Fame, fortunes and follies

Anthony Blond

WHO'S REALLY! WHO by Richard Compton Miller Harden's Books, £6.99, pp. 354

Languid Lothario. This caddish merchant banker is the archetypal equal opportunities playboy. No colour, creed or age is excluded. His conquests range from model Samantha Bleby, his girlfriend for seven years, to journalist Cherri Graham, 'just a summer frolic'. 'The cardinal rule is never to use the dreaded four-letter word — love. Cads don't make commitments. They always keep every- one guessing.' He insists all his lovers display a 'thrusting cleavage'. After Lancing and Cambridge, Harley Street surgeon's son .

And so on for two thirds of a page the standard entry — through two wives and a pair of Purdeys to a house alone in Little Venice. Who the hell is he? A rich, no longer young, philandering shit, his name meaning nothing to Spectator readers who are not among the 30 million who read the gossip columns culled by Richard Compton Miller for the magic 400 featured in this work. For work it was. This is no cuttings job and is as fresh as new-mown hemlock, revamped at the 11th hour to exclude Wales, Diana Princess of, 1 July 1961, of whom he had written: 'Perhaps her close friendship with Egyptian playboy Dodi Fayed will remove some of the pres- sure.'

But fate does not usually foil Compton Miller. In the first edition of this title (Blond & Briggs 1983) he opined that Princess Anne should be made Princess Royal. HRH returned her complimentary copy — better than being summoned to collect it, as was Lytton Strachey by George V for Eminent Victorians.

Compton Miller is also accurate, listing, unlike Who's Who, the real birth dates of the thigh-revealing super-model, the arrogant pop idol, the stroppy DJ, the decadent duchesses, boisterous baronets, prancing playboys, flamboyant tycoons, literary lions, superchefs, charismatic politicians and musi- cal divas fawned over by Sir David Frost and Melvyn Bragg.

(Joan Collins is 64.) In fact the guests of Melvyn Bragg rise too early and are too seriously significant and influential to fea- ture in Who's Really! Who or to appear in the 'Social Register' at the back of the book, which is sectioned in bizarre cate- gories, listing 18 hairdressers, two publish- ers, Carmen Call under '24-carat Oz' and Gail Rebuck under 'Tycoon Tigresses', and one priest, Monsignor Gilbey. (When I asked Father Charles-Roux of St Etheldre- da in Holborn when he came to lunch the other day who the most important Catholic priest in England was, he replied immedi- ately with this name.) The emphasis is on youth, clubs and telly, so Robert Palumbo is preferred to his father, the lord (whom he sued as being unsuitable to manage his trust; settled out of court), Jamie Hanson to his. Mark Phillips is but a 'royal reject' but his son, 20, at Exeter university, is tipped as a man to watch.

Compton Miller has cleaner hands and a purer heart than most of his colleagues, is rarely malicious, often kind (as to Paul Getty Jnr) and mongers no scandal. One senses the comb of a libel lawyer upon his scalp, though we are told, as if we could not have guessed, that Major Hewitt, category 'Big Dame Hunter', is a manufac- tured gentleman. He allows himself two historically inept remarks; viz. of Lord Glenconner:

Despite his air of aristo disdain [he] has quite recent bourgeois origins. His great-grand- father was a Glasgow bleach manufacturer.

Indeed, he invented bleach as we know it in the 18th century, and left the second largest industrial fortune in the world. Again, the 11th Duke of Marlborough should remind himself that he is descended from a humble blacksmith.

Quite some time ago, for he is also descended from an earl in the 16th century — perhaps an arrogant blacksmith.

Anybody who cares about the origins, antics, follies, faiblesses and fortunes of those flashed by the paparazzi will relish this book for its compressed, jolting style — 'convent-educated Patsy is the daughter of an East End gangster and a posh Dior PR lady' — and the glimpses of bad behaviour, e.g. `foie-gras-loving Tory grandee "Bunter" Soames' and John `Thumper' Prescott. According to Compton Miller, the deputy prime minister,

as a steward on Cunard lines, acquired the class resentment that came to dominate his political philosophy

which Soames used to exacerbate with cries of 'Another gin and tonic please, Giovan- ni!'

An entry which impressed me was that of Dr Tony O'Reilly, an Irish customs offi- cer's son who invented Kerrygold and then became world head of Heinz with a take- home pay of $41 million, but is better known as a former Irish international rugby player. He married a Goulandris worth £300 million in 1990, and they are described as an

unbeatable team whose union — before God, Wall Street and the City of London is indivisible. They live in possibly Ireland's most beautiful house

and are the sort of unexpected pair who would have figured in the first edition of this title.

In the Sixties I had a look at A & C Black's Who's Who and found it wanting. The entries, supplied by their subjects, were often not the whole truth. So Sir Oswald Mosley did not mention his con- finement under Regulation 18b, nor my father his marriage to my mother, etc. The criteria for inclusion were/are often irrele- vant and antique; deputy lord-lieutenants, major generals or archdeacons are there forever, but where was the man who could close Fleet Street with an electrician's strike — we are in the Sixties — or could move the Pau out of BAT into Gallahers, or raise or lower the hemline?

I summoned Tariq Ali to El Vino's, bought him a tie and we had a chat. His sample entries were brilliant and worth, said Anthony Rubinstein, £50,000 a throw in libel.

News of the project generated a sheaf of unsolicited, savage and funny profiles of the famous, for we must have tapped a gusher of unpublishable bile. We rattled the opposition, because an A & C Black hireling, as Compton Miller would say, told me, 'You can be sure of one thing, Antho- ny, you'll never be in our book!'

And though this journal let me write a piece 'Why I am not in Who's Who', I never was.