Scorsese: Are You Singin’ to Me?
We hear tough-guy director Martin Scorsese is shifting his focus from Mean Streets to Sesame Street. At last week’s launch of Music Works – a SesameStreet.com and AOL initiative aimed at encouraging children to explore music – at Madison Square Garden, Scorsese showed up with his toddler daughter, Francesca. Video camera in hand, the proud father got into the spirit of the event – also attended by Jamie-Lynn Sigler, Ricki Lake and her sons Milo and Owen, and Alexandre Von Furstenberg and his daughter, Talita – by filming kids as they frolicked with Elmo, Big Bird, Rosita, and Bert and Ernie. After getting into the act himself, warbling along to such tunes as “Sing” (as in “Sing, sing a song”) and the Sesame Street classic “Sunny Days,” the 59-year-old director approached Children’s Television Workshop CEO Gary Knell and asked to be on the show. “We’d be absolutely thrilled to have him,” Knell tells us. “Robert De Niro was on the show last year teaching Elmo acting techniques, so Marty could either follow up on that skit or maybe he could direct one of the characters… . He can pretty much pick any Muppet he wants.” Knell says he hopes to get Scorsese on by next season.
Angie Everhart’s Got Nothing to Fear
You won’t see Angie Everhart competing against Donny Osmond, Kelly Preston, Coolio, Joanie “Chyna” Laurer, and Baywatch stars David Hasselhoff and Brooke Burns when the celebrity edition of Fear Factor airs on November 27. On the day of the taping, Everhart was overheard talking about how she had recently gone skydiving only six months after undergoing back surgery. When producers expressed their concern, Everhart insisted she had included her medical history in the required paperwork. But the producers weren’t taking any chances. They apologized for the confusion and sent Everhart on her way. A rep for the show confirmed the story, saying, “Even if decisions have to be made last-minute, we will never allow a participant to proceed with a stunt that doesn’t fit within the show’s strict safety guidelines.” But Everhart isn’t letting her time and effort go to waste. Because NBC agreed to donate $25,000 in each contestant’s name to a charity of his or her choice with a $25,000 bonus for the winner, Everhart has asked the producers to make a donation in her name to American Red Cross anyway, says our source. Everhart’s rep declined to comment. The show rep said he was not aware of Everhart’s request and said NBC had no plans to make the donation.
Vince Vaughn Plays the Village Idiot
Patrons of the Village Idiot were less than amused recently when Vince Vaughn decided to shake up a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon and spray it throughout the West 14th Street pub. An eyewitness tells us that an irritated bouncer grabbed the 31-year-old actor by the shirt and escorted him out. A female staff member followed the bouncer asking, “Did you know who that was? You shouldn’t have thrown him out.” To which the bouncer responded, “I don’t care. Nobody does that in my bar.” Vaughn – who in May was ordered by a judge to undergo alcohol counseling and banned from all Wilmington, North Carolina, watering holes after being arrested for his involvement in a bar brawl – was eventually allowed back in, but not long after he apologized to the bouncer, he lost his composure again. “He had another Pabst Blue Ribbon in one hand and a full pint of some other beer in the other, and he was just spilling it all over himself,” our spy reports. Finally, Vaughn had to be dragged out to the sidewalk by an unidentified brunette: “She was like, ?Okay, you’re acting like a jerk, pull yourself together.’ ” Vaughn’s rep insists that it wasn’t Vaughn who was thrown out, but some other, unknown gentleman who had been complaining about being splashed by water that a bartender was spraying on Vaughn and a friend: “There was no beer being sprayed. Vince was just dancing and playing with the waitress.”
Celebs Check In to Help New York Hotels
Whoopi Goldberg, Charlie Sheen, Bernadette Peters, Fran Drescher, and Drew Nieporent are just a few of the boldfaced names who have taken part in a new campaign to save New York’s tourist industry. When you call a hotel, instead of being subjected to Muzak, you may be hearing messages from one of these or the other fourteen celebs who pitched in to help bolster tourism. “Look, you come here and stay in one of these fine hotels, dine in one of the thousands of amazing restaurants, go to a jazz club or a piano bar or a Broadway show,” Goldberg coos in her message. “And by doing this, you’ll get a great time and great memories. And somebody here gets to keep doing what they do. The chef gets to cook. The actor gets to act… . I think you get the picture.” The Metropolitan, Flatotel, the Doral Park Avenue, the Marriott Marquis, the Rihga Royal, and Inter-Continental are a few of the hotels that are already playing the tapes. Michael Fazio, concierge at Inter-Continental, came up with the idea after receiving a barrage of cancellations in September. Fazio even got a firefighter – Dennis Banach from Ladder 125 in Jamaica, Queens – to record one of the twenty-second spots.
Maura Moynihan’s Passage to India
Maura Moynihan – the free-spirited expat daughter of ex-senator and former ambassador to India Daniel Patrick Moynihan – tells us she’s breaking into the Asian pop-music market. “My music videos are in heavy rotation on Asian music TV,” Moynihan writes us in an e-mail from Bangladesh. “I went to Bombay last May and met the whole MTV crowd there and will soon be airing my videos with them.” The videos, shot in Nepal, were for songs from her CD Yoga Hotel, which she describes as a combination of “rock, funk, and Hindi pop.” Moynihan fronted a band called Maura and the Mirrors in her Palladium days and sings in English, French, Italian, Hindi, Nepali, and Tibetan. If all else fails, Moynihan still has her South Asian?inspired clothing line, Choli, selling at Portantina on Madison Avenue. While in Bangladesh, she’s buying saris for the collection, which she plans to rename Sosari.
V Editor’s Bazaar Twist
Don’t be surprised if Harper’s Bazaar and downtown fashion bible V start looking awfully similar now that V editor Stephen Gan has taken on the added responsibility of being Bazaar’s creative director. More than one insider has informed us that upon receiving his Bazaar post this summer, Gan, with editor Glenda Bailey, pulled a fashion shoot from the Hearst flagship title and replaced it with one originally produced for V. The published spread – shot by photographer David Armstrong and featuring a gamut of haute couture threads, from Versace and Christian Lacroix to Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent – appeared in Bazaar’s October issue, which, though they’re not listed on the masthead, both Gan and Bailey oversaw (the recently appointed duo’s first official issue is November’s). In addition, fashion insiders are chattering about the possibility of further overlaps, with rumors of photographers shooting for both V and Bazaar on the same day. A Hearst rep would neither confirm nor deny the stories because Gan was in Paris but said, “There are a handful of photographers with a level of talent that meets Harper’s Bazaar’s needs. It is common for them to juggle a number of jobs at once and still be able to produce a repertoire of work that is truly diverse.”
Tribeca Grand: Oh No, Not Mao!
The staff at the Tribeca Grand Hotel got a shock recently when a man drove up and unloaded a ten-foot-high fiberglass statue of a Mao Tse-tung jacket on the street in front of the lobby entrance. The “gift” came courtesy of TriBeCa gallery owner Ethan Cohen, who specializes in avant-garde Chinese artists. When hotel staff told him the statue – Sui Jianguo’s The Legacy Mantle – had to go, Cohen insisted he had gotten prior approval from the promotions department. A rep for the hotel, however, tells us that although Cohen left a couple of messages in the past month about promotional opportunities, no one ever talked to him about the sculpture. Though tourists seemed to enjoy taking their picture with the artwork, the hotel rounded up five of its doormen and had them carry it back to Cohen’s gallery, about a block away. A gallery rep admitted that the hotel hadn’t responded to their press kit but insisted that the piece was meant to stay outside for only one night. “The statue arrived at the gallery, but it was too big to fit through our door, so we left it there… . We were hoping that they would want to keep it inside for longer.”
Star Jones’s Cheap Chic
It’s nice to know that Star Jones still buys off the rack – sort of. One of our tipsters overheard Jones at Denise Rich’s Denim and Diamonds benefit for the G&P Foundation for Cancer Research at Planet Hollywood bragging to several women that she was wearing $3 million worth of Vivid Collection diamonds “with a Lane Bryant jacket that cost $29.99.” But later on, Jones told our source that she had made a few alterations – including lining the inside of the jacket with several thousand dollars’ worth of camel-colored sheared mink by celebrity furrier Dennis Basso.
SHADY BUSINESS: Believe it or not, Anna Wintour can laugh at herself. The Vogue editor was sitting at a front-row table during last week’s annual fund-raiser for the Hetrick-Martin Institute, a nonprofit group for gay youth, when the night’s emcee, actor-comedian Mario Cantone, took one look at her and cracked, “Anna, why are you wearing your sunglasses inside?” Wintour smiled and laughed – as did her tablemates, Oscar winner Hilary Swank and her hubby, Chad Lowe, and makeup artist Kevin Aucoin – and actually took her glasses off. But alas, she put them back on within minutes.
THE GOOD FIGHT: World Wrestling Federation owner Vince McMahon’s wife, Linda, visited Rudy Giuliani’s office recently to donate $1 million to the Twin Towers Fund just days after the McMahons and The Rock hosted a brunch at the World restaurant in Times Square for 1,200 children and family members of missing World Trade Center victims.
With Catherine Townsend and Aric Chen.