The diva list

And, in a way, you have to laugh, because there is so much of this monstrous nonsense about. Look at that hot-tempered supermodel Naomi Campbell, who, in March, allegedly needed to find her designer jeans so badly, so fast, that pausing only to scream “You f***ing bitch!” she chucked a crystal-encrusted mobile at her 41-year-old maid’s head. Campbell denies the charge, but has been unable to suppress photographs of Ana Scolavino’s bloodied white work coat, whose “Miss Campbell” monogram has served as a poignant reminder to the world of who owns whom in the Campbell household.

Or what about the list of “downtime requirements” sent out by the US vice-president Dick Cheney’s people to every hotel he stays in? This stipulates, among other things, that before the Veep enters his suite, the temperature must be set to 68 degrees, all lights must be switched on, and every TV tuned to Fox News. And then there’s the traditional pop-star diva behaviour. The American R&B singer Mary J Blige has been known to insist upon payment in cash, on the night of the performance, to the tune of $65,000. This year she specified in her touring contract that every toilet in her dressing room and the backstage area had to be fitted with a new seat.

Do stars really want these things, or is this all a shadowplay, a desperate craving for indulgence for its own sake? Is it just about them trying to remind the world below, and reassure themselves too, that the normal envelope of asking and getting is theirs to push as they choose?

The most casually needy diva demand of all – “Do you know who I am?” – has reached epidemic proportions. An iconic diva of the old school like Elizabeth Taylor hardly needed to bother with it in the past. But even she felt called upon to direct it at staff at Buckingham Palace on the day in May 2000 when the Queen awarded her the title of Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Taylor’s special “request” was that a security sweep of the palace grounds be conducted, just for her, just in case…

When Clare Short, then international development secretary, framed the unanswerable question in October 2002, it really seemed that the virus of celebrity foot-stamping was infecting areas of public life it had scarcely touched before. Baggage staff at Johannesburg airport were insisting that she check in her bulky hand luggage. No deal. Despite the fact she was on her way home from the Earth Summit, it seemed that the minister’s sense of her own importance was unsustainably strong that day.

A good place to start when trying to understand diva-ish behaviour is Hollywood. The movie industry has validated the celebrity’s most basic demand: don’t just worship what I do, worship who I am, or at least the image of myself that I choose to project. Every year, this mantra is forced upon the public in the shape of the verbally incontinent Oscar recipient. The thank-you speech that seems to last almost the length of the film itself has a long, undistinguished history. The record for podium blathering was set in 1943 by Greer Garson, winner of the best-actress award for her role in Mrs Miniver. “I’m practically unprepared,” she began, before launching into a seven-minute improvisation. That was to be her last Oscar. Since then, there’s been no holding back. In 1979 Laurence Olivier delivered a cod-Shakespearian cracker upon receipt of his gong, praising “the great firmament of your nation’s generosities” and “the pure human kindness” of an award he described as “a beautiful star in the firmament that shines on me at this moment, dazzling me a little but filling me with a euphoria that happens to so many of us at the first breath of the majestic glow of a new tomorrow”.

The contemporary standard for mindless gratitudinising was established in 1982 by Maureen Stapleton, winner of best supporting actress in Reds. “I want to thank everybody I ever met in my entire life,” she intoned. And it was pushed way over the top by Cuba Gooding Jr, a supporting player in Jerry Maguire in 1997: “Tom Cruise! I love you, brother! Everybody, I love you! Cameron Crowe! James L Brooks! I love you. Everybody who’s involved with this, I love you. I love you. Everybody involved.”

On the other side of the luvvie gush lurks paranoia and worse. The only thing A-list actors find harder to bear than being ignored in public is being observed in private. In 1998, when Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were sued for unfair dismissal by their Hispanic maid Judita Gomez, her contract of employment was lodged in court. A standard document that all Cruise’s household employees were required to sign, it contained an extraordinary tariff of fines applicable in the event that Gomez, or whoever, should disclose anything about her employers to the media. The fines were linked to the number of people who received the information and were worked out on a per-person, per-medium basis, starting at $10 for every listener to an audio tape, and rising through newspapers ($20 a reader) and videotapes ($30 a viewer) to $250 for every book sold. The minimum levy in each case was $1m. Network-TV broadcasts attracted a flat-rate cost to the employee of $5m, satellite or cable were charged at $2m, and any broadcasts outside the US would have cost Gomez $1m a piece. Cruise’s litigious propensities – particularly when combating rumours of his sexuality – suggest if any beans had been spilt by the servants he would have prosecuted this contract to the letter. His list of fines ended on a note that mixed the sinister with the farcical: “With respect to unintentional disclosure, only half shall be payable.”

The place where bizarre contractual demands have long been accepted – even expected – is in the “tour rider”, a list of the exotic refreshments, amenities and ego-boosting effects that have to be supplied before a star sets foot on stage. It was the arrival of a new breed of übercelebrity in the 1960s – the rock stars – who raised this bar by making demands that were beyond outrageous.

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In 1967 the drummer of the Who, Keith Moon, drove a Lincoln Continental into the swimming pool of a Holiday Inn in Flint, Michigan, while celebrating his 21st birthday. Although the band’s singer, Roger Daltrey, revealed that the drowned Lincoln cost the Who $50,000, for a while it established an important principle: what rock stars want, rock stars get. This flagrant disregard for the law of consequences would flourish in rock circles for the next quarter of a century, peaking around the time Elton John called his manager in the middle of the night from a hotel in Paris asking him to get the rain to stop. In the 1970s, Led Zeppelin would rent entire floors of hotels, then race motorbikes up and down the corridors – often with the willing connivance of hotel staff. “We cater to the music industry, we do not accept complaints,” was the response to one sleep-deprived guest at the Hyatt on Sunset in LA. Among the less bothersome demands made by the supergroups of the 1970s was the backstage requirement of the band Yes. In lieu of a conventional dressing room, their singer, Jon Anderson, had to have a freestanding tepee specially constructed for his personal use.

The early 1980s saw the most despotic assertion of rock-star whimsicality. This was the notorious clause in Van Halen’s tour contract with concert promoters that stated “there will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area upon pain of forfeiture of the show with full compensation”. The image of some lowly stagehand sifting through giant packets of the Smartie-like sweets still stands as a memorial to rock in its most pointlessly hubristic phase.

Van Halen’s singer, David Lee Roth, later tried to claim the M&M clause had only been inserted as a trip switch to ensure the show’s detailed technical specifications would be followed to the letter. Nobody believed him. But Van Halen and all that gimme-gimme business are now a distant memory. Ever since Live Aid established a new creed of social responsibility, rock stars have progressively given up asking for silly or impossible things in public. The biggest acts of recent years – the Radioheads and Coldplays – never clamour for anything other than to be taken seriously. The only item U2 are particular about in their rider is bottled Guinness.

However, when the fame wanes, the desire for special treatment can get even fiercer. On her last, failed foray into the music market, Geri Halliwell took to ordering porridge in the middle of the night. On one occasion she called her manager and asked her to come to her room, immediately. “The hotel staff had put four strawberries in the porridge and Geri wanted me to take them out,” recalls her manager.

Some of rock’s senior citizens, who remember how things were, like to try it on. Paul McCartney insisted all the concert halls he performed in on his 2002 tour were swept by sniffer dogs checking for explosives. Peter Gabriel’s tour rider specifies a “hippie style” massage to be carried out before the show. But those hedonistic warhorses of old, the Rolling Stones, have become positively sedate. The only serious tantrum any of the Stones’ party can remember occurred in Toronto in 1994, when someone ate Keith Richards’s shepherd’s pie and the show had to be delayed while another was produced. “When it arrived, Keith only ate one mouthful,” a crew member recalls. “I think he was just trying to annoy Mick.”

In many cases, the original rock divas have turned into amiable old geezers. When Roger Daltrey sang My Generation after Arsenal’s last game at Highbury football ground in May, the only thing waiting for him in the dressing room, at his personal request, was a nice cup of tea.

So when it comes to making excessive demands, who are today’s star culprits? Jennifer Lopez “needs” an entourage of 75 for her TV appearances, including a specialist “eyebrow assistant”, and has been sighted being carried around a movie set on Malibu beach to avoid getting sand on her shoes. When Mariah Carey turned up in London last year to promote her new album, she demanded that the Knightsbridge hotel where she was staying put out a red carpet lined with 2ft-high white candles. At 2.30am. Earlier in the year she had her jack russell terrier flown first class from New York to LA because she was feeling “lonely”. The big names of classical music have been taking lessons from their pop compadres. The violinist Nigel “Nige” Kennedy has been known to insist upon a separate chauffeured car to shuttle his dog around, and Pavarotti’s tour rider states that there be no identifiable smells anywhere near the singer before, during and after his performance.

Writers have been playing catch-up too. In the summer of 1992, while he was still in hiding and guarded by armed security men in car coats, Salman Rushdie got hit by cabin fever and set off for Earls Court arena demanding to meet up backstage with Bono of U2. In Bono’s private trailer the two sat for a while, discussing world affairs. Rushdie subsequently appeared on stage with the band on their 1993 stadium tour, since which time certain authors have begun to view their “book tours” in a different light. The most bizarre example concerns Oliver Sacks, the psychologist who wrote The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Sacks suffers from a curious anxiety himself – that he might spontaneously combust. To counter this, he can stay only in hotels equipped with swimming pools that allow him to bathe, as he likes to do, wearing flippers.

There are other fields of human endeavour where demands that would once have been considered way out of line are now part of the package. Politics, obviously: Cherie Blair’s £7,700 bill for a month’s hair care was a revelation. Pro rata, this makes her private hairdresser, André Suard, a more highly paid stooge of the Blair camp than the average Labour MP. And football: ever since Beckham promoted footballers to the pages of Hello! and OK!, players can ask for whatever they like. The most intense competition between them today concerns the cars they turn up in at the training ground, and the security needed to keep an eye on vehicles with six-figure price tags.

But it’s the thrusting entrepreneurs of the hip-hop world who are leading the way. For his 29th birthday, Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs sent out a party invitation reminding the recipients how lucky they were to have got one, and stating, in case the thought hadn’t already occurred to them, that it was “an honor to be a part of history in the making”. He proceeded to lay down various do’s and don’ts for all guests. For the ladies, “waxing, pedicures and manicures are a must”. For the gents, no scuffed shoes “or you’re going to have a problem”. Outfits for all had to be “the flyest shot in your closet”. For the benefit of anybody slow on the uptake, Puff elaborated the dress code with a short list of acceptable designers which included Gucci, Versace and Yves Saint-Laurent. “This will go down as the greatest party of all time!” the invitation bellowed in conclusion.

Well, maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t, but it certainly encapsulated the most brutal and commonly heard diva demand of our time: respect me in the knowledge that I am richer and more famous than you are.