Gossip

Ritchie rich

by Chris Wright

Guy Ritchie and I bonded.

It happened a little under two years ago, when I interviewed the English filmmaker about his celebrated gangster flick Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels. Ritchie was about the same age I was, and he had run in the same circles as I had, trading blows with the "horrible, rough bastards" of West London. It felt more like a reunion than an interview. He gave me a hat.

STREET CRED LITE: Guy Ritchie is a child of affluence after all.

Later, when I heard that Ritchie, 32, had fathered a baby with Madonna, and that he would be marrying her, I felt a little ripple of pride -- a local-boy-makes-good sort of thing. Even when I read an interview with Ritchie in which he said he'd been raised in the slums of East London, I wasn't concerned. Maybe he'd moved.

Shortly before Christmas, however, as public interest in the Ritchie-Madonna marriage reached frenzied levels, the muckraking machine of Britain's tabloid culture groaned to life, churning up biographical details about Ritchie that would cast a shadow over our brief friendship.

Before he made Lock, Stock, Ritchie had explained to me the day we met, he was "borassic lint," which is Cockney rhyming slang for "skint," which is street slang for "penniless." Such were the depths of Ritchie's working-class credentials. "I've got a few quid now," he continued, "but I don't know what to do with it." We reminisced about London's fearsome crime families and exchanged war stories from the street.

"This geezer was bigger than me," Ritchie said, recalling a fight outside a nightclub, "and I lumped him, and he was about to lump me back. If he had I would have been bang in trouble, but he suddenly shat his load and legged it. I thought, `Yeah, showed you, son.' "

But this story, as a London tabloid reporter put it to me recently, is probably "a load of bollocks."

"He likes to pretend he's a hard man," the reporter continued. "But he's just a nice, upper-middle-class boy."

Indeed, it seems that Ritchie's been feeding a lot of reporters the line about his rough-and-tumble inner-city upbringing. And the British press, as is its wont, has responded with a resounding Gotcha!

"There are no gangsters in the family tree of this descendent of kings," sneered the Daily Mail, before going on to point out that Ritchie has family ties to Princess Caroline of Monaco, Sarah Ferguson, Winston Churchill, and Princess Diana. Ritchie -- who once said, "I've been poor all my life" -- spent his formative years wandering the grounds of his baronet stepfather's country manor.

When asked why Ritchie would even bother telling such fibs, the reporter snorted: "It helped sell the movie."

Okay, so I was had. But at least I got to sleep with Madonna before Ritchie did. My godmother, Margaret Thatcher, can back me up on that one.