Steven Tyler: Making Up Wasn’t Hard To Do
It’s taken eighteen years, but Steven Tyler and his ex-wife, former Warhol fixture Cyrinda Foxe, have finally patched things up. The two – who split in 1983 after five years of marriage – were reunited early last month shortly after Foxe was diagnosed with brain cancer. Their daughter, plus-size-model Mia, and Tyler’s daughter with Bebe Buell, actress Liv, persuaded him to reach out to his former wife. “We had brunch at Balthazar, walked around SoHo, and did the usual Sunday bullshit,” Foxe tells us. “It was a lot of fun with a lot of healing.” While Medicaid is covering the medical bills, Tyler is picking up the tab for Foxe’s room and board at the Gramercy Park Hotel, not far from Beth Israel Medical Center, where she’s undergoing radiation and chemotherapy. She has a 50-50 chance of survival after a year of treatment. “All I could say is thank you,” says Foxe, whose 1997 memoir, Dream On, trashed Tyler with accusations – which he has always denied – of physical abuse and nonstop womanizing. “But I don’t recommend that people wait twenty years to make amends. They should do it immediately.” Foxe doesn’t want to ask Tyler for any more help, so CBGB is hosting a fund-raiser for her on July 11. The night includes a silent auction (bid on lunch with Mia and her A Little Bit of Lipstick costar Soupy Sales!), a designer flea market, and performances by Buell, Church of Betty, the Drakes, and Sea Monster.
The Late, Late Show With Mariah Carey
Like a true diva, Mariah Carey appears to have adopted the motto “Better late than never.” Last week, five journalists showed up at the Tribeca Grand Hotel at 11 a.m. to interview the 32-year-old songbird about the soundtrack of Glitter, Carey’s big-screen debut, in which she stars as a struggling singer who climbs her way to the top of the charts. Shortly after the scribes arrived at the hotel they were taken uptown to the Pierre instead. At the new suite, food was served, and then they waited … and waited … and waited. Finally, at about midnight, a tipster tells us, Carey sat down for the first interview. Carey’s rep insists the journos would never have been scheduled for such an early time in the day because “she doesn’t start until the afternoon or early evening.” She claims Carey was no more than an hour late for any of the interviews and that all were completed – not started – by midnight.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’s Nose?
Four months ago, the Beverly Hills Institute of Aesthetic & Reconstructive Surgery announced that according to its survey of thousands of women going under the knife, the most popular celebrity nose by far belonged to Nicole Kidman. Well, if those ladies aren’t careful, they could end up looking like Virginia Woolf. While playing Woolf in The Hours – the recently wrapped Stephen Daldry-directed big-screen adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which also stars Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Claire Danes – Kidman wore a prosthetic nose that resembled the bisexual Bloomsbury writer’s somewhat elongated schnoz. But for some reason, filmmakers are trying to keep the fake honker a secret. A source close to the movie tells us that when Daldry (of Billy Elliot fame) was recently asked by a crew member about the nose, he gasped, “How did you know? No one is supposed to know about the nose.”
There Goes the Neighborhood …
Jeff Koons’s sculptures may fetch millions, but even he’s not willing to pay SoHo’s ridiculous rents any longer. Koons told us at the closing of his exhibition of murals at the Hugo Boss flagship store on June 26 that he has abandoned his downtown digs of ten years at Broadway and Houston for a new studio in North Chelsea. “I had to move because the rent just got raised and now it’s too high,” Koons says. (It was tripled, according to Koons’s studio manager, Gary McCraw.) But Koons will miss the conveniences of a gentrified neighborhood. “If you are in the new studio and want to step out for a cup of coffee,” he says, “you may be in trouble.”
Steven Spielberg Keeps His Cool
The premiere of Steven Spielberg’s highly anticipated A.I. was easily the hottest event in town last week. And not just because it drew the likes of Kate Moss, Ethan Hawke, Lauren Bacall, AOL Time Warner honcho Gerald Levin, Darren Aronofsky, Casey Affleck, Jason Cerbone, and, of course, the film’s stars Jude Law, Haley Joel Osment, Frances O’Connor, and Sam Robards. With temperatures soaring, these bold-faced names and about 400 other guests had to shvitz through a prescreening cocktail party at the outdoor atrium adjoining Remi on West 53rd Street. “Whose idea was it to have this outside in the middle of midtown in New York City at the end of June?” moaned Spielberg’s wife, Kate Capshaw, standing by a fan. “It’s crazy.” She might have asked her husband, but he skipped the party and went straight from his air-conditioned car to the air-conditioned Ziegfeld Theater. Meanwhile, Capshaw’s daughter, actress Jessica, blotted the sweat from her face with a ticket for the screening, muttering, “I’m soaking wet.”
Tara Reid Gets the Message
Tara Reid shouldn’t answer her two-way pager when she’s working. Reid got a page while she was at a Los Angeles shoot for Rolling Stone’s upcoming annual “Hot Issue” with her American Pie II co-stars Shannon Elizabeth and Mena Suvari. After frantically tapping on her pager, Reid bolted for a dressing room and refused to come out for half an hour. “She got very upset,” one source says. “She wasn’t going to finish, but she did.” Suvari was able to persuade Reid to complete the four-hour session and do their R.S. interview later on at the Sunset Marquis. Another source says the drama had to do with an item on “Page Six” about her fiancé, MTV poster boy Carson Daly, hanging with strippers at Flashdancers. “She did shut down for a bit,” Reid’s rep says, “but it wasn’t about the stripper thing.” For the record, Daly insists he’s never set foot in Flashdancers.
Jill Stuart: Just Looking, Thanks
It seems that Jill Stuart is on a shopping spree – well, sort of. At the recent Helmut Lang sample sale, we spotted a scruffy young lad purchasing two pairs of pumps, women’s pants, and a black vinyl-and-leather belt for $685 using Stuart’s gold Amex, signing the receipt with his best Jill Stuart signature. “He was probably one of her design assistants whom she sent because she couldn’t make it and didn’t want to miss the sale,” explains a rep for Stuart. Coincidentally, Stuart also went on a spending binge recently at Bergdorf’s, where we hear she laid out $3,000 for frocks by other designers. “Jill is a voracious shopper, she has three kids and a husband, and she shops for them,” says the rep. Okay, so why’d she return everything several days later? “It turned out that she didn’t like them.”
Michael Douglas: Spaced Out
Louis Vuitton graffiti maestro Stephen Sprouse and Hugo Boss model Anouck made the cut, but Michael Douglas got left on the curb at the June 21 party for French electronica duo Air at the Space and Gallery at Eyebeam Atelier in Chelsea. The trouble started about an hour into the bash – hosted by Dutch magazine and Le Book – when Space manager Joseph Cady closed the doors and turned away about 50 people waiting to get in, including Douglas and his son, D.J. Cameron, Natalie Portman, Chloë Sevigny, Moby, Perry Farrell, and sisters Nicky and Paris Hilton. He claimed that the Space had become dangerously overcrowded. “Everything was going really well, and he just snapped,” reports one onlooker. “He wouldn’t even let Air in. He started screaming that he didn’t trust anyone, that everyone was lying to him. But there was plenty of room.” Not so, insists Cady, who says access was only restricted for 30 minutes. “These people who walk around with their heads in the clouds gulping down free wine will always say that there is plenty of space.”
No “Fur Sale” Signs at Chloé
The fur won’t be flying at Chloé, the design house that Stella McCartney made animal-free. Despite rumors that Phoebe Philo, McCartney’s successor after she bolted for Gucci, would use fur in her frocks, it’s not the case. “Chloé is going to remain a fur-free house,” Philo recently wrote to the folks at peta. “Unfortunately there were some inaccurate quotes in the press saying that I was pro fur, but … it couldn’t be further from the truth.” However, a source close to Philo says she’ll probably bring leather back to the atelier. No tofu pies have been planned – yet. “We’re thrilled about the fur,” a peta rep said. “Hopefully, she’ll let go of leather someday.”
BILLY BEER: Bill Clinton recently made a late-night stop at Whiskey Park to hang with former staffers, including Cheryl Mills, the ex-White House deputy counsel known for her defense of Clinton during his Senate impeachment trial. Bubba’s drink of choice while holding court in a booth? An Amstel Light.
SOUNDS PRETTY: Supermodel Alek Wek is a closet musician. “I played the drums, then the piano … but now I’m really into my guitar,” she told us at a VH1 Save the Music Foundation T-shirt signing at DKNY. “No one knows about it, but I’ve been taking lessons.”
With Catherine Townsend and Aric Chen.