LOVE & KATE: Russell Brand wrote about bedding luscious Kate Moss. (WireImage)
Most people who become overnight stars do it with a stellar performance or a big movie premiere — Russell Brand did it by sleeping with a supermodel.
The wild-haired British comic reveals in a new book how he went from a nobody to a celebrity after he hooked up with Kate Moss in 2006 for a night of passion — and the paparazzi spotted them together.
“I could never have anticipated the instant elevation that this liaison would afford me, it was like being awarded a celebrity Victoria Cross,” he wrote. “The world ‘approved’ was stamped on my forehead and I was now to appear in The Sun newspaper as regularly as the horoscopes.”
Brand wound up bedding the waifish catwalk queen after a mutual friend said Moss liked his jokes. He writes that when the friend said “Kate would like to meet you,” he said, “Kate who?”
“Obviously you remember the prettiest girl in your school,” he writes in “Booky Wook 2.” “Her sweeping majesty, her ethereal glow, how the playground floor did not dare besmirch her gentle feet with its lowly asphalt touch. Kate Moss is the prettiest girl in all our schools. Behold our queen, but don’t look at her directly or all else you gaze upon till death brings down your lids will be as shadows compared to her beauty.”
The pair wound up traipsing through London and eventually sharing a kiss at their friend’s house. “My heart pounding, of course, but also my liver and lungs and feet. Paul Simon thinks my vital organs may be a lost African tribe and considers recording a follow-up to ‘Graceland’ in my colon.
“We kiss, and yes, on one level I’m enjoying the kiss, but my mind is screaming, screeching, body-popping, lambada-ing. Playground fads are revisited: yo-yos, hula hoops, pogs. ‘Kiss properly, stop thinking about pogs, you idiot.’ ”
“Ludicrously I say to her, ‘Do you want to come back to mine . . . Kate Moss?’ ”
Brand — who had a legendary reputation as a ladies man before settling down with pop star Katy Perry — finally managed to get Moss back to his modest London apartment. Seeing her there was “like looking into the garden and seeing Vegas Elvis mowing the lawn.”
They eventually went to bed.
“Her hair fans over the pillow like a peacock’s tail,” he wrote. “Kate Moss is indeed in the bed, and for a minute I feel like I’ve murdered her. ‘Oh my God, what have I done?’ I get up and back away like a butler on the first day with the Queen, not daring to turn from her for a moment.”
Brand left her lying in bed asleep to go to work on his radio show. When he came home, Moss had made the bed. Brand decided he was in love.
The next day, pictures of the couple together were splashed in the papers, making Brand a favorite of the London tabloids — though the couple would never date again. Shortly after their one-night stand, friends of Moss told The Daily Mail that “she accused him of making money off her name, ranting, raving and calling him a tw-t.”
In the book, Brand admits that he screwed up the way he handled the aftermath.
“What no one realized, not Kate nor the red-top tabloid press, was that far from viewing her as a conquest, I was absolutely smitten,” he writes. “When I clumsily ballsed it up by flatly telling journalists . . . ‘I was just larking around,’ she wisely withdrew and I had enough sense to stop calling her.”
What he didn’t do was delete her number from his cellphone, where he stored it under “Grimy Tyke,” “which is what I called her in an attempt to punctuate the endless flattery and awe. I keep it as a digital memento, just to assure myself that it wasn’t a dream.”