Bits #15
Things to read, watch, listen to, chew over
Good morning! I’m interviewing the founders of Shit You Should Care About at Phlox Books tonight about their book, Make It Make Sense. I’m excited! They’re forces for good, those girls.
The tickets are all sold out, but there’s still some available for an event I’m doing next week with Dr Lucy Foulkes, about her new book Coming of Age: How Adolescence Shapes Us, for Intelligence Squared. Foulkes is one of Jonathan Haidt’s key critics (who I’ve also interviewed) and I find her nuance regarding teenagers and anxiety, fascinating. Come along if you’re free. I know the audience is going to get so much out of this one.
A vintage Hollywood prank, relayed by Susan Sarandon to Will Pavia, for The Times:
Jack Nicholson lives, she says, in a little house on Mulholland Drive, crammed with priceless works of art. “You would just see these extraordinary paintings worth millions, just hanging on the wall next to each other,” she says.
For years, Brando lived next door. The two houses shared a gate, their gardens merged. At any moment Brando could wander like a deer into Nicholson’s yard.
“Sometimes Brando would walk right in to Jack’s house and take things out of his refrigerator,” Sarandon says. “Jack put a lock on it. They had this big thing. But Jack had always said: ‘If you’re ever going to sell your house please let me know.’ So Brando calls one day and says: ‘All right. I’m gonna sell my house but this is the thing. You have to have $15 million in a bag at the end of my driveway in three days.’”
It may not have been $15 million, she says later. But it was a sum in the millions, and it was a Friday afternoon. “Jack says, ‘But you know the banks are gonna be closed. How am I gonna have it there by Sunday night?’”
Nicholson began working the phone, she says, calling businessmen he knew, organising wire transfers. “He goes crazy and he starts finding money,” she says. “He goes through all the machinations.”
By Sunday, he had several million dollars in cash in a bag. “He calls Brando back. He says, ‘OK, I got it, I got it. I’m going to put it at the bottom of your driveway.’ And Brando says, ‘Hey Jack. What is today?’”
“April 1,” Sarandon says.
A BBC archive clip of people on the street being interviewed about edible knickers in 1982. No notes.
How did the erotic podcast Dirty Diana pass me by? It came out in the 2020 lockdown, has been turned into a book (and shortly, a TV series) and stars Lena Dunham, Demi Moore, Andrea Riseborough and Melanie Griffith. Not your average podcast, then. (A star-studded ‘erotic podcast’, must also be a first.)
Diana, played by Moore, is leading a double life: she can’t face having sex with her husband (played with suitable dismay by Claes Bang), but she’s secretly running an erotic website, which hosts audio recordings of women narrating their intimate fantasies. I can’t work out if I’m a prude or was just unprepared —but walking down Oxford Street listening to Liz (played by Riseborough) having an orgasm, I almost melted into the street.
The podcast was created by film director Shana Feste and her friend Jen Besser and it’s inspired by Feste’s own life. I’m two episodes in and I’m very compelled. Partly, this comes from the insane production value (the crew is massive — the credits go on for about 5 minutes) which makes it like audible Netflix. Also worth remembering that Radio 4 used to pull off sound effects of almost the same calibre with their radio plays on a shoe string budget, with about 5 people and a bar of soap, but anyway.
Demi Moore’s voice, that Mariella Frostrup-esque I’ve-smoked-60-a-day growl (as natural as the Valley Girl vocal fry is not) was made for podcasts - particularly, sexy ones. Have any of you listened to it? Would love to know what you think!
Also stuffed with sex - but leaving me baffled, rather than compelled - was Apple TV+’s lifestyle thriller (a genre now in itself, thanks in large part to Nicole Kidman) Disclaimer. Even the Fleishman-esque feminist twist couldn’t save it.