Lord Montagu Of Beaulieu: Notorious Car Collector Dies

Beaulieu motoring collector Lord Montagu dies - BBC News.

Hmm...

Hilariously BBC News don't mention how most people will know his name. [It was updated after about half-an-hour - most odd, or did I dream it?].

Telegraph.

PS I think The Independent was the only paper to pause and reflect on the import of the Montagu-Wildeblood trial. [Edit: Dandy peer and the sex trial that changed Britain, Daily Mail].

PPS Good piece by Kevin Childs in Gay Star News. And a woeful news story in Pink News.

Lord Montagu, pictured with friends in happier times.

Liberace: The Flamboyant Pianist Who Forced The Gay Marriage Issue

"In making the film, the socio-political aspect of it was not really in my mind but I was focused on... trying to make this relationship as believable and realistic as we could.
"When this issue comes up, of equal rights for gays, I am hoping 50 years from now we will look back on this and wonder why this was even a debate and why it took so long."

Steven Soderbergh speaking at a Cannes press conference for Behind The Candelabra, quoted by Reuters et al.
Steven surely deserves some kind of award for not choking on his vol-au-vent when a thick hack asked what this story of Liberace and Scott Thorson says about the great gay marriage debate.
What a ridickerless question!
Also note, SS's endlessly repeated line about the fillum being "too gay" for Hollywood - which we only had his word for - has now been downgraded to how The Man thought it might not break out of a niche gay audience. 
Which doesn't look quite so good in a hysterical "THAT'S HOMOPHOBIA!" headline.
As it's Saturday, there's an "The Liberace I barely knew" piece in the Telegraph today.
Here's something on Guardian Film, arguing - unpersuasively - that the best onscreen romances are now gay.
The best piece I've read on Lee in the British press this time round comes from Simon Edge in... The Daily Express!
Behind The Candelabra airs on HBO in the States tomorrow - Fagburn can't wait to see it.
 
PS Scott Thorson's memoir, Behind The Candelabra, has just been republished in the States. In this excerpt he shares his intimate memories of Liberace in the 50s, ten years before he met him.  

Update: And The Observer has a (syndicated) interview with Scott from Washoe county jail. Poor bugger.

Fagburn: TV Times

 
“The joke is that these people happen to be horrible to each other even as they love each other, and they happen to be gay. These guys aren’t funny because they’re gay, these guys are funny because of their wit and humanity.” 

Ian McKellen on Vicious in The Sunday Times, which starts on ITV tomorrow night.
Unfortunately "just happens to be gay" just happens to be a vacuous liberal cliche, and particularly silly when you're talking about a sitcom about a gay couple.
Could a male and a female actor have been slipped into the two lead roles?
And even more unfortunately, the word is Vicious happens not be funny.
David Benedict was hilarious - ironically - previewing it on Saturday Review; "The script is sooo bad..."
Looks like all those who said Ben Elton's The Wright Way was "the worst sitcom ever" could soon be revising their opinions.
Oops.

Grimmy - everyone loves Grimmy, don't they?
Did you know he's got lots of top showbiz mates?
Funny he never talks about that.
Anyway, he's got his own TV show!
Apparently, on Sweat The Small Stuff on BBC3 "he and celebrity guests argue the toss over things that don’t really matter. It is perfect for Grimshaw, and for the version of youth he embodies: celebrity-obsessed, fast-moving, dismissive, reductive fun. It is Twitter for the telly. Grimmy opted for it because, he says, 'I am fickle about pop culture. Like, I’ll love something one week, and then, yeah, I’m so over it.'”
Hope that's not tempting fate, Nick.
Oh, and good news, girls - he's still single!
But he quite "likes" James Franco.
“He’d be good, wouldn’t he? Like, older. Casual. And smart. I got a National Geographic subscription so that I could say things like: ‘Yeah, you know the blue whale’s spine?’ I thought he’d like things like that.”
Nick sounds quite a catch, doesn't he?

Update: Little parlour game. See if you can see any connection between this headline in Monday's Star - Nick Grimshaw Bans Harry Styles Over 'Gay' Jibes - and the story beneath it.

And not last but lust, another plug for Russell Tovey's new sitcom, The Job Lot.
Unfortunately it's on ITV on Monday straight after Vicious.
Let's hope everyone hasn't changed channels.
Russell plays a bloke who works in a job centre... who just happens to be straight!
Typecasting?
“Every character I play is straight, which is unique, my agent says, because it’s not really been done before that someone who is completely out is able to play straight roles. So for me to play gay it has to be something special, because it might actually be more of a risk. So I’m waiting for that role – I want it to be something that moves things forward.”
Can't wait.
Doesn't she look gorgeous right now?

And finally, the Sunday People has an interview with Scott Thorson, former lover of Liberace - "the bling-loving piano player".*
Scott's life fell apart after he split up with Lee, and he's spent the time since on and off drugs, and in and out of jail.
He let go the rights to his memoir, Behind The Candelabra, years ago, so may not see a cent from the TV movie.
Scott's now in prison - again - awaiting trial on credit card fraud and burglary charges.
Poor sod.

* There's a more revealing interview with Larry King from 2002 here.

Liberace: This Appalling Man

Jon Kelly writes for BBC News magazine on the paradox of Liberace; how could an entertainer so outrageously camp and over-the-top be so deeply in the closet?
Even infamously - and hilariously - suing the Daily Mirror in the 50s for daring to suggest he was not as other men...

"He is the summit of sex - the pinnacle of masculine, feminine, and neuter. Everything that he, she and it can ever want.
"I spoke to sad but kindly men on this newspaper who have met every celebrity coming from America for the past 30 years. They say that this deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavored, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love has had the biggest reception and impact on London since Charlie Chaplin arrived at the same station, Waterloo, on September 12, 1921. 
"This appalling man - and I use the word appalling in no other than its true sense of terrifying - has hit this country in a way that is as violent as Churchill receiving the cheers on V-E Day. 
"He reeks with emetic language that can only make grown men long for a quiet corner, an aspidistra, a handkerchief, and the old heave-ho. Without doubt, he is the biggest sentimental vomit of all time. Slobbering over his mother, winking at his brother, and counting the cash at every second, this superb piece of calculating candy-floss has an answer for every situation.
"There must be something wrong with us that our teenagers longing for sex and our middle aged matrons fed up with sex alike should fall for such a sugary mountain of jingling claptrap wrapped up in such a preposterous clown".

Lee won, quipping "I cried all the way to the bank".
Expect a sluice of articles on Lee as the biopic Behind The Candelabra approaches.
That's fine by me - I think he's wonderful and find him endlessly fascinating.
Partly as he's the greatest example of how the door to the celebrity closet is rarely slammed shut, it's just open to different degrees.

Update: Behind The Candelabra is getting a cinema release in the UK from June 14th. 

Matt Damon: Thought For The Day

“I never denied those rumours because I didn’t want to offend my friends who were gay – as if being gay were some kind of disease.
“It put me in a weird position in that sense. The whole thing was just gross."

Matt Damon quoted in The Sun.*
Have to say I'm addicted to scurrilous showbiz gay gossip, but never heard any rumours Matt Damon and Ben Afleck were a couple.

Damon also talks about the forthcoming Liberace biopic, Behind The Candleabra.
“We both have a lot of gay friends and we were not going to screw this up or bulls*** it.
“It wasn’t the most natural thing in the world to do, though. Like, for one scene, I had to come out of a pool, go over to Michael, straddle him on a chaise longue and start kissing him.
“And throughout the script, it’s not like I kiss him just once. We drew it up like a football plan.”

The Sun describe Liberace as the "flamboyant pianist", natch.

* Here's the original interview in US Playboy - a must-read at Fagburn Towers..

Liberace: Flamboyant Pianist

One of the sunniest entertainers ever to come along, flamboyant pianist Wladziu Valentino Liberace – known simply as Liberace – may have had a dark side, but he kept it carefully concealed from his public. 
That is bound to change next year when HBO airs the movie Behind the Candelabra, now filming with a cast-against-type Michael Douglas as the gilded showman and Matt Damon as his much younger lover, Scott Thorson – who exposed his life with Lee in a tell-all book and also sued for $113 million in palimony. 
"He thought his personal life was nobody's business," the real-life Thorson told PEOPLE in 1987, when Liberace, 67, died from Aids.
Oscar winner Steven Soderbergh (Traffic, Ocean's 11 and Magic Mike), directs the HBO production, whose title comes from the elaborate décor with which Liberace surrounded himself, including his trademark candelabra on the piano. Also in the cast: Rob Lowe, Debbie Reynolds, Dan Aykroyd, Scott Bakula and Cheyenne Jackson. 
In the scene shown here and taken on the set Monday, Douglas and Damon, both in character, are shopping for a car. 

People.
First onset photo to be released.
Think it's meant to look like it's unofficial.
God, I love Lee - this better be great.

Liberace: Candelabra In The Wind

Michael Douglas has reportedly signed up to play Liberace in a big budget biopic directed by Steven Soderbergh.
The screenplay is based on Behind The Candelabra - My Life With Liberace, written by Lee's last lover, Scott Thorson.
His yumminess Matt Damon is set to play Thorson.
The book focuses on Lee's relationship with his much younger lover (I'm sure Douglas can empathise), their separation - and an infamous "gaylimoney" case - and Liberace's denial about and then death from Aids.
Despite his very public denials of being gay, Liberace always seemed like a queer hero to Fagburn.
Maybe the new film will reposition him as a gay martyr, but of a very different colour to that Oscar-magnet Harvey Milk.
In a strange piece of synchronicity, Sacha Baron Cohen is to play Freddie Mercury, the other big name musical loss to Aids, in a new film scripted by Peter Morgan.
The 19th anniversary of Freddie's death was marked by BBC World Service's Witness where his personal assistant, Peter Freestone, remembered his last days.