Hollywood

An intelligent letter from a reader, Stanislas Yassukovich CBE, warms my heart. It’s nice to know there are others as appalled as I am by today’s so-called elite’s ghastly manners. Good manners, a rarity these days, are not a superficial activity. They serve a moral purpose, that of an inner unselfishness, a readiness to put others first. They are the opposite of brute force, concealing man’s natural belligerence. After the Titanic went down, it was revealed that first-class passengers had died in disproportionate numbers because they had queued in an orderly manner for a lifeboat. Forget the movie, that was Hollywood bullshit; Astor and Guggenheim, the two richest on board,

For some of you younger readers the name Schmuel Gelbfisz will not ring a bell. Yet back in the Thirties Schmuel Gelbfisz’s identity was a dinner-party quiz question, and the one who guessed correctly would receive a kiss from Mary Pickford — America’s sweetheart — if he happened to be a man, or an expensive trinket if a lady got it right. Schmuel was born in Warsaw, Poland, in July 1879, a Hasidic Jew, but later on falsified his birthday in order not to serve in the tsar’s army. He left my favourite country as a 16-year-old and walked to …Germany. He had no money and no friends, got to

Ahh! Spring has sprung at last! Or has it? Leaving a warm and sunlit London last month we expected balmy weather in Los Angeles but the skies were grey and murky and, like Lena Horne sang in ‘The Lady is a Tramp’: I hate California, it’s cold and it’s damp. It’s necessary to dress in three layers in the City of Angels. It can be seriously frosty in the early morning, when the movers and shakers don their sweats and pant down the boulevards of Sunset and Beverly. By mid-afternoon, however, it’s boiling and everyone strips to sleeveless. Not that Los Angelinos are big in the sartorial stakes. Whenever Percy

You can learn a lot from this book. Latin America has a smaller economy than Europe. Big companies can spend more on advertising than small ones. Maria Sharapova is attractive. Given that the book is written in the dullest of academic prose, there may even have been a paragraph I missed about how there is a Tuesday in next week. I’ve often wondered what they taught in business schools and if this book, which has Harvard Business School plastered all over it, is a guide then the main subject is the stunningly obvious. On 20 June 1975 Universal released Steven Spielberg’s movie Jaws with a spend on television advertising and

Shirley Temple, who died last week at the age of 85, was the most successful child film star in history. During the second half of the 1930s, a decade in which she made 23 films and earned $3 million before puberty, she was America’s most popular film star of any kind; Clark Gable came only a distant second. What was the secret of her enormous popularity? According to Temple’s own oft-repeated explanation, ‘People in the Depression wanted something to cheer them up, and they fell in love with a dog, Rin Tin Tin, and a little girl.’ This surely has truth in it, for the precocious, confident, sparkling little actress

Mr S doesn’t usually notice A List waists, but he wasn’t totally surprised when he heard that Matt Damon was on a diet during the filming of Monuments Men. While your correspondent has no reason to be smug, he will say that Damon wasn’t looking quite his Jason Bourne self. Steerpike was surprised, however, to learn that Damon’s diet apparently consisted of just one thing: grapes. Speaking at the premiere, co-star Bob Balaban told me ‘Matt was trying to lose weight and was hardly eating anything, just grapes.’ Am I the only person who thought that Matt Damon preferred apples? ‘How do you like them grapes?’ doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

Shirley Temple has died in California at the age of 85. She was known as America’s little darling after she appeared in her first film at the age of three. Later in life she moved into politics, running for Congress and joining the diplomatic corps. Henry Kissinger, she said, was surprised she knew where Ghana was, but she became ambassador to Ghana and later to Czechoslovakia. As for her films, Graham Greene, reviewing Shirley Temple’s latest performance in August 1936, was rather shocked: Captain January, the latest Shirley Temple picture, is sentimental, a little depraved, with an appeal interestingly decadent… Shirley Temple acts and dances with immense vigour and assurance,

Quentin Tarantino has responded to allegations in this week’s edition of Spectator Life. In the cover feature, Diane Kruger claimed the king of cool fired an actor for not bringing a pen to rehearsals. The director told the New York Post: ‘I’m not really sure what she’s referring to . . . However, any actor who shows up at rehearsal without a pen to make notes in their script isn’t professional enough to either be in my movie or worthy enough to be trusted with one of my characters.” He added, “That’s actually part of rehearsal: to test the actors, and if they’re not up to snuff, get rid of