Please God, don't let me wake up and see Simon Cowell's fake teeth and made-over face again: Concluding part to Michael Winner's dining with the stars - One of our best-known bon viveurs, MICHAEL WINNER has spent a lifetime eating with the rich and famous. Now, in the final part of our serialisation of his deliciously indiscreet new memoir, he recalls dining with celebrities from Simon Cowell to Ava Gardner — and reveals how Charles Bronson’s wife once served him the most revolting spaghetti he’s ever eaten...
SIMON COWELL
I thought to myself: 'That is a real decent human being': Michael Winner on the music mogul's generosity when out dining
When I met Simon Cowell ten years ago at the Jalousie hotel in St Lucia, I had no idea who he was. Nor did anyone else. Even his mother had difficulty recognising him.
He’d turned up for breakfast one day on the terrace with a blonde Page 3 girl, his mother Julie (the only person Simon loves more than himself), his brother Nicholas and a blonde actress called Mandy Perryment, who’d played a small part in one of my movies.
After going over to greet Mandy, I was introduced to Simon and the rest of the group. At that time, he’d never been on TV. He was a record company executive whose company occasionally went bust.
I found him immensely likeable and witty.
For Christmas and New Year, I was back at my usual hotel in the West Indies — the Sandy Lane in Barbados. For New Year’s Eve, I gave a dinner party at the hotel in the terraced dining room where my guests included the singer Chris Rea and family, former TV host Des O’Connor and his girlfriend (whom he later married), Simon Cowell’s party of five, a friend of mine in the theatrical game called Adam Kenwright and one of his friends.
It was a very nice group, indeed. Except for Des O’Connor, who is the meanest sod in the world.
He had been to one of my New Year’s Eve parties a couple of years earlier. These cost, even in those days, at least £350 per person. Des, however, never wrote and thanked me, never sent a bottle of wine or flowers to my girlfriend. Nothing.
Now I’d asked him again and he suddenly said that not only did he want to bring his girlfriend, he wanted to bring his daughter. So there were now three people there, which cost me around £1,500.
Once again, I got no letter of thanks, no flowers for the girlfriend. Nothing.
During the meal, Des O’Connor spoke as if he were on television, doing an interview. He also asked Simon Cowell to lunch with him the next day.
So Simon turned up to lunch with Des, who’d only wanted to see him in order to try to promote a record deal for his girlfriend. Not surprisingly, Simon ended up paying the bill.
To return to my dinner party: when the time came for the bill, I suddenly saw Simon was paying it with his credit card. He wasn’t even that successful in those days.
I became extremely agitated and said he couldn’t possibly do this.
In the end, Simon was adamant that he paid for half of the party. This involved paying for more people than his group of five.
I thought to myself: ‘That is a real decent human being.’
We had a number of meals thereafter — one being at my engagement party at the Ritz hotel, London, where I made a sort of ‘roast’ speech about many of the guests.
Toward the end of it, I said: ‘If I may end on a serious note. Each night I kneel down and I pray to God.’
I could see the audience thinking,: ‘Oh, he’s had all these illnesses and nearly died — he’s now going to be very serious, indeed.’
I continued: ‘I get on my knees in my bedroom and say, “God, please, do one thing for me. Please let it be that I wake up tomorrow and don’t have to see Simon Cowell’s f****** face in the newspapers again.
‘But, of course, I did. There he is every day, beaming at me with those fake teeth and that made-over face. It really is beyond belief.’
AVA GARDNER
'If you tell the truth about your life it will be the greatest autobiography, ever. Apart from your marriages, you've been with God knows how many other men': I told Ava Gardner
To go on the streets of New York with Ava Gardner was to see one of the great crowd-pullers of all time. People may not have turned up in their millions to see her movies, but she was an icon and a legend.
Once considered the most beautiful woman in the world, she’d been married to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra.
When I met her, though, the marriage to Sinatra had long been over and she was living alone.
We were in New York because she was playing a leading role for me in my horror film, The Sentinel — quite a bit of which was shot in a large spooky house in Brooklyn.
One day, Ava returned late from lunch. Now, I am somewhat draconian on the set. If you’ve got a unit of 80 people, I expect everyone to return from lunch at the same time and get on with the job.
Ava was 15 minutes late. So I gave her a bit of a telling off.
She apologised profusely, saying she had been to Peter Luger’s Steak House, where she used to go with Sinatra, to relive moments of their relationship.
Ava was always quite angry that she’d introduced Sinatra to her friend Barbara Marx (ex-wife of Zeppo Marx of the Marx Brothers) and Barbara had then nicked him.
It was Sinatra who kept Ava financially afloat after the divorce. She’d starred in an enormous number of films, but — as she put it to me: ‘You know when I made all those movies, actors and actresses didn’t get much money.
‘Not like today. We had no power. We were just shifted from movie to movie. So I never made what I could have done if I’d started out later.’
In London, she tended to stay in her apartment, only occasionally going out to see her gay friend Charles Gray, who played Blofeld in one of the Bond movies. She was always having rows with him, not speaking and then making up.
I remember when HIV started hitting the headlines, Ava said to me: ‘I go to his parties but I take my own glass now. I’m terrified of getting Aids.’
Occasionally, she’d come out with me. I recall a particular dinner at Wiltons (a posh restaurant in Jermyn Street), because she usually spoke very little about her past.
As we ate fried plaice and chips, she told me how (the aviation billionaire) Howard Hughes, with whom she’d had a long-running on/off affair, used to have her followed wherever she went. If any of her current relationships broke up, his people would approach her and try to persuade her to see Hughes, wherever he was at the time.
Once, she was in some ski resort in the U.S., where she’d just broken up with a man. She was persuaded to visit Hughes in Florida.
‘I got very quickly bored, because he was extremely boring,’ she told me, ‘and I decided to go to Cuba.’
'I wasn't such an ugly broad, was I? I looked pretty good in those days': Ava said of her appearance in The Barefoot Contessa
Doubtless, Ava had some other romantic situation ready to unfold in Cuba.
‘I booked a ticket at Miami airport to go to Cuba,’ she continued. ‘It was then I realised for the first time how immensely powerful Hughes was. Because when it came to 10.30am and the plane was due to board for Miami, an announcement came over the loudspeaker saying the flight had been cancelled.
'So I transferred to another flight three hours later. That, too, was cancelled. And thus it went on throughout the day. I realised that Howard was having various airlines cancel their planes from Miami to Cuba to stop me going there.
‘That made me even more determined to go. I hung on. And it was not until 24 hours later, at 10.30am the following day, that even Howard Hughes couldn’t stop the flights going to Cuba.’
Most nights, in her later years, Ava would have dinner alone in her elegant apartment in a Kensington square in West London, do a newspaper crossword and get sozzled. She would ring me many, many times.
One call I remember particularly because it was so moving. Instead of asking my view of an answer to a clue in the crossword, Ava said: ‘You know I’ve just been watching The Barefoot Contessa on television. I wasn’t such an ugly broad, was I? I looked pretty good in those days.’
I said: ‘Ava, you didn’t look pretty good. You were the most beautiful thing in the world.’
Even so, she was so desperately insecure and unsure of herself.
Some time later, she decided to write her autobiography, and I found somebody to co-write it with her. I told her: ‘Ava, if you tell the truth about your life it will be the greatest autobiography, ever. Apart from your marriages, you’ve been with God knows how many other men and you’ve been through the most extraordinary situations. You must tell the truth.’
Ava said: ‘Of course I’m not going to tell the truth, darling. I’m going to say things that leave the impression with people that I want left with them.’
She never did tell the truth. So most of what happened has gone to the grave with her.
After her death, Sinatra’s daughter Tina found him slumped in his room, crying and unable to speak. I can understand that.
CHARLES BRONSON
Charles Brosnan always insisted on eating at 6.30pm so he could see the news at 7pm. If you kept him longer on the set, he would become extremely irritated
When I made Death Wish and other movies with Charlie Bronson, we would go to lunch every day.
‘We’d share a dessert and often a main course, too. I lost a lot of weight with Charlie.
Charlie would keep forgetting his reading glasses so he’d say to me: ‘Would you read me the menu?’
This was rather sweet. On set, he was supposed to be a great sharpshooter, picking people off buildings 100 miles away — yet he couldn’t even read the menu.
Charlie had the most immaculate and beautiful house in Bel Air, run by Jill Ireland, who was a fantastic wife to him. The cutlery, the crockery, everything was exquisitely done.
He always insisted on eating at 6.30pm so he could see the news at 7pm. If you kept him longer on the set, he would become extremely irritated. Later on, he simply refused to work after 6pm.
When I begged him to do so to complete something for the day, he’d say, ‘Michael, it took me 40 years to become a star and those are the terms in my contract and I’m afraid I’m going to stick to them.’
I really don’t blame him for that, at all.
There was an unfortunate incident in Naples once. Jill, who was the love of Charlie’s life, decided to play a little game.
When we came back from a long day’s shooting, she said: ‘I’ve ordered a special dinner for you.’ We sat down and this spaghetti was served which was absolutely horrific — all gooey and sweet. Charlie didn’t say anything because it came from Jill. He was so in love with her that he just kept quiet and ate it, but I could see he was hating it.
I said: ‘What is this rubbish, Jill? It’s absolutely ghastly. What are you trying to do, kill us?’
She said: ‘No, it’s a special thing I’ve done — it’s spaghetti with chocolate sauce.’ I said: ‘Charlie, stop eating it at once, your wife is f****** mad. Let’s get a decent meal — we’ve been working all day.’
Although funnily enough, I read quite recently that there’s some sort of spaghetti dish they’re now doing with chocolate sauce. Which goes to show how appalling taste has become since 1971.
ALAIN DELON
Alain Delon told Michael he was 'very famous in Vienna' - he wasn't
While making the film Scorpio, I had dinner with the French star Alain Delon at the Watergate hotel. We were both staying there on the day the Nixon people robbed it. They may have robbed it, but they wouldn’t have stayed to dinner. The food was terrible.
The next day, we were sitting together on the film set in Washington DC, and Burt Lancaster — also co-starring — was a few yards away in his chair.
Around Burt were hundreds of people queuing for his autograph, taking photographs and treating him as a major star. There was nobody near Delon and me.
Alain Delon turned to me and said: ‘You know, Michael, here in Washington they all know Burt Lancaster and they’re all around Burt Lancaster. Next week, we are in Vienna and it will be quite different, because I’m very famous in Vienna. I’m famous as an actor and I also took out for years Romy Schneider, who is the Queen of Vienna. You wait and see.’
A week later, we were sitting together in Vienna in a lovely old square, with Burt a little distance away. Thousands of Viennese were clambering round Burt Lancaster.
Many were taking his photograph. The few who could get close to him were asking for autographs. It was exactly the same as it had been in Washington: no one was taking a blind bit of notice of Alain Delon.
I turned to Alain and said: ‘Alain, you told me in Washington it would be quite different here. That you’d get all the attention in Vienna, because you’re so famous.’
Alain said: ‘Not in this quarter of Vienna.’( dailymail.co.uk )
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