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March 9, 2000 | Last week, New York gossip columns were filled with gushing accounts of the novelist's comings and goings: multiple appearances with his new 29-year-old model/actress girlfriend, Padma Lakshm; a planned move to Manhattan; and news that his third wife, Elizabeth West (who Rushdie says "saved my life" during the fatwa), will remain in England with their son. This week, music critics were all over "The Ground Beneath Her Feet," a new U2 single for which Rushdie wrote the lyrics, from the soundtrack to Wim Wenders' "The Million Dollar Hotel." ("Some of the words don't stand up to usual U2 fare," sniffed one critic.) Amy Reiter Amy Reiter's column appears daily on the People site, Monday through Friday.
Got a hot tip? Tell Amy! There's even buzz that Rushdie's going Hollywood. At the opening of Anjelica Huston's "Agnes Browne" last week, Rushdie told tipster Baird Jones that, although a recent London Times item about his upcoming role as a ghoul in a vampire movie is false, he will be making an on-screen debut nonetheless. Rushdie will play himself in Jack Pierson's "Dirty Pictures," starring James Woods and airing on Showtime next month. "I've always been a frustrated actor," the writer admits, "but it did not make sense to try to get parts when there was a price on my head." Pierson's film, about protests surrounding the cancellation of the 1990 Robert Mapplethorpe show Cincinnati, is being shot in "fictional documentary style" but features a series of cameo appearances by celebrities as themselves. "William F. Buckley and Susan Sarandon shot their parts right before me, but I was the only one who got it right on the first take," Rushdie boasted to Jones. In fact, Rushdie seems to have a whole new outlook on life now that he's had an operation to correct his ptosis, a medical condition that caused his eyelids to droop. "I often feel very angry," he recently said of the years he spent under the fatwa, which was lifted in 1998, "but I kind of cannot be bothered. I have other things to do." A lot of them. - - - - - - - - - - - - Pretty please woman? "I say, 'Please, thank you, sir, ma'am.' I think I'm polite, I love to cook dinner, and I keep the toilet scrubbed." -- Julia Roberts on how she shows her Southern roots, in the New York Daily News. - - - - - - - - - - - - One sad Apple Fiona Apple is sorry. Sorry that she stormed off in the middle of her concert at the Roseland Ballroom in New York last week. Sorry that she let her fans down by leaving them hanging. "So fucking sorry" that she doesn't have "whatever it takes to be 'professional' in a situation like that." And, oh yes, sorry for being sorry, too. In a meandering message to fans posted on her Web site last week, Apple says she "can't apologize enough" for her onstage hissy. "I write this particular entry as the most humiliated form of myself," she wrote after the show. "I really fucked up ... I just couldn't hear myself at all on that stage, and I lost it ... I couldn't continue with a show that was shaping up to be one of the most embarrassing experiences of my life." So, she explains, "true to form, I got on a crying jag and couldn't stop." Awww. But wait, hold your pity. Maybe she's not so sorry after all. Before the end of her online rant, Apple's mood swings yet again, and she becomes rather defiant. Actually, she says, the show "needed to be aborted" and she thinks she "made the right decision" in storming off. "I'm glad I walked off," she writes, "because if I hadn't, the sheer mediocrity that that show would've become would've absolutely killed me." Uh-oh. I sense another crying jag coming on ... - - - - - - - - - - - - Jerry, the bargain shopper "We're not talking $40 million. We're not talking $20 million. Jerry's a good guy, but he's not stupid." -- Billy Joel on how much Jerry Seinfeld really paid for the piano man's 12-acre oceanfront East Hampton digs, in USA Today. - - - - - - - - - - - - And you thought she'd painted it on The answer to the most-asked question at the Grammys? Toupee tape. Jennifer Lopez says that's what kept her $10,000 Donatella Versace hanky masquerading as a dress from revealing even more than it already did. "There was a pair of, like, shorts ... and a little bit of toupee tape so it wouldn't move at all," Lopez told "Entertainment Tonight" this week. Next time, maybe she'll try a comb-over ... - - - - - - - - - - - - Juicy bit Oh, taxi! Al Gore may have had one hell of a night on Tuesday, but that didn't help his daughter Karenna Gore Schiff get a cab home from his New York victory party. The Associated Press reports that Schiff and her two Democratic aide companions had such a hard time catching a cab in the rain, they ended up walking four blocks and then negotiating with a passing limo to pick them up. Coincidence ... or Rudy?
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