To those who have requested an extract from Sweet Revenge, Tom Bower's biography of Simon Cowell, Lost in Showbiz is pleased to offer the following vignette.
We lay our scene in January 2010, in the waters surrounding the Tobago Cays, five tiny uninhabited islands in the Grenadines. Here, "a gaggle of billionaires' yachts" are anchored. There is David Geffen on Rising Sun, the world's biggest yacht. (Cowell is "depressed" by its size compared with his, Slipstream.) Then there's that nice Philip Green on Lionheart, while erstwhile M&S boss Stuart Rose is staying with Matthew Freud and Elisabeth Murdoch on their yacht. Next to them is Angle Share, James Murdoch's boat, and nearby is the floating holiday home of Carphone Warehouse boss Charlie Dunstone. Right in the middle is a craft whose precious cargo is Rupert Murdoch.
As is the way with the unimaginatively super-rich, they all adore one another's company, devising evening entertaininment such as a "public school vs showbiz" Trivial Pursuit game. The mornings sound still more delightful.
"Rupert Murdoch stopped by Slipstream on his tender," we learn, "delivering that morning's newspapers, published by News International in Britain, America and Australia. They had been reproduced on a printing press installed on Murdoch's yacht. 'The world's most expensive newspaper boy,' Stuart Rose had quipped, digging for a coin to tip the deliverer."
What to say? Other than: can the Bermuda Triangle please raise its bleeding game.
