Joan Crawford, the Waldorf Astoria, Times Square and Moi

Poster from Feud and right : Joan Crawford

There is a new movie Feud about to hit our screens staring Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon and it

looks sensational. It tells the tale of the rivalry between two Hollywood legends, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis.
It brings to mind Whispers part in making the movie based on Joan Crawford's life, Mommie Dearest into a minor world-wide hit. The film was based on a book by Crawford's adopted daughter Christina Crawford.

It was the late 1970s and Whispers accompanied then Daily Express columnist Timothy Swallow (left) to New York to produce a book about famous women. We ensconced ourselves for a fortnight at the Waldorf Astoria. Our madcap adventures in that two weeks are for another time but one incident has now become a legend. Timothy and I on a free afternoon ventured over to a Times Square cinema to watch Mommie Dearest staring Faye Dunaway. The movie was languishing in the box office doldrums and the Hollywood "elite" had turned their backs on Dunaway claiming her brilliant portrayal of Crawford was some sort of betrayal.
We simply loved the movie and early that evening over drinks in a  bar in the Waldorf we created a tale for Timothy's column in the Express: the William Hickey column. We claimed groups of fans were turning up to watch the film and at the crucial moment when Crawford attacks her children with a wire coat hanger, the fans stood up and waved their own wire coat hangers. Silly stuff to fill a column. Within days the tale was front page news around the world and life imitated art : fans began to do just that. The film became a minor box office hit and a year later back in London a producer tracked us down and took Timothy and I to the uber smart Knightsbride eatery San Lorenzo for lunch to thank us. Former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown later recounted our story in her book 1983 book Life As a Party.
Below is a trailer for Feud and beneath the infamous scene from Mommie Dearest.

Something in Common : Dracula & Rupert Murdoch

Russell Crowe may be in the frame to play Count Dracula in the 37th film about the legendary Transylvania but he is also tipped to play Rupert Murdoch in a planned film based on the memoirs of journalist Sir Harold Evans.

Harold Evans

Evans was the editor of the Sunday Times from 1967 to 1981 when Rupert Murdoch purchased Times Newspapers after a secret meeting with then PM Margaret Thacher, a fact just revealed in the Leveson Inquiry. He was appointed editor of The Times by Murdoch after extracting an agreement that Rupert would have no editorial input. That feel apart within a year and  Evans resigned, writing his auto-biography Good Times Bad Times in 1984.
He now lives in New York with his wife Tina Brown the former Vanity Fair editor and their 2 children.

Playing Evans will be the thinking woman's heart throb Colin Firth. This will be the second time an Aussie actor has played the Citizen Kane of the Antipodes. In the excellent TV  series Selling Hitler based on the phony Hitler Diaries and broadcast in 1991, Dame Edna Everage's manager Barry Humphries was cast as Murdoch. Rupert agreed to the purchase of the diaries after they were endorsed by the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper who later expressed reservations before publication. Despite being informed that the diaries were fakes, Murdoch famously said "publish them anyway, after all we're in show business".

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