How not to treat your Guest.

March 16th – There are some people in the entertainment industry who make you wonder, when you see how they live their lives and the choices they make along the way, it makes you wonder just how they manage to put their shoes on without getting killed let alone make it through a whole day.
Many of you reading this box of coloured bubbles I write each day have had, like me, more than one marriage. We all start out with the same shiny engine running the future and, when the cogs get rusty and it goes wheels-up in a ditch we do as the Jerome Kern/Dorothy Fields song advises;

‘Pick yourself up, dust yourself off and start all over again’.

The one thing you carry with you after such an event though, if you are in possession of even a scintilla of common sense, is a vow not to make the same mistakes again. But if you do decide to enter the state of wholly matrimony once more, you make damn sure the partnership has got all the bells and whistles in place and firmly attached before you add a band of gold to the trimmings. And we, you and I, we do these things mostly unaided, certainly unsupported by shrinks, agents, managers, life-coaches, faith gurus, promotions managers, continuity people, diary secretaries and booking agents.

So, what about those people who are fortunate enough to have all these supposedly knowledgeable professionals surrounding them and in addition have access to everything money can buy and yet still make a gold-plated fuck-up of it? Do they deserve our sympathy, those top-flight professional footballers who earn, on average, £30,000 per week and can still get through 10 million quid in seven years and claim they’re now broke? My answer is a resounding; no; FU. No sympathy and no respect.

On this day, in 2008, Liza Minnelli married David Guest. That statement alone should have brought on a sharp intake of breath; for one thing, he was her promoter. Now, I don’t know about you but from what little I do know of this business I’d say the four, very last people the talent should ever consider marrying are, in no order of preference, your manager, your tour booker, your promoter or your agent. You only have to see how they operate in the cut-throat world of show-biz to know they’re a plague you can well do without. Yes, OK, there have been instances but, by god, they’re few and far between; trust me, the odds are stacked against anyone making it a successful union.

It comes as little surprise then that not content with disregarding this piece of sage advice from the ordinary Joe on the stage and preferring, instead, to rely on her intellect and perspicacity when it came to partnership life-choices, Ms. Minnelli, the undisputed star in this coupling, married Mr. Guest, the undisputed promoter in this coupling and, by doing so, Mr. Guest became her fourth (4th) husband. 

I would like to believe that even a head-over-heels-in-love lady would have thought;

“Three times married, three times shot in the ass... Maybe it’s not the partner; maybe it’s me?”

I’d think that, wouldn't you? Well, Ms. Minnelli obviously didn't, but then neither did she change her name to Guest, so she must have had an inkling of the lack of rainbows on her future horizon…you reckon? 

Now, OK, Mr. Guest wasn't exactly an oil painting but I’m sure he had an exhilarating personality, certainly one sufficiently exhilarating to capture the heart of Ms. Minnelli…this coupling proving that old chestnut; ‘Love is blind.’ I mean anyone who thinks it’d be a good idea to have Michael Jackson as best man and Elizabeth Taylor as matron of honour (there’s a couple of interesting oxymorons) and not see the irony in those choices must have been deeply in love…mustn't they, because, surely, anyone even in vague control of themselves and surrounded by that lot should have felt a certain amount of…what shall we say…I don’t know…uncertainty…even as they took the vows?

Not sure how long the marriage lasted, just over three years...so not much longer than it took to write out the divorce papers and put the pre-nup into action, I’d guess…or I’d Guest, and by all reports the D.I.V.O.R.C.E. was really unpleasant with accusations of dietary cruelty and STD's being flung about (the accusations not the STD's).

IMHO the only good thing to come out of this union was that marrying each other meant only two people were miserable rather than four. I await her fifth conjugal arrangement with interest…or has she already had it…? I've lost count…and interest.