WITH SPENCER MORGANMarch 8. 2004
B-list Brawl: Hit Girls
We all know what happens when you put Tara Reid and Shannen Doherty in a room together. (No, no—before Tara falls off the table.) You guessed it: Fight! Fight! Our South Beach spies report that on February 21, Reid and Doherty were sitting back to back in adjacent banquettes at the opening of a new club, Mansion, and celebrating Ocean Drive’s VolleyPalooza tournament (models play volleyball on the beach; Calvin Klein roams shirtless). “They were squabbling,” says a source. “And then Tara tried to get Nicole Richie’s bodyguard to throw Shannen out.” (Nicole Richie has a bodyguard? To protect her from stylists bearing fuchsia hair extensions?) Doherty was apparently unfazed. “She said, ‘I don’t care. She needs to go to rehab,’ ” adds our source. We have to credit Doherty for her clairvoyance. “Page Six” reported that a wasted Reid later passed out and was carried out of the club. As usual, all of their publicists deny, deny, deny.
Crimes of Fashion: Pretty Theft
We hear that a senior-level W magazine staff member who recently resigned had been “borrowing” extensively from the magazine’s fashion stockpile for over six months. Among the items she was suspected of stealing are 28 pairs of missing Manolos (estimated value: about $15,000) and unique Chanel slippers that she put up for sale online—much to the consternation of Chanel’s PR department. She then tried to deflect blame to an intern. “Who else wears a different pair of Manolos to work every day?” asks an outraged former colleague. “And to brazenly lie to Chanel is crazy.” (And, if you’re W, blasphemous.) Another red flag: She used the magazine’s FedEx account to ship clothes from photo shoots to her mother’s house in Florida. (Not the pointiest stiletto in the shoe closet, that staffer.) “Everyone knew!” adds our source. The departed employee and her lawyer deny any sticky fingers and insist that the split was amicable. “I’ve taken it upon myself to pursue other things,” says the former staffer. “Is that so wrong?” A magazine spokeswoman declined to comment.
“Someone should tell Bush that if the only wayyou can win the ball game is by rewriting the rules,you’ve already lost the ball game.”
—Harvey Fierstein, on the proposed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.
Raised Eyebrows: Patently Absurd
A certain patent-dispute case recently appeared to be getting under Katie Couric’s skin. Literally. Women’s Wear Daily’s Greg Lindsay reported that Couric was scheduled to receive an endoscopic brow-lift from Craig Foster, the plastic surgeon best known for reconstructing the face of the Central Park jogger. Couric’s spokeswoman says the WWD item was “complete nonsense. We didn’t even know what a brow-lift was.” (Lindsay stands by his story.) The controversy concerns the tiny, biodegradable “hooks” Foster would have been inserting into Couric’s forehead, which fellow celebrity surgeon Z. Paul Lorenc insists he invented. Lorenc says he owns a patent on the hooks, which hold the brow in place, and is suing the company that is selling his hooks to doctors like Foster. Let’s hope for the patient’s sake that the hooks don’t have to be repossessed should Lorenc win the suit.
Spiritual Riches
“Some people wonder where all the money is going,” David Byrne deadpanned at the fourteenth annual Tibet House Benefit Concert last Tuesday night. “Well, it doesn’t go toward Philip Glass’s vacation house in Tibet.” Among the musical guests joining him were Yo La Tengo, Conor Oberst, Tashi Lhunpo monks, and Glass himself, the acclaimed composer and longtime Tibet House vice-president. Ray Davies, shot in the leg in January in New Orleans, was unable to perform for the Carnegie Hall crowd (which included Maggie Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Willem Dafoe, Lou Reed, and Laurie Anderson), but Patti Smith made a surprise appearance, performing two pieces by Allen Ginsberg, whose spirit, she said, was “hovering in the folds of the curtains.”
All Hail Harvey: Love Letter
Maybe Rick Schwartz’s aunt—and anyone else scared to death of Harvey Weinstein—can get some sleep now. Schwartz, who survived the headlock-and-death-threat school of management as Weinstein’s assistant and later became a senior vice-president of production at Miramax, has left after seven years with the company to produce on his own. In a note to some former colleagues, he takes issue with Peter Biskind’s book, Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film, which upset his aunt Rhoda: “She can’t sleep she’s so worried about me. She also has cataracts but now manages to comb Variety for the weekend grosses.” The reason Miramax employees declined to talk to Biskind, he goes on to say, is that “we don’t have time to make nice with a pesky reporter because we’re actually working.” He also claims that the Miramax office is not in fact a war zone where staffers worry, “How do I avoid a public spanking? What if an object is thrown at me?” (Worrying about spankings and thrown objects is for babies!) But it’s not all campfire songs and hugs, either. “If you’re looking for positive reinforcement and peppy elevator music,” he advises those he left behind, “I’ll call someone at Disney” (which, uh, owns Miramax: We don’t do happy! That’s our parent company!). Biskind declined to comment.
Exit Stage Right: The Nederlanders Scale Down in the Hamptons.
Theater scion James Nederlander—producer of Rent and Aida—and his wife, Charlene, are downsizing their Hamptons holdings. The couple recently purchased a $5.4 million house with a tennis court and pool on Southampton’s Halsey Neck Lane. Their eight-bedroom, 3.4-acre estate with 200 feet of ocean frontage on Meadow Lane is listed at $21 million. Broker Ray Smith of Prudential Douglas Elliman declined to comment.