DIARY
JOAN COLLINS
I. 've just spent six glorious weeks shooting in Gloucestershire. A movie that is, not pheasant. The Clandestine Marriage was Shot in and around Lord Niedpath's stately Stanway House, and I loved so little of the house and estate having changed since the 18th century. As usual, I was amazed how hard the film technicians and the cast had to work, often under extremely adverse co, nditions and for exceedingly long hours. Statistically, the average British factory or office worker puts in around 37 hours a week. By contrast, the average British film technician works around a 60- to 70-hour week, and is paid nowhere near the sums their peers in America receive, yet they're dedicated, professional and full of humour. On the whole, I adore English actors and actresses, but our Clandestine troupe was exceptional. Bewigged, painted, corseted and trussed into elaborate 18th-century drag for 12-hour stretches, they managed to Perform wonderfully, with hardly a word of complaint in spite of horrendous problems of money not arriving from promised sources, and typically inclement weather. I think they all give new meaning to the phrase esprit de corps. Would the assembly hne at Rover do the same?
Ac great friend of ours recently returned from a boring house party in Italy where he'd been staying at a house famed for its beauty and position, but certainly not for the less than rapier wit and conversational Povvers of its inhabitants. Sitting by the Pool one afternoon, he was asked by one of his fellow house guests if he had any idea as to who was coming to dinner that night. His reply i was typically to the point: 'Dullards, I )(13ect, as per usual.' He told us that as the the for dinner came, with still no sign of the notoriously unpunctual hostess to make the introductions, he noticed that the first pests had arrived and were shuffling their feet, looking around the drawing-room with vain for a familiar face. He watched with mounting panic as at that moment his pool- Side companion marched over to them and ,c)hdlY announced 'An! You must be the 'innards. How d'you do?'
Y mother owned the same fridge. for ,ahnost 30 years and it still worked efficient- l_Y when she died. When an electrician came tround last week to inspect my sound sys- ,,,eIII? which has gone on the blink, he said, le 'ave to go — it's ancient.' s ss than five years old,' I replied indignant- all,d wondering what on earth that made hie. You've got to change them every cou- 'nle °f years,' he explained. 'The replace- new cost you almost as much as a neW sYstem — get shot of it.' Coming from the waste-not-want-not generation, I was appalled. Why is so much made now with a built-in obsolescence giving almost every- thing a shorter and shorter working life? I'm told that my year-old television set will soon become a relic because it's analogue, not digital, whatever that means. As for irons, toasters and so forth, you're lucky to be given even a year's guarantee. Is it because today's workforce is simple inca- pable of making functional products that last, or do cynical manufacturers deliber- ately make them all fizzle out to further line their pockets?
Sadly, I haven't had a chance to go to the John Singer Sargent show, and as Los Angeles beckons to me with one of her long, bejewelled fingers, it may be several weeks before I manage a visit. But reading the reviews, I was reminded of an extraor- dinary day in Norfolk, at the end of the 1980s, spent with the late, great Sybil Chol- mondeley at Houghton. I was fascinated that the Dowager Lady C had been painted twice by Sargent and as we looked at these pictures together, she began to reminisce. She told me that the larger of the two — which, I think, is in the show — had taken him three months of sittings to complete. During this time she had found herself playing piano duets with Sargent, taking tea with visitors such as Henry James and lunching in the studio on duck — one each — as Sargent maintained that there was never enough on a duck for two. Rather unoriginally, I had said how much I would have loved to have been painted by him. 'But Sargent was most wary of actresses, my dear!' Apparently Eleonora Duse had com- missioned him to make a drawing of her — a 'mug-shot', as Sargent himself described this kind of portrait. These took him only three hours to finish, but after less than half that time La Duse had had enough. She suddenly leapt up, wafted across the studio, turned at the door and declared to the bewildered artist (who was reputed to be not the marrying kind), 'Mr Sargent, I wish you a long, happy life with many, many children.' With that, she swept out, never to be seen by him again. I assume the charcoal remained unfinished.
The cult of chef as demigod has been allowed to escalate into sheer madness. The ludicrous amount of publicity given to the recent ejection of A.A. Gill and myself from that damned restaurant, I think proves my point. As Adrian's guest I found myself in a cramped, overcrowded, poky room, totally devoid of atmosphere. Having ordered from the pretentious menu, we waited 25 minutes for our first course, before being told to leave. Gill's previous review of one of his former establishments had 'upset' the chef. Can you imagine actors taking the same approach towards their critics? On opening nights, a large sec- tion of the stalls would be asked — from behind the footlights — to leave the the- atre, or the performance would not contin- ue. I love wonderful food as much as any- one, but these egomaniacs are cooks, for heaven's sake, not life-saving doctors. It's only elaborate, expensive food, not a cure for cancer or Aids or heart disease. I'm no fool; I realise that by telling the newspapers that he's just thrown Joan Collins out of his restaurant he's likely to get more column inches than had it been Joan Smith. How- ever, I resent his saying, in one of the many interviews he gave on the subject, that he'd sent me 'an amazing bouquet of flowers' and a 'letter of apology'. These two items, for your information, consisted of nine (yes, I did count them) small, scentless red roses accompanied by a compliment slip from the restaurant, signed with only his name. Perhaps he thought he hadn't given me enough time in his restaurant to ask him for his autograph.
Previous page
