By now, I must presume that I have not been invited to Liza Minelli's wedding. Anyway, there'd be little point in turning up now with a gift-wrapped sandwich toaster in my hand, as the serving staff helped themselves to the usual showbiz leftovers of toupées, Prozac, Botox and mineral water.
Of course, this is not the first such fashionable wedding I have missed. Shirley Bassey, Ken Dodd, Tommy Steele, Larry Cunningham, Dickie Rock, Margo and her brother Bono - all these glittering stars of the crooning arts entered into the state of wedded bliss without sending me a gilt-embossed invitation to the ceremony. No doubt it was conducted by a singing priest or two, and was followed by a reception at Barry's Hotel, with ham salads all round, and then a night of bopping to the Mighty Avons, followed by a few impromptu numbers from the guests. Ah, the glamour of it all.
So I have steeled myself to accept such rejection. Much as I would love to have heard Bono and his soul brother Des O'Connor warble "You Need Hands" together at such wedding feasts, or Des's niece Sinéad join Susan McCann in their moving duet, "God Bless the Pope", it didn't happen to me. Such is life.
Grisly insight
So it probably sounds churlish to say this, but it does seem that the Minelli guest-list offers a particularly grisly insight into the showbiz world. After all, what does one say to Elizabeth Taylor? One can, I suppose, nervously remind her of Richard Burton's remark after first meeting her: "Black black black. She looks as if she shaves three times a day." If she scowls at this little tale, you can always muse hysterically: Wilkinson or Gilette, ha ha ha? Or one might offer her a little drink, and gracefully shift the conversation on to great showbiz characters she has known. This requires some care, because it's best not to refer to her ex-husbands' ex-spouses. Moreover, if as host you really want such a serial bride at your wedding, you should ensure that none of her husbands, or their wives, past or future, or their myriad of abandoned children, are on the same guest list.
This can become as complex as predicting when Jupiter's stars are next in alignment about a linear plane with Jackie Healy-Rae's cap. When you have cast your nuptial net as widely as has the fair Miss Taylor, leaving entire wagon-trains of deserted wives and squalling children in your wake, the Middle East furies don't compare. Logically, then, you abandon show-business guests and invite stars of current US literature. What about the writer Carrie Fisher, say?
Ah yes, her, the daughter Eddie Fisher abandoned (along with Debbie Reynolds, his wife, her mother) for his brief marriage to Liz, before Richard Burton rode his Welsh cob onto the scene and decided that he could put up with all those acres of body-hair after all.
In other words, if you're inviting Miss Taylor to your wedding - and heaven knows, she might even accept - make sure that there are no Hiltons, Wildings, Todds, Fishers, Burtons, Warners, Fortenskys, or oops, more Burtons again on the guest list. And don't talk to her about plane crashes, hotel chains, English actors, Welsh actors, the US navy or even a US navvy. Actually, it's not even safe to ask her: red or white?
Beam me up
Even guests who managed to escape her conversational genius at the Minelli wedding will sooner or later run into the bride. Now in the entire history of conversation, it's unlikely anyone has ever induced in the person they're speaking to that wistful, beam-me-up-Scotty yearning that Judy Garland's daughter does. Apart, that is, from Judy Garland herself. All those menopausally girlish screams, the varnished fingernail on the gleaming teeth, and the eyelashes battily fluttering like tarantulas swotting wasps.
Her new husband David Gest, 12 years younger than the blushing bride (aged 56), says they plan to acquire a family.
"We are adopting four children of all races. A black child, a white child, it really doesn't matter at all." Not to Mr and Mrs Gest, perhaps, but it certainly will to the children.
An infant being raised on the M50-N7 interchange with nothing to eat but road-kill flies and empty Big Mac wrappings would have a better childhood than any Third World toddler (of all races and colours, naturally) singled out by Mr and Mrs Gest in one of their family-harvesting safaris. (Gee look, Dave, there's a purple one, isn't she so sweet, wouldn't she be so cute against the mauve drapes in the aubergine bedroom?)
Palely loitering
So you reel away from the four- times-married Miss Minelli - astonished that there were that many idiotic men in the entire world - into the gruesome orbit of Mickey Rooney and his glinting gnashers. With a yelp, you struggle free like a fly out of a gluepot, and flee to the other side of the room, where Diana Ross awaits you, her pointy face as taut as the windlass on the back of her skull can make it. She cannot talk through her bared teeth, merely hiss, so you make another break for freedom, towards the strangely familiar creature, palely loitering in the corner...Michael Jackson. YAAAARGH.
All right. Take the worst wedding you have ever been to, the one where the bride's grandmother got drunk and made a pass at the best man. It doesn't even compare, does it? So rejoice then, rejoice that you do not reside in that human dustbin we call showbiz.