In his book, How To Lose Friends And Alienate People, Toby Young provided an enthralling and hilarious account of life on both sides of Hollywood’s velvet rope.

During the course of his work as a Vanity Fair writer, Young was exposed to the cream of the A-list crop on a number of occasions. As a member of London’s educated ‘media bourgeoisie’, he was supposed to look down on the tawdry and tacky behaviour of film stars but, in his words, he “longed to dive headfirst into the cesspool of tacky celebrity culture.”
And once he did, the experience yielded some hilarious results. His accounts of the “clipboard Nazis”, who blighted his experiences at various award ceremony parties, are now the stuff of legend – and they didn’t exactly instil me with confidence when I found out I was bound for the 7th Annual Screen Actors’ Guild (SAG) Awards ceremony in Los Angles, in 2001.
At this point, I should own up and admit that, unlike Toby Young, it wasn’t through my journalistic prowess that I gained entry to the ceremony. A writer friend was being courted by one of the major studios in LA, and demanded that a chum be flown over to keep her for company – sorry, for ‘co-writing’ duties.
I was duly flown business class to LA, where I stayed at a celebrated director’s house, the one he was sharing with his A-list actress girlfriend (I must admit, sleeping in the bed of someone worth over $30 million at the box office, pretty much did it for me). As if that wasn’t surreal enough, the studio also came up with tickets to an award ceremony, and being the sartorially challenged scribes that we were, offered to pay for Fred Segal frocks for the occasion into the bargain.
While the SAG Awards sound like a ceremony for ageing porn stars, they are in fact considered a barometer for the Oscars which follow two weeks later. Consequently, at this point in the calendar, LA was thoroughly gripped with Award Season fever. And for a city that is already obsessed with the star system, the weeks leading up to the award ceremonies are nothing short of a bewildering assault to the senses.
According to Toby Young, seeing A-listers in the flesh was an almost narcotic experience, one that left him strangely elated. After seeing some of the most celebrated actors of the day at this ceremony, I was in full agreement. At the 2001 bash, the big films up for gongs were Traffic, Quills, Gladiator, Almost Famous, Billy Elliot, The Contender and Chocolat, and a bewildering array of stars were out in force, some of whom most definitely had the allure of so-called ‘star quality’.
Tom Hanks, for example, had a supernova aura that reduced those of other attendees to mere matchflames, as did the luminous Kate Hudson and Joaquin Phoenix. Even Anna Paquin looked stunning under the unforgiving glare of the bathroom lighting – and looking cool in a toilet queue is no mean feat. On the other hand, seeing Julia Roberts (washed out), Catherine Zeta Jones (short), Russell Crowe (lecherous builder) and Kate Winslet (overly loud luvvie) in the flesh, was slightly disappointing.
Of course, we managed to distinguish ourselves as non-celebrities in some unique ways. For a start we were the only pair to arrive by city taxi, and once on the red carpet, we did some speedily surreptitious overtaking of various preening celebrities; including the casts of Sex & The City, Will & Grace and ER, and actors Jeff Bridges and Gary Oldman. The fact that I was wearing Adidas trainers underneath my Fred Segal-bought puffball frock didn’t seem to prevent me entering the hallowed portals of the ceremony – perhaps Toby Young’s clipboard Nazis were no more than urban myth?
Showing a complete lack of disregard for protocol is strictly verboten at these events, but we did our best – cajoling the waiters, monopolising the magnums of Möet, whooping like schoolgirls at the sight of Benecio Del Toro, eating mountains of pasta mere feet away from a visibly haughty Catherine Zeta Jones, and failing miserably to hitch a limousine out of the grounds (“but I AM Sarah Jessica Parker!!”). At best, this infantile, if highly amusing, behaviour served only to enlarge the gulf between ‘us’ and ‘them’, at which point we began to reluctantly accept that we weren’t quite cut from the same exquisite cloth as these immortals.
But, you know what? When we really thought about it, we decided that wasn’t such a bad thing…