SIMON SHUNS THE SMALL PRINT

You see the world and his wife at the Baker & Spice café on Elizabeth Street. I was walking past the other day, when out popped Simon Astaire, renaissance man of the media age. Formerly a talent agent, PR and rock’n’roll manager – not to mention being the public face of Princess Michael – he has now reinvented himself as a fiction author. Admittedly, his books have a strong autobiographical flavour, but with a CV like his, he’d be crazy not to draw on it.

His novels, he tells me, grew out of sessions with his shrink. A personal journal, concentrating on his school days at Harrow, absorbed him so much that he suddenly found he’d written a little bildungsroman. And this month, Private Privilege – which is in movie pre-production - has been followed by the waspishly-titled And You Are?, a reflection on his forays into Hollywood.

Simon has some great stories from his spells in Los Angeles – like when he took the Alzheimer-afflicted Sir Laurence Olivier to the Oscars, and the old boy had no idea he was being honoured. Then there was the time that Michael Jackson’s people approached him about limiting the damage being done to the late moon-walker. But the best anecdotes are in the new book, and I wouldn’t want to spoil it for you.

I like Simon’s writing style: it’s direct, intimate, almost like a private letter. And I’m full of admiration for his motivation. So many people in the media are trapped in their careers, addicted to the perks and borrowed glamour. Simon will probably never make as much money from writing books as he has from fixing articles and drawing up contracts, but he’s abandoning the celebrity circus and following his own star. Let it shine.