Archive for May, 2010

• Day 93: Feeling Lucky

  Date: 2010.05.31 | Category: Uncategorized | Response: 2

  Hard to believe I am on Day 93.  Just very glad I had the idea to do this blog because I’d be having a candy bar right about now without it.  Grateful for many things today.

  

• Day 90! – “Let Me Hear You Scream!”

  Date: 2010.05.28 | Category: Uncategorized | Response: 5

  Three months without candy.  I’m 1/4 of the way there.

  The below video, filmed two days ago at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in New York expresses how I feel better than I can put in words today.

  Love Ozzy and Sharon and their genius for a great PR stunt!

• Day 88: Are You as “Unique” As I Am?

  Date: 2010.05.26 | Category: Uncategorized | Response: 4

  Today I was pronounced unique.

  How does that relate to being a candy addict?  Well Sheila said, “You are unique!” in reference to a choice I made that she thought was strange.  It was just a throwaway comment on Facebook.  (Not to be confused with a very early boyfriend who once called me an “iconoclast.”  The term somehow seemed very elderly Somerset Maugham for someone who was 23, and female, at the time.)

  Anyway, this brought to mind something another friend who’s an alcoholic and who is in his fourth month of not drinking once said.

  He said he drank because of the way the world is. The way sometimes you feel so alienated from other people, or they just bore you to death, or you just feel so so different. Or because you’re… unique?

  Is that why I’ve always needed something sweet to get through life?  Because when you’re unique maybe everyone else isn’t unique enough?

  The backstory:  Sheila made her Facebook status update a query asking everyone to say what their favorite song was: “the sentimental grand-experience-marker, from an earlier time in (your) life, when emotional and bohemian Romance were everything.”

  Sheila chose Laura Nyro’s Timer. For whatever reason, I read the question as being about a song that was your earliest favorite song, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have made the same choice as I did.

  I chose a song from 1970 called Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes.) Because I remember that song corresponding to one of my earliest crushes, like in second grade in Massachusetts. His name was Joey Frontiera.

  To me, elementary school was unbelievably romantic.

  Imagine choosing Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes) for a favorite romantic song in response to a Facebook query by a sophisticated media friend in New York?

  Wait, does she know that Sugar, Sugar by the Archies is my idea of a perfect pop song?  What a coincidence, given my lifelong vice!

  In any event, when my friend responded to all of the comments – cool choices like Bob Dylan’s Desolation Row and Joni Mitchell’s River – she wrote that she couldn’t imagine my choice ever making such a list. You are unique! she wrote.

  So I looked into the band behind my unique song, Edison Lighthouse

  Below from the esteemed research center, Wikipedia:

  Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)” was written by Tony Macaulay Barry Mason and  Sylvan Whittingham. Essentially they were a studio group with prolific session singer Tony Burrows providing the vocals. When the song became number one a group needed to be put together rapidly to feature on the popular TV show Top of the Pops.  Sylvan Whittingham found a group called Greenfields and brought them to the auditions a week before Top of the Pops. Once chosen and rehearsed non stop they appeared on the show as ‘Edison Lighthouse’ to mime to the fastest climbing no 1 hit record in history. Burrows sang the song on the program, which happened to be his third appearance on the same show with three different groups. It reached number 5 on US pop chart, number 3 in Canada, and number 1 on the UK singles chart for five weeks in January and February 1970.

  I was more intrigued when I checked out the lead singer, Tony Burrows, and found this interview entitled “The Greatest Singer Whose Name You Never Heard.” Burrows, it turned out, was the anti-Bob Dylan.  No huge talent coupled with peerless ambition and savvy careerism here:  Burrows was just the one singer in history to have four top 40 singles with four groups in a space of four months.

  His favorite of all his hit singles?  Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes) of course.

  If you must know, my very favorite song of all time is Into the Mystic, by Van Morrison.

  But as much as I love that song, it doesn’t evoke the same “sentimental grand-experience-marker, from an earlier time in (your) life, when emotional and bohemian Romance were everything.”

  Not the way Love Grows (Where my Rosemary Goes) does.

  Am I also the only person who remembers the intensity of feeling you can have as a girl for another boy?

  Am I that unique? Is my freak flag flying that high?

  Can I say how much I love the people who totally get you and don’t think you’re unique? I can think of one right now.

  By the way, I came thisclose to buying a can of whipped cream tonight.

  C’est pas facile, cette vie.

  Pour a little sugar on it baby.

  And together we will float,

  into the mystic.

  Ta,

  

  
  

  
  

• Day 85: The Sun Also Sets

  Date: 2010.05.23 | Category: Uncategorized | Response: 1

  

  I left the dying embers of the Cannes Film Festival and bought some groceries and new plants for the terrace on the way home.  I feel badly for people who live the high life all the time.  How can they get any perspective?

  You can’t make sense of Shelley Hack and her strange connection to Alain Delon and my jealousy of Mick Jagger’s girlfriend L’Wren Scott without a little set of rooms with a view in Middle Earth.

  The last big bash of the Cannes Film Festival is always the amFAR AIDS charity throwdown at the Hotel du Cap Eden Roc in Antibes, just five miles down the old coast road from Cannes.  It’s one of the most beautiful places on earth – even if you know Villa America and the artists and writers are are all long gone and that’s Roman Abramovich’s vulgar yacht out in the harbor.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald, above with Zelda in Antibes in 1926, was so inspired by the hotel that he opened Tender is the Night with it:

  On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose- colored hotel. Deferential palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach. Lately it has become a summer resort of notable and fashionable people; a decade ago it was almost deserted after its English clientele went north in April. Now, many bungalows cluster near it, but when this story begins only the cupolas of a dozen old villas rotted like water lilies among the massed pines between Gausse’s Hôtel des Étrangers and Cannes, five miles away.

  The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one. In the early morning the distant image of Cannes, the pink and cream of old fortifications, the purple Alp that bounded Italy, were cast across the water and lay quavering in the ripples and rings sent up by sea-plants through the clear shallows.

  So it was that I arrrived Thursday night at the Hotel du Cap’s 2010 version of a bright tan prayer rug: the red carpet.

  And then, of all the red carpets in the world, he had to be there.  Before me, of course, and first in position in line.  Let’s call him… Pemingway.

  Pemingway rules the Parisian roost as king of entertainment reporters. We have a rocky history.  No, we don’t spar over pastis at Les Deux Magots or kick around iambic pentameter at lesbian literary salons.

  

  Let’s just say Angelina Jolie got between us a few times. Then there was that night when Madonna’s stage set collapsed in Marseilles.  Pemingway was on the horn from Paris, ready to tell me what to do per usual like he was Darrin and I was Samantha.  ”Don’t give me your journalism tutorials,” I barked.  Pemingway backed off.

  Until now.  The truth is, Pemingway and I had never met in person. Now we’d be side-by-side in the harsh afternoon sunlight as the first C and D-listers came down the red carpet. And we’d be together two hours later for the last of the A-listers as the sun slid slowly over the horizon.

  Tonight Pemingway and I were working for different media outlets. We’re free agents and tonight Pemingway was working for a television show. It was a new Pemingway, quick with a quip and chivalrous. He gave me an extra bottle of water and even offered to fetch me a shawl.

  We soldiered through Rachel Bilson, Karolina Kurkova, Chris Tucker, Michelle Rodriguez, Mischa Barton, Emily Blunt, Elizabeth Banks, Paris Hilton (and her mother,) and gaped at graying Patti “Horses” Smith, who walked the red carpet in jeans, motorcycle boots.

  Our bond deepened as Jennifer Lopez, Gerard Butler, Naomi Campbell and Michelle Williams swept by refusing to speak to anyone.  Russell Crowe, Ryan Gosling and Lindsay Lohan (again!) snuck in some side door.  Kate Beckinsale, Mary J. Blige, Harvey Weinstein, Kenneth Cole, however, paid us a certain kind of tribute.

  Oddly enough, I was struck by a vaguely familiar face.

  

  “It’s Shelley Hack,” I whispered to Pemingway, who squinted expertly in her direction and nodded.

  Shelley Hack is 62 and she’s no longer famous but she stood out on the red carpet.  She looks 20 years younger but as if she hasn’t had any work done.  She also looked as if she knows things other people don’t.

  Pemingway was more focused on Alain Delon, former huge French bad-boy star who now just looks permanently hung over.

  A PR person had asked me and Pemingway to ask us to interview Delon because he wanted to get some American press – but he didn’t want to speak English.  So we’re primed to speak to him in French.   Then Delon shows up, and appears to diss us.

  Pemingway worries that it’s him – that Delon has remembered him from some past encounter and doesn’t want to talk to him.

  Me, I don’t care because Mick Jagger and his 6’4″ girlfriend L’Wren Scott have just arrived.  I just saw Mick the other night before the screening of  Stones in Exile and he looked as youthful as… Shelley Hack!

  I’m irritated that if Mick is going to wind up with a tall woman with long hair in her 40s, why didn’t he just stay with Jerry Hall who’s not that much older and prettier than L’Wren Scott.   Then I wish I had gotten in there before L’Wren Scott.  I figure you could make it work with Mick just by letting him do what he wants.

  

  Mick can’t answer any questions because the stern, unsmiling L’Wren yanks him down the red carpet as if he’s six – and Mick seems to revel in it.

  Then, as quickly as Mick disappears up the stairs into the hotel, the “arrivals” have ended and the red carpet is going to be rolled up.

  Pemingway and I don’t say goodbye – but that’s because we’re both going in for the dinner and auction, in the big tent on the back lawn of the Hotel du Cap.

  I don’t see him during dinner, which stretches until midnight, with just a tiny appetizer, small entree (both good, though) and fabulous dessert that I can’t eat. I’m starving.  We move onto the big party across the lawn at midnight, inside the Eden Roc restaurant next to the pool and overlooking the Mediterranean.

  I bump into all the usual suspects – Paris, Lindsay, Benicio de Toro, Ryan Gosling, Michelle Williams – as I circulate the party with various other reporter friends or alone (you can never get a Plus One to these events so no invitations for Mr. Year Without Candy.)

  Then I see her:  Shelley Hack again, looking all-knowing while standing at a railing above the sea.

  I say hi and she is friendly, though wary. Her husband and another friend of theirs are chattier.  Her husband is a director named Harry Winer. He’s at Cannes with a movie and somehow Alain Delon is involved.  It turns out he and Shelley are friends with Delon and just had dinner with him and Harry tells me how hard he worked to arrange American press for Delon on the red carpet.

  “Oh,” I said. “I was there. What happened?”

  Winer said Delon panicked after he arrived and was faced with so many English-speaking reporters.  Somehow he didn’t realize that some of us could have spoken to him in French.  So very French of him to feel intimidated but act arrogant to hide it.

  

  I sighed.  So it wasn’t Pemingway after all.

  I had to tell him.

  A few of us stayed until 3:30 a.m. and the party was still rocking.  I tried every now and then to walk away to the edge of the sea and imagine the place, 90 years ago, when Fitzgerald and Picasso and Leger and the Murphys all had picnics on the beaches here and drank too much and chased their children and wrote and painted masterpieces.

  I tried, but it was hard.

  We drove back to Cannes in the dark.   Sometime the next day I sent Pemingway an email explaining the Delon mystery.

  I haven’t heard back.

  I’ve been… Pemingway-ed.

  We won’t always have Antibes.

  Tant pis.

  Ta,

  

• Day 82: Lindsay & Grace: The Importance of Not Being Sweet

  Date: 2010.05.20 | Category: Uncategorized | Response: 0

  

  Time got away from me the other  night at the Carlton Hotel because I was having dinner with an old friend, Entertainment Weekly movie critic Owen Gleiberman.  Owen is one of those people with whom you start having a profound debate less than 30 seconds after meeting and in a sea of Croisette-inspired small talk, that’s a good thing. Keeps me alert.

  We both said no dessert but the waiter had to bring a plate of pastries.  Owen ate some but fortunately kept arguing with me and saying he wasn’t sure I was right, which I enjoy and keeps me awake.  Boredom is the worst for causing sugar cravings.

  Then I saw my watch -1 a.m. – fuck, I’m supposed to be out scouting Michelle Williams, Ryan Gosling and Lindsay Lohan at a couple of parties: the Weinstein after-party for Blue Valentine at the Palais Stephanie – and Grace Jones at Le Baron.

  I’m about to meet some mean girls!

  I downed a coffee and headed over to the rooftop Palais Stephanie where I’m supposed to eyeball Williams and Gosling and figure out if they’re a couple.  I accidentally walk past three chunky producer types having their picture taken on a faux-red carpet and one calls me “cheeky” as I am still in earshot.

  Ah, an annoying British-ism just when my blood sugar is dipping precipitously. But it’s gorgeous up there; the pool is shimmering from the sliver of moonlight above and you can see the lights twinkling on the yachts in the harbor.  Away from the crowd, a couple makes out next to the railing overlooking the Croisette.

  The party at Le Baron where Grace Jones will perform is hotter.  In a festival short of superstars and trainwrecks, Lindsay Lohan is in the house.  Deep inside the VIP area where she holds court, I buy a sorely-needed 12 euro Diet Coke and the bartender gets mad when I ask for a receipt.

  I have the same reaction every time I am in one of these dens – be they in New York, Los Angeles, Cannes or St. Tropez.  It’s dark, it’s hot, it’s noisy and everyone seems poised for something to happen that never does.  If we’re all in denial what is truly in store for us (death), then being at a crowded nightclub late at night just reminds me of it more.

  All I can think of is, I can’t wait until I can go home and read a book.  I’m sure getting drunk to get through it would be the smart thing, but alcohol makes me sleepy and I’m already enervated enough just being here.

  I think of the soldiers in Evan Wright’s wonderful book about being embedded in Iraq, Generation Kill, and how they sometimes doze off right as they go into battle.

  

  I’m brushing up actor Dominic Cooper (had no idea who he was until someone told me) who is standing next to Lohan.  I watch her as she flirts with Cooper even though the word on her is that she is with some older lesbian cougar.

  Lindsay’s wearing a black hat, white wifebeater T, short white shorts. She gets her bodyguard to eject a very pretty blonde from her little circle who’s flirting with Cooper.  The blonde, exiled to a corner across the room, protests loudly for the next five minutes.  Can’t blame her.

  Everyone’s forgotten that Lohan is a fairly good actress but she seems so into her deliberate downward spiral that she’s more unlikeable by the moment. A judge is probably going to put a warrant out for her arrest when she doesn’t show up for a court date Thursday in L.A.  She’s supposedly in Cannes to promote a new movie in which she will star as Linda Lovelace but there’s no deal even in place yet.

  But I also get why Lohan sometimes gets into fights at these places. (She threw a drink at somebody in a New York club last week.)  Nightclubs really lack a sense of humor.  Her scary, scowling bodyguard looks as if he’s ready to punch anyone who looks at him.  I leave briefly to go look for the ladies room and unfortunately march straight into the path of fearsome Grace Jones who is flanked, African queen style, by three big, fierce bodyguards, one of whom pushes me so hard out of the way I am shocked.

  I glare at him; he glares back at me and to my amazement, Grace Jones glares back at me.  Did I imagine this? I don’t think so. Grace is quite the fucking diva. Fantastic. Now I’m awake again, got my second wind.

  Grace Jones, she of the fabulous posture, gets onstage and and I stand on a chair to watch her as Lindsay stands on a chair one over from me.  As Grace’s killer set wafts through the club, we’re lifted up into something briefly meaningful.

  Life is sweet.

  Ta,

  

• Day 81: Weakening

  Date: 2010.05.19 | Category: Uncategorized | Response: 2

  A bit tired with low blood sugar – was thinking how much I wanted a Snickers tonight and then got to my hotel room and there was a packet on the pillow with four little squares of chocolate.

  I need the chocolate; I need the energy.  I was thinking what if I just had one of the four: the milk chocolate one.  Nobody would know or else I could be honest and say I ate just one.  Minor relapses are supposed to be actually quite effective.

  I probably won’t eat it.    Of course it’s no big deal but the person I am afraid of is me.  If all of a sudden I say, OK, I’ll just have this one, I know me.  Tomorrow I’ll say, it’s OK, I’ll just have one scoop of the white chocolate gelato on the Croisette.

  And by Friday I’ll be chowing down on Snickers and Mars bars.

  It’s just a little bit of chocolate would help so much now

  Damn these chocolates on hotel pillows.

  Why not just put lines of cocaine on the bathroom vanity?

  Je suis faible et fatiguée,

  

• Day 79: Temptations Lurk Around Every Cannes Corner

  Date: 2010.05.17 | Category: Uncategorized | Response: 3

  

  Bonjour de Cannes!

  I’m only 11 days away from three months without sweets.  A bit strange to me that friends and readers of the blog wonder if I am actually not eating sweets, as if maybe  it’s just a blogging concept.  Like I’m chowing down on French macarons (yes they are spelled like that) while typing posts about how much I miss desserts? Um, no.

  I went to rent a car the other day from Nice’s best car rental agency, Elite,  and my friend Stephane who runs it, saw me eating from a bag while he was writing up my reservation.  ”I thought you were not eating candy?” he said. (When you’re on Facebook, spies are everywhere.)

  I showed Stephane that there were only almonds and raisins in the bag.  Raisins actually seems like cheating but only for some crazy-ass purist who doesn’t want a drop of natural sugar or processed sugar in her body.  I’m still just avoiding candy and all desserts.  That’s hard enough, bitches.

  So the point is – I am doing what I set out to do on Feb. 28, 2010.  Sometimes it seems almost easy, meaning I don’t crave sweets a lot or feel too deprived.  But just when I start to smug up and think I have this beating-candy thing down — I turn a corner, as I did yesterday in Cannes, and first see two girls eating ice cream cones.  Then I walk by the above boulangerie and see the macarons.

  I get hit hard and immediately feel – I want some of that and I want it now and how can I continue not to have the stuff I want?

  But the secret for me seems to be… about five minutes after I turn away from looking at the macarons and the girls with the ice cream cones are long gone, I forget about my jonesing and it passes.

  Sounds too easy, true.  And I don’t know about you, but the minute I get complacent and think I have everything under control, boom comes the big sledgehammer in the sky to take me down a peg.

  But… it keeps me on my hooves.

  Ta,

  

• Day 78: Jennifer Hudson Inspires Us!

  Date: 2010.05.16 | Category: Uncategorized | Response: 0

  

  Talking to Jennifer Hudson today at a seaside restaurant in Cannes was more than just another celebrity interview.  It was uplifting. Jennifer is only 28, she’s already won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Dreamgirls, had a baby last year and in two weeks will start the acting challenge of a lifetime:  playing Nelson Mandela’s ex-wife Winnie, in Winnie.

  She also lost a ton of weight for the new movie because the filmmakers asked her to, but she said she didn’t take it personally.  I told her about trying to give up candy and desserts for a year (78 days so far!) and she was all for it, except she said she could never do it.

  Jennifer lost all her weight on WeightWatchers but she’s now their spokeswoman and told me the company won’t let her say how much she lost.  I’m guessing about 40 pounds. She said she loves the WeightWatchers “points” system because she gets to eat enough and not feel hungry.

  We bonded over diet talk, what a girl cliche I know.  I told her I was glad she didn’t do the Beyonce and Gwyneth “master cleanse” that is so trendy and sort of scary, I think.

  Jennifer is one of the smart stars.  She talks to you as if you’re a friend; she’s funny and self-deprecating.  She’s TALL too;  at 5’9″ she was wearing four-inch stilettos that made her tower over me – and I’m 5’8″.  She says everyone is always amazed at how tall she is.  She looked like a supermodel today with her height and weight loss.

  So she’s not arrogant – but like a lot of truly talented people, you sense why she’s a star. From what I’ve seen over the years, it  takes more than just talent.  It takes ambition, a steely competitive drive and the desire to master things.  I’ve noticed big stars don’t ever seem to have much self-pity, even when bad things happen to them.  So many other people just give in.

  Jennifer’s mother, brother, and nephew were killed in a shooting in 2008 and she stayed out of the spotlight for three months afterwards. Her estranged brother-in-law was been charged with their murders.

  But then she had a baby – and now she’s learning a Xhosa tribal accent to play Winnie Mandela. She’s working with a Xhosa dialect coach.  She says she’s nervous, but you feel a calmness and determination radiating from her.   Love people who get right back up on the horse and don’t hesitate to start jumping again – first by having a baby, then by changing her body – and now portraying Winnie Mandela.

  Do we wish Jennifer Hudson the best?

  We do!

  Ta,

  

• Day 76: We Get No Love from Shia LaBeouf

  Date: 2010.05.15 | Category: Uncategorized | Response: 3

  

  In the new film “Wall Street:  Money Never Sleeps,” Shia LaBeouf’s character brings down one of the film’s bad guys by planting some not-so-flattering information about him on a small blog…

  Hmmm, what a good idea.

  Anyway, Without Candy has another packed schedule as of today but wanted to bring some good news before she gets into why Shia LaBeouf is not her favorite new person.

  Yesterday was so busy I didn’t think of sweets even once and the only temptation came at midnight at a fabulous, torch-lit villa up in the hills above Cannes and was just a tiny cup filled with sorbet and was easy to turn down.

  Here was my day leading up to that sorbet in Cannes:

  11 a.m. – Outdoor press conference for “Wall Street 2.”  Michael Douglas gamely fields a question from a reporter (not me!) congratulating him for “looking good” at 65 and asking “is it hard to get roles in Hollywood as a mature actor?”

  Ugh.  Is there a worse word in the English language than “mature” once you’re over 40? Think not.

  Shia LeBeauf was at the presser as well, looking serious and saying he had been intimidated by the “all-star cast” of Wall Street when they started shooting.  He was flanked by his co-star in the film, Carey Mulligan, with whom he is having a romance. Lucky her.

  12 – 2 p.m. – Reporting, filing stories and trying to avoid this one reporter with whom I worked with in the late 1980s (oh, does that make me mature?) and who I have run into about 10 times already and who I run into more than anyone I’ve ever worked with.

  2:00 p.m. – Learn I am assigned to the evening’s black-tie world premiere of “Wall Street 2″ and the after-party.  Yes, the entertainment reporting trade is like this. On the fly. Don’t ask. I was in black pants, which you cannot wear on the red carpet leading up to the Palais and the Grand Theatre Lumière when attending a world premiere.  They will stop you in line if they see you and expel you.

  2:01 p.m. – Panic. Do I have time to drive back to Nice to get one of my black dresses and return in time to gather at the Hotel Majestic bar prior to the movie screening?  No.  But figure I have enough time to buy one on the Rue d’Antibes a block from the Palais at a shop like Zara.

  2:15 p.m. – Set off for Zara.  Cell phone rings, am assigned a quick story to write and have to return to Palais.

  4:00 p.m. – Clock is ticking but am confident dress will be easy to buy. I go buy a Big Mac to steel myself for looonngggg evening.

  4:30 p.m – Head into Zara.  Tell them I need a black dress for tonight.  Incredibly, they have only a few weird, unflattering, awful dresses.

  4:40 p.m. – Go to another boutique.  Slight panic.  If I don’t buy a dress and be at the Majestic Hotel by 5:30 p.m. – I miss the premiere and the after-party and editors will not be happy.

  4:41 p.m. – Nice salesgirl brings me dresses designed for someone slightly slimmer than Gisele Bundchen.  Trying to pull dress down over me in tiny trying-on booth the size of a postage stamp.  Hate my life.  Know this will engender no sympathy.

  4:50 p.m. – Exit second boutique in full panic.  Decide I am too mature for this crap and wish I could skip tonight and just go catch some screening with a friend and wear my flip-flops.

  4:55 p.m. – Enter the Caroll boutique and find Catherine, mon ange. Catherine(below, on the right) sizes up my crisis in 30 seconds and produces 4 quite pretty dresses, gets me to a cabin, shows me how she would tie the belt on one and fusses over me as if I were Sharon Stone.

  

  5:10 p.m. – Still wearing the dress (on sale for about $100) after Catherine cuts the tags, I thank her profusely.

  5:30 p.m. – Make it to the Majestic for drinks with the Grey Goose reps who are sponsoring the premiere and who are allowing me and two other reporters what is called “access” in the trade.

  6:30 p.m. – Led by Grey Goose rep, we make our way out of the Majestic and get caught up in a soccer-like crowd melee with about 200 other people trying to cross the Croisette. It’s a surreal moment, our little group pressed against a line of French cops holding hands to keep the crowd which is pushing HARD. One woman gets sick or claustrophobic and cops yell “Malaise!” and pull her from the crowd.  I try not to topple over.  The Grey Goose rep remains unflappable.

  

  7:00 p.m. – We walk up the red carpet up to the Palais.  Even in a group, it’s always humbling to stroll past the hundreds of paparazzi poised on the steps who ARE NOT WAITING FOR YOU. Bump into Ellen Barkin at the top of the stairs. She’s very thin and friendly.  Brush by Harvey Weinstein.

  

  7:30 p.m. – We are seated and then the director Oliver Stone, Michael Douglas, Josh Brolin, Carey Mulligan and Shia LeBeauf walk to their special seats as the audience stands and applauds.

  8:15 – 10:30 p.m. – Watch movie.  It’s OK and interesting. Not great. Michael Douglas is good.  And I don’t understand why gorgeous, strong-jawed Josh Brolin is not a superstar.

  11 p.m. – Hustled into a van to go to “secret” location for the after party.  We wend our way through the hills above Cannes. The van is quiet as everyone, heads bent, remains in constant contact with their own personal control towers i.e. BlackBerries.

  11:10 p.m. – I’m tired but confident I’ll achieve my aim at the party, which is to get some quotes from the stars, and then call it a night.

  11:30 p.m. – We arrive at the gate of gorgeous Chateau Fayeres, looming on a hill at the end of a torch-lit driveway. The villa is alight with candles and torches; people are wandering between small white tents and an enormous pool.  It all looks vaguely Anne Rice.  ”Oh, look,” I tell one of the Grey Goose reps, pointing at a torch-lit area off the pool. “They’re sacrificing virgins.”

  

  Midnight – I make my first approach, to Michael Douglas. It’s never the most fun thing in the world to walk up to a famous person and just start asking them questions.  I’d rather talk to a cop, or a drug dealer, or a serial killer – in my other life as a hard news reporter. It’s been said before but nobody believes that the celebrity beat is the trickiest.

  12:01 a.m. – Douglas the pro, looking eerily like his father Kirk, is affable, genial – telling me his career has been all about “surfing the waves as they go up and down.”

  12:10 a.m. – Oliver Stone, another showbiz lifer, tells me he almost didn’t want to make “Wall Street 2″ when Douglas approached him in 2007. Then the 2008 financial crisis hit – and Stone realized he had a golden opportunity.  He also spoke at length about how Shia La Beouf and Carey Mulligan fell in love on the set. Great!

  12:20 a.m. – Shia is sitting at a table eating from the buffet (smoked salmon, shrimp, brown spicy rice, les petits farcis, a local Nice specialty) and probably indulging in some of the amazing vodka cocktails designed by the resident mixmaster.

  12:21 a.m. – I get a vibe that it might be better to send a Grey Goose rep over to request a quick interview with Shia and she says no problem.

  12:22 a.m. – Shia says no.

  12:23 a.m. – Thwarted, I plan my next move.  Can I get to his girlfriend Carey Mulligan? Will Shia loosen up after a few more vodka cocktails made with lemons from nearby lemon capital Menton?

  12:30 a.m.:  Non, and non, as it turns out.

  1:10 a.m. – Shia has taken off his tuxedo jacket and is holding court all over.  Salsa music is playing on the loudspeakers.  A few people are dancing.  The palm trees sway in the cool air. Heat lamps positioned around the pool keep us warm.

  1: 11 a.m. – There’s a wide open space around Shia. I move in, not so stealthily.  I start by introducing myself.  Shia holds up his arms as if to shield himself.  ”You’re a reporter?” he says, seemingly appalled.  ”Yes,” I say. “And Michael Douglas and Oliver Stone had such great things to say about your performance I wanted to be sure to talk to you.”

  1:11 a.m. plus 10 seconds:  Shia LaBeouf and I both wait to see if he will get his head out from up his own ass but no such luck. “Oh, no, I can’t,” Shia says.  He repeats, “I just can’t. I just can’t.”

  1:12 a.m. – Shia turns his back to me and hugs a well-wisher and hugs him. I stand there, starkly.  The celebrity reporting trade means you always get to remember what it’s like to be 13. No matter how mature you are.

  1:13 a.m. – I walk away and sit by the pool. Trying not to smolder.

  1:20 a.m. – De-smoldered, pick up a lemon vodka cocktail and relax. Word going around the party is how beautiful Diane Lane looks sitting next to her husband Josh Brolin.  Her hair is piled high in a brown beehive that looks great.

  Back to Shia. He’s only 23.  He’s already been acting for half his life and he starts “Transformers 3″ on Tuesday.  Has a fantastic career ahead of him.

  Do we wish him well?

  No comment.  :)

  Ta,

  

• Day 75: Down and Out in Cannes?

  Date: 2010.05.13 | Category: Uncategorized | Response: 0

  

  Was I holding court at the elegant Carlton Hotel tonight, a highball in one hand and a sidecar in another, watching as a tuxedo-ed Pierce Brosnan look-a-like leaned in to hang on my every word?

  

  Close.  It was a party of one on a bench on the Croisette just down from the Carlton with a takeout sandwich and a bottle of water from a favorite Lebanese stand near the Cannes train station.  But hey, there were 10 minutes of fireworks above the bay at 10 p.m.!

  I only had a few minutes in between investigative journalism opportunities.

  Someone get me rewrite…

  Ta,