JOAN COLLINS
Mv daughter was mugged last month. Not at midnight in a dark, nefarious alley or near a run-down council slum; she was mugged in broad daylight, waiting, with her baby in a pushchair, at a bus stop in Maida Vale. Tara was one of the lucky ones. The mugger didn't bash her about and break a few bones, as so often happens in these cases. He just viciously ripped the gold watch off her wrist, causing shock, pain and bruising, but fortunately no lasting physical damage. I was in New Zealand, working on a movie when she rang. When I told members of the crew what had occurred, they expressed amazement that not only does such an incident happen in one of the most supposedly civilised countries in the world, but it is considered a quite common event. There is little crime in New Zealand, and the denizens of Auckland can go safely about their daily life without the gnawing amdety that thousands of innocent Britons who have been attacked and mugged are forced to live with. London is now the crime capital of the developed world, and no one is doing a damned thing to stop it. Since Labour took office four years ago, street crime has soared and is expected to rise even further. As the sink estates spew fatherless and hopeless teenagers into our society, we can expect more and more brutal attacks on defenceless women, and on the weak and the elderly. There are not enough policemen on the beat, because their salaries are derisoty and too much of their time is taken up with bureaucratic paperwork and trying to be politically correct. If New York can solve its street-crime problem, as Mayor Giuliani did several years ago, by adding 28,000 cops to the 12,000 in Manhattan, why can't Ken Livingstone do the same for London? I live in SW1, an area of London that several years ago was considered so crime-free that the powers that be decided to close the Gerald Road police station, the only one in the vicinity. Since then, there have been dozens of muggings in my neighbourhood, including a particularly brutal attack on John Aspinall and his wife, as well as on The Spectator's exceedingly fit columnist Taki. At a charity event at the Savoy recently I asked Mayor Livingstone what he was going to do to clean up London's streets. He gleefully informed me that he was determined to get all private cars off the roads. 'So how would I have travelled to this event?' I inquired, dressed as I was in full evening drag. 'You'd take the bus or Tube,' he gloated. 'or go by bike.' Thanks, Red Ken, and how on earth am I supposed to pedal a bike in Jimmy Choo stilettos?
The annual Oscar Frocky-Horror show was a pleasant surprise this year. The lollipop ladies, with their enormous heads and social x-ray bodies, stayed at home, and the coast
was clear for a dazzling array of old-time Hollywood glamour. Led by Julia Roberts and Catherine Zeta Jones, the majority of the actresses were as elegantly dressed and coiffed as yesteryear's movie queens, Grace Kelly and Ava Gardner. Most of them seemed actually to have washed their hair, eschewing the straggly, greasy, rats'-tail look so beloved by Hollywood 'stylists'. Many of these latter-day self-titled ambassadors of fashion wouldn't know style if it were served alongside their decaff cappuccino. There were, however, a couple of ghastly exceptions. The singer Bjork was persuaded to dress as a dying swan, complete with lolling head and beak, in a creation that wouldn't have looked out of place perched on a Skegness landlady's spare loo roll, while Juliette Binoche was being strangled by a surfeit of faux-pearl necklaces, cascading down her chest to her thighs, and hideous ToulouseLautrec laced-up boots. But the full horror was the silicone-lipped/-breasted Pamela Anderson. Revealing all the taste and refinement of a hooker on holiday, she chose to buck the system in denim hot pants and teeny-weeny white shirt which struggled bravely to contain her pneumatically false assets. Accompanied on one side by her camp, pink-shirted 'stylist', and on the other by our own dear Elizabeth Hurley, she brought trailer-trash fashion right into the 21st century. At the end of the evening, she and Liz announced that they were about to take a jacuzzi together. The mind boggles. Oh. Liz, you really need Hugh to get you back on track. Who will be your big date next year — Disneyland's Mickey Mouse? I was delighted that Russell Crowe won 'Best Actor' for Gladiator and Benicio Del Toro 'Best Supporting Actor' for Traffic. They are about the only actors in movies today who have the macho he-man appeal of a Clark Gable or Spencer Tracy. and I bet they're not 'in touch' with their feminine side.
Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen,' sang Danny Kaye's Hans Christian Andersen in a long-ago Hollywood musical; and I must say, having just returned from three days' shooting there, I agree wholeheartedly, particularly about Copenhagen's beautiful airport. I've passed through my fair share of airports — some almost feel like my second home. In the last two months, I've travelled from London to LA and NY to Rome, back to London, and Nice to London to LA to Auckland to LA to London, then Glasgow to Copenhagen and back to London. I must have more mileage than the Exxon Valdez. Comparing Copenhagen's Kastrom airport with London's Heathrow is like comparing Cinderella with her ugliest stepsister. Kastrom is exquisitely designed: light, airy and spectacularly clean. You could butter bread OD the pristine floors, and there's not a discarded McDonald's wraliper or beer can in sight. The furniture and check-in desks are so attractive, yet functional, that they wouldn't look out of place in a Philippe Starck showroom. Heathrow now bears a revolting resemblance to a downmarket shopping mall, with its fast-food joints, endless perfumeries and designer shops that profess to be duty-free but give only the most minuscule of discounts. It's not difficult to offer significant discounts off high-street prices when ours are the most overpriced in the world. Beauty products are cheaper in the United States and on the Continent, and who wants to lug Gucci bags and Burberry raincoats on to a plane? It's absolute torture attempting to negotiate the maze of booths, boutiques, snack-bars and hash houses that constitute the Heathrow infrastructure, but I suppose it's better than Gatwick, much as the Salem witch-burnings were a slight improvement on the Spanish Inquisition.
My favourite joke of the moment is the one about the two Martians having just returned from Earth. One says to the other, 'So what are they like down there?' And the other one reports, 'The ones with the brains are okay, but the ones with the testicles I'm not too sure about.'
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