In love: Joanna Harcourt-Smith with LSD guru Timothy Leary in 1973
Days after burying his beloved mother, hedge fund tycoon Arki Busson is facing the grim prospect of having his family secrets laid bare by an eccentric aunt.
Joanna Harcourt-Smith, younger sister of his mother Florence, known as Flockie, is feverishly scribbling a memoir that is bound to embarrass and upset Arki, whose lovers have included two of the world’s most beautiful women, Elle Macpherson and Uma Thurman.
His unease about the contents of the manuscript can only increase with the news that her publisher describes it as ‘mind-blowing’.
Former debutante and thrice-married drug addict Joanna, who now lives in New Mexico, is three-quarters through the book and apparently pulls no punches in her recollections.
She has much to be sensational about.
She was a flower-power teenager in the Sixties, lived with the Rolling Stones in France, cavorted with playboy Gunther Sachs, Salvador Dali and the Aga Khan, before falling in love with the LSD guru Timothy Leary, by whom she has a son, Marlon.
As I revealed, Joanna, who has been clean of drink and drugs for the past 27 years, was deprived of her share of her family’s £100million fortune when she was persuaded to sign away her rights to her inheritance for a mere five-figure sum.
She is not close to her philanthropist nephew Arki, who is said to have given away £37million of his fortune. She will feel no compulsion to hold back any intimate family details.
Publisher Naim Attallah tells me: ‘I have read the first 75 per cent of the manuscript and it is absolutely riveting stuff, I can’t wait to read the rest.
‘Her frankness is unbelievable — her sex life, her addictions to every drug you can think of. The celebrities she knew. It is an amazing story.’
How she was deprived of her inheritance is expected to be part of her memoirs.
Says her daughter Lara: ‘She signed her life away in 1978 and had virtually no contact with her sister after 1983 when she became clean of drugs.’
THE Prince of Wales’s compelling TV documentary on Sir Hubert Parry saw Charles speaking some rueful words about Parry’s marriage.
The Victorian composer married Lady Maude Herbert but the match was an unhappy one.
Charles read from a family diary: ‘His wife never shared his life and was no companion to him. With her funny, arrested development and self-centred smallness of vision she was no help or comfort to him at all.
'She hounded him, irritated him, bullied him, was a drain on him. This gave him a note of melancholy.’
You do not have to be too brilliant a psychologist to understand Prince Charles’s interest in Parry.
Heir ex tensions
His own man: Nicky and Kelly
She has enjoyed a meteoric rise from junior stylist to head of male grooming at London’s most fashionable hair salon.
But for Kelly Simpkin, girlfriend of celebrated hair stylist Nicky Clarke, her ambitions do not end there.
For Kelly, 27 who has been stepping out with Nicky for two years, wants to marry him and start a family.
Trouble is Nicky, who at 52 is almost twice his young lover’s age, seems not so keen.
The celebrity crimper, who charges £500 for a cut, has been separated for more than a decade from wife Lesley but remains married to her.
She is managing director of his £50 million hair products company and lives only four doors away from him in central London.
Speaking at the Mount Street May fair in Mayfair, he said: ‘I’m very much in love with Kelly but I am still my own man.
‘Marriage and babies are definitely not on the horizon. We have never even discussed it.’
But at Hare Ball at the Dorchester where the couple were among the guests of honour, Kelly, out of her lover’s earshot said: ‘Of course I want to marry Nicky and have his babies!
‘I come from a solid family background and I’m not the sort to wait until I’m older either.
‘I’ll twist his arm!’
He has the build of a man who enjoys a pint, so it is perhaps understandable that the Duke of Rutland has been mistaken for a pub landlord.
That it was his future wife, the former Emma Watkins, a farmer’s daughter, who made the error is surprising.
The Duchess says after they met a huge bouquet with a card from ‘the Marquess of Granby, David Manners’ arrived at her home.
‘I’d never met a sir, never even met an honourable, so I didn’t know what he was,’ she tells Tatler. ‘I thought perhaps he owned a pub because there are lots of pubs called the Marquess of Granby.’
Telecoms tycoon gives a ring
Tying the knot: Dino Lalvani and Frankie John
His father was once linked to Princess Diana, but playboy Dino Lalvani is proving he is more than just a chip off the old block.
After romances with Prince Andrew’s exotic friend Goga Ashkenazi, but not, he says, with Paris Hilton, the Knightsbridge-based telecoms tycoon is tying the knot with student Frankie John.
‘l met Frankie at a wedding three years ago. Now l will be whisking her off to Phuket in Thailand for our own wedding,’ Dino tells me at a party at the Little Black Gallery in Chelsea.
Dino, 38, bought the Binatone empire from his father Gulu, who once took Diana dancing at Annabel’s, in 2008 for an undisclosed sum and launched the brand in the U.S. Dino’s restaurateur sister Divia is married to the entrepreneur Joel Cadbury.
As for Frankie, who studies at the European Business School in Regent’s Park, Dino has plans too. ‘I want her to advise me in business,’ he says.
Cheryl Cole has found an unlikely supporter in the shape of former Dynasty star Joan Collins.
Commenting on the Geordie singer’s axing from the U.S. X Factor, allegedly because of her accent, Joan, 78, says: ‘I feel very sad for Cheryl Cole, as I went to Hollywood when I was 21 and they wanted me to change my accent and said people didn’t understand me.
'I had just come out of Rada and you had to talk like Celia Johnson from Brief Encounter. So they gave me lessons and I got an American accent. When I came home, my mother said: “What’s happened to your voice? You talk in a funny way.”
'I think Cheryl got a really bad deal, as they knew she talked like that before.’
Artist Damien Hirst is used to being accosted for his autograph by admiring aficionados. But he did not expect to be asked to scribble his signature on an item of women’s underwear as he enjoyed the delights of Peter Stringfellow’s eponymous Covent Garden emporium last week.
One of the performers, Jessica, approached Hirst clutching an unworn pair of knickers and asked him to sign them. He agreed.
Explains Stringfellow: ‘He emblazoned them with hearts and butterflies, making it a genuine Hirst original. The other girls want Jessica to put her knickers on eBay and reckon she’ll get at least £10,000.
'But she’s an artist and wants to put them in a frame and keep them.’
No comments:
Post a Comment