in other news

Gossip Columns Write the Sweetest Valentines

Bar Rafaeli and Leonardo DiCaprio

Photo Illustration: FilmMagic, iStockphoto

Valentine’s Day is a very special holiday for certain people in New York. No, not cabdrivers with the late shift, you nasty readers. Gossip columnists! See, the way all other journalists can just phone it in over Christmas and New Year’s with needless roundups and lists, these guys can devote half or all of their columns this week to silly celebrity fluff about love. If you’re Rush and Molloy, for the last few weeks you’ve been having your stringers ask every starlet they see about their February 14 plans. If you’re Cindy Adams, you just call up Baird Jones, that mysterious nightlife crawler, and have him go through his massive database of celebrity tidbits and cull out the funniest ones having to do with love (and then you throw his name in there once or twice so he can get his requisite fee from Webster Hall). Anyway, most of these items are predictable and trite, but some are actually kind of funny. Below, we’ve gathered for you the best (okay, most salvageable) Valentine’s Day moments from the New York gossip columns! Today, as your boyfriend gives you a dozen red roses from the deli next to his apartment and takes you to the Olive Garden for an “ironic” romantic date, just think: It could be worse. You could be famous.

Teri Hatcher knows that her daughter, Emerson Rose, was conceived on Valentine’s Day! Because she and her first husband Jon Tenney “had sex once that year.” Dude, can’t your daughter read by now?
Bar Refaeli says, “I don’t need a big bouquet of flowers.” She told “Rush & Molloy”, “Maybe just one flower that you picked out on the street. Just write a card — no gifts, no dinner. I like simple things.” Damn, you’re Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriend. What a waste!

Jack Nicholson celebrates the holiday by disconnecting his computer from the Internet. “There’s so much porn out there that I never get out of the house.” Ew.
Wu-Tang Clan’s Raekwon makes it too easy. “I’m the type of dude who may be in a helicopter over the city having sex.”
Janet Jackson says she’s “a size queen.” That’s sweet, and perhaps unrelated to Valentine’s Day. Or, you know, love. “When I went on dates and saw the guy was not packing, I always pretended to have a headache.” We notice that’s in the past tense. What does that say about Jermaine Dupri?
Rebecca Romijn says that, when she was young, on Valentine’s Day her dad would freak out her dates. “He’d open the front door completely naked.”

Isn’t that sweet? Well, nothing tops Cindy Adams’s romantic final wish for the holiday: “And let us always remember on tomorrow’s love-filled Valentine’s Day to never do business with a hooker who gives you a discount on the anniversary of the invention of penicillin.” Who says there’s no such thing as romance anymore?

Gossip Columns Write the Sweetest Valentines