Celebrity Gossip
Dabbling with Darwin
Ralph Fiennes must be the most prolific actor working today. He seems to be “in” everything with no deleterious effect on his brilliant acting.
Now, his much more elusive brother, Joseph, is rumored about to enact the evolutionary Charles Darwin in a movie to be titled “Mrs. Darwin.”
While Darwin developed his controversial theories, Mrs. Darwin, who was his first cousin, lived a quite religious life and her husband’s theories put a strain on their marriage. Rosamund Pike is likewise rumored to play Mrs. Darwin.
Meantime, the talk of the town is The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, whose latest is “Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln and Modern Life” coming from Knopf. The award-winning writer offers as his theme that Lincoln and Darwin, born on the same day, Feb. 12, 1809, were men who were alike in helping to shape the modern moral world. They affected a “liberal civilization” based on democratic politics and scientific reasoning.
The other night, NYC’s most energetic and effective hostess, Tina Brown, tossed a party for Gopnik at her East 57th Street salon. The mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, showed up along with the dynamo Barry Diller, the Broadway star Frank Langella and the saucy writer Chris Buckley, to name just four of my favorite guys.
It was here that international literary agent Ed Victor and his wife, Carol, enlightened us to say they had been living in New York for more than a year and now they will go home to London’s Bedford Square for this year and only visit Manhattan.
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I laughed this week to find my longtime friend, the brilliant creator of “Doonesbury”—one Gary Trudeau—doing a cartoon segment with a character who is being let go from The Washington Post after 33 years! (The “33 years” part of this “funny paper” item was pretty close to home.) But Gary’s character is a bearded man who is being offered a buyout.
Oh, how terrific it would have been to be offered a buyout from The New York Post and for that matter; maybe I should grow a beard.
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Everybody seems to dislike the slogan “A Sign of the Times,” but what else are we to call the following? Here goes the economic splat for the day:
A man called a Hamptons, Long Island real estate broker saying: “Show me five houses in the $5 million range.” She did and he then said, “I like them all. Offer each one of the owners $1.5 million for their house. I’ll take any one that accepts this offer!”
They all accepted!
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