McCartney exits down the ramp with her—out of the Medioforum, and into his tour bus. His private jet is waiting: he’ll be in bed in St. John’s Wood by 3 AM. The crew line his route to the tour bus—whooping and clapping. He high-fives each one as he passes them.
“Thank you!” he shouts to everyone. “Thank you!”
And into the fog goes a blue-light flashing motorcade, over which can be heard the half-joyful, half-mournful cries of “PAUL! PAUL!”—the sound of his every entrance and exit since 1962.
I fly back to London with his plectrum in my purse.
And now onto celebrity weight-loss—a subject which, in Google returns, brings up more results than “potential nuclear holocaust” and “Charlie bit my finger” combined.
CELEBRITY WEIGHT-LOSS: THE TRUTH
Over the years I’ve been very fat (size 24—try getting that through the turnstiles at Regent’s Park Zoo in a duffelcoat) and I’ve been very thin (actually I haven’t, but all articles on weight have to start with this sentence, I have noticed)—and all through these vagaries of heftiness I have observed one thing: women have to lie about how they lost weight; and the more famous you are, the greater the lie.
If a non-famous person loses ten pounds and is asked to comment on it, they’ll say, “Oh, I ate a bit more salad, and went running a couple of times,” in a slightly awkward, “Let’s drop this” manner.
The reality is, of course, that they’ve been running up hills at 8 AM in the morning with “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” on repeat on their iPod, weeping with the searing pain that is manifesting, mysteriously, in one buttock only, only to return home to a great big plate of cold beetroot mash, and would rather die than tell you.
This reticence to fully disclose the reality of the endeavor stems from a) an unwillingness to become a Weight-Loss Bore (returning from the toilet: “Hey—everybody! Guys! Listen up! I lost an OUNCE!”) and b) an awareness that if you—as is statistically likely—end up putting the weight back on, you don’t want everyone casting pitying looks at you, and saying, “All that effort—and then she blew it all on ten-day holiday with an all-you-can-eat savory crepe-buffet. Oh, the humanity.”
No—as regards the circumferance of your arse, as far as everyone else is concerned, you want them to think it’s, “Easy come, easy go.” An air of studied casualness about your weight is the aim. It’s no biggie.
However. When it comes to celebrity weight-loss, this “studied casualness” is taken to absolutely absurd extremes. As someone who spends half their life reading glossy gossip mags—and therefore doesn’t miss a single post-baby/new album/new boyfriend weight-loss story—I can confidently announce that we are currently living through an Imperial Phase of celebrity lies about weight-loss, and have duly collated my favorite ones here:
1. First post-baby photo-shoot: mom’s looking HOT! She’s at a premiere in a Herve Leger Bandage dress—just SIX WEEKS after pooing out a human-child! How, Celebrity—HOW?
“I’ve been so busy running around after the baby, the weight just dropped off!” celebrity mom reveals, giggling.
Whoah here, missy, whoah! “I’ve been so busy running around after the baby, the weight dropped off”? But how can that be? Your experience is so very dissimilar to mine! When I had babies, I seem to remember most of that time being spent pinned under a fractiously half-sleeping colicky infant: unable to move in order to carry out even the most basic of human functions, like breathing particularly deeply, or finding the TV remote.
The first nine months of a baby’s life are an infamously non-mobile period. A baby’s notable stasis has been the inspiration for a number of high-profile inventions—such as the stroller, and the sling. How—six weeks after birth—anyone could be “running around” after something with all the motility of an ancient tumulus is an absolute mystery to me. Perhaps celebrity dads strap the babies to remote-control helicopters, and get the celebrity moms to chase them around the house. Yes. That will be how Victoria Beckham lost all that weight after having Cruz.
1. “I’ve been so busy with work, I just forgot to eat!” Again, celebrities, your experience is so very different to mine. I work on the fringes of entertainment/media, and one thing that I have noticed about entertainment/the media is that, in these fields, every single work-thing you could do—meetings, photo-shoots, aftershows, filming—is accompanied by AT LEAST three of the following: a plate of cheese and ham slices, brioche, potato chips, massive “platter” of assorted Pret sandwiches, miniature burgers, meat on a stick, selection of stupidly dandy cupcakes, spendy chocolate biscuits, twenty-four “deli-style” Scotch eggs, some salady shit that no one touches, and as many milky lattes as would take to fill a putative and revolving Lactose Hot Tub. You can’t “forget” to eat in these conditions. Everyone else around you is medicating their constant, low-level media anxiety by troughing refined carbs, interspersed with fags smoked outside while texting their boyfriends about how everyone else they’re working with today is a neurotic bitch. Just copy their behavior. You’ll soon “remember” to eat again in no time!
2. “I went to see this amazing woman, and found out I am allergic to wheat/that my blood type means I can’t eat cheese/that my face shape means bananas make me fat—and since I cut them out of my diet, I’ve never been more toned!” The truth: “As you can see, since I started mixing up all my prescription drugs in a big bowl by my bed and eating them like Dolly Mixtures, I’ve lost my mind* and I’m not terribly hungry. Life is GREAT!”
*falls asleep for twenty-six hours straight.
Nearly the end of the book, now, and a couple of obituaries to finish things off. We will stumble toward the end piece through death, and loss. Black-veiled and attendant at the graveside, thoughtful. Thankful. Confused.
Two of my favorite women died in 2011—Amy Winehouse and Elizabeth Taylor. Two lush-lipped, hard-drinking British women—broads made of eyeliner, grace and balls.
In my dreams, as a fan, I would have been on casual, cheerful email terms with both—enjoying the very great pleasure of seeing their names in my inbox, in black pixel; when they’re more usually up on billboards, in lights. Asking questions not for quote, but from curiosity. Trying, in some manner, to amuse a pair who—Cleopatra-eyed, both—had seen everything by the age of twenty-five.
In the end, the only thing I ever said to them was these obituaries—the worst letters, never sent; but posted up under headlines, instead.
ELIZABETH TAYLOR: HEAVY, LIKE WET ROSES
They were the greatest eyes, and now they have ended: violet, violently beautiful and lush-lashed, Elizabeth Taylor’s extraordinary eyes have passed from fact to artifact. Man, she was awesome—my favorite, my most-watched. The best of all the legends. A star in an era of dames and broads, Taylor out-damed and out-broaded them all—even fabulous Ava Gardner, who once, when her then-husband Frank Sinatra was described as “A 119-lb has-been,” replied, “Yes. And 19 lbs of it is cock.”
But Taylor topped that, effortlessly—with a private jet called Elizabeth, two Oscars, skin like milk and the ability to drink any man under the table, she could walk into any gathering like the commander of a star fleet. No one was superior to her—but then, no one was worthy enough to worship her properly until Richard Burton came along, for the first and then the second time, and kissed her right out of her shoes. Their relationship was like a bomb that kept going off: they were condemned for “erotic vagrancy” by the Vatican at the start of their affair, but carelessly racketed around the world collecting Van Goghs, Pissarros, Rembrandts and diamonds, arguing, drinking and trashing big beds.
Burton was lost the moment he met her—his description of their first meeting is one of the most astonishing declarations of love ever written. It twangs with holy lust, even forty years later.
“She was so extraordinarily beautiful that I nearly laughed out loud. Her body was a true miracl
e of construction—the work of an eningeer of genius. It needed nothing except itself. It was smitten by its own passion. She was unquestionably gorgeous. She was lavish. She was a dark, unyielding largesse. She was, in short, too bloody much.”
In a world where women still worry that they are “too much”—too big, too loud, too demanding, too exuberant—Taylor was a reminder of what a delight it can be, for men and women alike, when a women really does take full possession of her powers. Burton’s nickname for her was “Ocean.” Sometimes, it seemed too small.
On my wall, I have a shot of Taylor in her late forties. She is with David Bowie—outdoors in LA, at a guess. Bowie is emaciated—at the height of his cocaine addiction, but still, clearly, both powerful and beautiful. He has his arms around Taylor’s waist—a thicker, rounder waist than her corseted days in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; she is heavy, like wet roses. She looks like a banquet. As she puts a cigarette to Bowie’s mouth, her face is both lascivious and maternal—her lips are half-open; you can practically hear her coo, “Here you go, baby.” In that one shot, she makes David Bowie—David Bowie—look like a helpless teenage boy.
She was a storm front of a woman, in sapphires. Tonight, I will drink cold, cold champagne in her memory. Then eat a diamond.
And Winehouse.
WINEHOUSE—JUMP ON YOUR VOICE, LIKE A LION, AND RUN AWAY
In a way not morbid or maudlin, all I can do is YouTube Amy Winehouse. I watch her in the kitchen, in the bedroom; in the garden, on the laptop, while I hack back gloomy loops of summer hops. Her voice seems unsuited for the outdoors, but I want her propped up on a garden chair. In the sunshine, now. In my head I call her “Winehouse,” like a cartoon character or a punky kid: Winehouse with her tattoos and her stapled-on beehive; Winehouse with her long ankles, bottle in hand, tottery and roaring. A post-apocalyptic Marge Simpson; Betty Boop in charge of a pirate ship. Winehouse on Never Mind the Buzzcocks, shrugging off host Simon Amstell’s joky, awkward concern, with the downbeat timing of Joan Rivers or Dennis Leary.
Would Amy like to collaborate with MOR chanteuse Katie Melua, Amstell wondered. (MOR is the genre otherwise known as “Middle of the Road,” for its resolute determination in steering an unobjectionable, bland course right down the center of rock/pop. Melua was, at the time, skilled enough to have become Europe’s biggest-selling artist, thanks to her ability to keep right in the central reservation for 200 miles of pop, without once ever deviating into anything memorable.)
“I’d rather get cat AIDS,” Winehouse replied tartly, funnier than any comedian on the show, but still Winehouse—Amy Winehouse with the voice, with the astonishing voice, like Billie Holiday scared, angry, hot; tooling up. She wrote “Back to Black”—one of the best singles of the twenty-first century, a tendon-tight song that, halfway through, just dissolves into its own awfulness, leaving only the tolling of a church bell, and Winehouse singing “Black . . . /Black . . .” like it’s the only direction she has left—when she was twenty-three. In the video, she dresses for a funeral. Sharp. Tight skirt. Eyeliner. She puts her gloves on, tearless. By the age of twenty-four, she has five Grammys. By twenty-seven, she’s dead.
I can’t stop watching her because I can’t work out exactly how I feel about her dying. Her death is not something unexpected, after all—it had been coming down the tunnel for a long time. And yet it still rattled everyone—our preparedness is no preparation at all.
“This is how we will feel when polar bears finally become extinct,” I think, “after all that sad waiting. Or when the last tiger dies.”
We still won’t quite understand why—even though we watched almost every minute of it happen. I’m not the only one puzzled—friends, particularly women, keep fretting over Winehouse’s death. It’s not some wailing, pent-up boo-hoo, like when Diana died. Rather, it’s like when woodland animals circle another woodland animal who has died, uncomprehending as to why it has gone. How it could have gone.
Perhaps part of it is that we didn’t see who Winehouse really was, at the time. Like everyone, I’d always thought her problem was alcohol and drugs: those years of being photographed in bloody shoes, bleakly marauding at 3 AM. When the Hawley Arms in Camden—epicenter of the drunken world at that time—burned down, everyone joked Winehouse had done it, by accident. Winehouse, with an unfortunate combination of crack pipe and Elnett hairspray.
But when a friend said, “What if her biggest problem wasn’t drink or drugs, but her eating disorders?,” the YouTube footage suddenly felt like it was being played again; but now, with new subtitles.
So here is Amy Winehouse at the Mercury Awards in 2007, coming on stage to gasps, the bright neons of her dress playing badly against the pint-sized hollows of her collarbone. Everyone thinks it’s the crack—but she gives interviews where she says she spends all morning running on a treadmill. She wears hotpants and cut-off shirts, revealing that tiny, knotted belly—even in winter, even in snow. She cooks for everyone, but doesn’t touch anything herself. “All she eats is Haribo,” a friend reveals to the Daily Mirror. With an eating disorder like that, you’d have all the tolerance for drink and drugs of a newborn baby.
And because eating disorders are all about trying to regain control, it solves the biggest confusion I have had about Winehouse, since I heard she’d died: how you could have a talent—such a once-in-a-generation, seemingly gravityless, endless talent—and let it get so battered by your addictions that your big album, in 2006, is also your last. Surely you’d want to protect it as you would a child, serve it as you would an empress? Couldn’t she discipline herself? To keep her very Winehouseness safe? Well, she was. She was very busy disciplining herself. She wasn’t eating.
For anyone without a talent like Winehouse’s—and that’s all of us—we just stare, like unjealous Salieris, and wonder how someone could have something so astonishing move through them—yet not have it elevate them at the same time. We become like children. Couldn’t that talent, somehow, have saved her? Couldn’t a song as astonishing as Back to Black vouch for her against demons? Couldn’t Amy Winehouse just climb on to her voice, like it was a lion, and jump out of the window, and ride far, far away?
But then, perhaps that’s what she did.
This is the last piece in the book. Ending where we began—in bed, with my husband unwillingly dragging himself out of unconsciousness to deal with the kind of issue that looms large in the heads of women the world over, but seems like an outright declaration of insanity to all men.
MY TRAGICALLY EARLY DEATH
It is 11:48 PM. We are just about to go to sleep. I can hear the dishwasher downstairs come to the end of its self-aggrandizingly-named Superwash. The house is silent.
Beside me, Pete’s breathing changes down three gears—into early, stop-motion dreams. It has been a long day. He deserves his rest. Today is now ended. Sleep well, sweet prince, I think. Sleep well.
“Pete?”
“M.”
“What would you miss most about me if I died tragically young?”
“Whrrr?”
“If I died—tomorrow—perhaps brutally—what would you miss most about me?”
“Not now. Please. So tired.”
“When the sad, young policeman appeared at the door with his Casualty face on, and said, ‘I’m so sorry—there’s been an accident,’ what would be the first thing that popped into your head, that started you crying?”
“This is happening? Oh God, this is happening.”
Pete turns over. I sit up in bed.
“It’s just, I know what upsets me most about me dying tragically young,” I say. “Not being there for the girls the first time some fifth-form bitch is catty about their shoes. Never having learned French. Never having written that BAFTA-winning sitcom set in a lookalikes agency, called Cher & Cher Alike. But what about you? What would be making you feel utterly destroyed and helple
ss?”
Pete sighs. He is now totally awake. He does also look a bit sad. Talking about death in bed appears to be a bit of a downer. He finds my hand under the duvet, and takes hold of it.
“The total loss of companionship, love and sex,” he says, with a squeeze.
Pause.
“That’s a bit broad,” I say.
“What?”
“I wanted more specific things.”
“What?”
“I wanted to be able to imagine the exact points, during a day, you would suddenly go ‘She’s gone!’ and collapse on the floor, sobbing.”
“Why. On. Earth. Would you want to do that?”
I think this is a bit of an odd question.
“All women wonder it,” I explained, patiently.
“Why?”
“We just do. It’s a woman thing. It’s a thing we do. You just have to accept it, as part of sharing the Earth with us—in the same way we accept you will come into the kitchen and show us a book on the history of service stations, from 1920 until the present day, going, ‘Look at the pictures! Every single one is a gem!’ while waving around a shot of three men in Sta-prest trousers smoking a fag outside a café on the A6. You do that. We like to imagine the after-effects of our tragic early deaths on our menfolk. So. What, very specifically, would leave you feeling hopeless and broken?”
“Splinters,” Pete says.
“What?”
“Splinters. When the girls get splinters. You can go in there with the pin. Jesus. I can’t do that. Splinters.”
Pause.
“Okay,” I say, “now you’re being too specific. Can you take the focus of your Mourning Camera at some midway point between ‘Total loss of companionship,’ and ‘splinters’? Something in the middle?”
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