This will sound strange, but I'm almost beginning to feel sorry for Tom Cruise. After all, it took the actor two years finally to gather the courage to make a joke of being dumped by the octogenarian Hollywood mogul Sumner Redstone.

And then what happens? On the very day that his skit goes public - he plays a comically evil studio boss in the new Ben Stiller movie Tropic Thunder - he suffers a dust-up with yet another Hollywood kingmaker. Oh, and he loses his business partner of 25 years. And his agent. And he is named in a $250 million lawsuit against the Church of Scientology.

If this is a comeback, Katie Holmes is black.

I suppose it's a measure of Cruise's enduring celebrity that all anyone in LA wants to talk about is his appearance in Tropic Thunder - funny, or fist-in-the-mouth excruciating? - and his newly strained relationship with the MGM chief Harry Sloan. But all anyone wanted to talk about last summer was Britney Spears. A few summers earlier, it was Michael Jackson.

The politics of the Cruise-MGM affair are fascinating. After Cruise's falling-out with Redstone, Sloan helped the actor to set up his own independent movie production outfit, United Artists, with a half a billion dollars from Merrill Lynch.

But the money was conditional on a tight schedule of releases, and in the past two years United Artists' sole output has been the Afghanistan-themed flop Lions for Lambs. The next release is likely to be Valkyrie, in which Cruise ominously appears in eyepatch and Nazi uniform.

The reason for Cruise's seeming inability to release movies remains unclear but the upshot is that his business partner of 25 years, Paula Wagner, is no longer in charge. And her husband, Rick Nicita, his rep for years, is also out of the picture. For a while it looked as if things could only get better for Cruise. Now I'm not so sure.

And if you're wondering about the Tropic Thunder cameo: it's funny for the first few scenes (honestly). But by the end I was cringing so hard I thought I might injure myself.

The would-be terminators

Speaking of fallen icons, Arnold Schwarzenegger's term as Governor of California expires in 2010 and two ambitious candidates are jostling to replace him: the mayors of Los Angeles and San Francisco. I describe Schwarzenegger as “fallen” because California's finances are in the same awful mess as they were when he inherited them, hence his recent proposal to raise sales tax (California's version of VAT) and his almost George Bush-esque 40 per cent approval rating.

So what about the mayors? Could Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles or Gavin Newsom of San Francisco do any better? I shudder at the thought. Villaraigosa's most notable achievement in office so far has been his affair with a Spanish-language TV anchor whose job was to report on the Mayor's marital difficulties. If that sounds unlikely, get this: the name Villaraigosa is a fusion of his own surname (Villar) and that of his ex-wife (Raigosa).

Everything else you need to know about him was summed up by a list of favourite restaurants he recently submitted to the Los Angeles Times. Amid the collapsing economy, the Mayor of the People chose as his No1 spot Patina, where a meal for two can easily cost $400 (parking alone is $8). “I always get the foie gras,” he wrote. “It's great.”

As for Newsom - his CV includes a failed marriage to a former Victoria's Secret model and an affair with the wife of his campaign manager. He's a loyal one, Newsom. It was later found that the woman in question had received $10,154 from the city in “catastrophic illness” payments (for alcohol rehab, apparently), even though such handouts are normally reserved for those with months to live.

Here's my theory - Californians are going to miss “the governator” when he's gone.

Anger mangement

The other day I enjoyed a vastly entertaining breakfast with the chef Gordon Ramsay at his new hotel, the London West Hollywood. Ramsay is in town with his wife and four kids for about a month But he fears that the laid-back LA lifestyle - including those long lunches with the Beckhams - might be taming his temper.

Example: last week a cameraman arrived at the London to record a video clip of Ramsay for the Emmy Awards. “The guy said to me, ‘Can you be angry?'” Ramsay recalled wistfully. “I said: ‘No, I can't, f*** off'.”

Personally, I don't think he's got much to worry about.

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