Hot Gossips Of Celebrity

Pamela Anderson has married for the third time in a quickie Las Vegas ceremony to boyfriend of one month Rick Salomon.

The Baywatch star, 40, wore a white denim Valentino miniskirt while Salomon was dressed in a black tux and beanie hat.

The wedding was squeezed between Pam's Planet Hollywood shows.

There was no time for a meal but guests had cupcakes and a four-tier cake.

The wedding song was Sade's No Ordinary Love.

On her website, titled The Adventures of Scum and Pam have Begun, she said: "We are toasting the casino right after we get married after my show."

It was the third time for both Pam and Salomon, 39, who secretly filmed a sex video with Paris Hilton.

Pam has two sons by ex Tommy Lee, 44, and divorced Kid Rock, 36, after seven months in February.

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It was a classic American dream. The sweet child actor who became one of the biggest global music stars ever: Britney Spears had it all. But then the nightmare began and her wild and erratic behaviour took its toll - last week she lost custody of her children. Elizabeth Day travels to Los Angeles to trace the roots of a celebrity meltdown.
It is Wednesday night in downtown Los Angeles and the smoggy air carries with it a tang of anticipation. The sweep of Hollywood Boulevard is clogged with bulky black SUVs and over-polished sports cars.

My cab takes a left onto Schrager Avenue and draws up outside Opera, one of LA's most exclusive nightclubs. Uniformed valets swarm like bees around the parking lot, opening car doors for petite, tanned women, their hairstyles a confection of serum and curls. Across the street, a huddle of photographers jostle for best position. They are here, they tell me, for one reason only: to stalk the woman who has become the paparazzi's holy grail. Her face can boost magazine sales by several hundred thousand, her appearance at a club ensures sell-out attendance and her photograph is gold dust. She is one of the most popular musical performers of the 21st century, a former child star who was named the world's most powerful celebrity by Forbes magazine and the singer credited with releasing some of the most perfect pop songs ever written. Her name is Britney Spears.

'I have a hit list of 10 LA It-girls that I want to photograph and at the very top of that list is Britney Spears,' says Twist, a snapper for X17, one of Los Angeles's most successful celebrity photographic agencies. 'She's the major story in this town. All the trouble that she's gone through, all the bad publicity - if anything, that just makes her hotter right now. Britney sells.'

On such brutal realities is the fragile edifice of modern celebrity constructed. Britney has always sold - and sold spectacularly well. Packaged, primped and promoted since the age of eight, she is the pre-pubescent performer who grew up to redefine mainstream pop music. Now 25, she has shifted over 76 million records, racked up seven No 1 hits and is the eighth best-selling female artist in American music history.

Her hotly anticipated fifth studio album, to be released on 12 November, looks set to earn her around £5m. Spears's image has been used to promote everything from soft drinks to acne cream, her personally endorsed range of perfumes is believed to have made her £14.5m over five years and, like Madonna and Kylie, she is one of the few female pop stars recognised by their first names alone.

Her marketability has made her a global phenomenon, a performer whose cheerleader looks and bubblegum charm have catapulted her into the pantheon of modern fame. So successful was her branding that it was almost impossible to see where the product ended and the person began. Her ability to sell was the cornerstone of her success. It was also her fatal flaw.

Over recent months, the Britney brand has undergone a very public disintegration. The carefully constructed image of a wholesome, all-American girl from Louisiana has dissolved like so much Alka-Seltzer in a glass of water. Last week, while the paparazzi were gathering outside Opera, a Los Angeles judge awarded temporary custody of her two young children to her ex-husband Kevin Federline, after Spears ignored court orders to attend therapy sessions, submit to drug tests and go to parenting classes.

There are rumours of substance abuse, the inevitable failed stabs at rehab and an estrangement from her closest family. There is the constant partying at assorted nightclubs in barely-there dresses and never-there underwear. There are the hit-and-run accidents, the court conviction for driving under the influence and without a licence, the frenzied attack on a paparazzo's car with an umbrella. In February, she walked out of a rehab centre after barely 24 hours in residence and made straight for a hair salon in Tarzana, California, where she shaved off her hair in full view of the gawping public. When her smudged, empty eyes looked out at us from the next day's newspapers, it seemed that she had finally hit rock-bottom.

But then, at a supposed comeback performance at the Las Vegas MTV Video Music Awards last month, she stumbled over the lip-synced words to her new single, 'Gimme More'. Her eyes were unfocused, her dancing conspicuously out of rhythm and she had squeezed herself into a tiny sequined bikini - a sartorial choice that led to half-sniggered comments about her weight gain.

'She was out of it,' says an MTV employee. 'She'd barely turned up for rehearsals because she'd been out partying till four and then she wanted all the costumes changed. We'd wanted to put her in a flattering corset, but she said it wasn't sexy enough. She fired her hairdresser, she wanted the whole routine changed, it was insane. When she saw herself performing on the video monitors, she came running off stage yelling that she looked like "a fat pig". She was inconsolable.'

It was a grotesque pantomime, an uneasy reminder of what Britney had once been and of what she has now become. This was the popstar who, at 16, appeared in the music video to her hit single '...Baby One More Time' in a schoolgirl uniform with plaited pigtails and a kohl-eyed Lolita gaze. The breezy pop tune sold almost 1.5 million copies in its first week of release, breaking records for the highest sales in a debut week by any solo artist. It also rocketed the adolescent Spears into the big time.

Back then, much was made of her Southern Baptist roots and her stated intention to remain a virgin until marriage. She was apple-pie American goodness with a side order of unthreatening sexiness. It was a marketing man's wet dream.

Yet nine years later, here is Britney bleary-eyed and puffy-faced, having lost her family, her friends and her self-respect, a woman whose first response to handing over custody of her children was to go to her favourite tanning salon in Bel Air, trailed by hundreds of paparazzi. What became of that teenager who seemed to embody Southern wholesomeness and sweet girl-next-door naivety? Where did it go wrong for Britney Spears?

Britney Jean Spears was born in Kentwood, Louisiana, a small, rural town of clapboard houses and conservative tastes. The second of three children raised by Baptist parents - she has an older brother, Bryan, 29, and a younger sister, Jamie Lynn, 16 - she was marked out for fame from the beginning. Her mother, Lynne, a second-grade teacher, exerted an extraordinary influence, signing Britney up for jazz, ballet and tap lessons at the age of three. Soon, she was being entered for gymnastic competitions, regional dance festivals and beauty pageants at the age of four in a peculiar emulation of adult sexuality - all crimped blond hair, pink lipgloss and cutesy charm. By the time she was eight, she had an agent. At 11, she had relocated to Lakeland, Florida, to become a regular presenter on the Disney Channel's all-singing, all-dancing New Mickey Mouse Club, where her similarly precocious co-stars included Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake and the Oscar-nominated actor Ryan Gosling.

The sources I talk to say that Lynne's single-minded determination to make something of her daughter caused tensions in her marriage to building contractor Jamie Spears. The couple were rumoured to have divorced when Spears was 12, but so focused were they on their daughter's nascent stardom that they hushed up their separation for six years in case it jeopardised her career.

'It seemed strange for a young child to be so confident,' recalls Steve Hood, Spears's childhood dance coach. 'One minute, she would be this mature and serious competitive performer, the next she would switch into being a giggling schoolkid again - but she always acted the star.'

If Spears ever felt conflicted by the tension between her obvious youth and the mature demands of her profession, she did not show it - or she was not allowed to. By the time she was 13, she was being managed by the highly experienced showbiz agent Larry Rudolph, a man so adept at controlling the image of his clients that he was said to have chosen the precise shade of Spears's nail varnish.

A childhood contemporary of Spears who does not wish to be named, but who was also part of the Disney TV stable, tells me that Rudolph was 'obsessed with protecting this innocent, clean-cut image because it was what everyone was buying into'.

'I was with Larry the first time that Britney flicked [a finger] at the paparazzi and he just flipped,' she says, when we meet in her plush West Hollywood apartment, all cream carpets and ornamental Buddhas. 'He was straightaway on his cellphone setting up chat show appearances for her so that she could apologise.'

And so the marketing of Britney Spears began in earnest. Her debut 1998 album, ...Baby One More Time, was artfully constructed to garner maximum attention. From the teasing provocation of her schoolgirl uniform in the video for the accompanying single right through to the album's cover art featuring a close-up of Spears with her hands clasped in prayer, the slick packaging did everything it could to exploit the titillating contradiction between Britney's burgeoning sexuality and her insistence on remaining chaste till marriage.

'Unlike Christina Aguilera, Britney has never really been a great singer,' says a source close to her former management team over lunch at a discreet sushi restaurant off La Cienega Boulevard. 'But she's a great performer with a series of obvious assets. The virgin thing was a complete fabrication. It was selling an image that people could have hope in.'

In reality, Spears had, since 1998, been dating Justin Timberlake, a fellow Mickey Mouse Club presenter who later became a member of the American boyband 'N Sync and a highly successful solo artist. But throughout the course of their four-year relationship, she was also, according to the industry insiders who speak to me on condition of anonymity, sleeping with several other men. One of them was reputed to be the choreographer Wade Robson, who co-ordinated stage shows for both Spears and 'N Sync and counted himself as one of Timberlake's closest friends.

'Wade started getting a guilty conscience and told Justin in 2002, and that's when Justin broke up with her,' says the management source, prodding a piece of vegetable tempura with his chopsticks. 'She was very psychologically affected by it: she was in tears a lot of the time, didn't want to get out of bed but her publicists were pushing her to promote her tour.'

As if to reassure herself of her own attractiveness, Spears started taking more creative control, injecting her image and her sound with self-conscious wantonness. On the music video for 'I'm a Slave 4 U', taken from her eponymous third album, Britney, she gyrated like a souped-up Pamela Anderson wearing little more than a pink bra and a sheen of baby oil. At the 2002 MTV Music Awards, she shared an on-stage kiss with Madonna.

Off stage, her behaviour was becoming considerably more erratic. In 2004, she married childhood friend Jason Alexander during a drunken night in Las Vegas. The omnipresent Larry Rudolph managed to get the marriage annulled within 55 hours, issuing statements that it had all simply been 'a joke that went too far'.

But other aspects of her demeanour were less easy to dismiss as humorous high jinks. One of her former business associates talks to me at length about Spears's disquieting facial tics and obsessive-compulsive behaviour - characteristics that he says have been concealed from her fan base for several years. 'I remember walking along the street with her and she had all these facial twitches, like head wobbles, that she couldn't control,' he says. 'She will talk about hearing voices and have conversations with herself in weird languages and tell herself to shut up. It's like she has multiple personalities. When you sit down with Britney, she'll focus on you for two minutes at most. She'll start jiggling her leg, then her hand will start tapping on the table, then she stands up and has to be somewhere else.'

She has also, I'm told, developed a phobia of people touching her, supposedly as a reaction to the constant pawing of obsessed fans. When I ask Ruben Garay, the founder of the now defunct World of Britney website, what her attitude is towards her fans, he pushes back his baseball cap and raises his eyebrows. 'Britney has never really cared about her fans,' he says, with a sigh. 'We ran a competition on the website to meet with Britney Spears at her album launch party in LA [in November 2005]. It was all agreed with her management. We said that whoever won would have to fly themselves to California and, in the end, two guys flew in all the way from Ohio buying tickets on a maxed-out credit card.

'On the evening, we were standing by the bar waiting for her. She comes in, walks right by and passes straight through us without saying a thing. It was unbelievable. I just thought: "Show some respect." But she doesn't give a shit about her fans. She thinks the world revolves around her, she's very selfish, very self-absorbed and all that nice Southern girl shtick is total bullshit.'

But the Britney branding truly began to unravel when Rudolph quit as her manager. The apparent trigger was Spears's relationship with her backing dancer, Kevin Federline, who left his eight-months pregnant girlfriend to be with the singer. Friends tell me that Rudolph issued an ultimatum: it was either him or Federline. Britney married Federline in 2004 and Rudolph promptly ended their 10-year working relationship. He was reinstated after Spears announced her divorce two years later, but she fired him again in April, supposedly blaming Rudolph for insisting she go to rehab.

It was to mark the beginning of a gradual isolation for Spears. Insiders say that she began to mistrust even her closest associates, frustrated by the amount of control they exerted and simultaneously convinced that they were trying to exploit her for their own financial ends. Ruth Hilton, the deputy editor of the LA-based celebrity weekly OK! magazine, says that it got to a stage 'where she didn't realise how much her team was her'.

'I don't doubt that people have taken advantage of her and she feels that keenly, but she's gone from one extreme of being totally overworked to being completely without focus,' Ruth says, leaning back in her chair in her airy office overlooking the thrumming bustle of Wilshire Boulevard. 'You have to listen to people around you sometimes even if you don't want to hear what they have to say.'

Spears became increasingly needy at a time when her constant demands were paradoxically driving people away. A friend of Laura Wasser, Britney's former lawyer, recalls: 'Laura would be out at dinner and she would get 20 calls from Britney about every little decision. It was "y'all this, y'all that". She'd even want her advice on what to wear. Laura quit a few weeks ago because she just couldn't take it any more.'

Over the past two years, Spears's management team has fallen to pieces. She has either fired employees for trivial reasons - bodyguard Tony Barretto said he was sacked because he failed to pick up a hat she had dropped - or driven them to such levels of exasperation that they reportedly felt forced to walk out. She fired her publicist, Leslie Sloane Zelnick, last year, while her new manager, Jeff Kwatinetz, one of the most respected agents in Hollywood, is said to have dropped her after her lacklustre MTV performance, citing 'current circumstances [that] prevent us from properly doing our job'.

Whereas previously, Britney's growing unpredictability had been ringfenced from the outside world, now details of her emotional instability started leaking into the public arena. The situation was exacerbated by her highly publicised divorce from Kevin Federline in 2006 and the ensuing custody battle over their two children, Sean Preston, two, and Jayden James, one.

The copious mud-slinging included damning testimony from Barretto in which he claimed that Spears snorted cocaine in nightclubs, was under the influence of drugs in front of her children and subsisted on a daily diet of Special K and cans of Red Bull. Barretto was allegedly instructed not to sweat or eat in her presence.

Other sources tell me that Spears is addicted to everything from tanning salons and cigarettes to Jack Daniel's and Coke. Several witnesses say that they have seen her strip off in front of them for no reason or go to the lavatory with the door open in front of total strangers without any hint of embarrassment. 'The exhibitionism I think partly comes from her desperation to be thought attractive,' says a music industry acquaintance. 'She's been taught her whole life to use her sexuality as a marketing tool, so she goes out without wearing underwear and flashes to the paparazzi, almost as self-affirmation.'

Indeed, one singer-songwriter tells me that when Spears goes to Winston's bar on Santa Monica Boulevard, the bouncers are instructed by her entourage to let in only male guests. Her pole-dancing video for the forthcoming single 'Gimme More' was allegedly rejected by her record label, Jive, for being too provocative. And last week, rumours surfaced of a videotaped sexual encounter, filmed while Spears was holidaying in Hawaii earlier this year.

Quite what the effect of all this is on her children is a matter of fevered conjecture. 'There was a time I thought she was going to hurt the kids,' Barretto said in a newspaper interview last month. 'She'd put the kids at risk by driving on the wrong side of the road and into oncoming traffic for no reason at all.' When I put this to one of her party organisers, they concur: 'She doesn't know how to be a parent. She'll come back from clubs in the middle of the night and wake them up and want to play with them because she's got no idea of what it means to establish a routine.

'She wants to spend all day in bed. Sometimes, she'll walk from her bed to the kitchen to pick up a bag of Cheetos, she'll eat half, then drop the rest on the floor and it will stay there for weeks unless someone else picks it up. The children will walk through the mess - she won't even notice. She doesn't care.'

It seems self-evident to draw the link between Spears's own upbringing and her haphazard attitude towards her children. Having been a child star, working professionally from such a young age, she arguably has little concept of what a normal childhood should consist of. Nor does she choose to seek the advice of her own parents: when Lynne and Jamie Spears tried to book her into rehab against her will, Britney cut them both out of her life.

As a result, former associates tell me that Spears has no reference point as to what constitutes normal behaviour and no guidance from people with her best interests at heart. Having grown up in the limelight, with an assortment of flunkies on hand to do whatever she desired, she now seems to be struggling to make her own decisions in isolation. But she is unused to being on her own. Tellingly, she is said to be afraid to spend the night by herself in her seven-bedroom, £4.25m Malibu home and employs a coterie of staff to keep her company, including two 'sober companions' - former addicts who act as informal counsellors - at the rate of £500 each a day. Barretto said that she keeps a scrapbook called 'My New Friends Photo Album', which she constantly updates. Yet the tragedy is that many of these new friends are self-serving hangers-on - or 'enablers' in LA-speak - who enjoy their flirtation with the limelight and who encourage Spears to do what makes her happy, rather than what makes her better.

It is perhaps unsurprising that Spears attracts such an entourage: despite all her recent troubles, she remains very rich - court papers lodged by Federline's legal team suggest that she enjoys an income of around £370,000 a month.

Friendless, isolated and with an increasingly loosened grip on reality, Britney's troubled state of mind has become ever more disturbingly apparent. At a magazine photo shoot in August for OK!, she went into meltdown. 'She decided she wanted to eat chicken and she was wearing this beautiful designer pink silk dress,' says Ruth Hilton. 'When the stylist asked her to take it off while she was eating and put on a dressing gown, she wiped her greasy hands all the way down the front of it and all the way down the back. She was stubbing cigarettes out on the floor. She had brought along her new puppy called London, and there was a £3,500 Zac Posen gown on the floor in the bedroom that she had tried on, and the dog relieved himself on it.'

After a few minutes posing for the actual shoot, Spears walked out with no explanation, taking with her £10,000 worth of clothing and jewellery that she has never returned. 'The photographer tried to talk her back in, but she just wasn't with it,' says Hilton. 'There was no recognition of how erratic her behavior was. She didn't really understand that she'd done anything wrong.'

So where will it end? Family members are said to be extremely concerned that the loss of her children could further endanger her physical and mental health. Her record company, meanwhile, is insisting that Spears's new album will silence the naysayers when it is released next month. 'It's easy to forget that Britney is all about the music,' says Teresa LaBarbera Whites, the senior vice-president of A&R at Spears's record label, Jive. 'She put in 150 per cent and it's a great record, full of the freshest, hottest and best beats out there.'

But however good the new album, however upbeat the promotion and however glossy the packaging, it is doubtful that this will be enough to lift Spears out of the quagmire. Behind the airbrushed image, there exists a young woman with an extremely contradictory attitude towards the centrifugal force of global fame, whose celebrity has proved to be both the cause of her ruin and her raison d'etre. Ruthlessly marketed from early childhood, she has lived most of her adult life as a sort of public performance. While Brand Britney might have been her undoing, it was also her identity. For all that the outside world wants Britney Spears to confront her demons, perhaps the saddest realisation is that she has yet to confront herself.

Back on track: Exclusive preview of the new album

In eight years Britney Spears has sold 75 million albums, become one of the best-selling women in American music history, won countless awards, been named the world's most powerful celebrity by Forbes and sold millions of concert tickets. It's useful to bear these accomplishments in mind when the topic of Britney's uselessness as a popstar rears its head.

Certainly those looking for career apocalypse (as they were prior to Britney's last album, before she delivered 'Toxic') will be dismayed to hear that, on the basis of tracks available at the time of going to press, her new - as yet untitled - album's pretty good: a spunky and sonically adventurous collection of electronic pop tracks. Beyond the groove-fuelled but reassuringly hooky lead single 'Gimme More', one of the standout tracks is 'Piece Of Me', a crunchy cry of self-justification produced by 'Toxic' knob-twiddlers Bloodshy & Avant. By contrast 'Heaven On Earth', crafted by 'Gimme More' producer Danja, is a hi-NRG Moroder-esque dance track whose lyrics veer more into the territory of generic love song fluff, while 'Break The Ice' is an incredible cross between Nelly Furtado's 'Maneater' and Prince's 'When Doves Cry'. The icy, downbeat and melodic number 'State Of Grace' is another highlight on an album whose final tracklisting is yet to be confirmed - one brilliant track is based around a huge 1980s sample, which may or may not be cleared in time for the album's release.

This is a style of pop music which only works in a mainstream dominated by guitars and R&B when it is forced through by a megastar of Britney's stature. It failed in the UK for Rachel Stevens and in the states for Hilary Duff, but they are both uncompelling popstars. Britney, as the ultimate modern pop performer, looks like she might just pull it off.

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After just over a month of dating, Pamela Anderson, 40, and Rick Salomon, 39, have tied the knot. The couple exchanged vows shortly after 9:00 pm, in front of sixty friends and family members in a private villa at the Mirage Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Among the guests were Tobey Maguire, Kevin Dillon, her sons Brandon, 11, and Dylan, 9, and his daughters Hunter, 11, and Tyson, 9.

The wedding took place after conclusion of her 7:00 pm show, "The Beauty of Magic," at the Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino. Sources close to Anderson say she intended to return to Planet Hollywood to perform her 10:00 pm show, after which she would head to the Heart bar in the middle of the casino for a reception.

Anderson wore a white Valentino mini-skirt; Solomon wore a black tux with a black beenie. The backyard of the villa was decorated with white roses, and white petals were spread on the ground to create a path to a fountain where the couple exchanged their vows. For desert: white cupcakes and a four tier white wedding cake. "It was a beautiful ceremony," said one guest. The wedding song was No Ordinary Love by Sade.

Anderson has previously been married to rockers Tommy Lee and Kid Rock. Salomon is perhaps best known for his role as Paris Hilton's co-star in her widely distributed (with his help!) sex tape. He was also married to 90210 actress Shannen Doherty for a few months in 2002.

Anderson first revealed her engagement during an appearance on the Ellen DeGeneres Show on September 12, but did not reveal his name, referring to him simply as "a poker player." Anderson's explanation of the couple's meet cute? "I was playing poker one night in my room and I was down about 250 grand...he said if I made out with him, that I could clear [my debt]. So a couple of days went by, he followed me around like a puppy dog...and then I fell in love and now we're engaged!"

Just two weeks later, Anderson and Salomon applied for their marriage license.

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Lindsay Lohan has checked out of a drug and alcohol treatment program in Utah that she entered in August, according to People magazine.

Lohan, 21, left the Cirque Lodge treatment center on Friday afternoon, the magazine reported on its Web site, citing statements from her parents.

"I'm proud of her. She's moving ahead with her life," her mother, Dina, told People Friday. "Things were getting out of control. She took action. She took responsibility. She really needed to heal."

The exclusive center, which promises anonymity to clients, refused Saturday to confirm or deny the report. Calls to Lohan's publicist and attorney were not immediately returned.

Lohan's visit to Cirque Lodge was her third trip to rehab since January, a frenetic year in which she wrecked a Mercedes-Benz, released the box-office flop "I Know Who Killed Me" and was arrested more than once.

Lohan has been prominently in the public eye since becoming a star at 11 in the Disney film "The Parent Trap." She's also appeared in "Mean Girls," "Freaky Friday," "Herbie Fully Loaded" and numerous other films. In recent years, however, she's become better known for nonstop appearances on the Hollywood nightclub scene.

"Now that she is going out into the world, I can only hope for the best," her father, Michael Lohan, told People.

In May, Lohan was arrested after crashing her Mercedes-Benz into a tree in Beverly Hills. She was arrested again in July after the mother of Lohan's former personal assistant called 911 to report that her car was being chased by an SUV. The chase ended in Santa Monica, where police arrested Lohan for being behind the wheel.

In both cases, Lohan was found in possession of small amounts of cocaine.

In August, she reached a plea deal on misdemeanor drunken driving and cocaine charges stemming from the arrests. The deal called for her to enter treatment, spend a day in jail and perform community service.

"It is clear to me that my life has become completely unmanageable because I am addicted to alcohol and drugs," Lohan said in a statement released by her publicist last August.

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George Clooney may be the world's most eligible bachelor – or the most visible bachelor, anyway – but not all of his Hollywood friends think he will stay that way.

Michelle Pfeiffer, his co-star in one of his first hit movies, One Fine Day, revealed yesterday that she has upped a long-standing bet that he will, one day, find a nice girl and settle down.

The bet started out years ago at $100 (£50). But Clooney, ever more adamant about staying unattached, has steadily increased the stakes. "I bet him he would get married and he keeps inflating the bet, from $100 to $100,000," Pfeiffer told Jonathan Ross in an interview set for broadcast last night. "I still think he will, he's a handsome devil."

A hundred grand for Pfeiffer and Clooney is not, of course, the daunting sum it might be for the rest of us. Aside from her own stellar career, Pfeiffer is married to one of television's most successful producers, David E. Kelley. She is in Britain to promote the new musical version of the old John Waters movie Hairspray – a huge hit on the other side of the Atlantic and a hot early favourite for multiple Oscars.

Clooney, meanwhile, is still basking in last year's banner year in which he won an Oscar for his supporting role in Syriana, and received universal acclaim for writing and directing Good Night, and Good Luck. He has a slew of producing and acting projects, including a legal thriller called Michael Clayton which just came out in the United States.

At 46, Clooney is of course a celebrated charmer, frequently listed in the gossip rags as one of the sexiest men alive. He hardly lives like a monk – he rarely goes anywhere without a beautiful woman on his arm, and his list of reported girlfriends has included Kelly Preston (now married to John Travolta), Renee Zellweger and Mariella Frostrup.

But he also keeps his focus squarely on his work, on his core of longstanding friends, on his homes in Los Angeles and Lake Como, and on his growing passion for international politics. Clooney has campaigned harder than anyone to try to stop the genocide in Darfur, addressing the UN and lobbying politicians on both sides of the American political aisle.

He's often touted as a possible future political candidate, along the lines of Ronald Reagan, a charmer from another era, or Arnold Schwarzenegger. That, though seems unlikely, though. "Run for office?" he once said. "No. I've slept with too many women, I've done too many drugs, and I've been to too many parties."

That's about as specific as Clooney gets about his personal life. As he puts it: "It wouldn't be personal if I shared it."

But he does know a thing or two about marriage, because he tied the knot once in the late 1980s. His union with Talia Balsam, predating his break-out role on television in ER, lasted just three years.

As for his record on winning bets, he looks like he's sitting pretty. Pfeiffer, along with Nicole Kidman, once bet him $20,000 he would have a child by the time he turned 40. When he turned that corner six years ago, he graciously returned the cheques the two women wrote with a note saying: "Double or nothing for another 10 years."

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Alan Moore, the undisputed, eccentric king of comic-book writing, made it acceptable for literary-minded adults to enjoy books about superheroes. Will his new book do the same for erotica? Susanna Clarke, the novelist and long-time Moore devotee, speaks to him about sex, magic, and why he prefers his home town to Hollywood

I first became an Alan Moore fan in Covent Garden on a Saturday afternoon in 1987, when I bought a copy of Watchmen, his graphic novel about ageing superheroes and nuclear apocalypse. I had always been fascinated by comics but it had taken me several weeks to make up my mind to buy Watchmen; for someone on a publisher's assistant's salary it was some quite unheard-of sum of money. I began reading on the Tube home. I read all weekend and by Monday morning I still had a couple of chapters to go. For the book itself, I refer you to pretty much any review – intelligent, multi-layered, extraordinary, etc – but what I remember 20 years later is not so much what I thought of it, as its effect on me. That Monday at work I felt almost physically sick: sick from not being able to read Watchmen. The primary colours of Dave Gibbons's art danced in my head – everything else seemed grey and unreal. No other book ever took hold of me like that. That evening I went home and finished it. Then I was no longer sick. Only bereft.

It's not easy to convey to someone who doesn't read comics just how Alan Moore has dominated the field since Watchmen. He took something very American – the superhero comic – reinvented it (more than once) and sold it back to them. A list of his most famous works (Swamp Thing, Miracleman from Hell, Watchmen, V for Vendetta, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) reads like a list of classic comics of the past 20 years. When he fell out with the largest comics publisher in the world, the New York based DC, he found a home with an American independent publisher, Wildstorm. DC dealt with this defection in a remarkably straightforward way – they bought Wildstorm in order to get him back (an experience Moore describes as like having 'a really weird, rich stalker girlfriend'). All this without ever leaving Northampton.

Alan Moore is a peculiarly unsung triumph of British culture, and Northampton, where he was born in 1953, the son of brewery worker Ernest and printer Sylvia, is where you must go to find him. A long line of fans, film producers and directors have made the journey before me. We meet in a pleasant Italian restaurant in the basement of a city street. The restaurant has rather low, vaulted ceilings and Alan Moore is very tall; he seems to loom in the confined space. It is, however, an entirely affable, unthreatening sort of loom.

Photographs of him always make the most of his wild eyes, Rasputin-like hair and the magician's rings upon his fingers. In person, his expression is more mischievous than wild. And photographs can't convey the voice. Nowadays, we're accustomed to writers with bland, London-ish accents. Moore speaks undiluted Northampton. Which perhaps explains why a three-hour conversation with him about pornography and magic seems homely and down to earth – almost comforting.

In a career with more than its fair share of stormy periods (after watching several of his comics transformed into deeply mediocre movies, Moore now refuses to have his name credited on any film adaptations of his work or to accept any money for them – including the Watchmen film currently being made by the director of 300) he has now produced his most controversial work so far: Lost Girls, a three-volume, 16-years-in-the-making comic about sex. His collaborator in the project is his wife, the San Francisco artist Melinda Gebbie, who has been drawing sexually charged subjects since working in underground comics in the 1970s. There can be no doubt of the importance of Lost Girls to Moore and Gebbie. In one very concrete sense it has changed their lives: they met to work on the book, began a relationship and were married earlier this year. It's his second marriage; he has two grown-up daughters, Amber and Leah, from his first (Leah writes comics with her husband, John Reppion).

Moore had been thinking about ways to talk about sex in comics long before Lost Girls. He'd first tackled it in the 'Rite of Spring', an issue of Swamp Thing in which Alex, the lonely plant-based life-form, and Abby, his human lover, tenderly make love. (If you're wondering what sex with a self-aware vegetable is like, it's more psychedelic than anything else – 'A tide of emeralds engulfs me.') 'After a couple of years, it had hit me that it might be possible to do a story about sex that didn't involve a swamp monster,' he says. 'It was an outrageous, wacky idea?…'

In Lost Girls, three oddly familiar figures arrive at a hotel in Switzerland on the eve of the First World War: Alice, a world-weary lesbian; Wendy, a repressed middle-class wife; and Dorothy, an American girl brimming with sexual energy. They are, and are not, the girls from Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and The Wizard of Oz. In Lost Girls their stories are re-imagined as elaborate sexual awakenings – sometimes frightening, occasionally tender. Make no mistake, this is not delicately erotic fiction; it is pornography. Almost every spread contains images of an unapologetic, uninhibited sexual act.

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When the Spice Girls kick off their world tour at the end of the year, they intend to travel in style.

The band – not content with flying first-class – are leasing a Boeing 757 they have nicknamed Spice Force One to jet them around the globe.

The fuselage of the 757 will be adorned with official Spice Girls reunion artwork – and inside it will have facilities including a creche and make-up parlour.

The jet will transport the five girls – Victoria Beckham, Melanie Brown, Emma Bunton, Melanie Chisholm and Geri Halliwell – plus their families, management, wardrobe and make-up assistants and bodyguards.

"Spice Force One will be a flying palace," said my source.

As well as the creche and make-up facilities, it will include a dining room, business centre, state-of-the-art bathrooms, a media centre and sleeping quarters.

"Along with the immediate entourage, the girls will have a team of chefs and nannies who will be on hand 24/7 to feed and look after all the VIPs on board."

The eagerly awaited tour kicks off on December 2 and will see the girls visit Vancouver, San Jose, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York, Shanghai, Madrid, Beijing, London and Cape Town.

It is the first time all the girls will have appeared on stage together since Geri left in May 1998 – leading to the group eventually splitting in 2001.

In addition to Spice Force One, the band is also set to hire two further jets – dubbed Spice Force Two and Three – for their dancers, remaining staff, stage hands and equipment.

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