Speed Dial

'I don't just do one phone, I do two. I like to feel the heat on both my ears. Is that unusual?" Not if you're Ruby Wax, the brash Americanborn BBC celebrity television interviewer and host of Ruby Wax Meets ... as well as an eponymous roundtable show. Feeling the heat seems to be what makes her most comfortable. Toward the end of a decidedly unroyal interview with Fergie, Wax locked her out of her own house and captured the Duchess of York pounding on the window, with more than 13 million viewers tuned in. Wax also spent a day filming O. J. Simpson. For his parting shot on-camera she caught him stabbing the air with a banana. "His idea of a joke," she says.

But off-camera, on cell phone, whose conversation warms her ear? "A tidal wave of girlfriends," Wax says, including Jennifer Saunders (01) and Joanna Lumley (06) of AbFab fame. (Wax is currently collaborating with Saunders on a screenplay for Goldie Hawn.) Certain special men—such as husband and television director-producer Ed Bye (03), with whom she has three children; old pals Alan Rickman (02) and Rupert Everett (05) make the cut, too. But not transatlantic buddy Carrie Fisher. ("She's my key to everything, but she's not on my speed dial. I'm too cheap.") "It's an addiction," confesses Wax about her attachment to her cell phone. "Nonstop airtime. I've been through nine of them. They break on me—when I get really angry it seems like they just tune out." Wax's current phone of choice is the easily programmable Motorola StarTAC, which also has another feature she likes: an identifiable ring. "Mine plays something Yiddishy."

BETSEY OSBORNE