Unfamous Read online

  *****

  https://callmechiara.blogspot.com/

  Suicide? Sanctuary? Bullshit!

  Posted by Chiara on October 05, 2010

  Stacey Blyth, you stupid bitch...

  We had a deal. An understanding. A ‘mutually beneficial arrangement’ – maybe it’s those awkward four-syllable words that have confused her. Or maybe it’s her ‘amnesia’, conveniently back again come biography season... who knows.

  Anyway, for what it’s worth, the agreement was both sides would keep schtum (again, perhaps the language barrier is to blame here) so reputations remained unscathed and we needn’t recourse to expensive, shaming legal proceedings. But here we are – Day Two of The Great Revelations...

  Day One, I didn’t mind so much. Stacey’s entitled to make herself look as stupid as she likes, that’s her call. That’s her job, really. And for all I know, there’s a bit of truth in there, I wasn’t with her the whole time – maybe everything up to the point she makes a phone call in the hospital is exactly as it happened, summoning up the spectre of St Gwyneth of Paltrow and all. I doubt it.

  But what I know for certain is that no chauffeur-driven car came and whisked her to rehab any more than a mouse-drawn pumpkin carriage spirited her off to a ball, complete with glass slippers and ugly sisters. And my flat can be described as many things, but look like a Travelodge it does not. There’s an Eames chair in there (OK, a copy, but it’s the same effect) and loads of lovely Heal’s stuff (sale-bought though it may be), and a mate of mine on an interiors mag is always saying she might like to do a shoot there, if I didn’t mind painting one wall olive.

  But these flourishes I can handle, all the same. Who doesn’t elaborate their lives a little? In our own minds and anecdotes, we’re all taller and wittier and quicker and thinner. But I’m nowhere near as thin in my head as I’m fat in Stacey’s. Seriously – a shotputter!? If I didn’t know how self-absorbed she is, how she’s only remotely interested in things relating to her, I’d think she was deliberately trying to incite my ire. I’ll say only this – my Joan Holloway costume was very well-received at the last fancy-dress party I went to. End of.

  So, yes, in case you hadn’t already gathered from the blog title and my login, I am ‘Chiara’, insofar as any Chiara actually exists. It’s not my real name, but in a way I’m amazed Stacey has deigned to share space in her life story with anyone else, so I suppose I’m a tiny bit honoured her ego’s left any room for my alter.

  What else do you need to know right now? ‘You’. As if anyone’s reading this. I might as well just be shouting into a void or writing it longhand and shredding it, really; with a billion blogs online what are the chances anyone will find this one? But my version of events, of her story, deserves as much space as Stacey’s, so I’ll bang it out for peace of mind, and when I’m done I’ll delete it and no-one will even have noticed but I’ll feel better and that’s what it’s all about after all, isn’t it? Now that I’m not getting paid. Now that the deal is off. Now that I have to make some calls and call in favours, by way of damage limitation...

  Shame it’s all turned up in The Sun. If she’d offered it to us, I might have been able to get them to buy and spike it, or at least wrest back some of the money for myself, for expenses, effort and reparations, if not the final copy – I’m guessing she just vomited all that into some other poor sap’s recorder and left them to ghost it into something approximating another Jordan instalment. But I should at least get a kill-fee for what I wrote first. I know she’s got all that somewhere, and if any of my writing ends up in her extracts, I’ll be the first on the phone to the Accounts Department over at News International. Nothing would thrill me more.

  There’s another thing – what have they paid for it? She’s not that well known and even though I know what they’ve fallen for, the same big secret that hooked me, they can’t have bothered to check it out yet or they’d know what I know... It’s also odd that Entitled (!) isn’t listed on Amazon, and they haven’t named the publisher in the paper – maybe she’s sticking it out herself, or hoping for a deal off the back of the extracts? (Would they really print extracts on spec?)

  Well, two can play that game, can’t they?

  Let’s see who gets their book out first, shall we, Stacey?

  Where to start, where to start?

  We met first in rehab, that’s part’s true enough. Not in rehab, sort of at rehab – adjacent to... I’ll get back to that. But we didn’t bond while reading gossip in the bogs, or anything trite like that – we wrote it.

  I was – am still, alas – a showbiz columnist, and she was (but is no longer, for reasons that will shortly become clear) the one-woman entourage of one of west London’s most high-profile party girls. Stacey and I had one of those obnoxious nodding acquaintances – as established in VIP areas and at aftershow parties, the nod denoting acknowledgement and one-of-us acceptance – but we didn’t actually speak to one another until the day we sat opposite one another in the reception of London’s best-known treatment facility. Adjacent to rehab, see?

  (It’s possible to attend rehab under the radar, of course, but the one unifying thing all celebrities bar none are, by definition, addicted to is attention, which is ideal for people in my line of work. All we need do, if required, is check in for a short stay, keep our ears open and then head back to work with weeks of front-page splashes, like holiday souvenirs other people are actually interested in.)

  So I was all set for a stint, on the orders of my editor (let’s just say magnetic north on moral compasses doesn’t point to Canary Wharf...), but in the end I didn’t even need to feign ‘nervous exhaustion’, the euphemistic catch-all that covers everything from heartache to chemical excess. I was bare-faced – always a sign of impending insanity in the unforgivingly flash-happy land of Paparazzi – and prepared to sob to the admissions nurse, but the centre was overrun.

  I thought I’d be checked in and oversharing before lunchtime but no, so I’m trying not to break cover by getting out my phone and checking headlines, when I semi-recognise this fidgety girl sitting opposite me in the waiting area. I knew I ‘knew’ her but she could have been anyone – a stylist’s assistant, a junior PR, a lowly record-company intern. She was distinctive without being obviously pretty – ‘striking’, kinder people might call it – but still not so uniquely odd that she could make a living modelling, even part-time out in east London.

  She had cheap, brittle blonde hair, like she’d done it herself and left the solution on too long – rookie error, a brutal-looking concave nosejob (a cheap overseas operation, I decided; you get what you pay for with rhinoplasty) and a last-season outfit, instantly marking her out as sub-celebrity. Even the trashiest soap stars keep up with key trends, even if they’re high-street imitations. Wearing visibly old clothes means only thing: A-list hand-me-downs too gorgeous to pass to charity.

  A little sister? Unlikely she’d have slipped my attention for this long – she was past 30, even if her body language was embarrassed and adolescent, so where had she been hiding all this time, if she had a sibling’s coattails to clamber up?

  It was easier to start with her generous benefactor, and work backwards. The clothes were high-end boho, ruling out typically tacky WAGs and TV actresses. Trophy wives usually favour a more polished look, due to all their hostess duties, so I was thinking maybe a singer... until I saw the boots. Vintage and showing the stains of festival mudbaths past, they’d been papped extensively at last year’s Glastonbury, with copies rushed into shops before the end of the summer.

  But these were the real deal, hooked out of an exclusive second-hand boutique beloved by fashionistas whose greatest fear was wearing the same clothes as another boldface name, lest they come off worst in a side-by-side comparison in the weeklies. (You can’t spin that kind of shame.)

  This girl hadn’t bought them, of course. Her bad bleaching was proof of that – you only gain admission to certain shops when your coiffure reflects your credit rating
; if it isn’t a delicious-looking mix of honey and caramel highlights, they haven’t heard the bell and you’d better keep on walking. (There are exceptions; edgy crops also gain admission, but only because they’ll likely have seen your face on the right front covers.)

  So call me Sherlock: she’d somehow acquired the boots from omnipresent ex Cady Stone, whose three marriages to date – her first in her teens – had left her independently wealthy. Cady had the foresight/fortune to inspire her musician spouses’ most creative periods, sans pre-nup, conveniently leaving them when follow-up albums stiffed and tour dates stopped instantly selling out. Everyone was highly surprised when the settlements were reported; without children Cady wasn’t expected to get much, but each time it was GDP generous. Stories started that she must have incriminating pictures or videos, but nothing ever surfaced.

  I was still waiting to access the inner-sanctum of suffering (the receptionist had started ignoring new arrivals, she was so swamped) but I had something better: a potential in with a Stone acolyte who might know where bodies were buried – or rather, where memory cards were hidden...

  Of course, etiquette’s required in every social situation and the reception at a rehab centre is no different. Here, everything’s implicit; staff and patients alike must pretend they don’t know who anyone is – the opposite of Celebrity Big Brother, despite having a similar cast list.

  So I used a guaranteed icebreaker, a beguiling mix of ego boost and ignorance.

  “Your blouse is absolutely beautiful – is it Dior?”

  (It wasn’t, it was Chloé.)

  Stacey seemed startled to be spoken to, then blushed a little, smiling as she shook her head. “Thank you, but it’s Cacharel, actually.”

  (It wasn’t, it was Chloé.)

  I made a point of not changing my work look much – brown bob, red lipstick – so I was a) recognisable when I needed to be and b) could also disguise myself easily if avoiding anyone I’d angered with a snippy aside in that day’s paper. Being incognito today (no lippy, headscarf) meant Stacey couldn’t identify me straight away – not that she’d dare to admit as much, of course.

  So I smalltalked about the weather (freezing), the wallpaper (friezing – ha!) and whatever else I could think of until she shyly suggested we might have met.

  “Yeah, maybe...” I demurred, doing my best ‘I am thinking hard’ shrivel-face, wanting her to be certain and assured before I had to show my hand.

  While describing in minute detail a hideous Hawaiian-themed function I remembered we’d both attended – something to do with a tanning spray, being pimped that night by an almost-albino athlete who’d been custom-creosoted for the occasion – I assessed her again for suitability. Was she fit for my purpose?

  We (I don’t do the column single-handedly, I’d die of obsequiousness within a week) often get approached at the arse-end of an evening out by hard-up ‘pals’ and ‘source’ with lucrative leads; once they’ve proven their provenance is pukka, we add them to our ring-around list. But we’d never yet had anyone with anything we could verify about someone as upper-echelon as Cady Stone.

  Now, aside from her clothing, Stacey didn’t have the pampered glow of wealth; her skin was dull, bumpy and clumped with concealer, her posture didn’t suggest either regular massages or private yoga sessions and the way her eyes flicked to the mints on the reception desk every other minute implied she was rather peckish. So she could probably do with my money, grubby as it may be.

  The coup de grâce was obscenely simple. While pretending to be enthralled by her perfunctory recall of a reality-show winner-turned-DJ returning from the toilets at one mutually attended function, the miniskirt caught in her thong proving a poor distraction from the white powder rimming her reddened nostrils, I said, “You’re so expressive... are you an actress?”

  She wasn’t but, like everyone else eking out a living on the fringe of fame, she wanted to be. I was in. She beamed, then looked up through the thatch of her black-spackled lashes like a cut-price Princess Di: “How did you know?”

  I simply shrugged.

  Then she said – and it meant nothing to me at the time, it was just one of those awful actressy things that awful actresses say – “It’s in my blood.” And she flashed her eyes at me, like she was highlighting the words in my mind:

  ‘Ms Blyth, I’m so sorry to have to tell you this, but you’ve tested positive for ACT. There’s no known cure, but we’re doing amazing things with stem cells...’

  Indulge me going all Vanity Fair for a moment, but one of JFK’s biographers said of meeting his grieving widow that he felt he was “in the presence of a very great tragic actress.” Stacey’s no Jackie O but, as long as she believed I thought she was an Oscar nominee-in-waiting, we had an understanding.

  With a whole new topic on offer, and not before time – I was just about to start sniping about the state of the skirting boards – our chat turned to leading roles she’d wanted (but presumably not even auditioned for).

  As she reeled them off – plucky paraplegics, Austen heroines, Machiavellian mistresses, nothing minor – I dutifully dismissed each of the actual actresses who’d played them:

  “God, no, far too fat, didn’t you think?”

  “All wrong – she should have been a blonde, for starters...”

  “So tacky! She’d have been better as a stripper than a Bennett.”

  And on we went, denigrating every last BAFTA winner, until I realised ours were now the only voices in the room, and the admissions backlog had gone.

  It was time to close the deal and head home. (I hadn’t seen anyone interesting arriving and I wasn’t sacrificing my weekend for real people with real problems – fluffy stuff only for me, please. Take A Break is not my beat.)

  “I’d love to be able to act,” I lied, “but I’m not creative at all...”

  Stacey almost looked sorry for me as she said, “Oh... so what do you do?”

  NB – getting anyone even half famous to ask this of you is a miracle.

  “Me?” Little old me? Why, thank you kindly for askin’, ma’am!

  “I’m a writer... [a soft opener] ...on a newspaper.”

  She didn’t flinch, and usually people do, so I continued. Carefully.

  “I write the social diary. You know, who went where, who did what – with who! – and so on.” Which was not technically untrue but also not how my editor would have described it. “So... if you ever hear of anything you think would make a fun story – like our DJ friend with the wardrobe malfunction, for example – maybe let me know? If we can print it... [it’s important to imply that we have standards] ... then you’d get paid for it.”

  I scrabbled around in my bag theatrically, as if I couldn’t immediately find my details, to give her time to consider and accept my offer. When she seemed to have made up her mind, I slipped a business card out of the small mobile-phone pocket where I always kept plenty and handed it to her, as if embarrassedly asking her out on a date, and not scouting for a new source at all.

  “If you fancy meeting up for a drink, maybe – or dinner?”

  Her acting ability didn’t extend to ‘hard to get’.

  “I’d like that,” she grinned, hungrily.

  The card was bland enough to look like it could have come from anyone; thick-stock with a floral embossed motif, my real name in bold with the non-committal ‘Diarist’ below, and my mobile number. Well, one of my mobile numbers. I had another business card for official work purposes, with the masthead of the paper taking up two-thirds and my name, direct line, email and work mobile crammed down the bottom. For contacts I wanted to keep to myself, I had another phone, always on vibrate, which no-one at work had the number to; if asked, I pretended it was for friends and family – as if I had the time (or inclination) for either.

  Then she was beckoned to the desk and I made my exit; if she ever wondered why I’d been there and disappeared into thin air, she never said.

  She didn’t call befo
re we saw into each other again but I hadn’t expected her to. Out of loyalty to Cady – who she didn’t know I knew she knew, at this point – and fear for her social standing, she didn’t want to blurt out everything at once, like a slut on a one-night stand. She had to be wooed.

  So it was a month or so later, at Fashion Week, before we were face to face for a second time. It was an unseasonably squally September, so we were taking refuge inside a tent between shows when we exchanged The Nod. This time, I took it as a green light to edge towards her, slowly, so when the next show finally started – hours late, as is only to be expected – we were standing together.

  Cady, of course, had been given a prominent VIP seat for all her ‘friends’’ collections, leaving me plenty of space to ensnare Stacey at the back. I talked about anything but the column, starting the conversation off on goodie bags and unlikely front-row friendships. When, after much prompting, she eventually came out with a stale aside, I did an elaborate mime of stifling a belly-laugh then said, “That would have been perfect for the diary pages – shame you didn’t call me.”

  I changed the subject, as if work was the last thing I wanted to talk about (what else is there?), but Stacey was already on the hook, ready to be reeled in.

  “So would that have been worth anything?” she whispered.

  “Oh, maybe £50 or so?” I said, eyes fixed on the catwalk cadavers. “Not much, really, but they add up over the course of a month or so, if you’re out a lot...”

  Rather than hang around and risk being introduced/outed to Cady (who would have known exactly what was afoot), I made excuses and left as the designer’s undeserved ovation began, confident Stacey would ring within the week.

  She did.

  The stories were only passable to begin with – a too-hot-to-drop Ukrainian model who gained a dress size within a week (presumably pregnant), meaning some hasty haberdashery to accommodate her; a light-fingered friend of a stylist who made off with uninsured jewellery; a blind-siding hook-up between an openly gay designer and a girl. We ran a few of them, got the usual furious phone calls from flacks – mostly angry at hearing about clients’ antics secondhand – and I paid Stacey slightly over the odds, expensing the figures under ‘Entertaining’.

  Are you not entertained?

  What I really wanted was A-grade A-list dirt and I knew she had it. And, as I was soon to find out, there was only one way to get her to give it up. Flattery kept her sweet and the cash meant she would come back, but the crucial catalyst was jealousy.

  Whenever Cady was snapped next to some newfound confidante, Stacey became a solo smear campaign, ringing me with audible glee to reveal how appallingly her rival treated her children, partner or The Help, how she was fonder of the scalpel than the scales, and how friends daren’t leave her alone with their husbands.

  Stacey’s source? Cady, of course.

  Ms Stone was very sociable of late, table-hopping at ceremonies and darting across the aisle to chat at concerts, so each week’s engagements brought new acquaintances for Stacey to defame. I held back some items so their provenance wouldn’t be too obvious but I needn’t have bothered. Not then, anyway.

  Most of us, if we saw a string of stories about people we knew, recycling rumours we ourselves had spread, would get suspicious and suspect a mole in their midst. But most of us aren’t as self-obsessed as your average celebrity. It isn’t merely a matter of looking out for Number One, it is a single-minded mission to blinker out everything else. Even the most paranoid of big names, who employ professional clippings services to make sure they don’t miss a single mention – in addition to having as-it-happens Google Alerts sent to their always-on BlackBerrys and/or iPhones – don’t read around the subject of themselves. If they aren’t mentioned, they aren’t interested.

  Careful to keep Cady’s name out of the ensuing articles, we entered a purple period on the column and our super-connected source remained oblivious. Sales grew, online traffic to our section tripled, our URLs were re-tweeted hundreds of times and we were scooping rival dailies on, well, a daily basis.

  Like the flower revived by ET, shrivelled little Stacey began to blossom as the column gained notoriety. She was making far more than £50 per tip by now, and was funnelling the money back into her self-image. She made an appointment – under Cady’s name – with the best colourist in London, apologising profusely when she arrived at the salon without her and offering to take the slot herself rather than be penalised. It took hours to restore lustre to her over-processed locks, but the bouncy, buttery curls that resulted were transformative. Facials followed, and a session with the city’s most in-demand eyebrow shaper, and she even began to jog around the blocks by Cady’s mews house of a morning.

  The downside was, Stacey was getting noticed herself now. Snappers would include her in their shots as Cady arrived at clubs and parties, and the addition of well-chosen accessories to old Stone clothes got favourable nods from influential stylists.

  Great for Stacey – dreadful for myself and Cady.

  The last thing I needed was for her to ascend to actual celebrity herself, and stop calling because she was so inundated with TV offers, freebies and invites that she no longer needed my backhanders. For Cady, seeing her lapdog become a butterfly, so to speak, was surely as devastating as it would be for her to have a pretty daughter.

  Worse still, Stacey could acquire a famous boyfriend, at which point she would become a kept woman and never need to work again – the dream of 90 per cent of starlets and a nightmare for writers like myself... until the breakups, when they can’t tell the juicy details fast enough, suddenly needing some disposable income of their own again.

  Then the rows started. Knowing Stacey was still single, Cady could see no possible way she was funding her newly beautiful lifestyle without stealing from her. She immediately stopped the second-hand clothes supply, demanding back pieces that still fit her; she had gained weight of late, due to her ‘therapist’ (dealer) being on an extended holiday – he was stuck in some foreign prison, Stacey said, but we couldn’t confirm it.

  For the first time in their relationship, Stacey refused. She had realised – because I had told her – that her being considered hip was useful to Cady, who wasn’t at her best, and told the stony-faced Ms Stone just that. After all, she had an invite to a premiere that night and Cady hadn’t – did she want to skip it, “...or be my guest?”

  Their entente was cordial for cameras. Cady was apparently still incapable of discretion, so the stories kept coming, but they had an air of the tragic to them. Then one of her exes became embroiled in a copyright case with his old bandmates, and her un-sinkable star rose once more.

  It was another dull wrangle about royalties; he was the songwriter but they wanted more money for their input into the hits. It dragged on for a few weeks, but it wasn’t until Cady’s name came up that things got interesting.

  One of the contentious songs was written for the new bride during the honeymoon in the south of France, at some ’80s muso’s mansion. Surrounded by instruments, the second Mr Stone, as he was now effectively known, had composed a ballad, ‘Crazy (About Darling You)’, that had become the band’s biggest hit, helped by its inclusion in a hit romcom the next summer. The acronym was obvious; during divorce proceedings he had even tattooed the song title down his arm as a last-ditch attempt to change his estranged wife’s mind.

  Radio stations began to play the song again and Cady was back in demand once more. She secluded herself until she’d starved off her excess weight (or found a new connection), making her reappearance on to the scene at the High Court one morning.

  Called to the witness box, she testified that while the rest of the band might have added flourishes to the music, the demo she still owned proved that it had been completed at the château, and that song at least should be exempt from the case. She played an old C60 cassette – which had audible news-channel noise at the end, conveniently setting the date – and the court accepted her vers
ion of events.

  The case continued but the story had changed as far as the media was concerned – was reconciliation on the cards? Cady said nothing, just glancing shyly at her shoes when pressed; her ex was currently remarried but that had never stopped her before. At Home With... articles began, and cover stories followed – her social crown was back from the cleaners, buffed to a brighter shine than ever before.

  The unexpected upside was she either forgave Stacey or thought she must have imagined a time when they were vying for supremacy; it certainly seemed unlikely, now she was juggling offers from the glossies for their Christmas covers. And so the stories restarted, and the celebrity status quo was reached.

  So what went wrong? We got sloppy. The grace period I usually left between hearing tales from Stacey and dropping them into the paper shortened, and we used information that was probably too intimate. Still ignorant of anyone other than her, Cady didn’t notice or care – but her ex-ex did.

  Unfortunately for us, he was a decent sort. He didn’t pore over gossip columns or obsessively search for himself online, but he did keep his ears open. So when friends started congratulating him on a new publishing deal, he became wary; nothing had been signed, it was early days and he had only played new tracks to a handful of people.

  Leaked details of his new workout regime also enraged him, and his trainer was swiftly sacked for “trading on [his] name”. But when we hinted – and it really was only a hint – that “a certain retro rocker has renewed his love for an ex, so his wife would do well to check her stocking for divorce papers this Christmas,” he went ballistic.

  We hadn’t named names but given his renaissance no-one else fit the description, as vague as it was. And Cady had certainly amped up the intrigue, by implying she and her replacement were “great friends” and that she hoped they’d manage to see each other over the festive period – code for “she’s a bitch and I’ll see her in hell.”

  By now, I had given Stacey a phone that had a recording function, in case she ever needed to make memos of stories when she couldn’t get reception and call me directly. She was in the kitchen when the ex-ex arrived, enraged, and, sensing the tension in the air, set her phone recording in the corridor, and hid.

  Playing it back the next day, we knew the jig was up at this point:

  “Fuck’s sake calm down, I haven’t told anyone anything. There’s nothing to tell!”

  “Is this a test? Have you planted this as a test? I will leave her when I’m ready. She’s already paranoid about you, if I go now she’ll clean me out. She’s probably compiling a dossier already – there’s probably someone outside tailing me!”

  “She’s not that smart! And I haven’t planted anything, I don’t plant things, I don’t need to. They come to me! I don’t need to beg for blind items, I’m turning down covers. And I hardly need their help to get you to come back... you never wanted me to leave.”

  “Well someone’s said something, because that bit about the stocking was exactly what you said to me.”

  “What bit about the stocking – what are you talking about?”

  “It said I’d leave the divorce papers in her Christmas stocking – you said I should do that. Those exact words. How could they have known that? It can’t be coincidence.”

  “They made it up. [Laughs] I can’t imagine bountiful Bella in stockings...”

  “This isn’t funny – it’s on the page, verbatim. Who did you tell?”

  “No-one. I didn’t tell anyone. I don’t talk to tabloid journalists.”

  “Not just a journalist, anyone – who have you talked to about this?”

  “No-one! Unless...”

  And so ended our working relationship.

  The row soon petered out; the ex-ex thinking Stacey too sweet to spill the beans, he apologised and left, needing to be back home before midnight to not arouse suspicion. Stacey stayed hidden – there was a utility room off the kitchen that Cady literally didn’t know was there, having never in her life laundered her own clothes, incredibly enough – only creeping out when she could hear her de-facto boss snoring off a bottle of wee-hours Chablis on the vintage Liberty-print chaise longue.

  Stacey caught a cab to my office later that morning, which I paid for, and handed over the phone, looking rather stricken as she did. I don’t think she ever meant to hurt Cady, she wasn’t malicious, just broke and embittered by privileged idiots whose behaviour was an affront to their fans, if not humanity as a whole. She had seen her stories as a sort of public service, really – like she was part of the Morality Police.

  She was still wearing her clothes from the product-launch party we had attended early the previous evening: just strappy heels and a skimpy dress, not even one of Cady’s old (and therefore somehow socially acceptable) fur coats. For the first time since we had met in reception, she looked like a little girl playing dress-up in her mother’s cast-offs.

  She left her phone and sniffed at my offer of an old parka against the cold, then left, headed for a showdown at Cady’s house. It was possible she would wake up having forgotten everything, she had blacked out before at opportune moments, but Stacey tottered off with the air of someone approaching the gallows.

  I hadn’t expected to hear from her again, certainly not so soon, envisaging a brief period in Siberia, then a thaw if Cady’s remarriage didn’t happen. Instead, on accepting a reverse-charges call from a payphone in the Chelsea & Westminster hospital around 2am, I could only identify Stacey from the estuary accent to her incessant hysterics.

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  *****

  Daily Mirror, WEDNESDAY 06.10.2010

  SHH! Stars say they never believe what they read but they’ve taken certain recent reports to heart, despite mounting doubts about their reliability – two blabbermouth best friends have just found themselves uninvited from every upcoming A-list event in town...