NO LONGER WAUGH TIME

William Cash on why a friend's

behaviour visa vis Miss Hurley has not resulted in ostracism

Los Angeles IN EVELYN Waugh's brutal novella The Loved One, first published 50 years ago by Cyril Connolly in the February 1948 issue of Horizon, this city's expatriate cricket colony is darkly satirised as a clique of snobbish public-school buffoons, over-con- cerned about maintaining English upper- class appearance in Hollywood. Despite living in blistered-paint bungalows, where they sit out the warm Californian evenings sipping whisky sodas and reading out-of- date copies of the Sunday Times, all that matters is keeping 'face' in the eyes of 'our American colleagues'.

`Most important to keep the respect of these fellows,' the president of the Holly- wood Cricket Club, Sir Ambrose Aber- crombie, warns the 28-year-old poet Den- nis Barlow shortly after word gets out that his screenwriting contract has not been renewed by the 'Megalo' studio (a thinly disguised lampoon of MGM, which Waugh held in contempt after he visited LA in 1947).

The plot turns macabre when Barlow takes a low-paid job in the local LA pets' cemetery, and is ostracised by the British colony. 'As soon as I heard of it, I went to see him,' remarks an indignant Sir Ambrose to the white-flannelled expats assembled at the next cricket game. 'I advised him as bluntly as I could to clear out. I thought it my duty to you all. In Africa, if a white man is disgracing himself and letting down his people the authorities pack him off home. We haven't any such right here, unfortunately. The trouble is we all suffer for the folly of one.' Fifty years on, my Old Harrovian friend William Annesley certainly disgraced him- self when intimate details of his sexual romps in LA with Elizabeth Hurley were `exclusively' splashed across the front page of the News of the World (We'd make love, talk, snooze, wake up . . . and do it again'). On the Thursday before the story appeared on 8 February, I received a panic-stricken call from 30-year-old William — whom I first met six years ago on the excrement- soiled doggy park that is now used as the Hollywood Cricket Club pitch — saying that he had been to a long 'lunch' at a Thai restaurant with some businessmen, intro- duced by a friend. They said they were interested in investing in a would-be film of his.

`I got drunk and blabbed about everything,' he said, sounding worried. 'I've just had this call from Stewart White [the American editor of the Sunday tabloid] saying there was a News of the World inves- tigator present at the lunch, and did I have any comment to make about my affair with Elizabeth Hurley?'

Spectator readers may have missed the three-page-long story ('Hunk tells how beauty cheated on Hugh Grant'). In it Annesley, described as an 'upper-crust movie producer' (actually, he produces commercials), is quoted as saying about their frantic affair back in 1992-93: 'We're not talking lovey-dovey. This was just raw sex. She's fabulous at it.'

The highly informed (suspiciously so, I thought) Stewart White went on to recount how the blue-eyed Annesley at the time was two-timing his then girlfriend, Charlotte Lewis (an actress and former Playboy cover girl), who exploded with rage when she found Hurley's silk pyjamas in Annesley's bed. Miss Lewis sent the Pyjamas by express mail to Hugh Grant in Australia with the message: 'Tell your girl- friend not to leave her pyjamas in my boyfriend's bed.'

Yet, far from being sent home to Gloucestershire in disgrace as the rat-like Hewitt of LA, or even blackballed from Le Dome, the chic Euro-set restaurant where he can reliably be found at 4 p.m. every Friday enjoying an extended lunch, he and his blabbing have been met here with almost total apathy. If anything, he has been the object of some envy. So much for social shame today. 'I don't think anybody gives a shit,' Annesley told me when I asked him about any personal fall-out. He adds, however, that there is a very fine line between a rotter and a shit.' Certainly his friends don't seem to mind his blabbing. On Valentine's night, William was colour- fully visible at a 'festive' — as he likes to say — dinner party at Le Dome, the host of which was his close friend Lucas White, son of the late financier Lord White.

Success in America has little to do with personal behaviour; you are ultimately judged by what you can get away with, as President Clinton has amply demonstrat- ed. Had Annesley been exposed by the National Enquirer as having climbed up the windows of, say, Steven Spielberg's Pacific Palisades home and conducted a steamy affair with his wife, Kate Capshaw, while her husband was out of town, the reaction of Hollywood would have been very differ- ent. That would have been sacrilegious. Annesley would have been hounded out of town. If you are a lowly commercials pro- ducer involved in a kinky sex scandal (`we liked a bit of spanking') with a ravishing English film star, it can only improve both your career and potentially your bank bal- ance.

The town's lack of concern over Annes- ley's sexual adventure with Britain's lead- ing sex symbol is also a sorry reflection of the extent to which posh-sounding Brits have now slid off the Hollywood radar. In The Loved One, Sir Ambrose is painfully anxious that the expats will 'all suffer' for Barlow's disgrace. Today there is no such community. The expat movie colony is reduced to a jumped-up film society which almost anybody can join, including Ameri- cans, called Bafta LA. It hosts an annual `power-tea' on the lawn of Her Majesty's Consul General's house in the hope of impressing our 'American colleagues'. The famed cricket club founded by C. Aubrey Smith — Waugh's model for Sir Ambrose — is now a joke. William Annesley used to open the bowling without a shirt on. Worse, the club has recently acquired American baseball-style caps.

Back in England, meanwhile, where shame is still a healthy tabloid business, it was another story. Peter McKay in the Daily Mail called Annesley a 'seedy creep' for his betrayal and said, 'It would be a shame if Mr Annesley prospered.' Warned by a mutual friend that the News of the World was printing the story, Miss Hurley, I am told, went 'silent' on the phone. After the story broke, Henry Birtles, a close friend of Annesley's from his days at Lud- grove prep school (which Prince Harry attends), called from England and left a sniffy message on his answer-machine: 'I only hope the amount you were paid is enough to satisfy your conscience.'

`If only,' sighs William, when I bring up the subject of money. William flatly denies getting any cash for his story and main- tains that he was unsuspectingly entrapped after a bottle of wine too many at lunch. On the Friday before the story ran, I received an unsolicited call myself from Stewart White, who volunteered that he had known about the story for years, but couldn't run it for fear of Miss Hurley's lawyers. 'Between you and me, William, it was entirely fortuitous that a News of the World reporter happened to be at the lunch,' he said.

Quite possible, and I want to believe Annesley, despite rumours swirling around LA all week of a $30,000–$50,000 pay-off for staging the lunch. Still, in LA, as Hugh Grant will testify after his encounter with the prostitute Divine Brown, no deed is so wicked it cannot be forgiven. 'If William did pull this thing off,' said a bemused Henry Brocklehurst, a close friend of Miss Hurley's who has known William for over 20 years, 'I almost admire his cunning. I never thought he had the brains.'

Another reason why nobody here is shocked or bothered is that it is a dirty secret of LA's mid-Atlantic crowd that selling out is a leading — often their only — source of income. For many struggling ex-It girls, ex-boxers, an ex-wild child, ex- royal toe-suckers, ex-London socialites, who once appeared regularly in Tatter and the Dempster column but are now strug- gling to stay afloat in LA, selling the odd story or set of glossy pictures to Hello! about 'their new life in LA' pays the rent. Apart from anything else, they crave the publicity.

Denice Lewis, the former London It-girl of the Eighties who hasn't been doing a great deal in LA of late, charged the News of the World $20,000 for confirming that Dodi Fayed was a flop in bed last August. Nor have I any idea what John Bryan, Fer- gie's former 'financial adviser', does in LA, although I see him out at parties every week, and assume he is still living off his News of the World earnings.

Actually, Annesley did clear out of town. The day before the News of the World story broke, he fled to Las Vegas. I got a late- night call from him at the Hilton. Lacking coherence and expecting a female visitor, he complained about having 'lost a load of cash on the tables'. Where he got his money, I didn't like to ask.