The Party Of The Year

     There is a segment of the Los Angeles population for whom early January means one thing above all others – the Golden Globe Awards.

Photo by Owen Bjornstad

       The Golden Globes, handed out by a group of international journalists of whom I have been one for many years, are the scrappier, happier, younger sibling of the august Oscars. Informally known as Hollywood’s party of the year, they are held, not in a formal theatre but in the more sociable ballroom of the Beverly Hilton Hotel; champagne flows freely and celebrities delightedly hail famous buddies and obscure journalists alike; over the years we have seen Harrison Ford, first spill a glass of wine over Calista Flockhart, and then go on to fall in love with her; Angelina Jolie plunge headfirst, fully clad in her evening gown, into the hotel’s swimming pool; George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino engage in an impromptu fencing match with their respective winning trophies.

       To this day, Mr. Los Angeles get mistily affectionate when he remembers Jamie Lee Curtis asking him to save her a seat at the dessert table; I once dissolved into a pulsating puddle of London theatre-going fandom in front of the impeccably gentlemanly Sir Ian McKellen (“Well, darling,” was his grave response to my burblings about the effect of his Richard II on my teenaged self, “now I know why I took the part” – ohhh, be still, my heart); one year, we all fell into awed silence as Audrey Hepburn wafted into the room, borne on a breeze of serene beauty and superlative elegance.

       But the celebrity memory that is returning to me this year of all years is one of a smaller gesture that hardly anyone else at the time noticed, and now only I am left to remember.

       I used to have an older colleague called Anita, a diminutive woman with a voice like a corncrake and the heart of a lion. On this year, she had eaten something that disagreed with her, and when I found her wandering between the tables growling that she didn’t feel so good, there was only one thing to do, which was to grab her by the arm and hurry her to the nearest sink in the bathroom to execute the inevitable.

       Now, the bathroom at the Golden Globes is not like most bathrooms. It is where everyone piles in together, the famous, the infamous, the not famous but wannabe. It is where Renée Zellweger was once summoned from her cubicle to receive her award for Best Actress. It is where I once saw Cate Blanchett rather sweetly compliment a fellow guest on her dress – only to be still standing ten minutes later, glassy-eyed with embarrassment, while the woman, who turned out, appallingly, to be an aspiring fashion designer, relentlessly pitched her services. It is where, under the guise of looking in the mirror, executives’ wives price each other’s jewels, and struggling starlets check out the competition’s boob jobs.

       It is where no one wants to see two lowly journalists race in at full speed and commandeer a sink for a technicolor yawn that would have done Eastman Kodak proud.

       It was just as well, therefore, that Anita and I were not there to make friends: while designer skirts were drawn aside, and pearls, both metaphorical and real, clutched by bejeweled hands, we were left to concentrate our energies on performing the necessary business. Until suddenly, from somewhere near the ceiling, we heard an unmistakably Aussie voice saying, “Aoh! Are you all righ’?”

       We looked up … and up … and there looming above us like a cross between a goddess and a giraffe, was Nicole Kidman, unearthly beautiful in a formfitting dress the color of the bottom of the ocean, a peacock feather brushing her snowy shoulder, her cerulean eyes clouded with concern.

       Anita stood on ceremony with no one, and least of all with “A” list Hollywood celebrities.

       “I,” she announced, proudly if feebly, “have just done the most magnificent upchuck.”

       “Have you?” said Nicole sympathetically. “That’s terrible, you poor thing. We’d better look after you, hadn’t we? Let’s get you cleaned up.”

       She bent her ridiculous length almost double to reach Anita’s height, and together, ignored by everyone else in the room – since it appeared that by engaging in so lowly an activity amid such shamelessly non-famous company, Nicole had temporarily assumed the same mantle of invisibility that covered Anita and me – the world-famous movie star and I brushed and clucked and patted and soothed, until at last Anita was feeling herself again.

       After she was sufficiently recovered, she peered up at Nicole and nodded approvingly.

       “I like your feather,” she remarked.

       Nicole grinned.

       “It’s nice, innit?” she agreed. “I wasn’t sure whether I was going to wear it – I thought shall I, shan’t I, you know? – but I’m glad I did. OK, just turn around because we’ve missed a bit. There you go, you’re OK now.”

       Anita was indeed OK as far as the visuals went. But there is another of the five senses that is activated by the after-effects of throwing up, and this was an area in which I was unable to be of use, because an oddity about me is that I was born with almost no sense of smell. (Yes, I have efficiently working tastebuds, and yes, I am aware that this is unusual, but all I can tell you is that here I am). It’s obviously not how I would have chosen it to be, but as disabilities go it could have been very much worse, and I’ve long learned to navigate my own day-to-day life around it. However, I was not about to allow my dignified friend to go out there and potentially embarrass herself, and lord knows no one else in the room was offering to help, so … uhm … would Nicole mind … maybe …?

       “’Course.”

       Briskly, she folded herself over again and executed two honkingly practical double sniffs – “hnagh-nagh … hnagh-nagh” – one on either side of Anita’s neck.

       “Nah, you’re fine,” she said then. And beamed. “And you look lovely,” she added warmly. “Really lovely…. Look, I have to go and give out an award now, but you take care of yourself, OK? I’ll be thinking about you.”

       And off she floated to be a celebrity.

       It was not a very big thing that Nicole did that day. She did not part the Red Sea; she did not change water into wine. She did not discover a cure for cancer, nor did she broker peace in the Middle East. I don’t know that anyone else in the room even stooped to notice so déclassé an incident; and of the three of us who were part of it, Anita is now gone, and I wouldn’t know if Nicole herself would have remembered it a week later.

       But I’ve never forgotten it. Because while it was not a large thing, it was nevertheless an instinctively kind thing. And I have the feeling, as we enter whatever this new year will bring to us here in America, that in 2025 kindness is going to be at a premium.