Jodie Foster is coming to New York. Buzz in the West Village is that the two-time Oscar winner has bought a condominium apartment owned by Ricki Lake in a seventeen-floor prewar building. An insider tells us that Foster, who has two sons – 1-year-old Kit and 4-year-old Charles – paid $2.6 million for the one-floor spread. The apartment was originally a two-bedroom until Lake bought a one-bedroom beside it, combined them, and had the entire place redone by modernist Walter Chatham. We’re told Foster purposely went looking for a condo because she didn’t want to go through the hassle of appearing before a co-op board. Meanwhile, Lake recently told a pal that she and her hubby, Rob Sussman, are seriously considering moving to Los Angeles because they still haven’t gotten over the shock of September 11. Moreover, Lake said she wants to get back to moviemaking. The talk-show host last appeared in John Waters’s Cecil B. Demented two years ago.
All of Bill Clinton’s campaigning on behalf of Bill McBride wasn’t enough to unseat Florida governor Jeb Bush, but we know of at least one woman the former president won over. Just three nights before Election Day, Clinton arrived at Palm Beach’s famed Bice restaurant with a group of about a dozen people, including Ragin’ Cajun James Carville, when a friend approached him and asked if he’d mind stepping to the outside garden area to meet his two female dining companions. Clinton walked over to the table and shook hands with one woman while the other was applying her lipstick. But when she looked up from her compact mirror, the woman squealed loudly, declaring – so that the entire restaurant could hear – her willingness to pull a Monica Lewinsky on our former prez. Our spy reports that Clinton, a man rarely at a loss for words, was speechless. “He didn’t run away,” our spy told us. “He just stood there for like a minute. But then all these people at other tables broke out in hysterics. Bill just went inside and had his dinner.” But the brunette, who appeared to have had a bit too much to drink – and a bit too much collagen injected into her lips – kept mouthing off: “Oh, my God! Did you look at him? He’s so sexy.” Speaking of Lewinsky, yes, that was the former presidential paramour doing her best Michael Jackson impersonation at New York Post reporter Paula Froelich’s birthday party at Flow on Varick Street. She got into a moonwalking contest with Dow Jones Treasury reporter Steven Vames. Partygoers voted Lewinsky the winner.
Martin Scorsese is considering going an extra mile or two to promote Gangs of New York. We hear that the legendary director is in talks to personally lead journalists on a walking tour of lower Manhattan during a press junket. The Gangs of New York tour (which is being planned by Big Onion Walking Tours in conjunction with Miramax) goes through the former Five Points, the infamous neighborhood where Scorsese’s nineteenth-century gangland epic – starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz, and Daniel Day-Lewis – takes place. Stops on the Lower East Side include Paradise Square, “Murderer’s Alley,” and sites associated with Bill “The Butcher” Poole, William M. “Boss” Tweed, and the 1857 Police and 1863 Draft riots. The tour is scheduled to open to the public in January 2003 – but don’t expect to find Scorsese leading the common folks’ group.
It sounded like the best sighting of the year: One of our spies recently reported that she spotted Imelda Marcos – the former First Lady of the Philippines who famously owned 3,000 pairs of shoes when her husband was overthrown in 1986 – at Sergio Rossi on Madison Avenue trying on various styles of footwear. Alas. Despite the fact that customers and staffers at the store were buzzing about Marcos, according to a store rep, the regal Asian woman – who’s the spitting image of Marcos – was actually Her Royal Highness Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn of Thailand. “We had to shut down the store just to accommodate her entourage of 40 people,” he said. Ladies-in-waiting slipped shoes on her feet for about an hour, and the princess decided on eight pairs and dropped $4,000 before being whisked away in her motorcade. “I wish Imelda would stop in,” the rep said. “We would get really excited if we saw her coming.”
Eric Lindros is off the market. We hear the hockey star has been quietly dating model-actress-singer Cash Casia. A friend tells us they met a few weeks ago through some mutual friends. But no, Lindros had nothing to do with Casia singing the national anthem before the Rangers– Kings game on October 25. Casia got the gig when Rangers execs met her at the U.S. Open in September.
With Catherine Townsend.