Normally I rely on Pamela to do my instant obituaries, but she’s gallivanting somewhere, so here’s a link to the Wikipedia page.

He was tremendous in The Godfather, of course, which everyone should watch more than once.

I do have an anecdote. Here’s something just posted on Twitter by my old sparring partner Paul Myers, a showbiz writer and brother of Michael Myers (Shrek, Austin Powers, etc).

Paul thinks this funny, and so do I. As a veteran of the interview wars, I was always amused by people being openly obnoxious. Passive aggression was much worse. If a ‘sleb’ is nasty to you, you have a story. If they just play a dead bat, you’re stuck.

Predictably, lots of Twitter people have taken offence on behalf of the poor wage-slave Playboy hack ‘who would much rather have been at home writing his novel’. This is nonsense. Playboy writers make poor victims.

But there is a gross inequality in the interviewing role: if the writer had given as good as he/she got (I don’t know who it was), he’d have been out of work, whereas Caan’s reputation was only enhanced by his comic obnoxiousness.

I like Caan and I admire his approach to dealing with contractually-obligated publicity. But All Men Are Created Equal. Celebrities or not. Perhaps that explains my short-lived career as A Friend To The Stars.