Celebrity Gossip /By Liz Smith
Natasha: The un-diva
“Without an ever-present sense of death, life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs,” wrote Muriel Spark.
So many insightful tributes have been written to the memory of Natasha Richardson.
I want to recommend especially Candice Bergen’s heartfelt words, Joan Juliet Buck’s touching anecdotal account of Natasha more than rising to an occasion, and Julia Reed’s remembrance of her. You can still read these on Wowowow. com.
Personally, I tried to write about this tragic death of someone so beautiful, so real, so human and found myself unable to even begin to do her justice, so I gave up. But I did love a tribute to her by Marc Peyser in the March 30 Newsweek. He called her “Tasha,” her private nickname and brilliantly dubbed her THE UN-DIVA!
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And now for something that may be beside the point but in the interest of setting the record straight:
New York sources in forensic pathology say: “The press always gets everything wrong. Natasha’s body was not subjected to an autopsy. The family objected; they felt they more than knew the cause of her death and so the procedure did not happen.”
Likewise, press assumptions that “the show must go on” wherein Natasha’s famous mother Vanessa Redgrave is to appear in an April 27 one-night-only performance of “The Year of Magical Thinking” to benefit UNICEF, are again wrong. The performance at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine has been canceled.
The Joan Didion play includes the memories of a mother who has lost her daughter under tragic circumstances.
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Over six months ago I ran into Bruce Willis and he introduced me to Emma Heming, who he has now married in a private Turks&Caicos ceremony. At the time I thought I had never seen Bruce so happy or so revealing. He kept holding me close to his chest and murmuring—“I am so in love with this girl; she is the best thing in the world!” (It was an odd feeling to be caressed by Bruce while he spoke so feelingly of another woman. He’s 54; she’s 30.)
The world never ceases to wonder that Bruce and his first wife, Demi Moore, their children and Demi’s new young husband, Ashton Kutcher, all remain close friends and have been at each other’s weddings.
People who think divorce always spells dysfunctional doom for all concerned simply are not tuned in to the 21st century.
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