Ephraim Hardcastle
DISGRACED star Kevin Spacey’s film performance as late author Gore Vidal isn’t expected to see the light of day after his dramatic downfall. What attracted Spacey to this part? Vidal’s half-sister, Nina Straight, said Gore ran up a million-dollar legal bill stifling claims he had sex with under-age boys. The details were known to his chief enemy, the late Right-wing polemicist William F Buckley, but Vidal tied him up in litigation. ‘Gore was very upset, terrified,’ she said in 2013. He died in 2012, his reputation intact, but Spacey’s is now ruined.
HAVING hidden herself from the Press during the extended, 20th anniversary coverage of Princess Diana’s death, the Duchess of Cornwall will be in Fleet Street on Tuesday to attend the annual Commemoration Service at St Bride’s for ‘journalists, photographers, camera-crew, and support staff who have died or who have been killed on the front line…’ Disappointingly for the QC project – the effort by courtiers to make sure Camilla has the title Queen Consort when Charles become king – her latest approval rating has slipped from 28 per cent to 20.
SEXY songbirds Bananarama, whose three original members have reunited, had a 1984 hit called Robert De Niro’s Waiting. The movie star asked them out on a date. Band member Sara Dallin, now 55, pictured in her prime, said: ‘I don’t know which of us he fancied.’ Mercifully (considering the Harvey Weinstein brouhaha) there was no inappropriate touching.
LATE comedy star Peter Cook, who would have been 80 today, was invited by Sir David Frost to supper with Prince Andrew and his bride-to-be Sarah Ferguson. ‘Big fans – be super if you could make it,’ gushed Frost. Cook replied: ‘Hang on, I’ll check my diary. Oh dear, I find I’m watching television that night.’
FOOD critic Giles Coren branches out, inpudently describing the great Jane Austen as ‘an average chick-lit writer of her day’ in a forthcoming Sky 1 show. Coren’s forgotten 2005 novel, Winkler, won the Bad Sex In Fiction Award but the canny self-promoter got TV to show his documentary, My Failed Novel, last year.
GUESTS at the launch of Quentin Letts’s new book, Patronising Bastards, included Caroline Edmondson, whose ex-boss, Tory MP Mark Garnier, sent her to buy him a sex toy in London’s Soho. A constituent writes to the MP’s local paper pointing out that there’s a perfectly good sex shop in Kidderminster.
TORY MP Peter Bone, noting ‘pictures of BBC workers asleep at their desks while working at the BBC News Channel’, says in the Commons: ‘I cannot find that report on the BBC?’ Missing the point, Leader of the House Andrea Leadsom says: ‘I sincerely regret it if these reporters are so tired they fall asleep on the job.’ Fall asleep due to the ‘boring’ news they are required to assemble, surely.