Cancer Has Not Impaired Patrick Swayze’s Judgement

Patrick Swayze passed on playing a gay cheerleading coach in Fired Up for “creative reasons,” not because he’s sick. The script for Saturday’s Inner Circle show at the Hilton had to be overhauled in light of Spitzergate. Tom Brady made a rare post–Super Bowl public appearance with Gisele at the opening of the Zegna store on Fifth Avenue. Anne Hathaway bought five bottles of absinthe and borrowed an absinthe fountain from a restaurant for a party she was hosting with her boyfriend Raffaello Folllieri. ABC may cancel Rachael Ray’s show because of poor ratings. Padma Lakshmi and Salman Rushdie shared an “uncomfortable silence” after being seated six feet apart from one another at a Cinema Society screening.

Eva Longoria had an assistant run home to get her wedding ring because she didn’t want to start a tabloid controversy at the opening of an L.A. restaurant. Big-shot Manhattan attorney Joe Tacopina and his three sons are skiing in the NASTAR National Championships in Steamboat Springs, Colo. Girls Gone Wild sleazebag Joe Francis is out of jail and back to filming naked drunk girls. Yogi Berra thinks today’s crop of baseball players is too self-obsessed. A couple renting Mikhail Baryshnikov’s house in the Dominican Republic for their wedding celebration ended up burning his neighbor’s house with an errant firework. Fat Joe and his crew beat up Brooklyn rapper Papoose and his D.J. in a North Carolina hotel room. British magazine publisher Jefferson Hack, Kate Moss’s baby daddy, trashed a hotel in Milan during Fashion Week. Eighty-three-year-old Paul Newman didn’t attend the twentieth anniversary of his Hole in the Wall Gang charity because of a bad back, but also maybe because he had surgery for cancer in January. Molly Sims allegedly demanded that an Austin club owner create a VIP section for her and her friends, pay her for appearing at a party, and comp her $8,000 tab. A friend of Chris Noth made a dirty toast to the actor’s new son at ‘21.’ Marc Anthony attended an NYPD fund-raiser at the Waldorf, which he says marks the first time he left his house since he and J.Lo had twins. Liz Smith recommends you read the Vogue profile of Barbara Walters.