While several hundred flashbulbs are fizzing in unison to mark the arrival of Emma Watson at New York’s hottest red-carpet event, just a few feet away, a rather less glamorous spectacle is drawing a sizeable crowd of its own.
The driver of the Harry Potter starlet’s limousine is involved in a heated and vaguely comical exchange with one of the event’s parking supervisors.
Amid much rancour, the official is accusing the actress’s car of blocking the arrival of her fellow A-list guests, who include Sienna Miller and boyfriend Jude Law, Mick Jagger and Renee Zellweger, outside the city’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
But her chauffeur is refusing to budge. The reason: he insists he has been specifically instructed by the British actress to remain close at hand should anything untoward happen to her stunning, specially created Burberry gown.
He is on red alert, he is saying, in the event that a careless reveller spills red wine or inadvertently drops a crab puff on Emma’s handmade, white, floor-length frock.
Whereupon he will be expected to race inside on a mercy mission clutching an exact copy of the stunning gown, deposited in the boot for just such a calamity.
Clearly the focused Emma is in no mood to leave anything to chance. This may explain why her ‘plus one’ for the Met Ball fashion gala two weeks ago was not her new Spanish boyfriend, but Burberry’s chief creative officer Christopher Bailey.
Who better to have on hand should the off-the-shoulder, slashed-to-the-thigh frock need any final tweaks?
For, despite her tender years (she celebrated her 20th birthday last month), the determined Miss Watson is very much hands-on when it comes to the subject of her public image.
Witness the actress’s over-the-top reaction this week when she called in her lawyers to remove doctored pictures from an obscure website that appeared to show her naked.
At the same time, her spokesman issued a statement insisting: ‘If you look at it you will see that the head is marginally too big for the body and the angle of the face is physically impossible with the body in that position.’
Presumably this might equally apply to just about any of the faked naked pictures of female celebrities that litter the murkier reaches of cyberspace.
Would it not have been wiser for Emma, who plays schoolgirl witch Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter films, just to ignore such nonsense rather than draw attention to it?
The single-minded Miss Watson is not, however, inclined to take such liberties lying down.
Despite her movie stardom and assured public appearances (she is paid more than £1 million a year to promote Burberry at fashion events), Emma, it is said, is still struggling to adjust to being public property.
