Celebrity Gossip / By Liz Smith
Shields in her own class
Tribune Media Services
Updated: 06/11/08 6:37 AM
“T hisis a movie, not a lifeboat!” said Spencer Tracy on receiving equal billing with Katharine Hepburn.
The other night, at the Fred & Adele Astaire Awards, one of the best Texans of modern times, the talented Tommy Tune, was given the Douglas Watt Lifetime Achievement Award at Manhattan Center on 34th Street. The irony was we enjoyed a show about dancing where the stage was littered in front with sound boxes so big that you couldn’t see anyone’s feet.
The best thing about this evening was the emcee, Lee Roy Reams, ubiquitous actor/star from “La Cage aux Folles.” Lee Roy opened “big” with a number of hugely presented songs about dancing. I love this guy; he can do no wrong and when I came onstage asking the audience, “Is this show gay enough for you?” — people did fall off their seats laughing.
Lee Roy, meantime, rushed to the mic saying that he and I both had big life secrets together, which he was reluctant to reveal. Then he screamed: “We are both dachshund lovers!”
I guess you had to be there. There were too many winners of the Fred & Adele awards for me to list them here. They were all young and all trying and they were all introduced by veterans of show biz who, like me, are all old and still trying. I had the happy chore of bringing onstage the one and only Brooke Shields, who remains, as ever, in a class by herself. She is possibly the nicest person in show biz, but she was hobbling from a foot operation. Brooke did very well anyway and being excused from dancing, introduced Tommy, who gave her that all-important first job in theater, the one that seems to have meant the most to her.
Oh yes, the night benefited the Auditory Oral School of New York, which helps young hearing-and speech-impaired kids get a better start. I want to thank them for showing a rare film clip of Fred Astaire that I’d never seen before. Incredible man and Tommy is his perfect heir.
What’s more, Brooke, born a New Yorker, says she is moving her entire operation back east from California. She showed off photos of her 2-and 5-year-old and told me: “I am always so happy when, coming from the airport, I see the towers of Manhattan. Only then can I relax!”
•••
Oh, my, my! There was Rosie O’Donnell onstage at Radio City Musical Hall for the Cyndi Lauper tour. She entertained the audience with her past life on “The View” saying, “It started out as a tea party and wound up like a women’s prison movie. There were shivs out on the table.”
