I always knew that the British press fudged the truth, but my recent engagement and
marriage revealed to me just how they fib with fantastic fanfare, and how frenetically fanciful they can be.
The truth seems not to enter into their concoctions. The Evening Standard printed, on its front page, that while lunching at an Italian restaurant on New Year’s Eve day, I announced that I had been married to Percy that morning. According to other patrons (whose names are conveniently withheld) the happy couple (that’s us) ‘flashed their wedding rings’ (which didn’t exist),
‘quaffed champagne’ (which I abhor), ‘ate lobster’ (which I’m deathly allergic to) in a ‘£600 meal’ (which is ludicrous for a lunch). Although my PR, Stella Wilson, called to deny this claptrap, several redtops ran the story the following day, quoting those impeccable sources — two bus-boys and the restaurant owner, who garnered a ton of publicity for his spaghetti joint, which we had patronised only because the greasy spoon across the street was jam-packed.
Then the ‘showbiz’
‘editor’ of the Daily Mail, Alison Boshoff, 55, printed the same story, plus various other fabrications the following day, refusing to reveal her ‘impeccable sources’. These turned out to be a New York Post mention based on a series of fake email messages purporting to be sent by a ‘close family friend’ but in fact sent by a person (or persons) unknown, who faked email addresses for people in our family who don’t even know how to work a computer. Talk about the bad fairies not being invited
to the christening. Venomous and spite-filled as these emails were, it didn’t prevent the newspapers from printing them without checking the source. As a matter of fact, far from checking these apocryphal tales, they were embellished and reused by, among others, the NY Post columnist Neil Travis, 71, and Cindy Adams, 80.
Then on 11 February, a full page, yet again in the Evening Standard, written by Harriet Arkell, 39, revealed that we would be spending our honeymoon in a £92-a-night
quaint bed-and-breakfast on the outskirts of Auckland. This, too, was immediately repeated as fact by the many sheep masquerading as reporters in our daily press.
Then, out of the rotting woodwork crawled Glenys Roberts, 65, a hackette for the Daily Mail, who had a certain cachet with a group of my friends some 35 years ago when she was married to the popular Mayfair tailor Doug Hayward. This woman had done a couple of hatchet jobs on me and people close to me before, so I was no
longer on speaking terms with her, but she had the unmitigated gall to call herself ‘one of my closest friends’. Having intrusively doorstepped some of Percy’s and my relations and friends, she wrote two pages of tripe about what a mistake my marriage to Percy would be and how my friends were horrified.
Because I’ve been an actress since I was 16, most of these jibes affected me like the proverbial water off the fowl’s back, and, since Percy has broad shoulders, we countered by
sticking two metaphorical fingers in the air and sent legal letters denying their allegations and lies. Once, we even got a retraction — in small print — on the back page.
But it certainly did affect other people in our lives. Just because I’ve married Percy, why should relatives be placed in such an untenable position? People talk about freedom of the press with regard to celebrities and the duty to put them under the magnifying glass, but what about the freedom of those who are
related to or are friends of celebrities? Why should they be exposed to the glare of the spotlight?
During the run-up to the nuptials, furthermore, several F-list celebrities whinged to the media about not making the cut. One person, who would go to the opening of a root canal, has protested that, as he is yet another of my closest (or was it closet?) friends, he therefore deserved to be on the guest list. I found the whole thing amusingly bitchy, yet rather pathetic. Get a life,
dear.
After our wonderful wedding came the honeymoon, and Malaysian Airlines, which boasts flight attendants as glamorous as any Fifties film star, and airline cuisine that is hard to top, flew us not to a B&B in New Zee (who’d ever believe that?) but to Kuala Lumpur in 12 hours, without turbulence but with lots of caviare. We were then transferred to Pangkor Laut Resort, an idyllic island where we now languish hedonistically on the most gorgeous private beach in the middle of the
Indian Ocean, complete with golden sand, emerald sea, our own pool and all mod cons. It’s heaven, and I’m relishing every lazy second before returning to London, real life and the empty pavements of Belgravia
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