrobe people fuss with the ironic see-through baby doll negligee for the next slyly subversive picture, she explains how she hopes her role as Braun will see her considered for more serious parts. ‘Casting agents, they do tend to think, she looks a certain way, that’s all she can do. But things are changing. Look at Judi Dench. I’d like a career like hers. Old women are so inspiring.’

  Now Hollywood is calling, it says here in the publicity material I was given. Can she see herself in blockbusters? ‘God, that’d be so weird!’ she laughs, revealing perfect teeth. ‘I’m not sure I’d want to be, you know, Meryl Streep famous because then your life’s not your own. I’m going back next week for the endless slog of auditions but I don’t want it that much. They judge you on how you look and how well you can act, it’s very pressuring. When you get rejected a lot you start to realise it’s a very fake existence. And I’d miss my dogs!’

  And with that, she’s gone, in a gust of her signature scent. (‘You like it?’ her eyes light up. ‘It’s bespoke! They mix it for you at this amazing atelier in the Loire Valley. I’ll send you their details.’ True to form her PA mails me a day later, and I discover it costs more than the moon. Only someone unmaterialistic could assume a journalist’s salary could cover it. I get a glimpse of what it’s like to live like her, whimsically, in the moment, seeing so few limitations).

  But what IS her life? It’s simple, crazy and complicated, veering from casseroles to film premieres and Tolstoy and a pair of Basset Hounds called Pearl and Dean, and yet she takes all the madness in her faux-python Stella McCartney slingback-shod stride. It’s only after she’s left, in a moment of aching symbolism that poignantly encapsulates this entire encounter, that I notice she’s left me most of her bag of Minstrels. A gesture of such heartbreaking kindness that I might die wanking.

  THE GRACIOUS HACIENDA DRINKING GAME

  A recent letter from Tom Cruise’s lawyer, advising a publication that he had a ‘gracious and loving family home’ recalled the text of many a wonderfully sycophantic magazine article, or scenes in an MTV Cribs tour round a chintzy celebrity cack pile.

  ‘Gracious’ is a Beano comic imaginary word: always written, never spoken. ‘How’s your house?’ ‘OK, pretty gracious. Come round sometime. It’s also loving.’

  It occurs to me that there are so many key features that crop up time and again, you could play a kind of Obscenely Blingy Horror Shack Interiors drinking game and get nicely pissed.

  You’d think that having the kind of wealth that allows you to jizz funds around Harrods like Formula One champagne would mean an incredible diversity of result. However, it seems there’s an aesthetic ubiquity in the upper price bracket to rival that of IKEA’s Miserly Landlord range.

  Yes, YES I know MTV Cribs has been around awhile. But if, like me, you enjoy drinking booze, watching reruns, and leafing through nouveau riche Casa ‘Shoulda Gone To Specsavers’ mansion photo-shoots, this tick list is always gold. Like a rapper’s keeping-it-ghetto bath tub.

  KOI

  There must be a pond and it must feature Koi Carp, the landed gentry’s ’roided goldfish. A beginner’s spotter badge, award self one shot of Dooley’s.

  ‘This Is Where the Magic Happens’

  Mandatory phrase when being shown the recording studio in Cribs. If one’s tour guide is a member of Maroon 5, or in Fred Durstian oversized shorts, it’s not so much magic, as necromancy.

  Servant Sighting

  ‘Our lives wouldn’t run without her, she’s part of the family’ or similar, if being narrated to interviewer by willowy patrician blonde at her ‘Barbados hideaway’. Except presumably, most family members aren’t tasked with refilling the loo roll pyramid and required to give four weeks’ notice if they wish to leave. In Cribs, this is a bashful-looking middle-aged Hispanic woman who our ebullient host grabs, hugs and shouts: ‘I call her Mama!’ Well, unlike ‘The Person Who Cif Lemon Mousses the Thunder Box for Money’ it has the benefit of brevity.

  Showcase For Workless Wife’s Startlingly Appalling Taste

  Ushered into a lounge that features beige box pelmets, Regency stripe swags, tasselled tie-backs, a Warholian triptych of the Queen, a suspended flat screen TV and a kidney-shaped glass coffee table with lions’ feet, we’re told ‘My wife did all of this’ in an admiring tone that implies this isn’t a highly defamatory statement.

  ‘We’ve gone for a kinda country house, rustic, Ye Olde English feel …’ she says, clad in Juicy Couture trackie, in the blistering sunshine of the Hollywood Hills in a terracotta-washed Mexican style bungalow surrounded by palm trees. And the aim is to transport us, in this one room, to the Cotswolds?

  Breaking news: you’ve dropped two mill to pull off the same standard of illusion as Duty Free lagged Brits rofling through airport terminals in sombreros.

  There was a particularly splendid example of the ‘misguided pride in own DIY’ genre when Joan Collins welcomed Hello! into her Manhattan penthouse master suite, an aggressive whole-room pattern-matched vexatious twanging of the optic nerve; Jackson Pollock meets Heathrow Sheraton Classic Double circa 1988.

  She announced, imperiously: ‘I have an eye.’ That you keep in a drawer, like a marble? USE TWO.

  Turkey Bacon: So Many Questions

  Casually introduced in fridge contents inventory, as if it’s not a paradoxical mindbender and affront to gustatory dignity.

  What in the name of all that is holy is ‘turkey bacon’? Why can’t Americans see a thing, without trying to transpose it into turkey? Why have so much cash you could hire the White House lawn for a barbecue, and then eat not-actual bacon? Why consume a meat-hybrid that, if made flesh (‘Behold God’s abomination: Wattle Pig!’) you would run from screaming, not chasing with a mandolin slicer?

  Is this the dream? You become an NBA superstar, platinum seller or American Idol judge in a sprawling estate the size of Wigan. Beautiful partner, brace of kids, at the very pinnacle – the thin air summit of success – where you then get so light headed that you ask your private chef to toss a skin graft flap of reformed smoked poultry to shrink in a skillet?

  Turkey is not for winners. Turkey is for people who find chicken too exciting. To try to make bacon out of it is fucking demented.

  Artefact That Reminds Them Of Where It All Began

  Must be in a glass case. Extra shot awarded if it’s in a Temple To Thine Ego room full of trophies, awards, skateboards nailed to walls, framed photos of owner doing finger guns with wheelchair-bound confused Bob Hope, etc.

  My Friends, Who I Have For Money

  A loose affiliation of Entourage-style hangers on must be cluttering up the overstuffed sofa playing video games, or hanging around the island unit in the kitchen, waiting to do on-camera high fives. They have, of course, been ‘there from the beginning.’ The beginning of your being loaded.

  This ‘hired homies’ technique was later adopted by makers of Jamie Oliver programmes. Little known fact: he calls everyone onscreen ‘tiger’ because he doesn’t know their names. Even his nan. That’s a Central Casting stunt nan if ever I saw one. Let’s just see if she turns up as Aaron Craze’s, too.

  Specially Commissioned ‘Art’

  Because no one would embark on painting something that shit without being paid up front.

  Once on Cribs, a tour guide showed us his haunting oil painting of Tupac Shakur being baptised by Martin Luther King. ‘It came from an idea I had,’ he mused, ‘That Tupac Shakur could’ve been baptised by Martin Luther King.’ Rendering Ali G instantly satirically obsolete, he then put on a wolf fur coat and started howling.

  It was the finest ten minutes of telly ever.

  Untouched Kitchen That Cost 40 Grand

  ‘I love to cook!’ says our WWF wrestler host, holding a spatula upside down and waving it vaguely in the direction of a range that still has a fine coating of brick dust from the kitchen fitter’s work.

  ‘Yeah, I do egg white omelettes, and other stuff. Wolfg
ang Puck gave me a private lesson, it was wild. I can do sauces. All the sauces.’

  Ah yes, Puck’s saucing masterclass: the red one, the brown one, and the white one. The classic French jus trio for feasts of TURKEY BACON.

  There must also be a double-door fridge large enough to store a dead body, holding only neatly stacked cans of Gatorade.

  ‘Original Stone Tiles From Milan Are The Weapon Of Choice In The Luxe Bathroom’

  Not strictly relevant: I once proof read an interiors piece containing this phrase from the designer. I now realise I devised this whole feature idea just so I could share this.

  THINGS WE DON’T NEED TO SEE IN ROM COMS ANYMORE

  I love rom coms.

  After being inspired by Drive, I even worked up my own treatment for a film called Human Man, where Ryan Gosling is a human man. It’s a bit sketchy on plot but there are roles for Emma Stone, a longhaired kitten and fleeting willy.

  However, too often, myself and fellow genre enthusiasts find ourselves in Cineworld foyer bellowing, what in all that is holy was THAT?

  The same misconceptions about ‘what women find fun’ crop up continually, and I think it’s time to resolve some confusion.

  And yes, Sumner Redstone, holding on Line One, I will take your call to talk about Human Man further. Right after my nap.

  You’re Good At Your Job? Good Luck With That Sex You Were Planning On Having, Ever!

  When was the meeting held that agreed ‘professionally efficacious = frigid’? If you’re remotely competent, it’s a given you’ll be seeing no action whatsoever.

  Or if you are, it’s with a pin-striped Mr Wrong who we see in an early montage where they’re both standing up during breakfast and talking on their cell phones, juggling cups of filter coffee and eating croissants, because we all know that’s how Hitler got started.

  In The Proposal, Sandra Bullock is Don DeLillo’s literary agent, but has become so power-addled penis-repelling she has to blackmail men to marry her. Obviously, she must stay by a lake with people who wear plaid and be told her values are warped.

  (NB: Fragrant lady-jobs, such as florist, pediatrician or curator at MOMA, may not turn your uterus into a stingray, according to latest findings in The Lancet.)

  When a woman becomes more successful during the film, she must also be told her values have warped. In The Devil Wears Prada, Anne Hathaway’s magazine internship costs her the relationship with New York chef boyfriend, Adrian Grenier.

  Woah, wait – rewind? Yes, those notoriously time-rich, short-order cooks in The City That Never Sleeps. How unfortunate for ambitious Anne that her boyo got a job in The Restaurant That Closes At 8p.m. So You Can Go And Be Pious With Your Partner.

  It’s Zagat rated. Try the horseballs.

  ’Tis Pity She’s A Porker

  Memo Fox Searchlight, et al: seeing sensationally attractive women heckled about their appearance is not reassuring or enjoyable as schadenfreude. It’s depressing and bewildering.

  Martine McCutcheon being sent up for phantom lardarsery in Love Actually was a noteworthy low.

  In She’s All That, bonsai supermodel Rachael Leigh Cook is rendered the nuclear option in schoolyard games of ‘would you rather’ simply because she’s arty and wears dungarees.

  All of which makes us feel that if we could climb into this universe, we’d have the effect of The Scarecrow in Batman Begins, when the psychotropic gas pumps out and all you see is a screaming sack with wormy eyes.

  The Eighth Habit Of Highly Effective Females: Telling Their Paymaster To Piss Up A Rope

  As plot devices go, this is pretty sci-fi. Heroine flies kamikaze mission with her salary and comes out on top, as she is so pure that she sees and speaks truth with a child’s innocence.

  Trans: it’s only OK to get the great job if you win it by default by acting like a bit of a div.

  Extra points in busting the bogus-o-meter if the unlikely promotion is awarded by a crumbly Emperor Palpatine of a CEO in a spotty bow-tie, who suddenly magically transforms from a ruthless capitalist into a benign grandpa with his favourite granddaughter.

  ‘My God, Matilda Perspicacity, you’re RIGHT, I AM a massive wanker. I see now how you stole my nephew’s heart, by telling him he’s a bit of a wanker too. I’m firing all these sycophantic fools and making you Head of Everything.’

  Cue Katy Perry’s Firework and shareholders doing a conga round the boardroom with Tampax Pearls sticking out of ears

  He’s been nobbing someone else? This is a wakeup call. TO LOOK TO YOUR OWN CONDUCT.

  Mentions here for He’s Just Not That Into You and Sex and the City 2.

  Obviously, SATC 2 was a human rights atrocity of considerable proportions and I can’t say much while all our legal proceedings remain active.

  However.

  Miranda’s husband was scuttling a waitress, and the whole tenor of the storyline was that it was her fault for being too much of a shrew while juggling parenthood and a job that ran the family’s lifestyle.

  Alfred, fetch me my gun. No, the larger one.

  Bitch Gotta Make Rent There Is No Way Bitch Is Making

  In Sliding Doors, Gwyneth Paltrow was footing what looked like a Knightsbridge pied-á-terre and supporting a wastrel novelist boyfriend – by flogging lunchtime sandwiches. What were her price points on those baguettes, and was she selling them to concussed Saudi princes?

  In Confessions of a Shopaholic, Becky Bloomwood’s freakonomics saw a staff journalist amass a designer wardrobe a Kardashian would deem ‘a bit vulgar’, then sell it second-hand in an auction and clear her debt with ease.

  Who knew that garish Clown Porn rags were a canny investment?

  That’s why we’ve seen so little of Su Pollard lately! She’s in Cap Ferrat, drinking champagne out of a jewelled conch shell.

  Of Course I’m An Unholy Twat: My Dead Gay Aunt Only Has One Leg!

  Wherein our hero gets enriched, or excused, due to a Secret Pain. Just write us a sympathetic character; there’s no need for this Second Act, Get Out Of Jail Free revelation. Or if there is, maybe ask selves why.

  For example, in the otherwise-great Friends with Benefits, Justin Timberlake’s preppy shagger acquires sudden depth because his dad has Hollywood Alzheimer’s.

  A gentler variant of dementia, Hollywood Alzheimer’s does not cause you to take a shit in a shopping centre or shout ‘Are you an Arab?’ at the district nurse.

  Hollywood Alzheimer’s sufferers bark the odd non-sequitur but drift into lucidity long enough to deliver homilies about finding your one true love, and to help their sons nail Mila Kunis.

  In The Ugly Truth, we discover Gerard Butler had to be a raving chauvinist jebend because a woman once broke up with him first, or something.

  Bear in mind, by this point in the running time we really need Gerard to prove he’s being used as a skin puppet for the demonic bidding of a dead murderer.

  You were dumped, broheem? That’s all you got?

  In case you’re not catching enough of a whiff of what I think of The Ugly Truth, it’s a film that needs to fuck the fuck off while it’s fucking off and then come back, purely so it can fuck off again. (‘Roger Ebert Is Away’).

  However, in terms of muddled redemption, nothing beats batshit reactionary fable Pretty Woman, in which Richard Gere’s prostitute-boffing asset stripper reaches the denouement of a spiritual journey where he … builds big warships.

  HOW IS THERE ROOM IN YOUR BODY FOR THAT HUGE HEART?

  It’s possible Pretty Woman was conceived originally not as a romance, but a portrait of what a Bond villain does in his downtime. Think about it: Edward lives in a hotel penthouse, has his own plane, likes the opera, polo and hot tubbing with call girls.

  The man’s a nine iron, a can of Halfords metallic paint and a pair of plus fours away from Goldfinger.

  GOODBYE

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to my brilliant agent Ali Gunn, and the lovely Doug Kean, for making me a proper thing. Huge th
anks also to Jo Rees, whose superb critique somehow produced stellar results without destroying my self-esteem, something for which I will always be grateful.

  Praise be to my wonderful editor Helen Bolton, who proved her love of the book with her marvellous handling of it, and the whole Avon team at HarperCollins for being so professional and a total pleasure. And so much credit must go to the very talented designer, Emma Rogers, who created such a great cover. It had me at … no, I musn’t. But, thank you.

  My hugest gratitude to my exceptional extended family for all their support and encouragement, I couldn’t have done it without you, as you definitely know.

  Special mentions to Clive Norman, Chrissy Schwartz and Tom Welch for their early-doors generous help, and my friend Sean Hewitt and my brother Ewan for keeping me going when I had one of my many fits of ‘Wail, I can’t do this’. The phrase: ‘What happens next? Send more’ is probably the most helpful feedback you ever get.

  Cheers to all the great friends/willing readers/advice givers to a ‘I done a book’ bore: the lovely de Cozar sisters Tara and Katie, Helster, Tim Lee, Sally, Kristy, Manchester advisor Julia Pride, the frankly inspirational Tree C three, Natalie, Paula, Serry (thanks for the name, Nat!) and my sister Laura.

  And many witty people I know – notably Jeremy Lewis, Rob Hyde, David Wood, Stephanie Hale – have had their lines shamelessly lifted: much obliged! I hope there’ll be none of that horrid ‘legal action’. But be aware, if there is, I am disavowing this paragraph.