Brad Pitt is so gripped by chef Jameson Stocks’s extraordinary life story that he snapped up the movie rights in the hope of making a biopic.
But Pitt, a double Oscar winner, may find that it’s an even more interesting story than he imagined, thanks to Stocks’s former flame, model Jo Wood.
Stocks left home – and the attentions of an abusive stepfather – aged only 13, and spent the next two years on London’s streets, sleeping in shop doorways.
He then clawed his way out of squalor by getting a job working for legendary chef Marco Pierre White at the Soho restaurant Quo Vadis.
However, I can disclose that, though most are awed – and inspired – by Stocks’s youthful resilience and subsequent stellar achievements, such as winning The National Restaurant of the Year Award aged just 24, Wood, ex-wife of the Rolling Stones star Ronnie, is openly scornful of them.
‘I can’t believe that it will happen,’ Jo, 69, says of the feature film Pitt is intent on producing.
‘He was saying he was going to have this movie done of his life when I was seeing him, and that was two years ago. I can’t imagine it making it onto the screen. If it does get made, I hope I won’t be featured in it,’ she tells me.
It’s a brutally dismissive summary of the man she met at an awards ceremony in 2023. Despite the disparity in their ages – Stocks is 41 – romance followed, with Jo saying: ‘I do think he’s good-looking’. Their relationship was intense and short-lived, prompting Wood to describe it now as ‘six weeks of a mistake’.
Brad Pitt (pictured) has snapped up the movie rights to chef Jameson Stocks’ extraordinary life story
Stocks’s relationship with Jo Wood was intense and short-lived, prompting Wood to describe it now as ‘six weeks of a mistake’
Indeed, it would be fair to say Wood’s in something of a stew about Stocks, who she now says she won’t be talking to
Stocks with Wood at the Gelida devices summer summit at Nobu Portman Hotel in London in June 2023
Indeed, it would be fair to say that she’s in something of a stew about Stocks. ‘I won’t be talking to him,’ she says, refraining from explaining why her toyboy didn’t prove to be to her taste after all.
‘He just wants to be famous and it’s a shame,’ alleges Jo, who had two children with Ronnie Wood, whom she was married to for more than two decades.
‘I’m off men now. I love living on my own and I have a lot of male friends,’ she says.
Stocks, who, early in his career, was described by his former boss White as Britain’s next culinary star, tells me he is just back from South Africa but declines to comment on Jo’s outburst.
More recently, he has been romantically linked with former Atomic Kitten star Kerry Katona, 44, but that relationship has since gone off the boil – unlike his career, which continues to simmer to perfection.
Cara is cream of the crop for fashion week
The fash pack are in town for London Fashion Week and while it’s not known if model Cara Delevingne will make an appearance, she is the top choice for British designer Helen Anthony.
Last year Cara, 32, walked at the L’Oreal Paris show for the brand, which is known for precision tailoring, in a red satin shirtless ensemble.
The label’s creative director, Naeem Anthony, tells me ahead of the Helen Anthony x Coracho Tequila show tonight: ‘Cara is very confident and when she wears something she owns it. That’s what we love about her.’
Last year Cara Delevingne, 32, walked at the L’Oreal Paris show for the brand, which is known for precision tailoring, in a red satin shirtless ensemble
Another person he’d love to dress is the Princess of Wales, whom he cites as his royal style inspiration. ‘I see her as the perfect woman and she will be my ideal person to style,’ he says.
‘I’ll design a well-structured garment like a trouser suit for her.’
The smart set’s talking about.. Surreal return of Harry’s beloved Chelsea club 151
It welcomed everyone from Prince Harry to ‘Seducer of the Valleys’ Sir Dai Llewellyn but barred George Michael, who was sporting an earring – unforgivable in the high days of Chelsea in the Eighties, Nineties and Noughties.
Now 151, the nightclub established by Giorgio Burlo on London’s King’s Road, which closed following the wretched Covid lockdown, is back – albeit without Giorgio or, indeed, its old name.
The basement den reopens next month as The Rex Rooms under new management, who have thoroughly revamped it. Clubgoers can now while away the night watching surrealist performers and quaffing mushroom-infused cocktails.
The trippy, Salvador Dali-inspired redesign might have proved too much for former 151 regular Binky Felstead, 34, who, in her Made In Chelsea days, said she treated the club ‘a bit like a second home’, adding: ‘If I’ve had a lot to drink I kick off my heels and go to sleep.’
Intriguingly, 151’s old Instagram account is still active, with one post visible: a gravestone inscribed with the words ‘RIP Fun – 1984-2024’.
Rex Rooms pioneer Marc Jacques Burton is diplomatic when it comes to discussing the old order.
‘Giorgio ran an incredible venue, but the future is Rex Rooms,’ he says during a private tour of his new empire, which is leased from the Cadogan Estate – the 93 acres of Chelsea and Knightsbridge owned by Earl Cadogan. ‘We’re restoring Chelsea’s Sixties and Seventies heyday. 151 opened in the Eighties, when King’s Road lost its edge. The sticky dancefloors are out,’ he adds.
Whatever would the Seducer of the Valleys have made of that?
Trendy Prue’s on a different planet
A very trendy Dame Prue Leith has become a surprising muse for Vin + Omi, the King’s go-to eco-designers.
Earlier this week, the Great British Bake Off judge, 85, walked for the duo at their Kaos catwalk show in London. Now Vin has offered an insight into their relationship with the cookery star, who also had a role in the design duo’s 2022 sci-fi film Kepler 62F, set on another planet.
FAR OUT: Prue Leith with Vin, left, and Omi at Kaos
CALL ME: Debbie harry performing with Blondie at Central Park, New York City in July 1979
‘Prue lives next to one of our studios and we saw her on a train and bounced up to her and we said ‘Hello’.
‘She’s very open-minded,’ he said. ‘She’s quite posh, but we’re friends. We laugh a lot.’
In the film, she stars as the mother of Blondie singer Debbie Harry, despite being only six years older than her. Vin adds: ‘Debbie had fun filming it but she’s very professional and we’re not – so we could see her getting irritated with us.’
Joan’s Casanova affair
She entranced Laurence Olivier from the moment he saw her on stage, soon became his third wife and remained with him until his death in 1989.
But Joan Plowright, who died last month aged 95, conceded in 2018 that marriage to the legendary actor and director was ‘a bit of a nightmare sometimes’.
Now I can disclose that, while steadfast in her devotion to Olivier, Plowright enjoyed a great love affair with another star of stage and screen – all with Olivier’s blessing.
Joan Plowright with Frank Finlay. The actress had a love affair with the Oscar-nominated Finlay
Her lover? The Oscar-nominated Frank Finlay, whose saturnine looks made him a household name when he was cast in the title role of the 1970s TV show Casanova. ‘He and Joan met when they starred in Saturday, Sunday, Monday,’ a theatre veteran tells me, adding that the pair later starred in the TV version of the same play (above).
‘The affair went on for ten years. Larry was complaisant in it all.’
A necessary concession on Olivier’s part, perhaps? Soon after marrying Plowright, who was 22 years his junior, he started an on-off affair with actress Sarah Miles – who was 12 years younger than Plowright. Finlay remained married to his wife, Doreen, for 51 years until her death in 2005. He died, aged 89, in 2016.
Sascha’s baby relief
David Bailey’s son Sascha registered as transgender in Japan to ‘escape the trauma’ of his unhappy marriage to Tokyo lawyer Mimi Nishikawa, as I disclosed last year.
And I can now reveal that Sascha, who decided against transitioning, is to become a father.
The art curator and his new girlfriend, photographer Lucy Brown, 34, are expecting a baby. Sascha, 30, says his father, 87, ‘is happy but in true Bailey style – very understated’.
Sascha, who would have been left infertile if he’d had transitional surgery, says: ‘It’s really something to have been thinking about closing this door for ever two years ago.’
Sascha Bailey holding a scan of his baby he is expecting with girlfriend Lucy Brown
With only one week until the BRIT Awards, Universal Music UK has sent out the A-list invites for its London afterparty.
I hear the label, whose artists include Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish, is planning a flamboyant affair.
It teamed up with Liverpudlian artist Chila Kumari Singh Burman MBE, 68, who has paid homage to her Asian roots with her piece for the party’s backdrop. She calls it ‘a musical, magical image with subversive punk pop Punjabi glamour, with empowerment embodied by my neon white tiger’.
There are plenty of ‘pro’ terms floating about these days, and presenter Anthea Turner has added another one to the pile.
The former Blue Peter star, 64, says she’s ‘pro-mouse’ – much to her socialite fiance Mark Armstrong’s disgust.
She tells me: ‘I love mice and we’ve got some in the kitchen. Mark wants to lay traps but I won’t let him. There aren’t a lot of them; they are tiny little things trying to earn a living. They are not hurting us.’
Former Blue Peter star Anthea Turner (left), 64, says she’s ‘pro-mouse’ – much to her socialite fiance Mark Armstrong’s (right) disgust
(Very) modern manners
He bade farewell to the 14th-century family seat, Stobhall in Perthshire, in 2012, after putting it on the market for more than £2.3 million, then raised more than £900,000 by selling off a treasury of chattels, too.
But James Drummond, 19th Earl of Perth, has waited until now to raid the dynastic dressing-up box – and pull out his grandparents’ coronation robes and coronets. They’re among the heirlooms he’s entrusted to an online Bonhams auction, running until March 11.
The Earl, 59, hopes the collection of four robes, two coronets and a dress for a peeress, which has been split into two lots, will fetch up to £4,500 in total.
