Ephraim Hardcastle
SEAN Connery’s celestial departure prompts Jilly Cooper to recall her ‘heavenly’ illicit kitchen snog with the 007 star when he and his then wife Diane Cilento came for dinner with her and husband Leo in the swinging sixties. ‘I went out to get the pudding and Sean followed me,’ recalls Jilly. ‘And he just kissed me, we kissed each other. It was heaven. A proper kiss, yes.’ In her new book Between The Covers, Jilly admits once falling in love with an unnamed man who reciprocated. Was it Connery? ‘No’ she insists, adding: ‘I was very married. Sean was very married. Nothing more happened ever but I loved him very much.’
SEAN’S heroic Scottish thrift was in evidence when he bankrolled the 1996 West End launch of Art starring Albert Finney, who brought his two elderly sisters to the opening night party at the ICA. Unhappily sitting at a table with the ladies, he pointed at his host, declaring: ‘Connery’s only gone and introduced a pay bar.’
DAVID Dimbleby’s heartache when his fiancee – described as ‘the love of his life’ – refused to marry him is revealed by political commentator Sir Ferdinand Mount in his new memoir Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca. David, then 23, was looking forward to marrying Ferdie’s cousin Georgie, 20, in 1962 when the bride-to-be’s mother Munca forced her to sever all ties with Dimbleby. David burst into tears, observes Mount, who believes his aunt feared the Dimbleby journalistic clan would uncover her various secret identities, adding: ‘It was also demented snobbery. No Dimbleby would do for her princess.’
NIGELLA Lawson, pictured, admits to owning 6,000 cookery books, adding: ‘I can’t fit them into my house but I can’t bear to get rid of them.’ Couldn’t she put them in a giant greenhouse outside? Then, like China’s Great Wall, they’d be visible from the Moon.
REVIEWING Tom Bower’s Boris biography in The Literary Review, journalist Michael White notes that Bower lacks his usual menace, giving unauthorised biography a bad name. ‘Might this have something to do with the peerage recently given by Boris to [Tom’s wife] Veronica Wadley?’ he asks, noting that the PM ‘is not a stranger’ in the Bower/Wadley home.
SPITTING Image’s Margaret Thatcher impersonator Steve Nallon shares his secret of mimicking Theresa May, saying: ‘I have noticed one thing with Theresa. There’s a tiny hint of Homer Simpson. It’s so slight that if you exaggerated it too much it wouldn’t sound right. Hers is a push-through one-note voice.’ Queueing at the charisma bar counter, Theresa got the orange juice.
WHEN Cliff Richard shared a record label with Elton John he persisted in addressing the Peter Pan of Pop as Sylvia. Why? ‘It’s because [my then manager] John Reid says you’re always phoning our office asking if your record has gone silver yet,’ explained Elton. ‘I call you Sylvia Disc. But I don’t always call you that – sometimes you’re “the Bionic Christian”.’