2) Who does Bobby blame? The coppers, apparently. According to the Desert Sun newspaper in Palm Springs, Calif., Downey told the arresting officers who discovered 4.5 grams of cocaine and methamphetamine stuffed into a Kleenex box in his hotel room, “Don’t do this to me. You’re going to ruin my life.”

3) Who dropped the dime on him? Some papers have speculated it was Downey’s dealer, who dialed up 911 to rat him out. Others suggest it was a fellow “Ally McBeal” cast member, concerned about his health. (One NP reader even wrote in to tell me he suspected it was Downey himself, although the fact that the caller got a key fact wrong — there was no gun in the room, as the caller contended, when police arrived — blows a big hole in that intriguing theory.)

A Palm Springs woman named Laura Burnett, who says she spent Thursday and Friday with Downey in his hotel room, opines that the caller “was just somebody who knew [Downey] was there and wanted to make a big ordeal about it.”

But police say locating the dime-dropper is a non-issue. (As is locating Burnett, who has eluded them despite the fact that she went on “Access Hollywood” to tell her story. They did, however, find what is believed to be her Wonder Woman costume hanging in Downey’s closet.) “If we don’t locate the woman or the 911 caller, it doesn’t really go to the heart of the matter,” Palm Springs Police Sgt. Patrick Williams told the Desert Sun. “We don’t need them to file a case.”

4) A Wonder Woman costume?

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The dynasty continues …

“When Debbie Reynolds first showed up, she said, ‘I’m old and I’m fat and I don’t care.’ Then she got a look at Joan Collins and, believe me, she cared.”

– Costume designer Nolan Miller on rivalry on the set of the upcoming flick “These Old Broads,” which stars Elizabeth Taylor and Shirley MacLaine in addition to Reynolds and Collins, in W magazine.

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Juicy bits

Bond, Catherine Zeta Bond? According to the U.K. Mirror, the new Mrs. Michael Douglas may play the first female 00 agent alongside Pierce Brosnan in the upcoming Bond flick, “Beyond the Ice.” She apparently found time, somewhere between birthing baby Dylan and planning her opulent wedding, to screen test for the role. Good to know, in case diamonds are not forever, she’s got the old acting career to fall back on.

Hope Hugh Grant likes pie. Chris and Paul Weitz, the geniuses behind that instant classic “American Pie,” are set to direct the film adaptation of Nick Hornby’s most recent novel, “About a Boy” — and according to Variety, Grant is a leading candidate for the lead role.

Whom to believe? The U.K. Sun’s Dominic Mohan, through whom Madonna often airs her news, claims Madonna and Guy Ritchie are planning to tie the knot Dec. 22 at Dornoch Cathedral in northeast Scotland — and says the $1.4 million reception will be held at nearby Skibo Castle. But the Scottish Daily Record claims to have it from a source close to Madonna that Skibo is definitely out — and that Madonna’s people have booked several other venues to “keep everyone guessing until the last minute.” The smart money’s on Mohan, who adds that Madonna will wear a Stella McCartney gown and that Guy “has been fitted for a kilt.” Some people wear tuxes …

Here they come, walking down the street. Heaven help us, three members of the original Monkees — Davy Jones, Mickey Dolenz and Peter Tork — have announced plans to reunite and tour. The band’s spokesman says that, if the “Monkee Mania Returns 2001 tour,” which will trek through 15 cities, is successful, it could culminate in a run on Broadway. Hmm … what do you suppose happened to Mike Nesmith — and his hat?

‘N Sync’s ‘n trouble. Sid & Marty Krofft Pictures, the folks who brought you such Saturday morning classics as “Land of the Lost” and “H.R. Pufnstuf,” are suing the members of ‘N Sync for copyright infringement. According to Krofft, the boy band owes them a cut of souvenirs depicting the 25-foot puppets of the band members the company created for the group’s “No Strings Attached” tour.

Couldn’t Krofft just have sicced Witchiepoo on them?

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Miss something? Read yesterday’s Nothing Personal.

Stephen Frears’ intimate, character-driven directorial style is of course ideal for “High Fidelity,” and the early-’90s, shabby hipster interiors are perfect, right down to the peeling, 6-year-old posters and the cockeyed Pier 1 blinds. As an actor, Cusack sets himself a nearly impossible mountain to climb. In an effort to capture some distilled essence of Hornby’s self-conscious first-person narration, Rob constantly breaks out of the scene to deliver his compulsive internal patter directly to the audience. At times this produces enjoyable comic effects, but it’s also basically undramatic, sometimes rendering the movie a cozy bohemian-lite sitcom: “Malcolm in the Middle” for guys who have original Stiff Little Fingers LPs.

For my money, the best moments in “High Fidelity” come without gimmicks, when Rob is simply hanging out in the store with his even more maniacal cronies, Barry (Jack Black) and Dick (the amazing Todd Louiso, surely born to be an affectless record-store geek, or at least to play one). Danish actress Iben Hjejle (EE-ben YAI-la, if you’re curious) is quite charming as Laura, the girl who forces Rob to tiptoe toward his future, but personally I think her Scandinavian-skeleton look is entirely wrong for the character; Laura should have had more substance and brass, physically and otherwise.

Tim Robbins (as a New Age creep) and Lisa Bonet (as a slithery, seductive folk-rock singer) make the most of their cameos, and Joan Cusack is a delight as the gabby, densely accented mutual friend who passes info between Rob and Laura. Lili Taylor and Catherine Zeta-Jones, on the other hand, are squandered in brief, jokey appearances as Rob’s exes.

The Cusack and Frears interviews are agreeable, if routine, P.R. kissy-face, but the deleted scenes include several gems that fans of the film shouldn’t do without: Confronted with the impossible task of creating a Top Five All-Time Songs list, Rob shockingly neglects “Let’s Get It On”!

Asked what sort of ball Drach hit, Douglas replied he hit “a liner.”

“There are liners and there are liners, sir. I am not trying to be facetious,” said the lawyer. “There are some people that hit a liner so low to the grass they are almost called grass-cutters. Some hit them 5 or 6 feet off the ground. What is your best recollection as to the type of hit it was?”

“He hit what we call somewhat of a duck hook,” Douglas recalled. “He hit it low and hard.”

Pow! Right in poor Parker’s personal sand trap.

You can uncross your legs now.

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Dressed to kill

“The terrorists in America are so right-wing, and they dress so badly. It’s all that camouflage. At least left-wing terrorists have a ‘look.’ But the right-wing terrorists don’t even know how to do it right. They just keep dressing like Patton.”

– John Waters, on fascist fashion faux pas.

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That’s the power of Paltrow

Guess what? You’ve got more to be grateful for than the fact that you weren’t the one to get castrated by Michael Douglas’ troop of dubious duffers.

Here’s some more good news: Gwyneth Paltrow has decided not to embark on a full-fledged recording career.

No thanks to Huey Lewis, with whom the actress collaborated on one of three songs she sang on the soundtrack of the film “Duets,” which is directed by her dad, Bruce Paltrow.

“Huey very quickly was becoming my musical manager and advice giver,” Paltrow told USA Today. “He would say, ‘You have to make a record,’ and I’d say, ‘I’m just happy to sing with you, Huey.’ I’ve got my hands full with my day job. I don’t think I want to ever do a record.”

In other words, Huey: This is it — she’s letting you know.

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Juicy bits

A playmate for little Rocco Ritchie? In the wee hours of Tuesday morning, Iman birthed a baby girl, Alexandria Zahra Jones. Proud papa David Bowie was on hand to cut the umbilical cord. According to a spokesman, “Both parents are of course overjoyed.” And the rest of us (presumably including Bowie’s 28-year-old son, Duncan Jones, nie Zowie Bowie, are just relieved he didn’t name her, say, Chloe.

So much for “no fences.” The Garth Brooks Museum — in Brooks’ home in Nashville, Tenn. — may soon be open to visitors. But only if his neighbors consent. “Getting the support of his neighbors is absolutely essential,” the country singer’s lawyer, Chris Maddox, told the BBC. “Garth will not go ahead with this unless they approve.” Another Brooks spokesman said the museum would provide “an opportunity for folks to view the home and the barn and see the personal effects of Garth and Sandy and kind of capture in time their home life.” Chris Gaines, docent?

If you think George Clooney is unaware of his charisma and good looks, think again. “High Fidelity” scribe Nick Hornby told a group of London filmgoers that Clooney turned down the lead role in a film based on his book “About a Boy,” onaccounta his babe-magnetism, reports the U.K. Sunday Mercury. “George read the book,” said Hornby. “He said nobody would believe he would need to join a single parents group” to meet women. Get John Cusack on the phone — stat!

It is not surprising that “High Fidelity,” directed by Stephen Frears and based on a 1995 British novel by Nick Hornby, has received almost no attention for its pro-choice politics. Its abortion plot line occupies about three minutes of film time.

Running down the list of things he did to cause his girlfriend to leave, Rob (the protagonist, played by John Cusack) tells us that, among other things, he slept with someone else while his girlfriend, Laura (Iben Hjejle), was pregnant. He quickly explains that he didn’t know Laura was pregnant, but Laura knew about his infidelity and, as a result, had an abortion without telling Rob about the pregnancy in the first place.

Rob learns of the abortion during a conversation with Laura about having children. She breaks down and tells him about the abortion. Mortified and full of guilt, Rob responds by chastising Laura for having had an abortion without consulting him. And then he does an amazing thing. He tells the movie audience — flatly and without melodrama — that his response was both spineless and insincere. It was not a valid complaint, he admits sheepishly, but just more evidence of his selfish unwillingness to take responsibility for cheating on Laura. And then he starts talking about something else.

That’s it.

The abortion incident becomes part of Rob and Laura’s history, another example of how they have hurt each other (mostly how he has hurt her). It is not an event that defines who they are or what shape their relationship will take. Laura is not a villain for having had an abortion. Rob is not a villain for using, in a moment of self-serving piousness, the anti-abortion language of “It’s my baby too.” They are just two people who experience the ups and downs of an intimate relationship, including the reproductive consequences of sex.

“High Fidelity,” in a context free of dogma and high drama, represents Laura’s abortion as a brief moment of crisis that does not doom her to eternal unhappiness. In fact, the film gives Laura and Rob a happy ending. That is radical. When has a movie ever suggested that a woman can have an abortion and move on with her life?

Certainly that is not the message of “The Cider House Rules,” which is based on the 1985 novel by John Irving (who also wrote the screenplay). The first woman we see having an abortion in that movie dies. She is a young, nameless white woman who suffers through a gruesome illegal abortion only to die before she can be helped by the “good” abortionist, Dr. Larch (Michael Caine). Maybe this woman, as a symbol of all the women who endured the horrors of illegal abortion, had to die. But her death is more than just a poignant reference point in the movie; it sets the tone for the whole saga. All the women who have abortions in “The Cider House Rules” are punished in one way or another.

Candy (Charlize Theron), the film’s heroine, undergoes an abortion that initially appears to have no significant consequences. She is reassured by Larch and the nurses that her abortion will not affect her ability to have beautiful children, and her recovery is swift and relatively painless. Her life goes on; her love life even thrives.

But when Candy’s boyfriend returns from the war paralyzed from the waist down, the film exposes its contradictory politics. (Did you wonder why the boyfriend couldn’t have been blinded or maimed?) His injury, contracted not honorably in battle but by contamination from disease-bearing mosquitoes, insures that Candy will have no children, beautiful or otherwise. Maybe now she and her boyfriend will experience the regret they never seemed to feel about the aborted fetus — in hindsight, their one chance to have a child.

Then, of course, there is Rose Rose (Erykah Badu), the young African-American woman whose pregnancy is the result of incest with her father. It is Rose’s pregnancy that finally convinces the film’s young protagonist, Homer Wells (Tobey Maguire), that it’s OK to perform abortions. (Watching the young white woman die as the result of an illegal abortion somehow wasn’t convincing enough.)

Rose runs off after stabbing her father. We can only guess what will happen to her. Homer asserts that Rose will be OK, that she knows how to take care of herself, which would be convincing had the movie not turned on the fact that Rose could not take care of herself: She had been made pregnant by her father and would have been unable to secure an abortion had it not been for Homer’s help.

After tormenting all the women who have abortions, “The Cider House Rules” finally kills off the doctor who performs abortions.

Dr. Larch dies as the result of an ambiguous overdose of ether. His addiction is elliptically referenced in the film as the byproduct of his dedication — exhaustion has made it difficult for him to sleep. But the image of Larch’s ongoing nighttime battle with ether conjures two anti-abortion taunts: The abortionist cannot sleep at night or the abortionist cannot live with himself. In either case, the film’s treatment of Larch hardly works as an endorsement of his good works.

Young Homer does return to the orphanage to continue to perform abortions, but this move does not dispel the pall cast by this film. Abortion seems to make everyone in this movie miserable, except perhaps the quirky and happy orphans who exist, it would seem, to illustrate yet another tenet of the anti-abortion agenda: If it weren’t for the difficulty of securing an illegal abortion, these orphanage kids wouldn’t exist at all. “Don’t abort us!” these kids seem to shriek out to the audience. “We’re too cute to die!” Hence the orphan Homer’s ambivalence about the morality of abortion.

Admittedly, it is odd to want to celebrate “High Fidelity” for its three-minute act of creative courage, especially when we are expected to praise the more sober and eminently rational “The Cider House Rules.” But whatever else “The Cider House Rules” may do, it doesn’t deviate from the basic script that says women who exercise the right to choose are inexorably stained and deserving of punishment.

“High Fidelity,” with its brief depiction of Laura’s abortion as distressing but surmountable, actually delivers the more radical message that abortion doesn’t have to be the stuff of tragic melodrama. It can be, and often is, simply one compelling anecdote in the overall narrative of life.

People who care about pop music, and I am one of them, like to discuss songs as liberators, as catalysts, as jokes or friends. But what of the term background music? Just as often, probably more often, listeners use music as a kind of stopgap. I like to think of fandom as a way of being in the world, but so often it’s a way of avoiding the world, a barrier, a wall. Witness the witty scene in the new charmer “High Fidelity.” In that film version of Nick Hornby’s novel, John Cusack’s Rob, a record-store owner, holes up after his girlfriend’s left him and tries to put it out of his mind by reorganizing his record collection “autobiographically.” He sits among his stacks of albums as if in a fort.

Ellis writes deftly about people who shouldn’t be doing what they’re doing, and one way they live with themselves is by shutting off the silence that is the examined life’s requisite. You cannot examine your life too closely if you’ve got “Walking on Sunshine” full blast on your Walkman, as serial killer Patrick Bateman (played by Christian Bale) does in the new screen adaptation of Ellis’ “American Psycho.” I always thought good people needed good music to make a good life, but do the bad-to-worse characters of Ellis’ imagination need music to drown out the sound of their own consciences?

Another novelist, Richard Price, seems to think so. In “Freedomland,” Brenda Martin, a character inspired by the Susan Smith case, is suspected of killing her young son. When this damaged woman doesn’t have soul CDs screaming out of her boombox, she’s wearing a Discman and hearing them on headphones. “She was listening to something now, staring straight ahead and moving her lips to the lyrics,” Price writes. “Lorenzo [the detective assigned to her case] could hear ‘Feel Like Breaking up Somebody’s Home’ coming through her phones, minute and metallic. He didn’t hold the music against her, figuring that the phones were there to keep her brains from leaking out her ears.”

Is that what Katrina and the Waves are doing for “American Psycho’s” Bateman? Keeping his brains from leaking out his ears? In another scene in the film, Bateman’s in a limo with his Walkman on, his girlfriend beside him. “I’m trying to listen to the new Robert Palmer tape,” he says, “but Evelyn keeps buzzing in my ear.” The book, to my mind Ellis’ funniest, is loaded with instances of music getting in the way. For example, Bateman, talking to an acquaintance at a club, narrates, “Luckily, the long version of ‘New Sensation’ by INXS drowns out his voice.” Or, at the same club — and this is in the movie also — “Pump Up the Volume” (a title that might be the secret theme of the Ellis oeuvre) covers up the words Bateman’s sneering at the bartender: “You are a fucking ugly bitch I want to stab to death and play around with your blood.” He says this while smiling.

In the novel, some of the most hilarious bits are the periodic chapters in which Bateman delivers veritable “Trouser Press” entries on his favorite musicians. He loves Huey Lewis and the News, Phil Collins and Whitney Houston. There were times in the ’80s I heard their records and thought you’d have to be crazy to like them. Psychotic, actually. What genius that a stuck-up, insane, murderous yuppie would call Houston’s “The Greatest Love of All” “one of the best, most powerful songs ever written about self-preservation and dignity.”

Of course! “The Greatest Love of All,” lest we forget, posits that the greatest kind of the grandest emotion is not romantic true love or the love of a parent for a child but “learning to love yourself.” It is probably the most solipsistic pop tune ever written, and that’s why Bateman likes it. As he says, “Since it’s impossible in the world we live in to empathize with others, we can always empathize with ourselves. It’s an important message, crucial really, and it’s beautifully stated on this album.”

The genius of director Mary Harron’s film “American Psycho” is the way she juxtaposes Ellis’ musical tirades into the action. In the movie, she has Bateman delivering his manifestos while he’s killing people. Harron’s comic timing is impeccable. Now, when Bateman’s talking up Huey Lewis and the News he’s jabbering that their album “Sports” is “a personal statement about the band itself” as he ax-murders a guy. After he’s finished the guy off, Bateman absorbs “Hip 2 Be Square” with blood all over his face; he lights a cigar, and — something Ellis would probably never let him do — actually listens to the song. Even though sometimes the reader feels like Ellis is letting Bateman get away with murder, the author punishes his protagonist: He has no peace; and despite the fact that Bateman shall have music wherever he goes, it’s Collins’ “Sussudio,” which strikes me as punishment enough.

Regarding Ellis’ “Less Than Zero,” Greil Marcus once wrote, “In ‘Less Than Zero’ pop music is just weather — everybody talks about it but nobody does anything about it. You don’t know what Clay or his friends get from it, what they want from it, why he turns on MTV every chance he gets. The constant pop-song references bounce off the flat surface of the prose: no song ever plays.”

I think part of the reason Ellis douses his characters with music but hardly ever lets them engage with it is because they don’t deserve that kind of joy. Ellis is a father who grounds his children and unplugs their stereos as punishment.

One reason I love Ellis’ books, and those of his confrere Jay McInerney, is that they have little to do with me. I started reading them as a youngster in Montana in the ’80s and their coked-up, nihilistic nightclubbing New York was as foreign to me as a National Geographic photo spread. That was their appeal.

My culture was lovable “Young Fresh Fellows” songs (“When I’m down I think of you/My friend Ringo,” went my favorite), camaraderie and cheap beer. And I think books like “Bright Lights, Big City” and “American Psycho” were written for relatively stable, relatively nice people like me. Because the fucked-up cokeheads the books are frequently about wouldn’t have had the quiet time, not to mention the quiet minds, to actually sit still and read. Remember how the protagonist in “Bright Lights, Big City” was always meaning to spend the evening at home, ensconced with the great American novels?

If debased characters like Bateman and, by extension, debased people need heartfelt music and heartfelt culture, heartfelt people need representations of debasement. It’s cathartic. I can’t tell you how amusing it was to read Ellis’ and McInerney’s friend Tama Janowitz’s book “Slaves of New York” — filled with characters whose life decisions are dictated by the insane Manhattan real estate market — lying in bed in my $92-a-month Montana apartment.

If we Montanans got a lot of cheap thrills rubbernecking at Ellis’ and McInerney’s barren New York and L.A. in the ’80s, we got what we deserved in the ’90s, because after all those rich New Yorkers and Angelenos got out of rehab, they went straight to Montana, jacking up the property values so that I’ll never be able to afford a house in my formerly cheap hometown.

But of course, the New York novelists are on that tip, too. In McInerney’s last book, “Model Behavior,” a journalist who writes celebrity profiles brags, “Already my word-processing program contains macro keystrokes which instantly call up such phrases as ‘shuns the Hollywood limelight in favor of spending quality time with his family at his sprawling ranch outside of Livingston, Montana’ (CNTRL, Mont).” Takes me back to 1989: I was at work at the ski hill, wiping down the bar in rhythm to the Rolling Stones, and in walks Dennis Quaid, of the Livingston Quaids, asking for a beer.