Super literary agent Caroline Michel - aka Lady Gush on account of her, er, gushing - is still the CEO of literary/talent agency Peters, Fraser & Dunlop (PFD), I assume, unless something happened while I was away in Turkey. I only wonder because in her Londoner's Diary in ES mag today no mention is made of PFD: she is merely described as a literary agent. Nor is she described as the CEO of PFD on its neglected website (which is about to be relaunched - news last updated last November); she is listed merely as an agent. I'm sure someone will advise me as I can't be bothered to Google.
But for a superb demonstration of gushing, Michel's is almost nonpareil. She tells Matt Damon how "beautifully" he spoke at Anthony Minghella's memorial service. No person was "ever more loved" than Minghella, she writes - always a hard one to compile, that - y'know, the top 10 most loved people that ever lived (famous people, that is. Nonentities need not apply here).
She encounters George Clooney at a dinner party and concludes: "He's every bit as funny, clever, handsome, charming as you'd expect." Hanif Kureishi is "mischievous" which is a bit like affectionately ruffling a naughty boy's hair at a village fete; and Harold Pinter is "handsome" at a lunch in St Albans.
She loves Salman Rushdie because he loves women ("and they love him": certainly the old goat has cock-cunted quite a few). My favourite line concerns a Rushdie dinner whose guests "were mainly women" except for "manly Hanif Kureishi" (we wouldn't want to think of Hanif as a man who seeks women's company because he's a nancy boy) and, oh, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan were there, too. Oops, she nearly forgot them!
Caroline then gazes at the assembled female friends of Salman - "Nigella, Kathy Lette, Mariella, Carrie Fisher" and concludes: "Friendship, particularly old friendship, is a wonderful and precious thing." Even Gordon Brown is credited with getting a prediction right about the future being "rosy" (I assume she has prophetic skills).
One imagines Caroline trails a sound of purring and cooing wherever she wafts as the sweet fragrance of her platonic tongue-fu enclouds and seduces fragile, famous egos. One can only hope that they're worth the bother.
1 comment:
The poor thing is Dallas Revisited. So embarrassingly twentieth century. Not that she was ever on my list.
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