January 12th, 2006

    Katie Holmes recently added another year to her age—making her 27 on December 18—and is one of those holiday birthday babies born so close to Christmas they always feel they got short shrift—gift-wise. We don’t know if the dazzling ruby-and-diamond necklace her future bridegroom was seen buying at Gearys on Rodeo Drive is a birthday present or a Christmas gift. What we do know is that Tom Cruise was seen buying such a bauble at the tony Beverly Hills emporium. It is from The House of Taylor Jewelry Collection, a creation of that well-known entrepreneurial gemologist Dame Elizabeth Taylor, which Gearys is selling exclusively.
What’s more, the soon-to-be-wife, soon-to-be-mother yearns to be an aviatrix and when the baby boy’s born and the nuptials are pronounced (presumably in that order), she’ll be taking flying instructions, joining a growing list of show biz luminaries-cum-pilots that includes, her main man Tom, their fellow Scientologist adherent John Travolta, Angelina Jolie, and her main man, Brad Pitt. That’s right. Brad is another one of those Christmas babies and even shares with Katie Holmes the same December 18 birthday, turning 42, and, like Katie, is undergoing flight training so that he can qualify to pilot the new jet plane he and Angelina acquired over the holidays. If the jet is their Christmas gift to each other, that is nice, to be sure. Even nicer—and certainly much more personal—is the portrait of Angelina and her two children, rumored to have been painted by Miss Jolie herself, which she gave Brad for Christmas.

Lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II proclaimed 60 years ago that there is nothing like a dame. Today, we say the only thing better than one dame is two dames, by which we mean the aforementioned Dame Elizabeth Taylor and Dame Judi Dench. By all reports, these two acting legends are getting quite cozy. We have it on excellent authority that Dame Judi will be wearing a piece of jewelry from the House of Taylor Collection to the Golden Globes awards ceremony. We heard this after our colleague Liz Smith reported that the two recently broke bread together at the Four Seasons hotel and that the lunch lasted more than two hours.
What could they be talking about? Is it possible that they are planning on doing a film together? By press time, neither of the ladies’ spokespersons had gotten back to us. As fate would have it, we ran into Dame Judi, who’s getting high marks for Mrs. Henderson Presents, as she was leaving Spago in B.H. She told us that contrary to persistent rumors, Harvey Weinstein’s name is not tattooed on her butt, at least not in any permanent way. (Weinstein’s company produced six of Dench’s films.) But, she said, she did have his name painted on by a makeup lady as a joke. “It made me laugh when I told him that I had his name tattooed on my bum, and then showed [it to] him,” she said to us, barely able to suppress a giggle. Judi once reportedly said about her dame-hood: “I feel the same; I still say rude things and swear a lot.” When we asked her about it, she admitted, “Yes, I did say that, I’m afraid so. It makes no difference to your demeanor in the slightest. And of course it means another thing entirely in America. It’s much nicer—dame—in America. I think I’m more the American kind of dame.”
We offered Dame Judi our congratulations on all the glowing word-of-mouth about her performance as Mrs. Henderson, including her Golden Globe nomination as Best Actress. As to speculation about an Oscar nomination, she said, “I don’t attend any specific functions. You may try to be unaware of all the speculation, but the press takes over as to who might and might not be up [for the award].” (The Oscar nominations will be announced on January 31.)
Also at Spago was another Golden Globe Best Actress nominee, Rachel Weisz, who was cited for The Constant Gardener. She said she visited Kenya before going to Africa to shoot the Focus Feature dramatic thriller. Looking fabulous in a Roland Mouret dress, Rachel said, “The production exposed me to a different side of the country than I had seen when I was there before [in 2000]. It was incredibly beautiful—the landscape and the sky and the wildlife. But I never saw the slums of Nairobi until we shot the movie.” Rachel and her colleagues have set up a fund, the Constant Gardener Charitable Trust, to help combat poverty in places like Kabira, a slum residence with a population of about one million.
“A million people live without running water or sanitation or electricity. It is unimaginable. We have built a school in the slum and a bridge and showers and W.C. facilities,” she said. “And we are in the process of building a secondary school in the north of Kenya in an area where there isn’t a single secondary school.” Rachel plans to return to Kenya soon to see the buildings she is helping to construct. But she said she is also drawn to Africa because of the irrepressible spirit of its citizens.

Back at Spago, in what must be a new level in product placement, we learned that Wolfgang Puck has opened his latest bistro at the fictional Montecito Resort and Casino on the set of NBC’s drama Las Vegas, starring James Caan and Josh Duhamel. Puck and his restaurant will make their debut on the episode broadcast on January 9 about the grand opening of the ubiquitous dining spot and will appear in a number of subsequent episodes.
Vanity Fair keeps pushing the envelope in pursuit of controversial and questionable covers. The latest subject is Rachel McAdams, who was asked to pose in the altogether for the magazine’s Oscar issue alongside Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightley. All these ladies are white hot at the moment with multiple releases recently or currently in the country’s multiplexes: Keira in Pride and Prejudice, the disappointing Domino, and the latest in the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy; Scarlett in Woody Allen’s Match Point and The Island; and Rachel in The Family Stone, Red Eye, and The Wedding Crashers.
At the Tower Bar of the Argyle Hotel one recent evening, we learned that Graydon Carter and V.F. will be taking over Jeff Klein’s hotel for a Golden Globes bash, which will take place on Sunday, January 15, the night before the awards, January 16. Entree to the party has become the most coveted invitation in town. The televised Golden Globes is competing for viewers with the nation’s most popular program, Desperate Housewives. And to accommodate those devoted to the goings-on on Wisteria Lane, television monitors will be set up throughout the party rooms. As the world knows by now, all four ladies from the show—Felicity Huffman, Teri Hatcher, Marcia Cross, and Eva Longoria—are Golden Globe nominees and are expected to attend the festivities hosted by Vanity Fair’s Mr. Carter, who is determined to out-do his legendary Oscar party, held for years at Morton’s on Melrose.
Another buzzed-about individual at the Tower Bar that night was Prison Break’s Wentworth Miller, a Best Actor nominee (for television drama). With his status as the Fox network’s breakout “it” guy, one would assume the actor would be tempted to buy into his own hype. But Wentworth assured us he’s not the type to let sudden fame go to his shaved head. The Princeton grad remembers his screen test for Prison Break. “I’d been a temp for studios, agencies, and production companies for a while in case the acting thing didn’t work out,” Miller told us. “There I was doing my best test in a room full of Fox executives, and I realized that I had worked as a temp in the offices of probably half of them. I’m there to test for the lead role in this big, primetime drama series, and a lot of the people I’m trying to impress remembered me from the copy machine. It was insane.”
Wentworth conquered his nerves though because he loved the part too much to let anxiety get the better of him. “This business is ruled by fear,” he says. “The people in charge can smell desperation and they’re not going to sink millions of dollars into you if you’re tentative. I had to get past that.” It was a good strategy. Wentworth landed the lead, that of a man who robs a bank in order to be sentenced to the same prison as his wrongly convicted brother, the idea being to help his doomed sibling break out of the prison. He said he is on hiatus from the series, which is shot on location at Joliet prison near Chicago. He’s in town talking to some people about a film project.
This was quite a night at the Argyle’s Tower Bar! Sitting alone, having an intimate dinner, looking very cozy at a corner table, we spied Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn. Obviously, though there was no “do not disturb” sign at their table, that was the subliminal signal we received—though we must tell you, only a couple of weeks before, Jennifer was girlishly garrulous mooching Marlboros from us outside MR CHOW. Since that time, some loud mouth told us that Jennifer built a blazing bonfire outside her Malibu beach house and had a little champagne party with some very close friends. Fueling the fire was the wedding dress Jennifer wore at her marriage to Brad Pitt, along with love letters, photos, and everything and anything that reminded her of her ex.
Obviously, Jen wants to get on with her new life, sans Pitt, and this, they’re saying, is the way she wanted to do it. William Congreve probably said it best when he wrote, “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.” From the looks of Jen and Vin dining in their own private world, it would seem that Jen is indeed getting on with her new life.