Actresses just love nicking shit. Poor old Winona isn’t the only one.

I’m not sure why it’s a pathology common to actresses but I know I found myself at a swanky party this week hiding in the bathroom and shoving a huge crystal ball down my trousers at the behest of one of our leading ladies. Anything for her I thought, but her amour was in the other room.

I had to make a swift exit as my trousers were bulging and I was holding the booty in place with my left hand. It looked like I’d never been to a party with models before. When I got out of the heady perfumed atmosphere of the marble bathroom and away from the force field of my leading lady I realised my plunder was just a piece of junk. They’d probably bought it at Zara Home or Graham and Greene.

What this has got to do with anything I couldn’t tell you except that after months of idleness such are the strange privileges of an actor’s life. God knows I haven’t sussed it yet but still I’m lucky enough to steal from the rich with the beauties of the day. And still I feel like the beggar at the banquet. Actors tend to take it while they can get it. They know the present has gone already and the future is short.

Of course some of us employ publicists at £2,000 a month simply to go to these events - to present prizes at the races or naff about at the ghastly polo. One of the English virtues is decadence but the American attitude to partying as a duty of work is quickly taking hold here.

I once made the mistake of suggesting to a lovely young actress that perhaps at her age she should be going to parties to have fun, not to get herself in ES Magazine, but she dropped me for that indiscretion and married a billionaire, so what do I know? Another actress I once knew from her student days when she was politically active on the left and a regular demonstrator now gets $35,000 just to walk into a party.

If you can’t spot the sucker at the table, the sucker is you, as they say in poker. Or perhaps the opposite is true - that if we stop to take spoils that aren’t rightfully ours we will lose the battle. The distractions can be fatal.

American actors especially tend to be treated so appallingly by the gatekeepers of showbiz on their way up the greasy pole - the producers, casting directors, agents and so on tend to smear the pole with shit as well as grease - that they stick it right back to them once they’ve found success. Hence the monsters of Hollywood legend.

Things are a little more civil over here, if only because our pond is so small. Outsize megalomaniacs like Louis B Mayer or James Cameron would look rather silly and get themselves laughed at in our paddling pool of an industry.

Talking of polo, I was dragged along to it recently and got introduced to the English actor Tom Hardy who chose not to shake my hand in greeting but roll his shoulder into mine as though we were dealing dime bags on a Baltimore street corner, which I thought a little incongruous at the polo.

Well, I could do with a less neurotic disposition so I’ve been listening to Leon Russell singing If I Were a Carpenter… and he rather sums up my feelings this week in his version of that song, where the carpenter stands for any low income craftsman like the actor…

“…Could you see the future?

Could you stand the losses

Of lovin’ a carpenter

And being a lady

And taking a chance on me

Just to be my baby

Well, I might go crazy

I have to warn ya

Well, I get so mean sometimes

When the spirit’s on me…”

Leon always made it look easy and that’s because he wore pink satin and just didn’t care…

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Image: Adam Kesher by djenvert, available under a CC BY-NC-ND license.