A Rum Collins

‘WHERE Des O’Connor leads, others follow. And looking at the cover of this week’s Hello! we see Joan Collins cuddling a young baby.

”I’m not extinct yet”

”She’s so gorgeous,” says Joan, ”like a little Botticelli painting. I didn’t want to hold her in my arms until she was two months old. And then I just fell in love with her.”

Can Joan be so cruel as to deprive the fruit of her still fertile loins some motherly comfort for the first few weeks of its life?

Well, no, because little Ava Grace is not hers – she’s the daughter of her son Sacha and his wife, Angela.

But the little love has, as Hello! tells us, inherited her grandmother’s heart-shaped face and ”enormous eyes.”

Those familiar with drawings produced by victims of alien abduction will know the look well.

It’s little wonder then that, as Joan says, ”whenever Sacha and Angela take her out, people swarm around her like bees to a honeypot”.

Human beings can be a curious bunch, and while Sacha and Angela’s fellow New Yorkers gawp at Ava Grace with wonder in their eyes, we ponder why it is that Joan likes to be known as Dodo.

”My other two grandchildren call me that,” explains Joan. ”It’s a family name.”

With that cleared up, we then wonder why it is that Joan – sorry, Dodo – is soon seated by a picnic in New York’s Central Park wearing a cowboy hat?

And why her daughter-in-law is doing the same?

But we need not even ask why Sacha, a budding artist, is back indoors painting his little bundle of space dust.

It may be that with such enormous eyes, the flash from a normal camera would bounce back and render Joan and the family blind.

A painting seems the safest option. And will arouse less suspicion.’

Posted: 20th, October 2004 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink