Attending my goddaughter Cara Delevingne’s 26th birthday party at the trendy Chateau Marmont hotel in LA, I was interested to see how today’s young dress to party. Forget the fairy frocks, cocktail dresses and lounge suits I remember from my Hollywood parties in the golden age; it was shorts, ragged jeans and T-shirts emblazoned with cryptic messages for the boys, and minute, fabric-saving, low-cut dresses for the gals. Or perhaps it was the other way around. Fortunately the Chateau hasn’t yet succumbed to the fad for gender-neutral toilets that almost every institution in the UK has adopted. Where is a girl supposed to apply some lippy and have a quiet gossip nowadays? These temples of privacy and comfort are slowly being stripped away from us ladies and it’s time to reclaim them before we are reduced to locking ourselves in the supply cupboard to get some ‘me time’ or to escape the clutches of a predatory boss. The party was amusing, with half-naked strippers parading down the stairs and a mermaid frolicking in the pool. But it’s better I stick to my own hangouts where a knee-length little black dress isn’t out of place.
I admit I like going to restaurants. I enjoy the theatre of them and I love good food. There are two or three in LA, London and Saint Tropez that I frequent regularly, where they greet me immediately upon arrival and are always happy to see me. So when asked to dine in a different boîte, I normally decline. I’m not keen at being stared down haughtily at the entrance by a millennial who asks, usually in the squeaky Minnie Mouse voice which is so de rigueur nowadays: ‘What is your name?’ When I recently replied to this query, she asked me to repeat it because she didn’t understand my ‘accent’.
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