March 3rd, 2005

A lot of men dream about Teri Hatcher’s breasts. We dream about her cookies. Her chocolate chip cookies. Say what? To clarify: We recently ran into the Desperate Housewives resident vixen at the Melrose Trading Post the other Sunday and we spoke to her for a few minutes. She was looking at some kitchenware, 1950s mixing bowls by McCoy and Roseville, as well as some Griswold baking pans. We told Teri that we’d seen her on Prime Time Live, talking to Diane Sawyer and baking some chocolate chip cookies. And, yes, we told her we’d dreamed of her cookies. We also told her we’d called Prime Time Live’s offices at ABC in an effort to get her recipe. For about a half-hour we got the runaround and lots of the TV network’s executives’ voice mail boxes. Our calls were not returned.

  So imagine what a thrill it was to run into the gorgeous brunette, who famously called herself a “washed-up has-been” when she accepted a Golden Globe recently. Now, we thought, we’ll get that recipe, right? Wrong! Despite our exhortations and implorations, she smiled that killer smile and said, “I’d rather not. It’s my secret recipe.” We even told her about another chocolate chip cookie experience we had when we worked for Martha Stewart. It seems that Martha published a recipe for these tasty sweet treats in her first cookbook, Entertaining, something that, according to Stewart’s chief baker, Sarah Gross (whose recipe it was), she had no right to publish. When Sarah complained to the empress of entertaining, Martha told her, hoping to close the matter, “Dear, you can’t copyright a recipe.” Teri smiled but remained unmoved. But the mention of Martha Stewart apparently struck a chord and Teri said that someday she’d like to become “a Martha Stewart of sorts, with products for the kitchen and home. Maybe even a cookbook.” We’ve heard from people who know that Teri is a terrific cook, preparing dishes for the cast and crew of Desperate Housewives all the time. In fact, Marcia Cross, Teri’s cast mate, jokes that “Teri is the real Bree,” the super-prim, perfect-homemaker character that Cross portrays on the Sunday-night hit.
  Somewhat like Bree, but more like Martha Stewart, Teri prepared for her seven-year-old daughter, Emerson’s, winter carnival at school popcorn balls, lots of cookies and 25 or so bags of homemade bath salts and, last year, a gingerbread church with fruit roll-ups as stained-glass windows that lit up. If that doesn’t sound like Martha Stewart, then we don’t know who does. Teri says doing the domestic thing is very grounding and for her, “a stress relief.” Who would have thought that the sexiest woman on TV is really a Suzy Homemaker at heart.

  It’s just as well that Teri kept her chocolate chip cookie recipe to herself. Since we ran into her, we’ve given up sugar for good. It’s now the Karl Lagerfeld diet all the way for us (since beginning this column more than six months ago, we have packed on an embarrassing amount of poundage). House-guesting at our friend Cornelia Guest’s beautiful home on Long Island, Templeton, will do that to even the most calorie conscious. We were there for all the fashion goings-on recently and realized that Beatrice, our little Pug, had also picked up some weight. In fact, she went into diabetic shock and we had to rush her to the emergency room vet, who put her in intensive care for a week. She’ll be seven years old on March 8 and is fine now, thanks to Cornelia. We must give Bea insulin shots twice a day to control her diabetes, along with a diet recommended by Dr. Joanne Carson: chicken breast three times a day, mixed with her prescription medication W/D—no more cookies for Beatrice or us!
  Back to Karl Lagerfeld’s diet: His book is due out next month, co-authored by Dr. Jean-Claude Houdret, about Karl’s remarkable weight loss of over 80 pounds in about a year. More than a diet book, it provides valuable insights and useful tips for preparing the mind and developing the willpower necessary to commit to the diet. Dr. Houdret offers one 120 recipes that cover breakfast, soups, starters, salads, eggs, seafood, meat, pasta, pizza, vegetables, sauces, and, yes, desserts—like Karl’s fabulous strawberry mousse.

  We were not fortunate enough to be invited, but we heard from someone who was, that Johnny Depp was at Jack Nicholson’s Mulholland Drive home for a Saturday-night, pre-Oscar party, along with Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Scorsese, Mark Wahlberg, and Matt Damon, who’re all involved with Jack’s next project, The Departed, which director Scorsese will begin filming for Warner Bros. in April. Nicholson will play an Irish gang boss, with Matt portraying a gangster who infiltrates the police and Leo portraying a cop who infiltrates the gang. Wahlberg also plays a cop in the film, a remake of the Hong Kong thriller Internal Affairs. Jack’s last three films have been comedies, so he is looking forward with relish to this bad guy role. Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B, is producing the film. We heard that Brad and Jen were also at the Nicholson affair.
  Another source told us that Mark Wahlberg paid a visit to accused wife-killer Robert Blake to research the role of Perry Smith in Every Word Is True, a new film that re-visits the events of Truman Capote’s nonfiction novel, In Cold Blood. (The 1967 film version of the book starred Blake as Smith, one of two men who robbed and brutally murdered the Cutter family in Kansas in the 1960s.) Problem is, says Wahlberg, it is not true. “I flirted with the idea of playing that role.” Our guess is that someone misspoke because it is actually Mark Ruffalo, not Wahlberg, who is taking on the Smith role in Every Word Is True. As to whether there’s any truth to the story that Ruffalo visited Robert Blake, his people didn’t have an answer for us. If in fact he didn’t visit Blake, maybe this’ll give him the idea. The film focuses on the intense and complex bond that developed between Capote and Perry Smith in the course of his researching and writing In Cold Blood. Toby Jones plays Capote; Sandra Bullock is Truman’s childhood friend, Harper Lee (the brilliant, reclusive author of To Kill a Mockingbird). Gwyneth Paltrow plays singer Peggy Lee in Every Word Is True, written and directed by Doug McGrath.

  A few months ago, Johnny Depp bought himself an island more or less on a whim. (He may have gotten the idea from his one-time co-star and friend, the late Marlon Brando, who did that very thing, some 30 years ago.) Having just wrapped Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Johnny is headed there with his partner, French actress Vanessa Paradis, and their children, Lily Rose Melody, and Jack, to sleep, read, swim, and think clear thoughts, because, as Depp says, “You can’t do that in L.A.” The name of the island, accessible only by boat, sea plane, or helicopter, is “Little Hall’s Pond Cay.” It has six beaches, its own harbor, lots of palm trees, and a lagoon. The home is a tiki hut.

  At Jack Nicholson’s Saturday-night soiree, we heard that the guys were playing the new The Godfather video game. James Caan and Robert Duvall joined Marlon Brando in providing voiceovers and likenesses for the new Electronic Arts video game, which will not be released until the fall. Caan and Duvall reprised their roles as Sonny Corleone and Tom Hagen from the film and both were involved in the development of the game. They attended the game’s premiere in New York City’s Little Italy. Brando granted his friends and Electronic Arts the rights to use his likeness and recorded voice-overs for the game to virtually reprise his Oscar-winning role as the titular Don Vito Corleone. The game allows players to create their own mob characters and work their way up the criminal chain from petty theft to drive-bys and extortion to control of the Corleone family in a virtual New York, circa 1945-1955. Jack and his chums played the new The Godfather game for hours, according to our source.

  Dining out recently at MRCHOW in Beverly Hills, we happened upon our old neighbor, Sandra Bullock, who was with her steady man, Jesse James, host of Monster Garage. It was like old-home night since we hadn’t seen Sandra in more than 10 years, when we all lived in the Melrose Avenue area. We would often have dinner together at our friend, photographer/writer Karen Hardy’s house. She said she and Jesse dine at MRCHOW all the time and wondered why we never ran into each other. We were dying to ask her about the rumors that she and Jesse were engaged, but knowing how very private she is, we decided against it. But we can tell our readers that there was no sparkler on that third finger, left hand.
  Since we’d just heard about Sandra portraying Harper Lee in Every Word Is True, we asked her about playing this wonderful Alabama writer who received worldwide acclaim for her autobiographical novel To Kill a Mockingbird and yet for more than 40 years has assiduously shunned the spotlight, a southern distaff version of J.D. Salinger. Sandra told us that that is precisely what attracted her to the role of Harper Lee: She gave birth to this incredible story that was an enormous popular and critical success (receiving the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for fiction), which was then made into one of the world’s most beloved films and despite all this, has remained almost obsessively private. “She could have gone down so many paths that she chose not to take,” said Sandra. “I am moved by and envious of that. No one does that anymore. Nowadays, people want the fame and the accolades.” Comparing the career paths of the childhood friends, Harper Lee and Truman Capote, Sandra said, “They couldn’t have been more different. Harper cherished her privacy; Truman reveled in his notoriety.” To be able to at least attempt to play her will be really exciting, she said.
  Sandra Bullock has had a remarkable career and is a major player at Warner Bros., where she has her production company. Warner president Alan Horn has said, “Sandy is right up there with the best of them” (with Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, and George Clooney, all of whom have their own production companies). Clooney and Steven Soderbergh have their offices next door to Sandra’s Fortis Films on the Warner lot. Clint Eastwood’s Malpaso Productions is across the street. This spring, Sandra will appear in the Paul Haggis-directed film Crash, which deals with race relations in America through the lives of several interesting characters in L.A.

  Sandra was the Harvard Hasty Pudding Club’s woman of the year for 2004. This year, it was Catherine Zeta-Jones, cited for her “lasting and impressive contribution to the world of entertainment.” She led the parade around Harvard Square and then was “roasted” by a bunch of sharp-tongued students. This tradition began 54 years ago, with the great Gertrude Lawrence. Others that have followed over the years include Rosalind Russell, Katharine Hepburn, Meryl Streep, and Julia Roberts.
  Zeta-Jones was overheard telling one of the students that her wish is that one day her children will attend the Ivy League university. “It’s such a fine institution,” she said. She might have added, “and expensive.” So it is no wonder that the Welsh beauty stays busy with commercials (for Elizabeth Arden and T-Mobile) and a line up of films that includes Rachel’s Holiday for Universal and the sequel to the hit Zorro, called The Legend of Zorro, also starring her leading man Antonio Banderas in the title role.
  Husband Michael Douglas will be working just as hard. He will star alongside Eva Longoria (the sexually active and very attractive Desperate Housewives star) in The Sentinel. The film also stars Kim Basinger, but rumors have it that it is Longoria who has been driving Zeta-Jones absolutely ga-ga. “Absolutely not true,” was the response we got from the couple’s spokesperson when we called to check on the reports. As a matter of fact, Zeta-Jones says the cast and crew of The Legend of Zorro are “addicted to Desperate Housewives.” She further said that she and Michael never make plans for Sunday night, so they can stay home to watch the show.


  We had already returned to L.A., so we unfortunately missed the New York tribute to our good friend, the late artist Keith Haring, at Deitch Project’s exhibition of his sculptures. Many of Keith’s old friends from the 1980s braved single-digit temperatures to honor him, among them Madonna, Guy Ritchie, and their two kids, Lourdes and Rocco. All of us used to hang out together at Keith’s studio back in the ’80s and at clubs like The Pyramid and Area. Our friend Patrick McMullan, whose wonderful photos illustrate these pages, captures the decade in New York so well in his marvelous new book, So ’80s. The 18 pieces of sculpture—bright-colored stick figures living in harmony—reflect the two-dimensional graffiti work for which Keith Haring is best known. Only one of the pieces was built by the artist himself, a self-portrait in green.
  But before he died in 1989, Haring left meticulous instructions for the fabrication of the rest of the unfinished pieces. Madonna’s daughter, Lourdes, is thought to want one of the sculptures, but we heard it is really mama Madonna who wants the self-portrait—the only one that bears Haring’s artistic touch—and she offered a substantial amount (in the millions, reportedly) and wanted it shipped to her home here in Beverly Hills. We checked with Jeffrey Deitch of The Deitch Projects to find out if and when the sculpture would be arriving. He would not confirm the story and Madonna has not returned our calls.

  “No, guys, I am not dating my King Kong costar, Jeff Black.” That was Naomi Watts’ response to our question when we ran into her and her “down-under” friend, actress Radha Mitchell, who stars in the Woody Allen movie, Melinda and Melinda. We ran into the two Aussie lovelies browsing the shops along Abbott Kinney Boulevard in Venice a short while ago. When we approached, Naomi held up a pair of monkey wall sconces that we really wanted to buy. Naomi says she’s always had a “thing” for monkeys and, when a friend recently asked her what she wanted for her birthday, she said, “to go see the monkeys.” Well, it’s a good thing, we thought, since she’ll be playing the part that immortalized Faye Wray 70 years ago and that Jessica Lange also had a go at almost 30 years ago in the films about the biggest simian of them all. Naomi called King Kong “the hugest film I’ve ever done” and said that “the intimacy is greater than almost anything I’ve ever worked on.”

  Naomi has memories of being a frustrated Aussie transplant trying to make a living as an actress in Los Angeles. “I was so broke, I got kicked out of my apartment and lost my health insurance.” She says she packed her bags to go back to Australia so many times, but what kept her from throwing in the towel was her good friend Nicole Kidman, whose couch she slept on for a while. She says, “Nicole was a huge inspiration...even in my deepest frustration, she told me not to give up. It only takes one thing to get a break in this business.” And for Naomi, that “thing” was Mulholland Drive. She didn’t give up and and now she’s an A-list star.