One of the snags of going on holiday with one’s high-powered girlfriends is they suddenly split to run for Governor of California. Especially if it’s raining.
I am sitting with Arianna Huffington in the dining room at Ballymaloe House in County Cork debating with her kids and mine whether to explore the tea shops of Bunratty or the rainswept cliffs of Ballycotton when there’s another blast of the Tallyho overture from Arianna’s cell phone. This time it’s Warren Beatty. The gist of his message: “Run Arianna Run!”
Perhaps it’s all a brilliant stunt, like Bunburying in “The Importance of Being Earnest,” so she can escape the Irish weather. As I start to consider this possibility there’s a cacophony of new calls — from political consultants, Hollywood activists, media pundits, and, just when she had sat down again to enjoy the show-stopping summer pudding, a Hispanic labor leader who swears the fealty of all his members. Nope, it’s real. We’ve only been in Ireland for two days and Arianna is heading back to L.A. to throw her hat in the California recall ring.
The key to Warren Beatty as a political consultant is that he sees everything as a movie. Huffington versus Schwarzenegger? The Athenian Amazon versus the Austrian Atlas. Big hair versus big biceps. Insurgent Greek versus Hapsburgian Hulk. TV talker versus action star. The battle of the accents, a cartoon race between self-invented superaliens. Maybe he’s right. Except that ever since it became clear that the Democratic governor Gray Davis was toast and a moneybags Republican car alarm mogul successfully financed a recall campaign, this race has been not so much a movie as an episode of “American Idol.”
Ultimately even Arnold had his moment of doubt. Schwarzenegger’s sudden reticence was supposedly about “family issues,” i.e., the unwillingness of his wife Maria Shriver to keep reading about his rumored infidelities. But I suspect that Arnold’s issues were more political than pulchritudinal. Arnold worried that edging out 300 weirdos in the recall wouldn’t be about anything but his name I.D. as a movie star – and he wants full-on political acceptance. Anything less would fail to shove it up the nose of his hoity toity Kennedy in-laws. As one Hollywood sage summed it up to me, “Going for the recall is like putting out a $10 million indie movie and hoping to do 50 million in grosses. As always, Arnold wants to make a $100 million picture and gross a billion.” But in the end, the “T3″ babe knew that the Governor was too good a part to turn down.
With Arnold as a foil for Arianna, I see no downside in her giving the race a whirl as an Independent candidate. Her whole career has been one of fantastic reinvention. I’ve known her since she was the star of the Cambridge Union debating society and I was a burgeoning hack at Oxford in the seventies. I’ve enjoyed all her incarnations, from early protigi of Lord Weidenfeld and girlfriend of the London Times’ op-ed grey beard Bernard Levin to conqueror of New York society and Park Avenue hostess in big-shouldered suits, from inexplicable New Age disciple of self-fulfillment guru John-Roger to campaigning wife of Republican oil heir Michael Huffington (she helped him blow $30 million on a failed race for California senator), from Washington right-wing saloniste to shrewdly self-deprecating comedienne divorcee on the talk show circuit — right down to her unlikely role today as ecologically hip anti-SUV campaigner, folk heroine of radical political web sites, and author of the best-selling, corporate America-skewering “Pigs at the Trough.” In all the frenzy of these juggled identities she’s still a tactile mom, wrapping her adoring daughters in absentminded embraces as she jabbers into her earpiece about campaign finance reform.
There’s no doubt that Arianna’s weird odyssey was always destined to settle her in California, capital of reinvention. She looks 10 years younger than she did in New York and D.C. The big hair has slimmed down and she has lost the Madame Secretary maquillage, too. Now she’s hot – a tall, striding 50-something babe in designer jeans who hikes the Hollywood hills with entertainment power women.
At first, Arianna’s noisy switcheroo from Republican moll to left-of-center firebrand was seen as the opportunistic move of a publicity ho, given the handsome terms of her divorce settlement from Huffington when he decided to come out as gay. But Arianna is genuinely smart. Liberated from Huffington (who made a sudden, unwelcome re-intrusion the other day when, in an act of competitive petulance designed to embarrass her, he announced that he too may be a candidate in the recall race), she spent the next seven years industriously columnizing. She won the hearts of TV producers by rescuing innumerable draggy cable TV talk shows with ballsy displays of intellectual flame-throwing. Now the left has finally realized they ought to be grateful to her. They badly need entertaining spokespeople and Arianna is articulate and funny and sexy.
Early Wednesday morning, Candidate Huffington unveiled her newest identity in a packed press conference at the grassroots South Central L.A haven for needy teens, A Place Called Home. She has always been a dynamite speaker and this one was a barnburner.
“My Democratic friends say that this recall is a right-wing power grab; backed by those who want a backdoor way to overturn an election they lost.
“And you know what? Those friends are right. [But] however corrupt the parentage of the recall effort, it has given us an unprecedented opportunity to take back our political system — to reorder our policy priorities so that our public servants will finally, at long last, get back to serving the public.
“I am not running to aid and abet a right-wing coup. Indeed, I am running to prevent it. We must make sure that we don’t turn control of the state over to zealots who would bring us back to the Dark Ages on reproductive rights, gun control, gay rights, and immigration policy, while selling off our precious natural resources to the highest bidder!”
Arianna is up and running. You go, girlfriend.
Jeffery Archer would feel at home in the Hamptons. New York’s East Coast playground right now is the social scene of the crime. It’s crawling with uptown parolees and high-end cons. Everyone’s feting felons. If you’re indicted, you’re invited. The post-Enron era feels like the nearly ’90s all over again, when Wall Street was in its penal prime.
The missing guest is Martha’s pal Dr. Sam Waksal, once feted for his quest to market a new drug for colon cancer. While his friends flee the city on their private planes, the biotech millionaire, ex-chairman of ImClone and medical man about town has packed up his stylish SoHo loft to go to jail. I went by to see him with one of his friends just before he disappeared into the slammer for insider trading, tax evasion on art buys and obstruction of justice (i.e., lying to the feds).
He was nursing a sore gum. Upscale prisoners-to-be spend the last days of freedom in an orgy of root canal work. Jailhouse dentistry is notoriously fiendish and Waksal will be inside for seven years, no parole. His bitterest reflection is that he’ll be locked up when Erbitux, the drug he battled to develop, will finally be helping cancer patients. It’s about to receive approval from the FDA, the very agency whose rejection in 2001 triggered Waksal’s illegal panic alert to family stockholders and the spiral of his decline.
In his glory days as a 50-something divorcé, Waksal’s expressive walnut face could be seen at Manhattan power dinners working the room with an intellectual showmanship that was as much catnip to women as to investors. All that winner’s spin has subsided and he has reverted to the more interesting self he submerged long ago — the worldly nerd with a questing mind, who probably would have been of little interest to the high rollers. He sits framed by blank walls (his Rothkos and DeKoonings have gone). An electronic ankle bracelet peeps from his khaki chinos. “If I was told I have a choice,” he says, “between canceling my sentence or postponing Erbitux again I’d choose jail every time.” It sounds like a defense mechanism prison shrinks call “dissonance reduction,” but Waksal is genuinely haunted by the scandal’s impact on his proud parents who survived the Holocaust. “Mother is not doing well with all of this. My daughter told her, ‘Dad will get through it. Think of how you got through Auschwitz.’ And she said, ‘Yes, but Auschwitz was only one year.’”
Waksal’s biggest fear is not the loss of freedom. It’s being unproductive. “As long as I can read and write I’ll feel less scared.” He’s decided to teach himself Italian and ancient Greek. “Do you know how much time one wastes in real life?” he says with a touch of his old brio. “Answering the phone? Going out to dinner? Trying to get laid?”
He recalls a beautiful girl he dated who was interested only in gifts and trips. “As I walked away, feeling guilty about ending the affair, she called out, ‘Sam!’ I turned around expecting tears of regret. She said, ‘The water ski instructor needs to be paid in cash.’”
Memories like this may help Sam Waksal say goodbye to the man he was.
Clearly, the tabloid cliché of millionaire cons living it up at a Club Fed “open prison” is way off. An assignment to a “medical facility” is not a soft option. It’s where the Bureau of Prisons dumps some of the biggest sickos. At the federal prison where the stately Sotheby’s CEO Al Taubman did time, he was liable to run into Justin Volpe, the famously evil New York cop who sodomized a Haitian detainee with the handle of a floor mop.
Taubman looks misleadingly svelte now, and so does the former big-shot lawyer, Al Pirro, a graduate from Eglin Prison Camp in Florida on a tax rap, but they will tell you there is no such thing as easy time. Pirro, who has rebounded as a successful public real estate negotiator, coped with prison by deploying a Zen approach. “I lived moment by moment, never discussing anything about my life with the other inmates.” On Day 1 of his sentence, he told me, an inmate approached him.
“He said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s not that bad. Do you play golf?’
“I said, ‘Yeah, I play golf.’
“‘You’ll love Mondays then. Tennis?’
“‘Yeah, tennis is good.’
“‘Well, all we do on Tuesdays is play tennis. You like smoking cigars and playing billiards?’
“‘Sounds great.’
“‘Wednesdays will be good. You gay?’
“‘No.’
“‘You’ll hate Thursdays then.’”
A joke, of course. But what’s real, said Pirro, is the fear of attracting “diesel therapy,” which can be administered pretty much on whim. Officially, what’s involved is simply a prison transfer. The destination prison may be better or worse, but the trip itself is the real punishment. It’s hell — worse if they want to make it so. By comparison with diesel therapy, Jeffrey Archer’s three-hour transfer in a 4×3 sweatbox was a joy ride. The U.S. prisoner is cuffed at a 90 degree angle, shackled at the ankles, chained by the waist to other cons, and stuffed into a stifling van (hence the “diesel”). It stops only to pick up desperadoes from other “body warehouses” with the unlovely prospect of sharing sleepovers with them in a different correctional hellhole every night. This can go on for a week, or months — the marshals have 180 days to get you there. Meanwhile, family and lawyer have no idea where you are. And God help you if you have to relieve yourself more often than once every four hours.
I didn’t have the heart to tell Sam Waksal about these researches into diesel therapy. I can only wish the poor guy well with his studies of Italian and ancient Greek.
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There’s been a round of elegant goodbye dinners in New York for the retiring British ambassador to the U.N, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, whose “soft landing” is the hellhole of Iraq.
Instead of presiding this autumn as scheduled over convivial skull sessions at Ditchley Manor, the Oxfordshire country house for Anglo-American Big Thinks, Greenstock is headed for a portacabin in the military compound in the roiling stews of Baghdad.
The perverse thing about being a diplomat is that this is considered an honor. Because of the increasingly absurd compulsory retirement age of 60, too many of Her Majesty’s most experienced diplomatic servants are pottering about Norfolk gardens when they could be sorting out some needy corner or ex-Empire.
Sir Jeremy, who hits the big six-oh on July 27, was plucked out by Tony Blair to be his special envoy for nine months of crisis management, getting the new Iraqi Governing Council off the ground and then, hey presto, creating a new constitution. His wife Lady Anne, who, like her husband, speaks “conversational Arabic,” plans to go with him if she can carve out a decent role. “I am not going to twiddle my thumbs and go for long walks along the Tigris,” she told a mutual friend.
No one who knows Greenstock doubts he has the right stuff. He started his career as a housemaster at Eton, and he has that keen-as-mustard authority that must have made a disciplinary trip to his study a rather bracing form of humiliation. He’s the kind of able, dry-humored, shrewdly cultured Foreign Office fixer who, as Madeleine Albright told me, “always knows how to de-fang the problem,” usually with a sly joke or some cunningly crafted, multi-layered bit of maneuvering. Casting-wise, you’d have to think Fox brothers, James or Edward (either would do). Greenstock played a crucial, behind the scenes role in 1999, securing east Timor’s independence. “I find that problems are usually solved in small talky groups,” he explained at the dinner the other night, “not with big, stated goals.”
He will be the rapier to the broadsword of Bush’s can-do neocon, Paul “Jerry” Bremer, who is never seen without his Army combat boots. (The boots are for the dust, he claims, but at the singularly undusty Davos conference in Jordan, the suspicion was that they’re just another Bush administration cowboy style signifier.)
“It’s true that the Brits do have a broader atavistic memory for a country like Iraq,” Greenstock told me. “But even we can’t understand all the intricacies of a situation which has been repressed for so long. We are very keen to spread the load internationally.”
According to Henry Kissinger, British diplomats are peerless when it comes to finding the right words to codify elusive agreements. And they’re superb manipulators. “Brits have the ability to make us feel embarrassed when we disagree,” he told me. “They use guilt, which is very effective. They also have great analytical gifts. Greenstock brings experience of how issues appear in a multilateral framework.”
Or as one network journalist put it, “Greenstock is the kind of Brit who can pull a historical reference out of his ass when he’s talking to Al Jazeera.”
The British diplomat usually gets a bad rap in movie folklore. Either he’s an upper-class twit who can fake it because he knows how to order a decent Chablis and is aware that Uffizi isn’t a brand of sparkling mineral water, or else he’s a small moustached cutthroat with impeccable manners slicing up the Ottoman Empire over a dry sherry. Chamberlain in his striped pants waving Hitler’s signature was the essence of untrustworthy mandarin professionalism, and the Cambridge spies Burgess and Maclean didn’t help the crumpets-and-buggery image of the F.O. over here.
The Iraq chaos and the ego tussles between Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon, along with America’s Blair worship, have brought a new appreciation from Democrats and Republicans alike for sophisticated operators like Greenstock. Plus, he has filled the gap of articulating Anglo-American positions since the departure of the high-profile Richard Holbrooke as Clinton’s man at the United Nations. John Negroponte, in a dis to the U.N. by the Bush crowd, was denied the Cabinet rank of his predecessors, so is more bottled up in access.
Greenstock’s genial, prep-school style could not be more different from Donald Rumsfeld’s blustering shiftiness with George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week” when he quizzed him on how those 16 words about African uranium slid into the State of the Union speech in January. “You don’t listen,” barked the Rumster (nearly adding, “kid!”) when Stephanopoulos had the temerity to press him on how long U.S. troops might stay in Iraq. Between bullying Rummy and boy George the show was a schoolroom smackdown between Mr. Wackford Squeers and Nicholas Nickleby. Under fire, Rumsfeld’s irascibility is turning ever more Dickensian.
In boiling Baghdad, maybe Greenstock can overcome the political feuds and save the day for Blair, Bremer and Bush. Either way, though, it’s probably a win-win situation for Bush where Blair is concerned. If things more or less work out, the poodle wins the blue ribbon at the dog show and Bush, far more than Blair, gets the political credit. If it all goes to hell, the Bushies get the consolation of seeing the British version of Bill Clinton go down the tubes. Not only is Blair Clinton’s best friend and soulmate abroad (still), he’s also, in domestic terms, just the kind of politician the Bushies are most afraid of — socially liberal but with strong appeal to the moderate middle and a spooky talent for stealing the center-right’s thunder. The special relationship is all very well but there’s also a special relationship between Republicans and Tories on the one hand and Democrats and Labour on the other. If Blair goes down it’ll weaken the former but strengthen the latter. Radical Islamism might triumph, but at least it’d be the end of International Clintonism.
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For tabloid editors and the beach blankets of the Hamptons it was a double boon that the latest round of Kennedy scandals hit just in time for the Fourth of July weekend. After a frowning spring of post-Iraq agonies, we can all use less Saddam and more Gomorrah.
First we have the publication of Ed Klein’s bioporn epic “The Kennedy Curse,” with its hush-hush unraveling of the marriage of the late John F. Kennedy Jr. and poor, doomed Carolyn Bessette. This has given the tabs an excuse to rerun all those elegant, sexy pictures — Carolyn dashing from apartment buildings like a gorgeous greyhound fleeing her troubled secrets, John with his softly chiseled hurt handsomeness and his smooth Adonis-like musculature.
Hard on the heels of Klein’s revisionism comes the rather more startling news of the marital Chernobyl of Kerry Kennedy Cuomo, Bobby and Ethel Kennedy’s high-minded human rights activist daughter. Kerry — mother of three, sister/niece/cousin/aunt of too many to count — dumps her thrusting politico husband, Andrew Cuomo, for a charmingly caddish lounge lizard, restaurateur Bruce Colley.
Wow! For once, a Kennedy woman behaves like a Kennedy man! A nice revenge for the generations of Kennedy women who have borne their husbands’ infidelities and the family’s bullyings in stoic silence.
The last time a Kennedy woman showed that kind of spunk was in 1944 — nearly 60 years ago! — when JFK’s eldest and most spirited sister, Kathleen, known to all as “Kick,” bravely defied her piously Catholic mother to marry Billy Cavendish, aka Lord Hartington, son and heir to the Duke of Devonshire. Seven months later he was dead, killed in action, and soon enough she was dead too, killed in a small-plane crash in the south of France in 1948 — one of the crashes Jackie must have had in mind when, decades later, she beseeched her son not to take flying lessons.
For the hungry paparazzi who’ve had nothing to cover but the premieres of bad summer blockbusters, the Kennedy-Cuomo-Colley saga has been a welcome feast of flashy photo ops. There is the nonchalant picture of Colley swinging a polo mallet like some throwback to Scott Fitzgerald’s Tom Buchanan in “The Great Gatsby.” There’s the steamy Kerry Kennedy bikini shot with windswept hair on a boat in Hyannis Port, where she fled for familial support. There is the pained glimpse of Andrew Cuomo stewing alone on a grim vacation with the kids. (Colley, natch, hightailed it out of town. The only disappointing aspect of Kerry’s fling is that she seems to want to marry the guy, who is an obvious bad boy. You can tell from the fact his ex-wife and ex-girlfriends all like him.)
The way the scandal has broken provides additional juice. Andrew Cuomo went public first in a gnomic statement from his lawyer that puzzlingly said, without further details, “Mr. Cuomo was betrayed and saddened by his wife’s conduct during their marriage.”
In Southampton, at a swell annual party on a carpetlike, blazingly green lawn, nobody had much time for the wronged husband. This is not just because the east end of Long Island is Kennedy country — Caroline, Jean Kennedy Smith and Pat Lawford, another JFK sister, all summer there. It’s because Andrew Cuomo broke all the rules of gossip deportment. Maybe his complaint about betrayal was a genuine, uncalculated cri de coeur. But if (as the Hamptons crowd takes for granted) it’s a strategy, then it’s a colossally dumb one. What can he hope to gain from playing the self-pitying victim? Kennedys don’t like losing, so the Cuomo marriage was probably doomed after Andrew’s failed gubernatorial run last year; at rallies for Andrew, Kerry had increasingly hogged the mike as his chances faded. As JFK, Bill Clinton, and even Bruce Colley could have told him, women (and the public) prefer a philanderer to a victim.
Mario Cuomo, New York’s distinguished Democratic governor for 12 years, became America’s liberal Demosthenes, revered for his eloquence and passion. If Cuomo the younger wants to rise in politics, calling up Bruce Colley and yelling, “Stay away from my kids!” showed only a distressing recourse to a Soprano ambience his classy dad disdained. Thus, the big men of Southampton who cruised the lawn at dusk with their martinis decreed that Andrew Cuomo is not just a loser, he’s an asshole.
Hamptons women, meanwhile, focused on the meaning of Kerry Kennedy’s front-page from-the-knees-up frontal bikini shot in the sailboat. Who’s her trainer? they wanted to know. Those taut abs are awesome, and there’s no way that snap was an accident. It was a statement to both those guys, loudmouthed Andy, who was always exploiting her name as well as his own, and craven Bruce, who, the minute the press heat was on, announced, “I love my wife” and split. In Monday’s tabs we got another Kerry pic, wearing tiny denim cutoffs. It confirmed what we had begun to suspect: The rest of her legs are just as good. You have to hand it to Mrs. Cuomo. After three kids and 13 years in a grueling political marriage campaigning for a guy who can’t get elected, she came up with a graphic, irrefutable way to announce: “This is what 43 looks like!”
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Meanwhile, across the continent, the only Kennedy anyone cares about is the Republican one, future Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who opened his campaign by winning the weekend box office in “Terminator 3.”
No one will yet admit to wanting to vote for Arnold, but he intrigues and delights for a simple reason: He’s a Happy Warrior. Remember when, amid the sullen landscape of young male showbiz, he seemed like the only guy who really enjoyed being a male movie star? Well, he’d enjoy being governor, too, and after the allegorically named Gray Davis, the dismal incumbent, that counts for something.
As usual in West Coast matters, the East Coast media has got it all wrong. The snooty Op-Eds doing omigod-he’s-an-actor! outrage? That was tried against Ronald Reagan in the ’60s, and look where it got him.
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The worst thing about my 12-year-old daughter Isabel’s going off to sleepaway camp is that I couldn’t take her to the New York opening of “Legally Blonde 2.” Instead I went with her indifferent, yawning 17-year-old brother and my visiting 19-year-old nephew, who were hornily focused on the after-party.
There’s a moment of truth at movie premieres when all the hype — the cellphones and VIP passes and 7-foot-tall security goons with earbuds guarding the seats reserved for the star’s pedicurist and Kabbalah instructor — is vindicated. Barry Diller once described this moment to me at an Oscar party as “the exact second when all the bullshit metastasizes.”
At the “Legally Blonde” opening the magic moment is at 10 p.m. when Reese Witherspoon — pregnant, but only in the tiny, bowler-hat-under-the-gossamer-mini-dress way young movie stars have perfected — makes her way through the after-party throng in a shimmer of lip gloss and flash bulbs. “You were great in ‘American Psycho,’” says my nephew, who figures this strategy allows him to protect his film purism. “Whatever,” says Reese, with an absent-minded, vestigially irritated smile.
Ms. Witherspoon is the No. 1 blond love-object of Us Weekly, the trash mag favorite of the young and the strapless. Last week, its vixenish editor, Bonnie Fuller, who turned the ailing celebrity rag around, absconded after only 16 months to run the publishing group that includes the National Enquirer and the Star for a salary of up to $3 million a year. Her exit followed hard upon Fuller’s boss, Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner, coming on my show to talk about the magazine’s success without once mentioning her name. Probably just a coincidence.
Fuller’s cleverness at Us Weekly was knowing that there are only four or five celebrities anyone under 28 wants to read about. They are, currently, Reese and her husband Ryan Phillipe; Charlie’s Angel Drew Barrymore; the 25-year-old “Punk’d” star and Demi Moore playmate Ashton Kutcher; and Beyoncé Knowles, the Destiny’s Child babe. The other featured “stars” — spawned by reality TV, sitcoms, sequels to blockbusters, and way-up-the-dial cable channels — are around too briefly to make it worthwhile memorizing their names. They belong to the rampant tribe of what Radar magazine’s cover story this month dubs “B-list Nation.”
At the “Legally Blonde” opening, the famine in A-list celebrity (aside from Reese herself) was so profound that my son ended up granting three interviews. “My preference is for brunettes,” I overheard him telling an urgently scribbling reporter from the New York Observer.
The proliferation of new B-list celebs has given a heartening second wind to jaded entertainment editors. B-listers, unlike the big-gun “destination” actors, are always happy to be photographed. They couple and uncouple in sync with the newsstand frequency of each issue. What editor can be bothered anymore with arm-wrestling publicists for passé Hollywood royals like Tom Cruise and Penelope Cruz? That relationship has no sizzle anyway. At 41 he’s too old (outside the demo, as MTV would say), and she’s dating in a fourth language. You’re better off with whosis and whatshername from the last reality show finale.
This means that editors of magazines that aspire to make real money no longer have to bother with expensive studio photo shoots where the star gets bossed into a bad mood by some hissing “stylist” and his retinue of spike-haired assistants. (The most preposterous cover credit I ever published at Vanity Fair was a picture of Dustin Hoffman in a black turtleneck sweater with the caption “Styled by Sheva Fruitman.”) Shrinking magazine budgets are less tolerant these days of studio bills for five-star breakfast buffets laid on for stars and their entourages who usually shun the exorbitant croissants in favor of herbal tea.
Something cheerfully democratic and businesslike is happening to celebrity coverage. At a time of excess media, pictures can’t look mediated. The tabloids have always lived on paparazzi pix. But the fabloids — as I like to think of Us Weekly and its imitators — are the pioneers of the choreographed, resourcefully produced paparazzi shot. Celebrity “sightings” are sometimes as arranged as studio shots were before. (It’s the same in politics. Think W landing on the aircraft carrier in perfect evening light.) A publicist calls to tell the magazine’s picture editors that at midnight Star X is going to be making out with Twinkie Y at New York’s hottest nightspot, Bungalow 8. The “snap” of them together — she in the tiny red Gucci thong she’s contracted to promote, he in the sunglasses whose account he is negotiating to land — goes straight to the next fabloid cover, fulfilling all the requirements of product placement. And at little cost to the magazine.
Shrewd publicists know that the essential extra component in a movie’s hype is the celebrity romance. The plot of “America’s Sweethearts,” the fanciful Julia Roberts comedy of a couple of years back, has been recycled as a marketing plan. Cameron Diaz’s walkabout with Justin Timberlake and Demi Moore’s smoochfest with Ashton Kutcher were handily timed for the opening of “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle.” The Demi/Ashton twofer is especially hot because it has something for everybody. It makes Ashton look as if he has a Y chromosome and Demi look like a dangerous woman. It prompts middle-aged babes on the loose to upgrade their dating profiles on Match.com.
Meanwhile their besotted teenage daughters know that Ashton is still, like, available because of Demi’s immense age (40). Perhaps that tired old duo Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck could freshen up their act by having J.Lo dump him for the horse in “Seabiscuit”?
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Former Times of London editor Peter Stothard’s new book, “Thirty Days,” his Bob Woodwardian, up-close-and-personal diary of the scene at No. 10 Downing Street as Blair and his inner circle prepared for the war with Iraq, will be eagerly seized by the P.M.’s doting U.S. fans. It will not reassure British critics, however, like Claire Short, who think that the country’s affairs are run by a small circle of the prime minister’s court. But then, war cabinets tend to be close-knit and impatient with what they see as the less well-informed skeptics on the outside.
Stothard paints a portrait of a prime minister in a hurry, for whom the Labor Party and the House of Commons itself are just obstacles he has to navigate to get what he wants done.
Blair is now formidably tough. Perhaps he always was, beneath his mannerly charm. As Stothard notes, “He has grown used to winning arguments, to winning elections, to defeating opposition in his party, to almost destroying his official opposition in Parliament. He has discovered that he can absorb attack after attack and still be left standing.” And, it seems, in the aftermath of war, the worst is yet to come.
Has Tony Blair turned into the Hulk? The hero of the new comic strip action flick, a young scientist called Bruce Banner, is a brilliant and diffident charmer until his moral ire is aroused; then he becomes a colossal mass of bright green muscle, able to smash everything around him. Like the Hulk, and unlike Bush, Blair doesn’t flex the muscle unless pushed. When one of his team oversteps the mark in some moment of levity, Stothard describes how the normally genial Blair will shoot him “a look” — a warning that the Bruce Banner persona might harden into something else. It explains why, in one memorable vignette, as they are about to leave for a trip to Washington, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw scuttles back into Downing Street to retrieve the prime minister’s forgotten glasses — a gesture of subservience hard to imagine coming from a Lord Carrington or a Colin Powell (though not, perhaps, from a Condi Rice).
Stothard makes a persuasive case that Blair’s Iraq policy was based on conviction, not on kowtowing to America. The Bush/Blair relationship is one of deal partners, rather than prayer partners. No one at this point should attribute Blair’s position on Iraq to sycophancy. “What amazes me is how happy people are for Saddam to stay,” he ruminates to his team. “They ask why we don’t get rid of Mugabe, why not the Burmese lot. Yes, let’s get rid of them all. I don’t because I can’t, but when you can, you should.”
Blair’s implacable resolve derives from “layers of toughness,” as he describes it, grown in the course of years of political fights. Some of it, however, is deeply personal.
One of the most difficult flak storms of his six years in office was the incident last year when his wife was torn apart in the debacle of “Cheriegate.”
Readers didn’t get more than a whiff of it here, but it was a six-week-long row about Mrs. Blair’s errors of judgment when, as middleman to get a bargain on the purchase of an apartment in Bristol for her son Euan (who’s at school there), she used the boyfriend of her exercise trainer, who turned out to be a convicted con man. Her error was not the mistake itself so much as embarrassing the Downing Street press office. Kept out of the loop by Cherie, they issued misleading statements and the tabloids went bananas. Mrs. Blair, until that point a respected lawyer, was depicted as either a flake, a liar or so hopelessly out of it that it made her ambitions to become a judge into a joke.
For Blair, it was a nightmare.
Only the husband of this proud professional woman could know how wounding it was to have the underbelly of Cherie’s domestic improvising laid bare and ridiculed. It revealed the kind of ad hoc messiness that is the embarrassing secret in every frantic two-career marriage.
No doubt Blair feels keenly how god-awful it is for his family to live above the turmoil of the political store and feels much guilt about their invasions of privacy. You get the picture when Cherie shouts a harassed phone message down the stairs from the Downing Street flat to Blair’s political team as 3-year-old Leo Blair bowls through the historic corridors with his plastic cart delivering chocolate wagon wheels to the prime minister. One longs to know what the more left-leaning Mrs. Blair really thought about going into Iraq. Was the Blair household divided like so many others? Cherie is missing in action from Stothard’s book, and one feels her nonpresence is more than wifely discretion. Her wounds from Cheriegate are palpable.
Going after Cherie so mercilessly was the last fingernail the press could pull out. It left the prime minister impervious to criticism and ready for moral risk. His stand on Iraq was not so much a trial as a kind of liberation.
