SUZY
Byline: Aileen Mehle
The news from Paris has those veteran French screen heartthrobs of the sexy Sixties, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon, plotting to team up for a new movie. Lock up your grandmothers.
Jose Carreras, he of the liquid voice and one of the three top tenors of the world, is planning to marry the Polish model, Patrycja Woy-Wojciechowski in September. If she’s planning to keep her name, I give up. Jose has been divorced since 1992, but until recently was linked with German model Petra Schlapp. She’s a darling and all that, but maybe her name wasn’t weird enough.
If the Labour Party wins the next election in Britain, and Tony Blair takes over as prime minister, Lauren Booth, who plays a lovely, long-legged nurse in “In Love and War,” will have a half-sister as the new First Lady. Lauren is one of the seven daughters of actor and legendary ladies’ man, Tony Booth, and so is Mrs. Tony Blair. No need to stop the presses.
Vatel was the name of Louis XIV’s starcrossed chef who killed himself when the fish didn’t arrive on time for dinner, a piscatorial tragedy of the first water. Now that fish story will be made into a movie, and Gerard Depardieu will star as Vatel. No truth to the report that the soundtrack for the flick will go heavy on “O, sole mio,” though. Oh, hahahahaha.
Gucci-goo. Paolo Gucci’s widow, Jenny, is being sued by his mistress, Penny Armstrong, to gain title to his estate in England as well as maintenance for the two children she claims he sired. Jenny and Penny are not seeing eye to eye, no siree. Meanwhile, over in Italy, Patrizia Martinelli, ex of fashion heir Maurizio Gucci, is the star prisoner in a Milanese jail, awaiting trial on charges of arranging Maurizio’s murder. It’s all that hot Mediterranean blood combined with all that spicy pasta al dente.
No sooner were the beauteous Lady Antonia Fraser’s daughter Flora and New York entrepreneur Peter Soros married last week than Flora’s younger sister, Natasha, announced her engagement to property agent Jean-Pierre Cavassoni. And since Flora and Natasha’s elder sister, Rebecca, is happily wed to legal eagle Edward Fitzgerald, don’t you just love Lady Antonia’s telling quip after the announcement? “I feel just like Mrs. Bennett at the end of ‘Pride and Prejudice,”‘ quoth she, referring to that fluttery lady’s giddy glee when she finally got her girls suitably married. Lady Antonia is herself suitably married to the playwright Harold Pinter — but you knew that.
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So many actors are dying to work with director Mike Leigh, whose “Secrets and Lies” just won an Oscar nomination, that they’re willing to pay. One of them is Greta Scacchi, who laid out $1,500 for a walk-on in his new film. Not because she’s short on job offers, mind you. She bid for the part at a London charity auction, the sweet thing. Will she have to pay more if they build up the part?
Another bit of London gossip, take it or leave it: Prince Charles is said to be so concerned about aggressive reporters pursuing his adored Camilla Parker-Bowles that he’s put his driver and personal staff at her disposal. Ain’t that what friends are for?
So there was Sharon Stone, who never stays home, draped in silk and stole, sitting on the aisle opposite Veronique and Gregory Peck at “Chicago.” Leaning across, she introduced herself, said she’d enjoyed hearing Gregory at a performance reciting Irish poetry and then added, “Put me in touch with the Irish in me.” I don’t know what you think, but Veronique Peck thought it was sweet.
Then the society orchestra leader Bob Hardwick, sitting behind Peck, introduced himself, reminding the star how he had helped to change Hardwick’s career. Several years ago, when Hardwick was playing the piano at a Kentucky Derby party, he told Peck he was thinking of giving up a banking career to become a musician full time. To which Peck replied, just like in a movie, “A life in the arts is always preferable to a life in business. Look how well it turned out for you.” It’s enough to bring a lump to the throat, almost.
It’s heigh-ho and off for Round Hill in Jamaica the weekend of March 7, just in time to celebrate Round Hill’s big anniversary party. Such swells have been invited to share the fun as Pia Lindstrom; her half-brother Robertino Rossellini; Jennifer Grant (Cary Grant’s daughter); Errol Flynn’s widow, Patrice Wymore; Errol’s grandson, model Luke Flynn; Ricky and Ralph Lauren (they own a house in Round Hill); Archduke Karl von Habsburg and his wife, Francesca (she is the daughter of billionaire art collector Heinie Thyssen); Judy Green; Ann Downey, and the noted director Robert Zemeckis and his wife, Mary Ellen. The junketeers are all looking forward to three days of tropical splendor with Jamaican food and music, a beach party under the stars and a raft trip on the Great River. It takes so little to make some people happy.
There’s an old Italian expression that would have us believe people fall into two categories, mushrooms and orchids, coming either from the forest floor or the hothouse. Do you know which you are? Do you care? Whatever, both forms of life were on hand at The New York Botanical Garden’s Orchid Dinner at the magnificent University Club, but only the orchids were on parade at the winter garden party. Philip Miller of the Saks Fifth Avenue Millers and his wife, Ann, were the co-chairmen, and Mrs. Thomas J. Hubbard and Carolina Herrera, who looked very much the orchid in her Carolina Herrera silk evening suit, were the honorary chairmen. Nancy Novograd gathered together a group of orchid lovers who created the table’s centerpieces, and Madison Cox, the garden designer, provided orchid wrist corsages for the women at his table. Jane Stubbs, the book and print lover, said her inspiration came from an antique print that depicts a garden party at Versailles when Louis XIV was in flower, and Josie Natori, the fashion and fragrance designer, settled on a landscape orchid garden in pure white. Others who provided the lush table-top gardens were Bill Blass, Oscar de la Renta, David Easton, Rennie Reynolds, Bunny Williams and others too orchidaceous to mention. Do you remember how these exotic blooms figured so prominently in the stylish lives of Coco Chanel, Diana Vreeland and Doris Duke? Or how Geoffrey Beene, C.Z. Guest, Betsey Whitney, Diane Von Furstenberg and Yves Saint Laurent have trouble living without them? Yves has his own hothouses in Deauville and insists that the finest orchids be driven up to Paris just as they’re opening. Is that Yves precious or what?