Bits #32
pitty pat, letterbox wine, criminal whatsapp chats and why the bush revival is fake news
It’s rare that I read an obituary as riotous as that of Primrose Dunlop. The Australian socialite known as Pitty Pat (!) became world famous in 1990 when her groom, Lorenzo Montesini, fled their lavish Venetian wedding with his best man. Don’t feel too sad for Pitty Pat, because the impending nuptials were a sham: the bride-to-be, who liked to party hop between Sydney and London, was only marrying the openly gay Quantas flight attendant so that she could use his staff discount. Montesini got the willies and tried to back out, but Pitty Pat’s mother would have none of it. So on the day, he bolted.
The pitch-perfect beach reads on The White Lotus demand a conversation of their own: this season Lochlan’s reading existential novel Hunger, Victoria’s reading The Beautiful and The Damned, and Chelsea is reading Rumi (natch.) Kate, of course doesn’t read at all: she just scrolls her phone, no doubt cruising for RFK memes. Props master Michael Cory tells Chloe Mac Donnell how he worked with show creator Mike White to match the books to each character and it makes you realise just how much thought goes into every single tiny detail on big shows like this.1
As a newly converted Wuthering Heights stan, I’m excited for Emerald Fennell’s adaptation. I’m of the opinion that novels are allowed to take new shapes with each auteur, but the internet is “abuzz” (aflame, even!) over Margot Robbie being 15 years older than Cathy, Jacob Elordi being white when Heathcliff is very clearly not, and Robbie being photographed wearing a white wedding dress in the late 1700s, when brides only begun wearing white in England after Queen Victoria married Prince Albert in 1840. (Before that, it would be red, pink, black or brown. Mmmm, a brown wedding dress.) Love—like really truly love—a niche historical nugget.
The inestimable Ian McKellen via The Sunday Times:
“Being in the closet is silly—there’s no need for it. Don’t listen to your advisers, do listen to your heart. Listen to your gay friends who know better. Come out. Get into the sunshine.”
I think to many Americans, British people are like Mr Tumnus: half man half fawn, emerging from our chintzy caves once a day for a cuppa char. Because how else to explain even the slightest bit of traction for a recent TikTok hoax, that claimed a national tea alarm goes off each day in the UK and if we miss it, we have to pay a penalty? Sorry to say, I don’t even drink tea.
The entire point of biohacking is to live longer, but every time I read a biohacker’s diary I think, is this living? Give me 20 years less, and a feast of friendship, culture and spontaneous life experience.
Turns out, there is no bush revival. Gen Z like a fanny wax even more than millennials.
I can’t wait to tuck into Atlantic writer Sophie Gilbert’s new book, Girl on Girl, about how pop-culture turned women against one another. (If you’ve listened to my audio docs Pieces of Britney and Unreal, you’ll know this is bang up my street.) Gilbert’s book is out in May, so whet your appetite with her piece on how technology is turning us against our own faces.
“The writer Daphne Merkin once observed that in reality, we find imperfection enchanting because we recognize “that behind the visceral image lies an internal life.” Which, I’d wager, is why the wonky smiles of Wood and Le Bon are so compelling in this moment: They assert the intangible beauty of having a soul.”
Gwyneth Paltrow does a Ben Affleck and lets us if not totally behind the curtain, then a lot further than we’d usually get. (As does her daughter, Apple, for Interview mag.) As she ventures back into acting after a 15 year hiatus, GP tells Vanity Fair that dating Brad Pitt is like “having dated, I don’t know, Prince William or something”, that she regrets the ‘clickbaity’ vagina candle, and that sh'e’s happy to be mocked if it means treading new ground.
“By some instinct or curiosity or desire, I go somewhere and I hack through the path and I get the scratches of hacking through, but I make space for other people then, to do it.”
When it comes to MAHA she speaks in tedious riddles, but she’s clearly smart as a tick and I liked her re-branding ‘empty nesters’ as ‘free birds’—a much more hopeful way to look at your kids leaving home. I’d expect nothing less from the woman who put ‘conscious uncoupling’ on the map. (Which, incidentally, she admits was tough as hell to execute.)
If I could recommend just one thing this week then it would be Clemency Burton-Hill’s documentary about surviving a near-fatal brain haemorrhage in 2020. Clemmie is an old friend—and an extraordinary classical musician, journalist and broadcaster—and My Brain: After The Rupture is an intensely moving film directed by Ursula Macfarlane about Clemmie’s extraordinary determination, while battling aphasia and post-traumatic epilepsy, to learn to walk, talk, spell her name and venture tentatively, once again, into the bright lights of real life. “I am frozen in neurological winter”, she says slowly and painfully, grieving the life—and self—she left behind. When her eldest son, Tomos, (with whom she is desperate to play the violin with again) tells her he can’t remember who she was ‘before’, my heart near cracked in two. It is a candid, brave, life-affirming chronicle of building a new self, against the odds, and a testament to the astonishing and healing powers of music.