Chrissy Iley

Grey Lights

I arrived back to the UK and everything was grey, literally. Once cosy warm restaurants with lights that use to flicker happily are all plunged into a pale fluorescent greyness because of a stupid ruling that says these grey lightbulbs are supposed to save the planet. Instead I read they are going to give us mercury poisoning.

I have just paid a doctor £350 in LA to test me for mercury and it’s so bad that I can never eat tuna fish again. But what about the grey lights? Not only am I being poisoned without any sushi pleasure, I can’t see and everything looks ten years older and dusty, and worse than that in my house I only have chandeliers. Are they now supposed to be illuminated with horrible grey curly things? It’s just wrong, wrong, wrong.

I am sure I am not alone in the fact that I now have a three year supply of chandelier light bulbs. In fact I know I am not. Women everywhere who are used to coming home with secret shopping are just coming home with bulbs.

Chateau Cat

The other night I ran into Cat Deeley at the Chateau. I haven’t seen her for about two years when she was still in London. I remember an evening at Fifty and then a minicab in which we were singing Carpenters songs. We longed to be close to you…

She’s exactly the same but a thinner LA version of herself, battered skinny jeans, cowboy hat, tiny vest. We got our Blackberrys out to exchange our LA numbers. She was horrified at mine with 397 messages saved or unread, actually pretty good for me. And I am as shocked at hers. No messages saved. “They come. I answer or delete them. They go.”

I’ve always known she was a very unusual girl who doesn’t even carry the baggage of a few unread emails. I am in awe.

flying with jonathan rhys meyers

I am always sympathetic when people get into fights at airports. It’s happened to me so many times. Just the stress of having the control of my own life about to be taken away so easily warrants a last bid punch for freedom.

So when I saw that Jonathan Rhys Meyers had allegedly hit a waiter in a departure lounge at Charles de Gaulle, I am of course extremely empathetic to Rhys Meyers.

I once travelled on the same plane as him from London to Los Angeles. It was Virgin Upper Class in the days of the free massage. He was charm itself. He carried my bags and said that I looked more stressed than him and that if he got offered the massage first he would make sure they gave it to me instead.

Those people at Virgin just don’t know what they did when they stopped the free on board massage.

food and sex

I’ve got this friend who has a gorgeous body. She’s tall, with a skinny waist, full breasts and pilates toned upper arms and thighs, but nobody wants to have sex with her.

Another friend of mine, Bradley, saw her eating Chinese food recently and explained that how we eat is how we have sex and this girl has negative sexual energy, all apparent in the way she urgently consumes.WIthout any pleasure, she eats with desperation. Chews every mouthful 300 times. Everything is fast, angry, tortured.

She works out for two hours every day and in the very act of her eating you can see her punishing the food away.  It can’t stand to be inside her and she is thinking about the treadmill later. She doesn’t enjoy anything. She is consumed with rage. The food doesn’t touch her. It’s afraid of her.

He said she was like a hummingbird and hummingbirds have to consume thousands of calories just to fly in the one place. And it’s not easy to have sex with a hummingbird. So that’s why she’s sexually repellent.. She’s eating her feelings instead of allowing herself to have any.

The equation is: The more normal a person eats the more sexually attractive they are. Of course it’s not easy to eat normally, and I know plenty of other people who love their food so much they hold on to it because they are replacing love with food, and  that’s why they get love handles. But in a funny way, at least they still have a need to feel  loved, even if it’s only by food. These people might be sad but they tend to be less needy, voracious and desperate.  And at least they know how to love something.

with bono in washington

I spent quite a lot of time with Bono over a period of six months, interviewing him in various places, his home, Washington DC, California, London. He is enormous fun to hang out with. A brilliant mimic, he does a great Clinton and a surprising Javier Bardem. I think this is because he can really get inside people’s heads. It’s easy for him to recreate them. When I learned he was working on Spider - Man the musical …

I asked him what would his superpower be - flying, X-ray vision, making people do things. “I can do all of that already,” he laughed. Indeed he seems extra human. Everybody I talked to who knows him, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Nancy Pelosi, all cherish him highly. They all say he never forgets anything, a birthday, a comment, a number.He puts it down to playing chess in his youth. And doesn’t forget words because, “Words are really important.”

He is an intoxicating cocktail of charm, persistence, passion.

See full interview in ‘The Articles’

vinnie jones

Vinnie Jones had amazing eyes, blue, piercing, like Paul Newman’s. His house is extremely clean. Everything black and white. Two tiny dogs, no paw marks.

When you’d ask him a question he’d just look. Not at you but at some middle distance, perhaps staring at some imaginary speck of dust in his white room.

He would answer it very slowly. It’s the silence that’s a bit scary. Everything else about him was sweet. It got sweeter after Jason Statham phoned during the interview and Vinnie said, “I’ve got this girl here. She says you met her.” He put the phone down and said to me, “Jason thinks you’re alright.” Then we really started talking.

* See Sunday Times Magazine article.

the trainer

I used to have an editor who reminds me of the most Nazi airbitch. I’m going to call it It because I’m not going to reveal it’s sex, because this is not about sex is it? It would tell you to do something just because it thought it could.

It would deny you things. It would try to curtail and control. To punish for no reason. It would scalpel beloved words just because it could. Or it thought it could. Although it couldn’t do that much really. It had a title, a position, that was its uniform. Anyway, things got uncomfortable because I would react in exactly the same way as being told, sit down, strap up, shut up.

Like all bullies there is a way of bullying it back into its place. That’s what the whole S&M industry has been built on. People who have some kind of power enjoy relinquishing it. Sometimes they enjoy it as much as they enjoy exercising it.

It was this very editor who told me once, “The masochist holds all the cards because the masochist can stay stop. Sadists can’t.”

Yesterday I tried on a purple dress of which I am very fond. It was the one which Pavarotti forbad me to interview him in because purple is the colour of death and deemed unlucky. At the time I thought it was just because he wanted to see my bra. But now this very dress set me on a new course. The zip wouldn’t do up. I phoned my local gym in West Hollywood to immediately join. The very nice chatty bubbly girl on the phone asked me for my starter package would I like a male or a female trainer.

I really wanted to say, ‘Actually, I’d like a pasty white ugly gay man who will amuse me into action.’ But 1: There aren’t any of those available in West Hollywood. Plenty of gay men, all gorgeous. 2: I felt sexist, guilty to state a preference, so I said ‘I’ll leave it up to you to find me someone great.’ Really hoping it wouldn’t be any strapping, gorgeous, male and heterosexual because then I’d never be able to concentrate.

And guess what? I’m introduced to the trainer and he is just that. I can barely speak, I sort of squeak. I’ve no idea what’s coming out of my mouth. I forget my height. So when he does my BMI I turn out to be obese because I’ve knocked two inches off my length. I forget my credit card. I forget what I ate just a half hour ago. He’s not just beautiful, he’s kind of clever, knowing. Not pushy. Carries himself with a quiet authority.

Then he wants to measure me. He’s measuring my bust. He’s measuring my thighs. I have no choice but to surrender. On the treadmill I say, ‘What else can there be in it for you. I’ve submitted now to the most horrendous intimacy. No one has ever measured my thigh and I let you. You’ve got all the control now. What else is there?”

He smiled knowingly. “Well that’s most of it, but I might find something else. So it just goes to show, sometimes I like to surrender.

airbitch

It was my friend Austen that came up with this thought. The world is divided into two sorts of people; those who can fly and those who can’t. The ones who can’t fly cause disturbances on airplanes, always get into a game of one upmanship with the trolley dollys who want to put you in your place, and you do not want to sit.

You go on a plane carrying this hate me energy and the airbitches seek you out. They tell you fasten your seat belt, and then they tell you, put that book, that bag, that paper, in the overhead. And you tell them, You do it. You just told me to fasten my seatbelt. Then they spit in your food.

I am no stranger to a police escort. A woman with a bad leg said she’d like to stretch it out and put it on my lap. I threw it back and said I paid for this space, your leg can’t be in it. There was a fight, she got sent to Upper Class. I’ve been almost thrown off Upper Class aswell. When you used to sometimes get a massage and sometimes not. They would ask you, “Do you want to be woken up for your massage” before the plane took off. And this was a trick question. If you said no, not only would you not be a priority for massage, you wouldn’t get a little card that guaranteed you one for the next time. Usually there was a clever way of answering this question, but not when you were dealing with a jobsworth. When I said I didn’t want to be woken up but wanted the card anyway we were at a standstill and she kept saying, “I’m sorry you will have to answer the question, yes or no.”

A man behind said to the airbitch, “Sometimes you have to think out of the box. That’s what this airline was built on, out of the box thinking.” With that security came and asked us if we would like to leave the plane or stop being rude. Some people fly without aggression, without expectation. They surrender, they arrive. But some people cannot give up control. Some people always mind being told what to do. And I am that person.