“It’s nobody’s business how much I earn”

Rolling Stone revived

Ronnie Wood is counting his blessings. “I’ve had a fight with a touch of lung cancer,” he told Louise Gannon in The Mail on Sunday. “There was a week when everything hung in the balance and it could have been curtains.” The Rolling Stone – who was a smoker for half a century, before giving up last year – recently had a cancer removed from his lung. Mercifully, it hasn’t spread. “I was bloody lucky, but then, I’ve always had a guardian angel looking out for me. By rights I shouldn’t be here.”

Until he met his third wife, Sally Humphreys, Wood’s hellraising was legendary. At one point, in 2008, he was so blitzed on booze and drugs that his family despaired of ever getting him straight. But then someone had the bright idea of asking the artist Damien Hirst – himself no stranger to excess – to help. “I didn’t know Damien back then,” says Wood. “I was living in Ireland in a mad cocoon and Damien just came over, took charge, put me in the back of a bread van [to avoid the paparazzi], got me on a flight back to London.” Hirst booked Wood into rehab, and then, once he was clean, came back to collect him. “He took me to this house that he’d stacked full of canvases, paints, brushes, easels, crayons – enough to furnish a whole art school – and said, ‘Go on then, start paying the rent.’” Wood has since gone on to have a second career as an artist – and he and Hirst are now firm friends. “He did it because he cares. He hates waste. He didn’t want me to go to waste.”

Feltz on BBC pay

Vanessa Feltz gets paid £399,000 a year as a BBC radio star – considerably less than her male counterparts, but more thann any other female radio presenter. We know thiss because all BBC salarieses over £150,000 were re made public last monthonth – much to her r disgust. “I was as embarrassed and I thought it was prurient and voyeuristic. It is nobody’s business how much I earn,” she told Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian. “When I worked in Barratts shoe shop in Oxford Street, I certainly didn’t discuss with the other sales assistants how much are you being paid, and nobody ever does in this country and that is one of the nicest things about it.” Besides, she says, what did the exercise actually prove? “Because there is no comparison. Nobody knows, for example, how much people at ITV get paid. It’s like asking what does everyone get paid at Mcdonald’s without asking Burger King.” Even the apparent gender pay gap is not altogether clear cut. “How do you prove two people on the same show are doing an equal job? Has one of them been around longer, has one of them been poached from somewhere else and therefore they had to be offered more money? Obviously, I think people should get paid the same for the same, but in this instance I do think it’s a bit more complicated than that.”

Gaiman’s fame pain

Neil Gaiman is that rarest of beasts: a famous living novelist. The author of American Gods and Coraline is seldom out of the bestseller lists, and his black-clad, gothic style and lugubrious face make him more recognisable than most literary figures. But he’s not thrilled about this. “I used to be exactly famous enough,” he told Hayley Campbell in The Observer. “From 1992 until around 2008 I was never famous enough to get a fancy seat in a restaurant, but if I needed to talk to somebody, they would take my calls. Now I am somebody who is recognised in the street. I [no longer] feel like I’m an amiable invisible person observing life, but not part of it, which is how I like being as a writer.” Even his sales figures can’t cheer him up. “There’s nothing like studying the bestseller lists of bygone years for teaching an author humility. Today’s bestsellers are tomorrow’s forgotten things.” Pat Mcgrath is the most influential make-up artist in the world, says Sali Hughes in The Guardian. She designs the make-up for around 80 major fashion shows each year, has her own range of cosmetics and a slavish Instagram following of 1.5 million, and has just been made beauty editor-at-large of British Vogue. And she owes it all to her mother, Jean. A Jamaican-born Jehovah’s Witness, living in straitened circumstances in Northampton, Jean was obsessed with make-up. “She would stand in front of the TV and we’d have to guess what she’d done differently with her eyes. I’d think: ‘Get out of the way!’ But she wouldn’t move until I’d told her,” says Mcgrath. “She always put on a full face of make-up then got in the bath to get that dewy finish. It was next level, but this is where I got my make-up tips from – at seven years old!” Mcgrath caught the beauty bug, but in 1970s Britain, “there was no make-up for women of colour. NOTHING.” So she started mixing her own pigments and developing a bold, experimental style. She had a eureka moment one day in her teens, while “stalking Spandau Ballet outside Radio 1”, wearing New Romantic clothes and bright lipstick on her cheeks and eyes. The DJ Janice Long spotted her and asked, “Will you do that on me?” “I didn’t even know that was a job. She said it was, so I went home knowing what I was going to do with my life.”