Off Screen

Earlier this year, Richard Gere and Cindy Crawford spent £20,000 on a full page newspaper ad to put an end to rumours about their three-year-old marriage. It boldly declared “We got married because we love each other and decided to make a life together. We are heterosexual and monogamous and take our commitment to each other very seriously . . . Reports of a divorce are totally false.” Obviously the wedding vows weren’t enough for them, they needed their marriage sanctified in the media.

I suppose this was mildly less nauseating than appearing on the cover of Hello, declaring their undying love for each other, but it seems to have had a similar effect. Their £4.6 million mansion has been put on the market, Cindy has been reportedly waltzing around in New York in the company of various men and notably not wearing her wedding ring, and tabloid journalists caught 22-year-old English model Laura Bailey leaving Richard’s newly bought Kensington flat. Nothing peculiar about that you might think, except she was climbing over his back garden wall in the wee small hours of the morning.

Now, as a man who has climbed over a few garden walls in his lifetime, not to mention down a drainpipe, across a rooftop and once, in classic style, out a back window and down some knotted sheets, I know what all this points to. It has been said that a Hollywood marriage is one in which couples vow to be faithful until after the honeymoon, and it looks like the honeymoon is over for America’s starriest couple. Perhaps their earlier advertisement of monogamy and commitment should be looked at by the Advertising Standards Authority, who could force them to take out another ad in the papers putting the facts straight. Something along the lines of ‘Richard Gere and Cindy Crawford would like to announce that their marriage is in serious trouble’ should do the trick, although if Richard has really fallen for young Laura, perhaps they ought to take out an ad announcing their adultery.

What really fascinates me about this predictable saga (I mean, 44-year-old star trades in wife for younger model is hardly the most original storyline going) is that Richard apparently met Laura at a party thrown by the Dalai Lama. Frankly, I didn’t realise the Tibetan Bhuddist threw those kind of parties. I would have thought you’d have been more likely to run into Mother Teresa at one of his dos than a 22-year-old model with her own garden wall scaling equipment, but what do I know? Perhaps those religious leaders really know how to let their hair down (although that might prove a little difficult in the Dalai Lama’s case, since he hasn’t got any). . .

I have written frequently in this column on the rise and fall and rise of John Wayne Bobbit, the man with the most famous detatchable penis in the world. I finally got to see John’s member with my own eyes, when I was handed a grainy video pirate of his semi-autobiographical, semi-fictional, hard core film debut: John Wayne Bobbit Uncut. John Wayne stars as himself, in what must be the first porn film to feature a scene in which an angry wife severs her husband’s penis with a kitchen knife, followed by actual footage of the micro surgery during which it is reattached. Then just when you think he should be recuperating, a nurse hops on board to test his equipment out. I must admit I found this harder to watch than the torture scene in Reservoir Dogs. I was afraid that if she got too vigorous the damn thing was going to come off again. How would she explain that to her gynaecologist?

I don’t think Harvey Keitel is going to be too concerned about the possiblity of John pipping him at next year’s Oscars, but his penis proved to be the real star of the show, a stand-up guy, shown as often as possible in sharp focus, close-up and primed for action. With over 42,000 videos sold already, Uncut is on its way to becoming the biggest selling adult video in history, proving once and for all that you can’t keep a bad man down.