All the celebrities Prince Harry mentions in Spare – from Spice Girls to Courteney Cox and supermodels
Topping the bestseller lists and creating headlines around the world, Prince Harry’s memoir Spare is the book everyone is talking about.
From claims his brother Prince William physically attacked him to losing his virginity to an older woman in a field behind a pub, the revelations have not stopped coming.
For those celeb-spotters out there, there’s another reason to get stuck into the 410-page book – it’s packed with stars. Here are some of Prince Harry‘s biggest name drops, and what he got up to with them.
The Spice Girls
Prince Harry remembers being “thrilled and baffled” by the news he would be hanging out with Nelson Mandela and the Spice Girls while accompanying his father on a trip to South Africa in 1997.
The Spice Girls had a big concert in Johannesburg and were calling in on President Mandela to pay their respects.
Harry says his father – who he calls Pa – had engineered the meeting for some good PR.
“The truth was, Pa’s staff hoped a photo of him standing alongside the world’s most revered political leader and the world’s most popular female musical act would earn him some positive headlines, which he sorely needed. Since Mummy’s disappearance he’s been savaged.”
Calling it “a work trip”, Harry goes on: “The Spice Girls concert represented my first public appearance since the funeral and I knew, through intuition, through bits of overheard conversations, that the public’s curiosity about my welfare was running high.
“I remember stepping on to the red carpet, screwing a smile on my face, suddenly wishing I was in my bed at St James’ Palace. Beside me was Baby Spice, wearing white plastic shoes with chunky twelve-inch platform heels.
“I fixated on those heels while she fixated on my cheeks. She kept pinching them. So chubby! So cute! Then Posh Spice surged forward and clutched my hand.
“Further down the line I spied Ginger Spice, the only Spice with whom I felt a real connection – a fellow ginger.”
The Spice Girls with Harry and Prince Charles
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Courteney Cox
We may not have much in common with Prince Harry’s day-to-day life, but there’s one thing we can relate to – he’s a big Friends fan.
He says he spent so much time at home watching the US sitcom while eating takeaway, “it’s possible that in 2013 I watched all the Friends episodes”.
Unlike Harry, however, not many of us have hung out at Monica’s house.
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Recalling a visit to the US with a pal in January 2016, Harry ends up at a party at Courteney Cox’s mansion.
“She was a friend of Thomas’ girlfriend, and had more room,” he says. “Also, she was travelling, on a job and didn’t mind if we crashed at her place.
“No complaints from me. As a Friends fanatic, the idea of crashing at Monica’s was highly appealing. And amusing. But then… Courtney turned up.
“I was very confused. Was her job cancelled? I didn’t think it was my place to ask. More: Does this mean we have to leave?
“She smiled. Of course not, Harry. Plenty of room.”
Courteney Cox: ‘She was Monica. And I was a Chandler,’ Harry writes
Harry goes on to admit he had quite the crush on Cox: “She was Monica. And I was a Chandler. I wondered if I’d ever work up the courage to tell her. Was there enough tequila in California to get me that brave?”
The party hots up, Harry meets “Batman from the LEGO movie” – Will Arnett we presume – and with his help Harry moves on from tequila to something a little more trippy.
“He led my mate and me to the fridge, from which he extracted a soft drink. While the door was open, we spotted a huge box of black diamond magic mushroom chocolates.
“Someone behind said they were for everybody. Help yourself boys. My mate and I grabbed several, gobbled them, washed them down with tequila.
“We waited for Batman to indulge as well. But he didn’t. Not his thing or something. Howdya like that, we said. This bloke’s just sent us by ourselves into the f***ing Batcave.”
Harry says he was worried about Meghan when he met Rihanna
Rihanna
One of the best-selling female music artists of all time, Rihanna agreed to hook up with Harry in Barbados to encourage people to get tested for HIV.
Pretty exciting right? Well, turns out Harry was a bit distracted by his girlfriend at the time, Meghan Markle.
Here’s what he had to say: “The occasion was the upcoming World AIDS day and I’d asked Rihanna, at the last minute, to join me, help raise awareness across the Caribbean. To my shock, she’d said yes.
“November 2016. Important day, vital cause, but my head wasn’t in the game. I was worried about Meg. She couldn’t go home because her house was surrounded by paps…
“I turned to Rihanna and we chatted while I awaited the result. Negative. Now I just wanted to run, find somewhere with Wi-Fi, check on Meg.”
Hopefully he stuck around for long enough to thank Rihanna for coming along…
Caroline Flack was ‘funny, sweet and cool’, Harry says
Caroline Flack
Prince Harry had a short-lived romance with presenter Caroline Flack in 2009. In his book he opens up about meeting her in a restaurant with friends, dodging paparazzi together and eventually going their separate ways due to press harassment.
Calling her “funny, sweet and cool”, he says he met her a few months after splitting up with the socialite Chelsy Davy.
Despite Flack being a pretty famous presenter at the time, Harry says he didn’t know who she was as “I don’t watch much TV” and struggled a bit to remember her name.
Luckily, she didn’t take offence and they met a few days later for dinner and poker. Further dates ensued, but after being photographed together Harry says: “Those photos set off a frenzy.
“Within hours a mob was camped outside Flack’s parents’ house, and all her friends’ houses, and her grandmother’s house.
“She was described in one paper as ‘my bit of rough’ – because she’d once worked in a factory or something. Jesus, I thought, are we really such a country of insufferable snobs?”
He says they continued to see each other “on and off, but we didn’t feel free any more”. He goes on: “The relationship was tainted, irredeemably, and in time we agreed that it just wasn’t worth the grief and harassment. Especially for her family.”
Flack also mentioned the relationship in her 2014 autobiography, Storm In A C Cup.
The Love Island presenter took her own life aged 40 in February 2020. Later in the book, Harry mentions her death, writing: “Caroline Flack, a very good friend of mine, had taken her own life. By the looks of things, she couldn’t bear it anymore.
“The years of constant harassment by the press had killed her. I felt awful for her family. I can’t forget how much she suffered for her fatal sin of going out with me.”
Harry’s mention of his former flame has not gone down well in all quarters. Flack’s former agent has hit out at him for repeating “long forgotten slurs” and called for him to be stripped of his titles.
Claudia Schiffer is one of the supermodels Harry has met
Supermodels
Lots of teenage boys spend time looking at models. But not many get to meet them in the flesh.
While you might expect it to be the moment of many boys’ dreams, Harry says it was actually “very confusing”.
Thanks to the help of a therapist, who helped him recall previously forgotten memories, he says he remembered meeting the biggest supermodels of the 90s with his brother when he was a teenager.
He writes: “I remembered Willy and me joining her for a chat with Christy Turlington, Claudia Schiffer and Cindy Crawford.
“Very confusing. Especially for two shy boys, at or about the age of puberty.”
Among the most photographed models of the time, Turlington, Schiffer and Crawford frequently featured on magazine covers, runways and in fashion campaigns throughout Harry’s teenage years.
Harry with Sir Elton John in 2015
Sir Elton John
They first met when Sir Elton John rewrote Candle In The Wind for his mother’s funeral, but Harry has since become firm friends with the Rocketman hitmaker.
But they’ve had their disagreements too.
In his memoir, Harry says he was less than happy when he discovered Sir Elton would be publishing his own no-holds barred memoir in instalments in the Daily Mail.
Harry says he questioned why he had chosen the newspaper he claimed had made Sir Elton’s life “miserable”.
He says Sir Elton said he “wanted people to read it”, adding: “Where better than the very newspaper that has been so poisonous to me my whole life?”
Saying he was sweating as they chatted, Harry goes on: “I reminded him of the specific lies the Mail had famously printed about him. Hell – he’d sued them, just over a decade earlier, after they claimed he forbade people at a charity event from speaking to him.
“They’d ultimately written him a cheque for a hundred thousand pounds. I reminded him that he’d stirringly said in one interview: They can say that I’m a fat old c***. They can say that I’m an untalented b******. They can call me a p***. But they mustn’t lie about me.”
Harry says he did not want to “push” the matter, adding: “I loved him. I’ll always love him. And I also didn’t want to spoil the holiday.”
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Later, Harry says it was Sir Elton and his husband David Furnish who inspired him to sue press outlets directly if he believed they had used illegal means to access information about him, rather than trying to persuade the palace to fight on his behalf.
He says they told him about “an acquaintance of theirs who was a lawyer, a charming chap who knew the wiretapping scandal better than anyone”.
Both Harry and Sir Elton are among a group of celebrities suing the Daily Mail publisher over alleged bugging, impersonation and accessing bank accounts. Associated Newspapers denies the claims.
Cameron Diaz and Harry were rumoured to have had a relationship in the press
And two celebs Harry hasn’t met
Despite tabloid stories saying otherwise, Harry insists he’s never had a thing with Cameron Diaz.
Recalling press interest in his failure to marry by his late 20s, he writes: “They dredged up every relationship I’d ever had, every girl I’d ever been seen with, put it all into a blender, hired ‘experts’, aka quacks, to try to make sense of it.
“Books about me dived into my love life, homed in on each romantic failure and near miss.
“I seem to recall one detailing my flirtation with Cameron Diaz. ‘Harry just couldn’t see himself with her, the author reported’.
“Indeed, I couldn’t, since we’d never met. I was never within 50 metres of Ms Diaz, further proof that if you like reading pure b******s then royal biographies are just your thing.”
He also says he never met Christina Aguilera, despite briefly thinking he did.
Harry was smoking weed when he thought he met Christina Aguilera
At another house party, with “more tequila… and more mushrooms”, Harry says: “We all started playing some kind of game, some kind of charades – I think?
“Someone handed me a joint. Lovely. I took a hit, looked at the rinsed creamy blue of the California sky. Someone tapped me on the shoulder, said they wanted me to meet Christina Aguilera. Oh, hello, Christina.
“She looked rather mannish. No, apparently, I’d misheard, it wasn’t Christina, it was the guy who co-wrote one of her songs. Genie in a Bottle. Did I know the lyrics? Did he tell me the lyrics?
“Anyway, he’d made a boatload from those lyrics, and now lived in high style. Good for you, mate.”
Harry then heads back to Courteney Cox’s beachfront house, just another chapter in his royal life.
Entertainment
Erin Brockovich: ‘My chiropractor saw mud on my stiletto – I said, I’ve been collecting dead frogs’
Erin Brockovich says a chance conversation about a muddy stiletto with her chiropractor led to the making of the award-winning film about her life.
The climate activist, who was played by Julia Roberts in the movie, told Sky News: “My girlfriend, who was a chiropractor, was giving me a chiropractic adjustment and asked me why I had mud on my stilettos.
“I said, ‘Oh, I’ve been collecting dead frogs’. She goes, ‘What is wrong with you?’ So, I started telling her what I was doing.”
Then just a junior paralegal, Brockovich was in fact pulling together evidence that would see her emerge victorious from one of the largest cases of water contamination in US history in Hinkley, California.
Her hard work would see her win a record settlement from Pacific Gas & Electric Company – $333m (£254m) – but that was all still to come.
Little did Brockovich know, but her tale of a muddy stiletto would get back to actor Danny DeVito and his Jersey Films producing partner Michael Schamburg, and through them to the film’s director Steven Soderbergh.
Brockovich says Soderbergh was “wowed” by what he heard.
She says he realised her image “was something that Hollywood might be drawn to that I was never thinking of – the short skirt, the attitude, the big bust, the stilettos, the backcombed hair. Somehow, it came together.”
‘I was always going to be misunderstood’
Released in 2000, the powerful story of one woman’s fight for justice made Brockovich a household name, and the film won actress Julia Roberts an Oscar.
Now, 25 years on, Brockovich says she believes her legal victory was helped in part by an unlikely ally – her learning difficulty.
Julia Roberts and Russell Crowe win best actress and actor at
the 2001 Oscars. Pic: AP/Richard Drew
Brockovich says: “Had I not been dyslexic, I might have missed Hinkley.”
Recently named a global ambassador for charity Made By Dyslexia, she’s been aware of her learning differences since childhood and still struggles today.
She says “moments of low self-esteem” still “creep back in”, and she long ago accepted “I was always going to be misunderstood”.
But for Brockovich, recognising her dyslexic strengths while working in Hinkley proved a pivotal moment: “My observations are wickedly keen. I feel like a human radar some days… Things you might not see as a pattern, I recognise. There are things that intuitively, I absolutely know.
“It will take me some time in my visual patterns of what I’m seeing, how to organise that. And it was in Hinkley that that moment happened for me because it was so omnipresent [and] in my face. Everything that should have been normal was not.”
‘A huge perfect storm’
Brockovich paints a bleak picture of what she saw in the small town: “The trees were secreting poison, the cows were covered in tumours, the chickens had wry neck [a neurological condition that causes the head to tilt abnormally], the people were sick and unbeknown to them, I knew they were all having the exact same health patterns. To the green water, to the two-headed frog, all of that was just I was like on fire, like electricity going, ‘Oh my gosh, what’s going on out here?'”
She describes it as “a huge, perfect storm that came together for me in Hinkley”.
But a side effect of the movie – overnight global fame – wasn’t always easy to deal with.
Pic. Made By Dyslexia
Brockovich calls it “scary,” admitting, “when the film first came out the night of the premiere, I was literally shaking so bad, I was so overwhelmed, that Universal Studios said, ‘If we can’t get you to calm down, I think we need to take you home’. It was a lot”.
Brockovich says she kept grounded by staying focused on her work, her family and her three children.
With Hollywood not always renowned for its faithful adherence to fact, Brockovich says the film didn’t whitewash the facts.
“I think they really did a good job at pointing out our environmental issues. Hollywood can do that, they can tell a good story. And I’m glad it was not about fluff and glamour. I’m glad it was about a subject that oftentimes we don’t want to talk about. Water pollution, environmental damage. People being poisoned.”
‘Defend ourselves against environmental assaults’
While environmental awareness is now part of the daily conversation in a way it wasn’t a quarter of a century ago, the battle to protect the climate is far from over.
Just last month, Donald Trump laid out plans to slash over 30 climate and environmental regulations as part of an ongoing effort to boost US industries from coal to manufacturing and ramp up oil and minerals production.
In response, Brockovich says, “We’re not going to stop it, but we can defend against these environmental assaults.
“We can do better with infrastructure. We can do better on a lot of policy-making. I think there’s a moment here. We have to do that because the old coming into the new isn’t working.
“I’ve recognised the patterns for 30-plus years, we just keep doing the same thing over and over and over and over again, expecting a different result.
“For me, sometimes it’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, just get your ego out of the way’. We have to accept that this might be something greater than us, but we can certainly defend ourselves and protect ourselves and prepare ourselves better so we can get through that storm.”
You can listen to Brockovich speaking about her dyslexia with Made By Dyslexia founder Kate Griggs on the first episode of the new season of the podcast Lessons In Dyslexic Thinking, wherever you get your podcasts.
The Menendez brothers’ bid for freedom through resentencing can continue with the hearing scheduled for Thursday, a judge has ruled.
Lyle, 57, and Erik, 54, received life sentences without the possibility of parole after being convicted of murdering their parents, Jose and Kitty Menendez, at their Beverly Hills home in 1989.
Lyle was 21 at the time, Erik was 18.
Last year, Los Angeles district attorney George Gascon asked a judge to change the brothers’ sentence from life without the possibility of parole to 50 years to life. That would make them immediately eligible for parole because they committed the crime when they were younger than 26.
But Mr Gascon’s successor Nathan Hochman submitted a motion last month to withdraw the resentencing request, saying the brothers must fully acknowledge lies they told about the murder of their parents before he would support their release from prison.
Separately, Governor Gavin Newsom, who has the power to commute their sentences, has asked the parole board to consider whether the brothers would represent a public safety risk if released.
Anamaria Baralt, cousin of Erik and Lyle Menendez, hugs attorney Mark Geragos. Pic: AP
In light of Mr Hochman’s opposition, Los Angeles County Superior Court judge Michael Jesic ruled on Friday that the court can move forward with the hearing.
“Everything you argued today is absolutely fair game for the resentencing hearing next Thursday,” he said.
From prison, the brothers watched through a video link and could be seen in court seated next to each other in blue.
Speaking after the hearing, the brothers’ lawyer said: “Today is a good day. Justice won over politics.”
Prosecutors accused the brothers of killing their parents for a multimillion-dollar inheritance, although their defence team argued they acted out of self-defence after years of sexual abuse by their father.
The brothers were convicted in 1996 of first-degree murder. Pic: AP
The brothers have maintained their parents abused them since they were first charged with the murders.
A Netflix drama series and subsequent documentary about the brothers thrust them back into the spotlight last year, and led to renewed calls for their release – including from some members of their family.
Entertainment
Ex-Abercrombie & Fitch chief executive Mike Jeffries ‘unfit to stand trial due to dementia’, prosecutors and defence team say
Abercrombie & Fitch’s former chief executive is not fit to stand trial on sex trafficking charges as he is suffering from dementia, both prosecutors and his lawyers have said.
Mike Jeffries has Alzheimer’s disease, Lewy body dementia and the “residual effects of a traumatic brain injury”, his defence attorneys wrote in a letter filed at a federal court in Central Islip, New York.
The 80-year-old needs around-the-clock care, they added, citing evaluations by medical professionals.
Prosecutors and defence lawyers are calling for Jeffries to be placed in the custody of the federal bureau of prisons for up to four months. They say he should be admitted to hospital to have treatment that could allow his criminal case to proceed.
The business tycoon, who led fashion retailer A&F from 1992 to 2014, pleaded not guilty to federal sex trafficking and interstate prostitution charges in October, and was released on a $10m (£7.65m) bond.
A total of 15 men allege they were induced by “force, fraud and coercion” to engage in drug-fuelled sex parties.
Prosecutors have accused Jeffries, his partner Matthew Smith, and the couple’s alleged “recruiter” James Jacobson, of luring men to parties in New York City, the Hamptons and other locations, by dangling the prospect of modelling for A&F advertisements.
Smith and Jacobson have also pleaded not guilty to the charges against them.
‘Progressive and incurable’
In their latest letter on Jeffries’ health, his defence lawyers said at least four medical professionals had concluded his cognitive issues are “progressive and incurable”, and that he will not “regain his competency and cannot be restored to competency in the future”.
These issues “significantly impair” his ability to understand the charges against him, they wrote.
Jeffries’ partner Matthew Smith, pictured outside the court in December, has also pleaded not guilty. Pic: AP
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“The progressive nature of his neurocognitive disorder ensures continued decline over time, further diminishing his already limited functional capacity,” said Dr Alexander Bardey, a forensic psychiatrist, and Dr Cheryl Paradis, a forensic psychologist, following evaluations made in December.
“It is, therefore, our professional opinion, within a reasonable degree of psychological and psychiatric certainty, that Mr Jeffries is not competent to proceed in the current case and cannot be restored to competency in the future.”
Jeffries left A&F in 2014 after leading the company for more than two decades, taking the retailer from a hunting and outdoor goods store founded in 1892 to a fixture of early 2000s fashion.
His lawyers did not immediately respond to requests by the Associated Press news agency for comment. The US attorney’s office for the eastern district of New York declined to comment.
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