Hype, your insidious spell is everywhere. John Borrowman, the current star of the London production of “Sunset Boulevard,” is denying he’s ever been Cher’s plaything. But who said he had? He does admit to having shared “toffee pudding” with Cher, but he doesn’t say where or when. (Toffee pudding? Is that like sex?) Borrowman has been previously linked with Angie Dickinson and Elaine Paige, to name but two. A hunk is a hunk is a hunk. At least his ladies aren’t 12 years old.
Everybody on the set of “Rob Roy,” the adventure epic now filming in the Highlands of Scotland, is thrilled to bits over Jessica Lange and her amazing ability to speak like a true Scot. She learned the tongue of the trade from Scottish-born Juilliard professor Elizabeth Smith, and even the movie’s director, Michael Caton-Jones, himself a Scot, believes that Lange, who plays the wife of the 18th-century Highland hero, Robert Roy MacGregor (Liam Neeson), boasts a better burr than he does. He would, wouldn’t he? (“She’s absolutely marrrrvelous!” he gushes.) It was Professor Smith who was responsible for Dustin Hoffman’s profound British accent in “Hook,” but try not to hold it against her.
You will be tickled to hear that Michael York and his wife, Pat, spent the first few months of their marriage in a castle on the wildly romantic West Coast of Ireland while Michael was filming a Viking epic. The local salmon were so abundant they practically leapt out of the streams, and the Yorks spit-roasted them over an open peat fire. Ah, wilderness — with a fish on a stick. It’s enough to make the bosom heave.
Now, a quarter of a century later, Pat and Michael are back in Ireland, this time in Dublin, where they are renting writer Polly Devlin’s charming Georgian house and trying to forget that it rains every five minutes. And Michael is again making a picture in a castle, this time in Leixlip, the glorious Irish pile of Desmond Guinness, the founder of the Irish Georgian society. Desmond’s wife, Penny, is practically feeding the Yorks, providing such goodies from her garden and eggs laid right this minute, emerald greens and the local wine-berries, sticky but welcome.
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Michael’s new movie, “September,” taken from Rosamunde Pilcher’s wonderful novel of the same name, reunites him with two fetching, former leading ladies, Jacqueline Bissett and Jenny Agutter, but he gets a new screen wife, Mariel Hemingway. Of course, Pilcher’s novel is laid in Scotland and is as Scottish as a sporran, but you know showbiz. They’ll just tie thistle on the shamrocks.
As for Pat, she was absolutely dazzled by 25-year-old Alyssa Donati’s debut novel, “The Marzipan Pigeon” (Simon & Schuster) and has optioned the movie rights. She’ll produce it with Paul Alberghetti and Sean Ferrer, Audrey Hepburn’s son. Plus she’s working on her second book (her first was “Going Strong”), interviewing and photographing doctors from all over the world who believe it’s time for orthodox and alternative medicine to join forces and work together. She hopes Hillary Rodham Clinton is listening.
Along those lines, you read here earlier in the summer that Mrs. Clinton took a detour during her trip to Italy just to visit Gore Vidal at his wondrous villa in Ravello on a day hot enough to fry the brain. And that together they perused Gore’s memorabilia of Jackie Onassis, whom HRC greatly admired. Comes now this note from Gore, who never seems to miss a trick:
“Dear Aileen, Nice to hear from you, as it were, in the public prints. The picture of me rushing back and forth to show Mrs. Clinton Jackie memorabilia is gorgeously nutty since Jackie and I, with some effort, avoided each other for a third of a century. Mrs. C. and I did talk about Eleanor Roosevelt, O.J. Simpson’s trial by TV, and the American media, which we both revere. Come pay a call. Yours, Gore.”
Dear Gore, I knew you and Jackie were on the outs for years — didn’t everyone? — but I thought maybe you had some old photos and stuff still hanging around to show Mrs. C. from the good old days when you and Mrs. O. didn’t avoid each other. So glad to hear that you and HRC revere the American media — oh, hahahahaha. We are adorable.
Oh, and I’d love to pay a call when the temperature drops, but only if you promise not to discuss Eleanor Roosevelt, the O.J. Simpson trial by TV and most of all the American media, icky warts and all. Else, I’d have to take a little nap. Your admiring pen pal, Aileen.
Marylou Whitney, queen of the Saratoga racing set, has made it perfectly clear that she will not hold her annual Whitney Ball at Saratoga’s Canfield’s Casino next year. That is, unless the New York Racing Association changes the date of the famed Whitney Stakes, a $350,000 race traditionally held on the first weekend of the Saratoga season. The Whitney Ball, replete with 300 of racing’s top names, was always held the night before, but in 1992, the NYRA changed the race to the last weekend of the meet. This ticked off our Marylou, who stamped her foot, tossed her curls and said for all to hear, “The reason I give my party is to celebrate the Whitney Race. So there is no reason to give it now that there’s nothing to celebrate.”
It’s a shame, because the Whitney Balls have been going on since 1958 when Marylou and her late husband, Cornelius Vanderbilt (Sonny) Whitney gave their parties at the Saratoga Golf and Tennis Club before moving in 1978 to Canfield’s Casino, which Sonny paid $150,000 to have air-conditioned. Before that, all those fancy types were dancing around in pools of you-know-what, and some of them didn’t even know it until their patent leather pumps sloshed.
When the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute unleashes its new show and party of the year the night of Dec. 5, the theme will be Orientalism, Orientalism and more Orientalism. Let that be your guide should you care to wear a little something Chinese-y to blend with the decor. As usual, Pat Buckley is the chairman of this annual extravaganza, which reaps so much money for the Museum, and this year her co-chairmen are those two up-and-coming fashion designers, Oscar de la Renta and Bill Blass, who expected to add éclat — and to bring along their claques, the dear boys.
The show will trace the influence of Oriental style upon the fashionable world, which suggested to Pat and designer John Funt a goldmine of fantastic imagery and charm, typified by secret gardens and lacquered surfaces firmly rooted in 18th-century chinoiserie. So the two of them, who have worked together on so many of these lavish Museum affairs, are already combing the Inner (New York) City for exotic trappings, the better to transform the party’s setting, that usually prosaic barn, the Museum’s restaurant, into something Chinese-gorgeous for the night.
It will go like this: Guests will enter an orange and lime-green Moon Gate at the base of a three-story pagoda modeled after Sir William Chambers’s 1761 sensation at Kew Gardens. (Chambers had been sketching in Canton and went home to England to erect the first “Chinese” building in Europe, soon to be imitated throughout the Continent.) From the pagoda’s upturned roofs, lanterns will hang in the moonlight and thick shocking-pink wisteria will tumble over the eaves. Candles will line the upper gallery of moss-covered tiles. Think “Turandot.”
Dinner tables will be spread out in two different ways — just for fun. Half the tables will be centered with wirework pagodas decorated with tiers of gardenias, and the other half with tangerine parasols with red coral bases sprouting white lily blossoms. All tables will be covered in figured toile-de-Jouy — are you ready for crazed mandarins romping under spice trees? — and the quince-colored chairs will be cushioned in cherry red. How do you like it so far? Stay in touch, because Friday’s column will tell you more about what Buckley and Funt have in store.