It Happens This—and Next—Week
• New York State Bar exam
• Pizza expo at Javits Center
• ‘World Series of Football’ AC Milan vs. Chelsea FC exhibition at Giants Stadium
• That dirty-joke movie …
• Models rappel! Target Vertical Fall Fashion Show at Rockefeller Center.
• Backstreet Boys reunite! At Jones Beach.
Drawing Fireat the Drawing Center.
Upcoming museum exhibit questions war, again.
The Drawing Center, under fire from Governor Pataki and others for displaying what the Daily News called “kooky and anti-American art,” threatened to abandon its Lower Manhattan Development Corporation– approved perch at ground zero last week in protest. Meanwhile, it’s forging ahead at its Soho location with programming that may stoke the flames. Its big fall exhibition is “Persistent Vestiges: Drawing From the American-Vietnam War,” marking the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. The show will include Martha Rosler’s photo-collage series “Bringing the War Home,” which drops wounded Vietnamese into scenes from interior-design magazines. (A similar series was exhibited at the Gorney Bravin + Lee gallery last year with an Iraq-war update.) Collages by veteran antiwar activist Nancy Spero and embroidered drawings by the Vietnamese artist Dinh Q. Lê will also be featured. The curator, Drawing Center director Catherine de Zegher—who recently declared, “The LMDC knows that we would never be able to accept censorship”—was traveling in Asia and could not be reached for comment.
—Karen Rosenberg
Off the Grid but on ‘GMA’Bio-Daryl
Makes a splash.
Daryl Hannah likes to eat off other people’s plates. “Is that yours?” she asks, reaching forward and stuffing a guacamole taco into her mouth at the party for the cookbook Raw Food/Real World. “I’m gonna take it. If you don’t look fast, it’s gone.” And among the city’s eat-healthy elite, including Ann Curry, Elisabeth Röhm, and Kyle MacLachlan, Hannah stands out for her extreme commitment to being green: She lives in a completely solar-powered house in the Rockies decorated with a couch made of moss-covered stone and drives a 1983 El Camino run on recycled cooking oil. Listen up, smug Prius owners: “I get 40 miles to the gallon—Rudolf Diesel invented the diesel engine so farmers could make their own oil. And we’re fighting a war over gasoline?!” And don’t get her started on space tourism (“I don’t believe in punching a hole in the ozone layer just to see what’s on the other side”). Hannah apparently is okay with using energy for TV and movie production, though: Her stint as green correspondent for Good Morning America begins this week. But, she notes, “I don’t have a TV.”
—Melena Ryzik
What Happens atElaine’s
Elaine sort of remembers.
Elaine Kaufman isn’t sure what to make of the libel suit filed by Roman Polanski against Condé Nast. It involves a 2002 Vanity Fair article about Elaine’s. In it, Lewis Lapham recalled that the only time he’d seen “people gasp” at the restaurant was when, en route to the 1969 funeral of Polanski’s murdered wife, Sharon Tate, the filmmaker sat next to a “gorgeous Swedish girl” and slid his hand up her thigh, saying, “I will make another Sharon Tate out of you.” (Vanity Fair has since corrected itself and said the incident happened two weeks after the funeral.) “I don’t know what condition Lewis was in at the time, if this indeed did happen,” says Kaufman. She remembers the night Polanski came in. “Yeah, sure. It was very dramatic.” But as for thigh-skimming, “I don’t look under tables. Give me a break. I’ve got enough to look at on top.” According to her, Polanski came in with buddies Dick and Paul Sylbert and Robert Towne, or as she calls him, “you know, the big tall guy; he’s got a beard now.” It’s a bit of a blur—perhaps for everyone. “I just have a sense of humor about what people think they can remember from 30 years ago,” she says. “The accuracy must be overwhelming.”
—Jada Yuan
Rocco and JaiSquash Gay Dish
“It’s a little annoying.”
Jai Rodriguez wants to set the record straight: He and Rocco DiSpirito are just friends. First came a claim on a Website, Gawker.com, that he’d been seen “at a midtown gay bar recently sucking face with the fallen TV-kitchen hottie responsible for $20 plates of drama, New York meatballs, and more than his mother’s share of agita.” DiSpirito wasn’t named—but didn’t have to be. Then came the second item, in which the two were overseen whispering at the Bewitched premiere and skipping the after-party for drinks together. “Nothing happened!” Rodriguez says. “They made it into something it wasn’t. We hang out, go to dinners, completely platonic. But I love him like a brother.” Via e-mail, DiSpirito said only, “My reaction to that rumor is LOLOLOLOLOL!!!” “It’s a little annoying,” says Rodriguez. “I used to feel very comfortable saying that Rocco was my gay boyfriend, but now I have to rephrase that. He’s my straight boyfriend.”
—J.Y.
Even the Very SocialBillionaire
family can squabble.
Can’t $4.9 billion make a family happy? Mogul Marvin Davis, the Southampton social force and onetime owner of 20th Century Fox and the Beverly Hills Hotel, died last year. But society sources say that the family isn’t getting along. Exhibit A: Dana, the youngest daughter, was to be married in Hawaii the weekend of July 23, and as of press time, her sister Nancy planned to skip the wedding. “When I asked Nancy if she was going, she just shrugged like it wasn’t important,’’ says a West Coast source, who also notes that of all the kids, Nancy is closest to Barbara, the mother, who was also said not to be going. “Nancy isn’t attending because she has young twins, and the wedding was moved at the last minute from Malibu to Hawaii,” says family rep Mike Sitrick, who dismissed the idea that Barbara was going to miss it. Apparently, she had had an injury but was determined to make it.
—Beth Landman
EDITED BY CARL SWANSON