Emerald City Update #4

ONE OF AUSTRALIA'S top publicists, Roxy Jacenko of Sweaty Betty fame threw a swish bash in her Woollahra home last night to launch her first book Strictly Confidential.

Roxy

Roxy seems to have a best-seller on her hands going by some of the reviews:

‘Think of it as The Devil Wears Prada meets the PR industry … ‘
’It’s a riveting read with lots of humour and plenty of real-life characters who are so thinly disguised as to be almost see-through…’
‘As well as providing all of this saucy intrigue, Jacenko manages to write with lots of humour so Strictly Confidential is an entertaining read.’
-  Ros Reines, The Sunday Telegraph (high praise indeed from Ros !)

‘If you like gossip, designer clothes and handbags, you’ll love this story.’
- Vittoria Bon, Sunday Telegraph  and Hobart Mercury

‘… it’s a faced-paced, enjoyable read that offers the right amount of escapism and a juicy insight into the world of Sydney celebrity.’
- Lizzie Stafford, Sunday Mail, U on Sunday

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Snooki from Jersey Shore

Ruby

The talk is that Roxy's vivacious sister Ruby Jacenko may soon start work as a scribe on the increasingly successful Latte Life newspaper that is distributed around Sydney's Eastern Suburbs.

Does Latte Life have the staid Wentworth Courier that has coasted on it's market dominance for so long, worried ?. You bet your life. For the first time in living memory the Wenty has appeared over the Christmas break-a slim version-when they never usually bother


# The Yanks strike again :  Many readers may recall when the TV show Baywatch was on it's last legs and they convinced the then NSW premier Bob Carr to invest in the series by funding filming on Sydney''s Northern Beaches (much to the chagrin of locals as film crews trod and trampled the delicate undergrowth ).

A handful of local actors were employed plus the late Rene Rivkin appeared in some episodes before the producers, wads of taxpayers cash in  hand decamped to see out Baywatch's last days in Hawaii.

Now the ghastly US reality show Jersey Shore is threatening to descend upon  Queensland's Gold Coast and the local burghers have fallen hook line and sinker. It could be a marriage made in Heaven!


##  KYLE SANDILANDS is stumbling from advertiser woe to woe as they flee his radio show (why did he think he could viciously insult a News Ltd journalist and get away with it ?).

Jenny Craig stepped into the breach when Holden and others fled depriving he and Jackie O's radio show of up to $8M in revenues.
Now after thousands of complaints Jenny Craig have fled as well.

But is Jackie O planning to do a bunk ?. An insider tells the Shuttle that while publicly supporting Sandilands, Jackie is privately fuming over the dramas and has been spotted in secret talks with a rival radio network. Although she is contracted to 2DAYFM our legal expert tells us Kyle's actions are enough To break her present contract. Watch this space !.
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What Have We Done To Kevin Spacey?

Following our story on Bob Carr's attack on Kevin Spacey's Richard 111 performance  in Sydney, and our follow-up tale on the British blogger Madame Arcati who had become embroiled in a Spacey family spat and been subsequently banned by Spacey from his Twitter account, the "former shoe salesman now making a go at film and theater. Wish me luck..." (Kevin's description of himself)  Oscar winning actor has gone into meltdown and suspended his Twitter account.

Spacey tweeted the following message : "“Unless Twitter implements better ways to stop harassment and stalkers, my account will stay locked,” 
and subsequently : “If this doesn’t work then I may deactivate my account and suggest that others do as well.” 

Yesterday the following appeared and Spacey locked out his 2,223,091 followers  
@kevinspacey's Tweets are protected.  
Only confirmed followers have access to @kevinspacey's Tweets and complete profile. You need to send a request before you can start following this account.

Has the curse of Madame Arcati struck again ?

Kevin Spacey, Madame Arcati : An Obesession With Penises

Kevin Spacey’s Richard III closed last night after a triumphant  run at the Lyric Theatre with Spacey receiving standing ovations. After the final performance Spacey shared champagne with billionaire Paul Ramsay who had forked out a $200,000 donation to the Kevin Spacey Foundation for a pair of tickets and another 100 grand for a game of tennis with the actor.

One theatre patron who wasn’t too taken with Spacey’s acting or the Sam Mendes production was former NSW premier Bob Carr who walked out of the play at interval and ripped into the Hollywood star's performance on his blog Thought Lines. 

Another who is probably not on Spacey’s Christmas card list is the famous British blogger Madame Arcati who has finally hung up her bicycle clips. Madame announced a week ago that her four year run was at an end.

Arcati has delighted, amused and horrified readers in equal doses but it was when she ignited a family feud amongst the Spacey family that her readership went through the roof.

Madame interviewed Spacey’s brother Randy Fowler in 2008. Randy had written a book Spacey’s Brother: Out of the Closet  in which he revealed that as a child he was regularly raped by his father who was was obsessed with pornography, was anti-Semitic and a member of the American Nazi Party.

Then Randy’s ex-wife Stephanie Mastini contacted Aracti bemoaning Spacey's superiority complex and claimed Randy was being ignored by his famous sibling.

Randy

Stephanie

Over the next two years matters degenerated into a family squabble with Stephanie’s sister Francine Mastini entering the fray calling her sibling Madame Batshit.

Finally Randy Fowler returned fire blaming Madame Arcati for all the fuss and accused all and sundry of trying to out his Oscar winning brother as gay.

There had already been much snickering about Spacey-who is the current artistic director of the Old Vic Theatre in London-after he was mugged in a London park at 4.30am by a young man who stole his mobile phone. (The incident brought back memories of the legendary BBC correspondent Sir Robin Day who had  been similarly mugged in Holland Park Walk whilst taking a constitutional walk. Day said at the time he had no idea the Walk was a gay beat even though he had lived nearby for 20 years.)

Soon Randy's ghost writer Jack Ewing chipped in and not to be left out, Spacey's biographer 

Randy Tamblyn had a few words to say as well.

The outcome was a rash of twitter bannings by Spacey with Madame Arcati and Stephanie being consigned to the sin bin where they have probably been joined by Bob Carr.

The penises ?. The man who is reputedly the mastermind behind the Madame Aracti blog  Victor Olliver has fled to the gentler world of Astrology and has become resident star gazer for the famous publication The Lady, Britain's oldest published magazine. 

Editor of The Lady, Rachel Johnson (sister of London's Lord Mayor Boris Johnson) has just resigned with dreadful timing to join the PR fixers Bell Pottinger.

The magazine's publisher Julia Budworth once accused Johnson of being "obsessed with penises".

Bob Carr Savages Kevin Spacey

The critics have loved his performance but former NSW premier turned art critic Bob Carr has walked out of Kevin Spacey’s Richard 11 during interval.

Writing on his Thoughtlines website Carr says:

Bob Carr loonpond.blogspot.com

“If you like Shakespeare, don’t see this. If you liked Kevin Spacey in American Beauty (1999) don’t see this. If you like the fun of Shakespeare’s villain Richard, Duke of Gloucester, don’t see it.”

Ouch!. But there’s more: "Spacey plays the cheapest and most obvious laughs, as if entertaining a school-age audience “The crude over-acting by him and his colleagues was reflected in too many shouted lines. Words are lost in the upper registers. Resonance and enunciation are thrown away and Shakespeare’s words go missing”

Wagner enthusiast Carr wasn’t too keen on Derek Jacobi’s Lear either despite the production receiving high praise from The Guardian and UK Telegraph.

" I, however, found it distinctly unmoving."

Even the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Antony and Cleopatra comes in for a pasting from Bob

" With inadequate voices (that is, inadequate for these roles) from Kathryn Hunter and Darrell D’Silva I found myself consulting the paperback text on my knee when I could."

And in the comments section our Bob  rips into those who disagree.

Derek Jacobi in Lear

Brendan W says " I do so love the implication that by enjoying the Spacey version of Richard III that I am somehow dumb….Of the two plays I saw this past weekend (Gross Und Klein and Richard III) I only enjoyed one, but was treated to spectacular, albeit very different, performances on both occasion"

Bob puts Brendan in his place: " You have seen TWO professionally-performed Shakespeare and declare that one was the “definitive”? When you have gone to the UK and seen productions by the RSC and The National Theatre come back and engage."

Bob is a famous Civil War enthusiast which possibly explains his support for the disastrous Iraq war but he once managed to wangle a forward for his book out of Gore Vidal, an anti-Iraq invasion exponent.

He was premier for 10 years before suddenly resigning in 2005 and fleeing to the sheltered workshop for those with political contacts –the Macquarie Bank also known as the Millionaires Factory. 

                

Many said he was the ‘best premier the Conservatives never had” who stuffed Sydney’s public transport, slashed legal aid and injury compensation and engaged in an unholy alliance with News Ltd tabloids on phony Law & Order auctions, eventually making it difficult for many to get bail which filled the jails.

Bob  fled with perfect timing as three successive Labor premiers tried to hold together the shambles left behind only to be turfed from office in a massive landslide to the Coalition last March.

Currently he’s lecturing the State and Federal Labour Parties on how to succeed but it's nice to know his lavish state pension and merchant bank sinecure keep him theatre tickets.

Recently Bob poured scorn on  the Occupy Movement saying the “greedy incompetents on Wall Street” will be tamed by “parliamentary politics”.

The Macquarie Bank is one of the largest and most successful private banks on the planet with extensive dealings on Wall Street. The CEO received a $33M payment last year. With Carr at the Macquarie the amount of government contracts worth billions that flowed into Macquarie while Labor was still in power may have been pure co-incidence.

Maybe Bob's role in the Millionaire's Factory is to 'tame' them We live in hope.

A "When Did You Stop Beating Your Wife ?" Moment

The verdict is in and Labor has been removed from the NSW political landscape having captured a probable 21 seats while the Coalition have at least 64 seats. There are oddities as usual in this state election. Although the Greens picked up over 10% of the vote they won no seats while the Nationals with just over 12% win 17 seats.

For all the doomsday predictions in the media this isn't too different to the '96 John Howard election when he crushed Federal Labor in a 'landslide' which reversed itself within 3 years with Labor winning over 50% of votes in '99 but still failing to take office. It does mean however that it will be a probable 8 years before Labor has a hope of winning although the voters belief that the Coalition is going to deliver them Paradise has the power to backfire badly.

 Common wisdom is that huge landslides really mean little in the way of a party's power to govern but do mean the electorate expects much and heaven help those who don't deliver. The claims of a mandate complicate matters when no-one actually knows what the Coalition intends to do apart from widen one highway as they announced. Labor had 11 new young MPs elected which gives them a chance to quickly re-invent itself.

As usual the local media-particularly the giant News Corp tabloids have performed woefully and spoken in soundbites that resemble Liberal Party press releases and have let new premier Barry O' Farrell slide into office without revealing one single policy.

The Fairfax Media, publishers of The Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne's Age newspapers seem desperate to descend to the same levels.

One report we noticed in the last days before polling was this piece about a well known personality who features on the Shuttle often-private investigator Frank Monte who stood unsuccessfully for the NSW upper house.

The Shuttle spoke to Monte yesterday and he was still annoyed. The previous week he had mentioned to us a tale of how the Herald had phoned him and asked why he was standing for politics.



Frank Monte







He gave them a quick run down of his policies and revealed that in the past he had worked for two state premiers and believed he could do a better job himself

The journalist's reply was "oh everyone around the office says it's only so you can get your hands on the electoral rolls."

Monte scoffed at the idea and responded that the majority of his work is now corporate investigation where local rolls are of little use and indeed, he spends more time working in the USA than Australia. And the very idea of spending $30,000 on a political campaign to get a copy of the electoral rolls was pretty silly.

Having set up the scenario (as our headline explains) -the Herald duly printed the outrageous slur without one scintilla of proof apart from some hacks in the Herald office deciding that must be the case. Office gossip became news.



Solomon Lew

 When the DJ's harassment case broke last year Monte announced (and it's presumed that it was a deliberate strategy by the client) that he was investigating the girl who made the claims which were eventually settled with no admissions made by the ex-DJs boss Mark McInnes who was recently described as the "disgraced" former DJ's CEO. Disgraced ?. Who says so ?. Certainly not Solomon Lew who just hired McInnes for a salary of $5.5M to oversee his fashion empire.

As we reported last year- during the infamous Versace court case, Donatella Versace said in an Australian High Court witness box in 2001 while being questioned by Monte's barrister, that she had never, ever taken drugs but just 18 months later revealed in Vogue that she had been addicted to drugs before and after Gianni Versace's murder.

Learned legal minds say that had Donatella told the truth about her drug use the trial's outcome may have been entirely different and in Monte's favour. The Herald amongst other newspapers got stuck into Monte at the time and have used every opportunity to bash him in print ever since.

They have gone strangely silent since the new verification that Gianni was indeed murdered as Monte had originally said-by the Mafia and which concurred with local confidential Miami police reports at the time that voiced the same suspicion .

Pairings and Partings

The former Premier of NSW Bob Carr once described him as "the Rumpole of the Lower Traffic Court"- colourful barrister Malcolm Duncan has passed away suddenly at the age of 54.

Duncan was a regular sight around Kings Cross and Potts Point where he was born and lived his entire life.
Taking on what some said were lost causes, he regularly tackled in the city courts issues that he saw as  'attacks on democracy' . One of his regular targets was the Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore who Duncan told the Shuttle was"out to turn Sydney into a bureaucratic nightmare where one will have to file a form in triplicate to the appropriate council office just to cross the road"

Duncan, a conservative was an adamant opponent of the Kings Cross  Medically Supervised Injecting Room but despite this he attended the launch of a book about the centre by it's director Ingrid van Beek.

Earlier in the week he had unsuccessfully attempted to obtain an injunction to prevent it's publication. The book described him in less than flattering terms during the very public political battles to keep the injecting room open. Malcolm was particularly miffed at being described as 'florrid' in the tome. but he couldn't keep away from the party and on spotting Clover Moore there he said "does she have the appropriate planning permission to be here !"

Despite his professed conservatism Duncan moved in many circles, supported the new nightclubs and discos springing up in the Cross with their extended drinking hours, successfully railed against Town Hall plans to redesign Fitzroy Gardens and wrote a blog on the left wing writer Margot Kingston's Webdiary where he described former PM John Howard's 11 year term as The Howard Drears and filed amusing chapters on his two books-The Great Australian Novel and The Chronicles of Nadir.

Duncan will be sorely missed-certainly by his political opponents who begrudgingly put up with Duncan's regular measuring of their campaign posters. Perched perilously atop a ladder in the busy Kings Cross streets during elections with a tape measure Malcolm would check the posters adhered to the rules and more often than not, would place his own above theirs at the same time.

Malcolm stood as an independent at almost every state and Federal election usually getting around 500 votes. He'll miss the appointment he had early next month with the private eye Frank Monte to give him some of his election tips for the March 2011 state election and next week the political rally he was staging in Kings Cross against the ruling Labor Party.
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Oliver and Roxy

Anthony & Terry

They were both at the recent Hermes beach party and they have just announced their engagements. Shoe designer Terry Biviano has told the world she and her current beau the Sydney Swan's footballer Anthony Minichiello will be getting hitched . Terry is also due to join the cast of the new Foxtel reality TV show WAG Nation which will follow the daily lives and adventures of sportsmen's wives and girlfriends.


And the effervescent boss of top PR firm Sweaty Betty Roxy Jacenko was sporting a sparkler on her hand that our diamond adviser says "looks like 5 carats to me!" when she arrived at the bash with her fiancee stockbroker Oliver Curtis. Perhaps these two should get their honeymoon in early. The Shuttle's legal mole says Curtis may soon be called to appear before some sort of official body over the affairs of his friend John Hartman who was jailed recently after being found guilty of insider trading.