Photo Finish !



Gai & Robbie Waterhouse, Hoda Vakili and Tom Waterhouse



Too many parties, too much champagne !.

Our discovery of the week : a travelling cocktail cabinet filled with Pommery Champagne. This we like.



The gorgeous Racheal Finch



It was at the  hot young bookmaker Tom Waterhouse's launch of his betting website at the Beach Haus nightclub in Kings Cross : http://www.tomwaterhouse.com/ : online betting.

Tom's family has been in the horse racing game for over 100 years. His mum Gai Waterhouse is Australia's (and one of the world's) top trainers who has trained so many winners she has billionaires and Middle East potentates battering down her door to have her train their stallions at her stud.



Terri Biviano & Tim Holmes a` Court

His dad is Robbie Waterhouse who had a slight mis-hap with a nag named Fine Cotton. Something about daubing it with paint and a substitution  horse. A few million bucks was won on the betting tote. The whole scheme came crashing down and Robbie was 'warned off' the course for awhile but he's back in business.



a Pommery cabinet !



But it's young Tom who has taken over the family mantle and he gave me a few tips for the track :

"it's always easier to back winners in the first half of a race meeting"-"if the track is heavy and the favourite is odds on, get on"- "if you like a horse and you are surprised the odds are longer than you expected, don't alter your bet, bet the amount you intended. Value is king"

So there it is, straight from the horse's mouth as they say.

                                             

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OK, enough already !. We've had a few dozen emails demanding to see our snaps of gal about town Sharon Sargeant who took the ritzy Black and White Ball crowd by storm in her glittering red outfit.



Here are 2 to go on with.  Sharon is launching her own website soon so check back for the address. She promises us you won't be disappointed.



The Parliamentarian who makes grown men tremble-Bronwyn Bishop MP & B&W president Sue Diver

# A special mention must go to Tamburlaine Organic Wines (alcoholic !) from the Hunter Valley who supplied their superb tipple at the Black & White Ball. Visit their website :  http://www.mywinery.com/. Not only  a very nice drop, healthy to boot !
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The Quay Restaurant is world famous. This year it was voted Number 27 on the coveted S.Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurant’s list, to become the highest ranked Australian restaurant in the world, as well as rewriting Australian restaurant award history by scoring a “double double” win, having been named Restaurant of The Year for the second consecutive year in the industry’s two top awards, the Australian Gourmet Traveller Restaurant Awards 2010 and The Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide 2010.



Leon & Margaret Fink



Chef Peter Gilmore & John Fink



So of course you would be stark raving mad to miss a book launch there especially when it's a recipe book by the famed head chef at the Quay, Peter Gilmore.

You know the nibbles will be superb, the Bollinger chilled to perfection and the crowd friendly. The only thing missing were some of the restaurant's regular clients when in town-David Bowie, Gordon Ramsay, Mick Jagger and King Constantine II of Greece.



our favourite Murdoch family member-Matt Handbury and partner Clare



The Quay is owned by Leon Fink and run by his son John. John's mum is the film producer Margaret Fink who produced Candy with Heath Ledger and My Brilliant Career (for which she won an Academy Award )and which launched the careers of Judy Davis and Sam Neil.



The view from The Quay Restaurant







Delicious Ironic Moments # 1

In an exert from her autobiography in the UK's Daily Mail, Jerry Hall-currently in Australia writes in a piece titled :

'I got Mick Jagger to quit heroin... but I could never get him to give up GIRLS': Jerry Hall reveals all in long-awaited autobiography

"He wasn't nearly as rich as people thought".....and in the following paragraph..

.."We bought homes in New York, London, Paris and Mustique !"

Kate's lawyers after Aussie paparazzo....

        The report that Kate Middleton has instructed the Queen's lawyer's to pursue 2 photo agencies over the sale of snaps of Prince William's girlfriend adds more woes to Sydney based agency Ikon and it's likeable boss, the roguish snapper Peter Carrette. (right in white sunglasses)
   The report -on Murdoch's News Ltd website says the pics were offered to British newspapers, presumably The Sun and other News Ltd outlets but were graciously rejected but published in Germany (forgetting to mention the slight fact that the German publication is part Murdoch owned ).
   Carrette, who lives in a Bondi apartment owned by friend and actor Jack Thompson and originally from London, has lived most of his life patrolling Bondi Beach and snapping topless stars .
    He came a cropper in 2006 when he organised himself and 2 aides to squirt actor Heath Ledger with water pistols at a film premiere.

      "You need us " was their claim and Carrette fronted several TV interviews broadcast world-wide proclaiming his right to do just about anything to get a saleable snap.
    That stunt backfired badly when the giant film corporation Village Roadshow banned him from all future events. 2 days later Carrette was filmed walking up the steps of the late Ledger's recently purchased Bronte Beach seaside house and leaving a bunch of flowers at the door with a note.
       As he departed a male opened the door-ripped up the note and hurled the bouquet after Carrette. Within 2 months Ledger announced he was flogging his much loved house and moving to New York to escape probing cameras. He died there in 2008.
     But another blast from the past is about to arrive Downunder and is seeking an apology.

Mick Jagger's ex-girlfriend Marrianne Faithful will be in Sydney in a fortnight and has said she is still smarting from a snap taken as far back as 1967 when she and Mick arrived here for Jagger's film role as the bushranger Ned Kelly. Faithful ended up in hospital on day two after a suspected drug overdose.
      A photographer sneaked into the hospital in a doctor's coat with stethoscope and snapped Faithful as she lay in bed looking like death. The pic went around the world in a flash.

     tSS spoke to Faithful via telephone a week ago about her up-coming appearance at the Sydney Opera House where she will be joined on-stage by the Federal Environment Minister and fromer Midnight Oil's singer Peter Garrett and actor Tim Robbins in a show conceived by actor Johnny Depp.
      Asked about the infamous snap, Marrianne said she  had "sort of forgiven the photographer but  I might just give him a kick in the balls if I run into him "
       Step forward Peter Carrette . According to the News Ltd piece Middleton's lawyers have asked for financial compensation. Carrette claims he receives $50,000 a picture-even claiming that was what he received for the Faithful hospital snap in '67 (which in today's money would be about half a million). Plenty enough  for a lead-lined jock-strap to protect those bollocks.

a film about Percy

Percy Savage

No party or fashion event is complete these days without the dreaded PR 'officer'. Apart from a few rare exceptions (and it's worldwide) they're usually rude and full of self importance and have done some useless "media " course at a technical school, tacking on a few initials after their names as they become instant door bitches armed with attitude,a clipboard and 'list'.

We've encountered them everywhere. In Sydney they have a turnover rate of about a year, after which one must explain one's impeccable press credentials all over again to a whole new clueless fool who thinks a scruffy paparazzi is of equal importance as the nation's top columnist. We've stood with astonishment at some doors where the offending dolt has muttered "your name is not on the list" as a troupe of Sydney's most infamous gate-crashers are waved through (and these liggers would be OK if they were personalities-which they ain't). In Melbourne they are marginally more polite.

But now comes a film about the legendary Percy Savage who died at age 81 in 2008. Percy was a Shuttle friend and favourite in London and invented modern fashion PR in the 1950's when he clad Elizabeth Taylor in a Lanvin gown for a red carpet premiere in Paris. The resulting pictures swept the world and the "red carpet' phenomena was born. Percy went on to become the greatest manipulator of 'press opportunities" for a host of celebrities like Jackie Onassis or Yves St Laurent.

  Savage in his Chelsea garden

Born just outside Brisbane, Savage travelled first to London in 1947 and then to Paris to escape Britain's post-war gloom. With little formal training he designed for Lanvin, Nina Ricci and Balenciaga amongst other famous fashion houses.And he hung out with Jean Cocteau.

  Back in London where he spent the rest of his life he promoted new younger designers like Mary Quant and Zandra Rhodes and made them famous. He specialised in seating arrangements for photo ops at runway shows, seating Liz Taylor with Mick & Bianca Jagger. Savage was a joy, a gentleman, flamboyant, elegant, grand and gracious but never a snob. And Dior named one of the world's most famous fragrances after him : Eau Sauvage!

Savage, A Life In Fashion is showing at the ACMI cinemas at Federation Square in Melbourne with Sydney dates to be announced. Don't miss it.

                           

just another balmy day in Sydney...

The perfect start to a warm sunny spring day with a light breeze. Breakfast at Doyles with former chat-show king Michael Parkinson. 

In Watson's Bay with it's boardwalk lined with weatherboard houses-Doyles gives the feeling of a Mediterranean fishing village cafe. It was where the legendary Marlene Dietrich dined before she appeared on stage one night at the Theatre Royal in 1972, promptly fell over mid-song and broke her leg which not only ended the cabaret but the great Marlene's stage career forever.

Parkinson is as amusing and interesting as any of the guests who appeared on his show. He doesn't mind he may always be remembered for Rod Hull and the Emu incident or the Meg Ryan debacle."Part of the territory" he says. Asked what went wrong between he and Ryan, Parky has a quick answer-"it was hate at first sight and went downhill from then on".

2 of Parkinson's favourite interview subjects were Dame Edna Everage and the late Kenneth Williams : "both made an interviewer's job so easy-one could sit back and let them do all the work".
He related the tale of when he, Kenneth and the late Marti Caine were invited by Lady Hardy to go on a Sydney Harbour cruise aboard an ancient clipper. A proper boat as opposed to the gigantic gin palaces that now blight the docksides.

" I'd warned them both it was a sailing boat-not a cocktail cruise. Marti turned up in 6 inch stilettoes and Kenneth wore a suit, a homburg and a mac. He spent the next 3 hours shivering in the cold wind and complaining about his piles" .

His most satisfying interview-Nelson Mandela who he travelled to South Africa to interview. "I couldn't have the president walking down that staircase on the show like he was a celebrity" says Parky.

He won't name the few stars whose interviews were nipped in the bud just as they were about to appear-totally written off. But he did cope with a stoned Robert Mitchum, and a drunken Elliot Gould and Donald Sutherland . Sutherland apologized 20 years later.

And his very first interview for TV in Manchester ?. A young Mick Jagger who reckoned he had about one year to make the most of his rock career-as long as Parky thought he himself may last.

Parkinson's reason for his cool manner during interviews-"sheer terror "!. He doesn't miss being on television and he doesn't miss 'modern ' celebrity and says he wouldn't touch reality stars with a barge poll. This weekend he gives the keynote address at a journalism conference.

"Ironic" says Parkinson,"especially as I know less about the business than I did 40 years ago. But I'll muddle through ".

Michael Parkinson's "the One-Man Show" begins in Melbourne on Monday 12th October. Bookings at the Arts Centre. 
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And so to a light lunch at our favourite Manta Restaurant on Woollooomooloo Wharf. It's strangely quiet for mid-day, mid-week. Except for one table looking alarmingly like the Last Supper.

It's new 'media personality' Mick Gatto and associates. Mick has been doing the rounds of the chat shows to promote his auto-biography (see below). As I took a snap and eyed the small gold mine adorning his wrists and fingers he kindly gave me a quick rundown-'Cartier, Versace and Bulgari" he said beaming. 

Mick Gatto (centre) with friends (c)

Mick's a pretty friendly bloke for someone who the National Crime Commission says is a figure behind organized crime and may have been involved in a few murders." Would you like a copy of my book" he asked ?."I declined."Never much time to read" I replied as Gatto's pals eyed me suspiciously.

I made my excuses and left.