Photograph: Lisa O'Connor/ZUMA/Corbis
Celebrities, I have discovered after extensive research, have even more of a love-it or hate-it relationship with furniture than they do with food. It is Manichean in its starkness, a true binary, with no excluded middle.
Barbra Streisand so adores tables that she requests, as part of her rider, 60 of them backstage. No word - so you have to wonder - if it is 60 identical tables or a selection of coffee, dining and bedside tables with a couple of bird tables thrown in just for decoration. Perhaps her backing singers have a sweepstake to guess the sort of table on to which Barbra will choose to pile her 120 bath towels, also requested in the rider.
Streisand, whose extravagant demands for limos and jets and towels seem somewhat at odds with her pal Al Gore's parsimonious urge to conserve resources, is rivalled only by Martin Kemp and his love of sofas.
He is so enamoured of upholstery that he seems to have turned his back on serious acting - or as serious as he ever got - to devote his life to fl ogging setteesin a variety of shades of leather (puce, maroon, taupe) with an evangelical zeal. With only the occasional break to invite Hello! or OK! or both into his lovely home (which, suspiciously, hasn't a couch in any of the aforementioned colours), his enthusiasm is awesome. Or possibly scary.
Courtney Love, conversely, has no such fondness for furnishings. To celebrate her 43rd birthday on Monday, she trashed a hotel room - breaking tables and stubbing out cigarettes on the bed and on sofas. It was as if "a wild animal had been let loose in there", said a tabloid spy - which is to say, one of the hacks writing the story.
Anyone who's had a bird accidentally fly into their house, and spray each room liberally with faeces before becoming entangled in, and ruining, their Our Solar System mobile before dying, presumably of a heart attack, will now have an image in their head that will be difficult to shift. It may be a picture not too far from the truth as the bedclothes from Love's room were, apparently, defiled.
Of course, Love's contempt for sofas and beds and tables (oh my) shouldn't come as a surprise. Something of a free spirit, she naturally has something against being "on the couch". And, just by looking at her, you know she's a stranger to Vim - unless it's piled in neat little lines. More over, when you have the strength of character to lose three stone in 12 weeks with nothing but a lock on the fridge to aid you, you arguably earn the right to mess up a hotel room as your reward.
Love has always been one for testing limits, as those who have heard her sing will know. Indeed, anyone who has seen pictures of her in a high-cut string bikini will know of her penchant for extremes. They will also have a familiarity with every curve and bump of her ladygarden . Some may even be able to sculpt, from memory, an exact replica out of Play-Doh.
We look forward, not without some anticipation, to the lovely Ms Love's 44th birthday. Let's hope there's a summer sale on at DFS at which to purchase her a smashing three-piece suite to trash.
