Celebrity news & gossip from the world’s showbiz and glamour magazines (OK!, Hello, National Enquirer and more). We read them so you don’t have to, picking the best bits from the showbiz world’s maw and spitting it back at them. Expect lots of sarcasm.
If everyone speaks out when they see criminality, the criminality would not be allowed to fester and become endemic. If so many claim to know, why do so few tell?
Is Harvey Weinstein suffering from a medical condition, and so deserving of our sympathy? Weinstein’s currently residing in a rehab centre, perhaps wearing a virginal white version of one of Hugh Hefner’s easy-open housecoats and bravely discussing his illness to a caring and fantastically well compensated expert.
Weinstein climbed into his air ambulance with a message to us all, and specifically, no doubt, fellow suffers of Weinstein Syndrome. “I’m hanging in, I’m trying my best,” he mustered. “I’m not doing OK but I’m trying. I gotta get help guys. You know what, we all make mistakes … Second chance, I hope.”
Stories abound that Weinstein is being treated for ‘sexual addiction’, which if right and placed in line with allegations levelled at him, reduces claims of his alleged criminal behaviour to a sympathetic hormone-fired back story. Get this from one of his people in the New Yorker: “Mr Weinstein has begun counselling, has listened to the community and is pursuing a better path. Mr Weinstein is hoping that, if he makes enough progress, he will be given a second chance.”
Second chance is the mantra – and possibly the name of the cure-all pills and the clinic that provides them.
PS: Is Weinstein V Addiction ever going to reach trial? If it does, given the vitriol and opining online and in print, can Weinstein ever get a fair trial? Better, perhaps, to blame it on the sex and have those troublesome genitals beaten with sticks.
Next week from behind the grave: “Jimmy Savile: I wound’t wish my disease on anyone.”
“I’ve never disguised the fact that I’m Jewish, and in any crisis in Israel I would be there. I am committed to the survival of the Jewish people.” – Leonard Cohen
On October 6, 1973, as Israeli Jews fasted in observance of Yom Kippur, Arab forces led by Egypt and Syria attacked. At Pinati, a cafe in Tel Aviv, pop star Oshik Levy was drinking coffee with singer Ilana Rovina, actor Pupik Arnon and musician Mati Caspi. They were planning a tour. Levy spotted a man across the room.
“I swear on my life,” Levy told his friends, “it’s Leonard Cohen.” “Are you Leonard Cohen?” he asked. “I am,” replied the man.
Levy wondered if Cohen fancied joining the tour. Cohen did. And with that Cohen was heading with his new friends to Israel’s southern air force base in Hatzor.
The legacy of that tour can be heard in Lover, Lover, Lover, the song Cohen wrote between performances in the Sinai. “This next song was written in the Sinai desert for the soldiers of both sides,” said Cohen.
Next up on the god-awful 1980 TV show Pink Lady & Jeff – a show featuring Japanese female singing duo Pink Lady (Mitsuyo Nemoto (“Mie”) and Keiko Masuda) and Jeff Altman, who was there because he could speak English, is Hugh Hefner.
The girls have rocked up at the Playboy Mansion to audition as Bunnies.
As you watch through knitted fingers, Hugh Hefner thinks it a good idea to sing My Kind of Town.
RIP Hugh Hefner (1926-2017), the man who made your feel less guilty about looking at nudes. Hefner was the man who gave us the enjoiner: “I only buy it for the articles.” And, boy, were those stories good. So good that the protectors of our minds and bodies branded Playboy magazine “obscene”. We lapped it up. And in the 1960s Hefner moved into teasing punters with actual flesh and satin-eared women in Playboy clubs. Punters drank in the wit of black comics Dick Gregory and Jewish enemy-of-the-state Lenny Bruce, a man Hefner could not stand to watch “persecuted or prosecuted for his words and his ideas”, proving that when it came to entertainment and escapism, segregation, whether born of race, gender or rudeness, is for losers.
This was social revolution.“
Hefner was the first publisher to see that the sky would not fall and mothers would not march if he published bare bosoms; he realised that the old taboos were going,” Time magazine said in a 1967 cover story. “He took the old-fashioned, shame-thumbed girlie magazines, stripped off the plain wrapper, added gloss, class and culture. It proved to be a sure-fire formula.”
Hefner became the unofficial spokesman for the sexual revolution that permeated the 1960s and ’70s and he was both lauded and criticized by feminists of the era, with some accusing him of objectifying women while others said he liberated and empowered them. During a conversation with Gloria Steinem in 1970, Hefner dismissed feminism as “foolishness,” and Steinem told him: “What Playboy doesn’t know about women could fill a book … There are times when a woman reading a Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.”
Hefner was a staunch supporter of abortion – including helping to finance the landmark Rowe v. Wade decision in 1973 — and more recently was an outspoken advocate of same-sex marriage, and his dedication to such issues (along with his distribution of pornography) made him a pariah in some religious circles. “By associating sex with sin, we have produced a society so guilt-ridden that it is almost impossible to view the subject objectively,” he wrote in 1963 in one of his many broadsides aimed at Christian leaders.
Cheers, Hef.
Image: Hugh Hefner (April 9, 1926 – September 27, 2017) at his kitchen table working on the first issue of Playboy (1953)
“Present:
I cocktail
thou cocktail
it cocktails
we cocktail
you cocktail
they cocktail. Imperfect: I was cocktailing Perfect or past definite: I cocktailed Past perfect: I have cocktailed Conditional: I might have cocktailed Pluperfect: I had cocktailed Subjunctive: I would have cocktailed Voluntary subjunctive: I should have cocktailed”
It’s pretty well known that Swedish dancer an actor Alicia Vikander is part giraffe. In her previous jobs the professional liars (surely ‘Photoshop artistes’? – ed) shorten Vikaner’s neck so as not to alarm household pets and dads.
Happily, for her part as Lara Croft in the latest Tomb Raider spin-off, Warner Bros have left Vikander well alone. And, rather horribly, everyone says she looks weird. Expect to see her mutated again very soon.
When Piers Morgan spotted Jeremy Corbyn chatting with Arsenal’s Spanish defender Hector Bellerin, he tried to butt in. Mrs Corbyn shut the boorish TV presenter down in the best way:
Ever hear the story about how in 1967 The Monkees sold more records than the Beatles and the Rolling Stones combined? Rolling Stone, that bastion of factual news reporting, told us as much:
In 1967 the Monkees sold more records than the Beatles and Rolling Stones combined.
Incredible fact.
And it must be true because in 1986 the Washington Post told its readers:
In 1967 they sold 35 million albums, twice as many as the Beatles and Rolling Stones combined.
In 1967, The Monkees TV show was a smashing success, and the self-titled album released to complement the show sold 35 million records, outselling The Beatles and The Rolling Stones combined.
They ended up being pretty much the biggest thing on the planet; in 1967 the ‘Prefab Four’, fronted by Jones, outsold the Beatles and the Rolling Stones
The story of The Monkees being bigger than The Beatles and Rolling Stones combined has made it into books:
And, of course, it’s on Wikipedia. In The Beatles Wikipedians, we learn:
All facts. And all utter balls. Mike Nesmith, one of The Monkees, tells us how the story came about in his autobiography Infinite Tuesday. The Monkees were in Australia. It was November 1977. Nesmith was being interviewed:
As we sat down for the interview, before he asked the first question, I told him that I was going to lie to him. He was taken aback, then seemed a little nonplussed and asked why. I said it was because I didn’t trust the press, that I didn’t expect him to tell the truth, so neither would I …
I said that some of the things I would say would be true and some false, and it was up to him to figure out which was which, according to the normal standards of journalistic responsibility. He asked how he would tell the difference between when I was lying and telling the truth, and I said, “You won’t. That is the point of the lie …”
Then came a point where he asked me about the sales of the Monkees records, and I saw the chance. It isn’t too well known, I said flatly, that we sold over thirty-five million records in 1967. More than the Beatles and the Rolling Stones combined … he diligently wrote all this down, and I wondered for a moment if I had chosen too outrageous a lie to tell, but it turned out it had been just right.
The next day in the paper, there it was, printed as fact.
Nesmith calls the story a “complete fabrication, totally bogus, class-A mendacity lie”. In 2015, Nesbitt told all to Gilbert Gottfried.
Stanton also led his own band, first known as Harry Dean Stanton and the Repo Men and later simply as the Harry Dean Stanton Band, and would play pickup gigs in L.A. area clubs. Bob Dylan, with whom he worked on Sam Peckinpah’s 1973 film “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,” was a friend. Another friend was Hunter S. Thompson, and Stanton sang at his funeral.
The character actor was the subject of two documentaries: 2011’s “Harry Dean Stanton: Crossing Mulholland” and Sophie Huber’s 2013 “Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction,” which featured interviews with Wenders, Shepard, Kris Kristofferson, and Lynch.
Steel yourselves, readers, for this epic battle between fans of Arenal and Spurs.
First up: the Selly Oak Crew with You Just Got Kaned. With sincere apologies to Chas ‘n’ Dave, mum, dad, musicians and every poor sod who supported Spurs when they could have opted for the Arsenal.
But Spuds toughs don’t have it all their own way in North London. Here are the Away Boyz. proving that even with a bigger budget you can still come across as utterly ridiculous.
Louella Michie is not the subject of reports on her untimely death. The 25-year-old woman’s body was found dead on her birthday at the Bestival music festival. And ever since that unhappy discovery, the Press have been telling us who did not die: her father. The Daily Mail has produced 7 stories on Louella Michie’s unexplained death. It’s hard to spot Louella as the media zoom in on John Michie, her dad.
The Evening Standard had the news first, sticking to the facts. The body of a young London woman had been found at Dorset’s Bestival. Police were investigating. Murder was one line of enquiry.
And then the media realised that the dead woman’s father is on the telly. The pick of the front pages being the Daily Telegraph’s, which amid talk of her alleged ‘MURDER” described Louella as a “TV detective’s daughter”. John Michie had for a while appeared in Taggart, the Scottish detective show. In the twilight zone between fact and fiction, Telegraph readers might wonder if DI Robert “Robbie” Ross would be investigating.
These are the Daily Mail’s headlines. See if you can spot Louella Michie:
Holby City and Coronation Street star John Michie insists death of his daughter, 25, at Bestival was an ACCIDENT as he mourns his ‘angel’ after a man was arrested on suspicion of her murder – September 11th 2017, 11:54:26 am
Man held after daughter of Holby City star John Michie dies at Bestival – September 11th 2017
Man arrested over actor’s daughter’s death released under investigation – September 12th 2017
Drugs quiz for man held over death of daughter of Holby City´s John Michie – September 12th 2017
Holby City star’s daughter looked ‘odd and unsteady’ in the hours before she was found dead in secluded woods in drug-related death – September 12th 2017
But our pick of the Mail’s barrage of stories on the death of ‘John Michie’s daughter’ is this one about Louella Michie taking the ice-bucket challenge:
The daughter of TV actor John Michie, took part in the internet craze.
Today’s story in the Mail begins in customary fashion, with the victim absent:
The rapper boyfriend of Holby City star John Michie’s daughter has been released by police after being arrested over her death at Bestival, with the actor’s family saying they believe the pair had taken drugs
As the Mail thinks the “dead girl” not worthy of mention by name, the Sun (nine stories so far) knows so little about Louella Michie it’s reduced to focusing on her looks. Today’s update begins:
A festival-goer claims the forest area where the green-eyed 25-year-old died had been used by drug dealers and that she “didn’t look very well” when spotted before her death
As police investigate the death so other green-eyed women and look for a pattern, Sun readers find Louella Michie missing from the paper’s headlines:
FESTIVAL TRAGEDY – Holby City star John Michie’s daughter Louella was found dead at Bestival – 13 September 2017
Pals reveal Holby City star’s tragic girl looked ‘unsteady and odd’ in woods used by drug dealers before she died at Bestival as boyfriend is released by cops – 13 September 2017
BESTIVAL SUSPECT RELEASED Boyfriend of Holby star John Michie’s tragic daughter is released as her devastated family say ‘there was no malice’ in her death – 12 September 2017
BESTIVAL PROBE Man held on suspicion of ‘murder’ over Holby star’s daughter is also being quizzed over supply of Class A drugs – 12 September 2017
BESTIVAL DEATH DASH – Holby City star made 130 mile 1am dash to Bestival after WhatsApp map pinpointed where his daughter was found dead – 12 September 2017
DAYS BEFORE DEATH – John Michie posted haunting photo of daughter sewing outfit for Bestival days before she was found dead – 12 September
HOLBY PAL’S HEARTACHE Strictly star’s heartbreaking message to Holby co-star after his daughter is found dead at Bestival – 11 September
But top prize goes in the John Michie news frenzy goes to the DailyMirror, which has published no fewer than 11 stories on Louella Michie’s dad, the pick of which being:
Who is John Michie? Tragedy as ex-Coronation Street star’s daughter confirmed dead at Bestival
At a guess, we’d say he’s man grieving for his daughter.
Hands up who feels sorry for Richard Branson, whose private Necker island was smashed up by Hurricane Irma? I said, “Hands up who…” Oh, never mind. The billionaire would-be rocket-shop operator has shared pictures of Necker after Irma hit. He tweets that he’s looking at ways to help people in the British Virgin Islands left destitute: “Necker damage huge, but BVI #Irma story is not about Necker – about 1000s of people who’ve lost homes & livelihoods.”
But how can such disasters be prevented? Better houses? More money? How about stopping climate change? On the Virgin Group website, Branson explains all:
“Man-made climate change is contributing to increasingly strong hurricanes causing unprecedented damage. The whole world should be scrambling to get on top of the climate change issue before it is too late – for this generation, let alone the generations to come.”
That’s the same Richard Branson who operates an, er airline and is looking to develop commercial spaceflight through Virgin Galactic. You might wonder how he reaches his Caribbean Island? Rowing boat? Balloon? You might also wonder if paying taxes in the country that helped you get stinking rich is its own way performing an act of social responsibility, allowing governments to sort out the cash and improve standards of living.
Branson is a tax exile.
But Branson has issued a call for help. “We were very fortunate to have a strong cellar built into Necker’s Great House and we were lucky all of our teams who stayed on the island during the storm are safe and well,” says Branson in a Virgin blog post.
He then pulls on the the missionary’s hat and tells the unfortunates without power, clothes, food, windows and roofs but who are nonetheless tuned into Branson’s views via the wind-powered internet: “There are worrying reports of civil unrest spreading. I urge everybody to stay safe, remain calm and support each other. Help is on its way.”
Virgin Atlantic is transporting aid to the region, he says. And that can only be a good thing. Think not of the rich man’s grandstanding but of the needy being helped. His son Sam is delivering supplies aboard Virgin’s 105ft catamaran, Necker Belle. “The region needs a Disaster Recovery Marshall Plan,” says Branson.
He then tells us: “There’s this image of the British Virgin Islands — yes there are wealthy people here but the very vast majority are ordinary working people,” he notes, reminding us that staff are not volunteers and not everyone’s there on holiday. Who knew?
Sir Ernest Shackleton (5 February 1874 – 5 January 1922) died on an exhibition to the Antarctic. In December 1903 the great explorer applied to be Secretary of the The Royal Scottish Geographical Society (RSGS). Indeed, he got the job on January 11 1904, acting as the RSGS’s Secretary from 1904-1905.
The RSGS’s current writer-in-residence Jo Woolf has found a copy of Shackleton’s CV. They want to know what it says in the margin. There are pencil notes (see above). You can let them know by writing to enquiries@rsgs.org.
Paul Hollywood, 51, once pulled on a Nazi uniform and strode into the White Stag pub in Monkon, Kent. His wife was dressed a member of the French Resistance, albeit unarmed and of a sort imagined by writers of British sex comedies (low cut top, perky beret, fishnets and lots of ooooo-la-la).
That Hollywood pretended to be a Nazi officer 14 years ago as part of a private fancy dress do is neither here nor there.
The British public accord unquestioning respect to presenters on TV cooking show The Great British Bake Off, and as a role model for impressionable amateur bakers, Hollywood should be rightfully shamed. Yes, the Pope wore a Nazi uniform, often, so too Kurt Waldheim, the fourth Secretary-General of the United Nations, Prince Harry, and rockers like Lemmy, Keith Moon, Siouxsie Sioux, Sid Vicious and Brian Jones also pulled on the feldgrau and Swastika, but they never made cakes on the telly. And for that we should be grateful.
Keith Moon
Former Labour Party MP and shadow Chancellor Ed Balls
“I am absolutely devastated if this cased offence to anyone.” says Paul, whose picture emerged in yesterday’s Sun. “Everyone who knows me, knows I am incredibly proud of the effort of those, including my own grandfather, who fought the Nazis during the war.”
In the Daily Mail, the paper that once infamously cheered for Hitler’s blackshirts, we hear not advice on how to sport the Nazi uniform and why Hollywood’s get-up is an affront to the shirt, rather the words of former Bake Off finalist Ruby Tandoh, who opined on Twitter: “Absolutely creasin at pple telling me: “IT WAS TEN YEARS AGO” as is the Nazis weren’t bad back then.”
To say nothing of them not being on he telly all that much.
He was giving a talk at an upmarket girl’s school about his time as a pilot in the Second World War. “So there were two of the f***ers behind me, three f***ers to my right, another f***er on the left,” he told the audience. The headmistress went pale and interjected: “Ladies, the Fokker was a German aircraft.” Sir Douglas replied: “That may be, madam, but these f***ers were in Messerschmitts.”
Former Manchester Untied and England footballer Wayne Rooney, now back playing for his boyhood club Everton, has been caught drink-driving in a car belonging to pneumatic single mum Laura Simpson. She says they shared a kiss and a cuddle. She says married Wayne, whose pregnant wife Coleen Rooney was on holiday at the time, ogled her breasts. She also says:
“I can understand [Coleen] being mad with him over the arrest, that was stupid and on reflection he should never have driven my car but he didn’t seem to be over the limit.
“But she can’t blame him for anything that happened with me because nothing did really, although we would have ended up shagging no doubt.”
In 2010, Norwegian TV show Gylne Tider, aka Gyldne Tider (trans: Golden Times) produced this stupendous video.
The show featured presenter by Øyvind Mund, cameraman Steinar Marthinsen and sound engineer Ingar Thorsen travelling to meet their childhood heroes. Having journey through Scandinavia asking ‘Didn’t you used to be..?’, the third series focused on international stars, such as: Linda Evans, Pamela Sue Martin, Lorenzo Lamas, Sabrina, Samantha Fox, Mark Hamill, Bo Derek, Al Corley, Bruce Boxleitner, Richard Chamberlain, Glenn Medeiros, The Bangles, Duane Loken, Mel Smith and Peter Shilton. For the 2010 series someone thought it a sound idea to get a load of familiar faces sing and have them sing The Beatles’ Let it Be.
Look out for: Pamela Anderson, Mickey Rourke, Jason Alexander, Glenn Close, Ricki Lake, Roger Moore, Daryl Hannah, John Nettles and more…
Just in case you hadn’t heard, it’s 20 years since the death of Princess Diana. The Diana Industry is in full cry. In today’s instalment, former royal servant Paul Burrell is seen eying the site of the car cash that killed his boss in Paris and sharing his “troubling questions” over her death.
Paul’s thoughts are front-page news in the Mirror. And on pages 4 and 5 you get a lot more of them. Burrell, who has made a career from being Diana’s “Rock”, says, “My heart tells me it was a terrible accident.” To say nothing of the countless books, coroner’s reports, police inquiry, TV specials and a million to-deadline opinions about the car crash.
Paul then takes time out to gives us a city tour. He says he “never realised how close the Eiffel Tower was” to the Pont de l’Alma tunnel, where Diana died, an underpass he “never realised” was so small. “Now I realise it [the Tower] must have been the last thing she saw before the crash,” says Paul.
Having realised much and shared her last view, Burrell then shares Diana’s demise, albeit mentally. “I dreamt last night I would crash and die in the exact same place,” says Burrell. Not all dreams come true. And Paul is alive to place a “touching” card on the bridge. It says – and it’s all written in easy-to-read capital letters:
YOU WILL BE WITH ME FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE … AND ONE DAY WE WILL BE RE-UNITED AND SIT AND LAUGH AND LOVE.
YOUR ROCK.
P.
Always nice when a staff member enjoys their work, but Paul seems a tad besotted with Diana. He says it took a few hours before he realised “she had left me”. In the hospital where she died, coppers showed him the room where Diana is lying, her hair washed, her body carrying the scent of formaldehyde – “I can still smell it, like I still smell her perfume, Hermes 24 Faubourg.” The Mirror plays along, saying Burrell was “the first person to see her body” (if so, who washed her hair and declared her dead?). He says he entered the room to “stare death in the face”. Lest you think facing the Grim Reaper something you do when faced with your own mortality, Burrell opines: “I’d lost my reason for being.”
But he found a new one, and whether it be talking about Diana in the tabloids, writing about Diana in your book, eating ‘roo gonads on I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!. judging would-be Dianas on Australian Princess, working out anagrams of ‘CROK’ on Countdown, singing on Celebrity Stars in Their Eyes, or shopping on Celebrity Big Brother, Burrell’s soldiered on.
Have you seen the “SEX PICS” of the “TWO TO TV STARS”. The saucy photos “LEAKED ONLINE” are front-page news on the Daily Star. Nasty stuff, indeed, to have your private moments stolen and shared with the world. The two celebs, two of the country’s “biggest stars”, have called in the lawyers.
The Star is appalled. And anyone looking for the “explicits naked snaps” of the “2 telly babes” – the “extremely intimate shots” – of the “beauties”on an “X-rated” website should be ashamed of themselves. Says a spokesperson for one of the women:” “The selfies were taken from social media accounts but the topless images claiming to be of her are fake.”
So there are no sex pics. The images weren’t leaked, rather shared and photoshopped. Aside from that the Star’s lead story is, er, correct.
Meanwhile, in other celebrity naked news, Katharine McPhee is “fighting back”.
The actress and singer, 33, filed suit in Los Angeles County Tuesday in response to intimate photos of her being published on pornographic websites after her phone got hacked.
Miley Cyrus is naked in public – again:
Intimate pictures allegedly showing Miley Cyrus and Stella Maxwell together, Kristen Stewart apparently topless and former couple Tiger Woods and Lindsey Vonn apparently naked have surfaced online.
The odd things about all this is that while the newspapers report on the story of leaked sex photos, anyone who cares is online looking for the images. If there’s any one story that shows how out-of-step the dead-tree Press is, it’s when dirty photos get leaked online.
If you want the KLF to sign your book, you’ll need to obey their rules.
On my way to Liverpool for the KLF thing and what’s shaping up to be the greatest book signing in pop history (pic via Kristy off Facebook) pic.twitter.com/nwHBxHwKns
Clooney looks “ace” in the Daily Mirror. The paper has a paparazzi shot of George Clooney and Amal Clooney at a tennis match lose to their home in Italy. Neither is holding a racket, but they are holding hands. They look like a well-groomed couple minding their own business.
But over in the Mail, Clooney is “frazzled”. He’s a new dad “after two months of sleepless nights”. No, not or the couple’s umpteen nannies, for George. To prove its point (surely to spin a story from a papped photo? – Ed) the Mail shows us Clooney looking “fresh-face and beaming” in April.
PS: on the day the the Mail leads once more with news of Princess Diana 20 years after her death, odd indeed it should feature a half-page paparazzi photos of the Clooneys. After all, it was in the wake of Diana’s death that the Mail made this pledge:
8 September 1997, eight days after the death of Princess Diana:
“Mail leads the way in banning paparazzi pictures.
“The proprietor of the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday and Evening Standard announced last night that his papers will not in future purchase pictures taken by paparazzi
“Viscount Rothermere, chairman of the Daily Mail and General Trust plc said: ‘I am, and always have been, an admirer of Diana, Princess of Wales, and nagged my editors to protect her so far as they could against her powerful enemies.
“In view of Earl Spencer’s strong words and my own sense of outrage, I have instructed my editors no ‘paparazzi’ pictures are to be purchased without my knowledge and consent.'”
