A certain actress Mr. Benioff has been linked to was noticeably absent. Wondering if he was single, we asked whether there's anyone for whose face he'd launch 1,000 ships.

"My girlfriend, yeah-Amanda Peet," he said. Turns out she's off shooting a film with Ashton Kutcher-no danger there, if recent reports of his marriage to Demi Moore are not greatly exaggerated.

Another cerulean-eyed beauty was very much present. Despite (or perhaps because of) rumors that her marriage is on the fritz, Jennifer Aniston held court in a floor-length black gown with an open back that extended to the tailbone. She couldn't remember who designed it.

"I'm so embarrassed!" she cried, much as the designer may when he or she reads this.

Orlando Bloom disappointed the droves of fans across the street holding homemade "Orlando" posters (which, surprisingly, outnumbered the "Brad" posters) when he failed to turn up. He's currently on location in Morocco shooting Kingdom of Heaven with Ridley Scott. He was there a year ago, when production started on Troy, although hurricanes and the war in Iraq moved the operation to Mexico. Although conditions were hardly favorable (the cast reportedly suffered bouts of food poisoning), director Wolfgang Petersen has fond memories of the secondary set and even brought back a souvenir in the form of a cat.

"She was dying," he explained. "A dog was biting off her little leg. Not leg, tail. And we brought her to Los Angeles and brought her back to life, and now she is a wonderful, wonderful, very lively being called Lola."

Just then Diane Kruger, who plays Helen of Troy, swooped in and kissed the director on the side of the cheek. Swathed in Oscar de la Renta, the comely actress admitted it doesn't take an invasion to win her over.

"Before I met my husband, he tried to date me for quite a few months, and I refused him," she said. "I finally agreed to go on a date with him, and I expected him to, you know, bring out the expensive dinner table and woo me. He actually took me to a movie and to McDonald's-so that was romantic, I thought. It was The Matrix!"

She and the rest of the cast soon settled in for the epic-although, at two hours and 46 minutes, few could stay put for its entirety. Actor Sean Bean-who plays Odysseus here and Boromir in The Lord of the Rings-took a smoke break and watched the remainder of the film standing in the back of the theater. While he watched his onscreen counterpart laying gold coins over the eyes of the fallen Achilles, the woman who launched a thousand haircuts flounced by, her no-name dress and her husband trailing behind.

Making an early exit for the after-party, Mr. Pitt and company accidentally brushed against The Transom.

"Excuse me," he said graciously without breaking stride.

At Cipriani, the couple was joined by various screen gods and goddesses (Will Smith, Chris Noth, Eva Mendes, Snoop Dogg, Anne Heche), the music demigod (U2's Bono), the demagogue (Spike Lee) and the mere mortal (that guy from The King of Queens). Famed twin Ashley Olsen (the blond one who isn't being accused of anorexia) looked nervous, standing with her publicist in a white lacy number by Magda Berliner.

Nearby, actress Gina Gershon was chatting about the movie with a group of male friends. There's more than a little similarity, to The Transom, between Troy and The Lord of the Rings, as Ms. Gershon's conversation proved.

"Let's talk about which of the characters was gay!" she said, sporting a glamorous updo. "That one guy was a little bit more than a cousin, don't you think?"

The cousin in question was Garrett Hedlund, who played Mr. Pitt's protégé onscreen and off. The two trained together to prep for filming. "I was a twig when I started. I was, like, 155, and I jumped way up!"

So did Mr. Pitt, whose signature bonsai leap popped up in almost every battle scene.

"It was a lot of hard work, this one, it really was," he said. "And it shows on the screen, I think. But those are the ones that are worth it, ya know?"

One of the biggest challenges was stunt performance; no doubles were harmed in the filming of Troy, apparently.

"It's all us," confirmed Eric Bana, a.k.a. Prince Hector. "I've gotta say, I was rehearsing in a track suit there, but it was a lot easier in the skirt. There was a little bit more movement, things flow a little easier-you know, nothing gets caught."

Mr. Pitt, on the other hand, got caught with his smarty-pants down. When questioned on his knowledge of Greek mythology prior to filming, he admitted: "Um, I would say iffy at best. No, we didn't cover it in high school, really." Three cheers for the public-school system!

We asked whether he has an Achilles' heel. "I'm passing on that one!" he laughed, and swore it wasn't his well-publicized battle with cigarettes. "War? I have no war! I believe in seasons. I'm on, I'm off, I'm on, I'm off. I'm on right now! There's nothing good about it, but I'm on."

Later, the actor snatched a fedora from co-star Peter O'Toole and perched it on his newly shorn head. Mr. O'Toole paused to reminisce, "When Brad and I had finished doing this very long and difficult scene, we were both absolutely exhausted. Then, in one voice-not rehearsed, nothing-we both said, 'We've done the fucker!'"

-Noelle Hancock

Mean Girls

On Friday, May 7, former Felicity star Scott Speedman was leaning back on a plush couch in the Church Lounge at the Tribeca Grand, recovering from a party the night before for The 24th Day, a film that premiered at the Tribeca film festival in which he played an H.I.V.-positive man who confronts and kidnaps the man who infected him.

"It shows more what I can do on some level," he said of his against-type role in the film. "A lot of times I would play nice, passive boyfriend types of characters, like in Felicity, but here I'm pushing the action, in a sense, and kind of running the show."

The handsome 28-year-old actor, wearing a faded green polo shirt and baggy jeans, stretched his arms out and slowly leaned forward to take a sip of water. He looked like he had just woken up on a California beach and spoke with a laid-back surfer's nonchalance. "I don't know what the façade is, but I'm not really that laid-back," he said. "I think it's kind of a protective thing that I do, or a character thing that I can keep in control, but when I'm around my friends I'm anything but laid-back. I'm more neurotic." It was still hard to picture him in the aggressive role he plays in the movie. "Anger's never been something that's been hard for me to tap into."

He said he still kept in touch with Ms. Russell and the rest of the Felicity cast, but was "not good at calling people back. It's more than nice when I see the people. Those people all were good people. Nobody was an asshole."

He now wants to move on from TV shows, but said "if the right thing came along, I would totally do it." Mr. Speedman hasn't worked in a year and a half because he said the right movie role has yet to come his way.

"There's a lot of good writing on TV that I don't see in movies right now," he said. "If I wanted to work, I could find work," he added, "but I want to work at a high level.

"I'm kind of ambitious," he said with a laugh. "I don't really see my way in now, though I don't really see movies that I'm like, 'I can see myself in that.'"

Mr. Speedman found a lot of reasons that there were few options out there for guys like him. He summed them up with: "Preteen girls are kind of dominating."

-Alexandra Wolfe

What The World Needs Now

On May 9, the Tribeca Film Festival officially closed for the year 2004, with a red-carpet-worthy awards ceremony.

And although the little neighborhood that gives the festival its name returned to a state of normalcy after being traipsed through by over 400,000 people in its nine-day run (that's up 50,000 from last year) and accommodating some 80,000 ticket-holders who ventured downtown (up almost 17,000 from last year), the memory lingered on for festival co-founder Jane Rosenthal, along with a raspy throat.

"I've been sick the whole festival," said Ms. Rosenthal on her way to another doctor's appointment. "I'm still sick. I think I'm sick and exhausted. But that said, I feel really good."

The festival was an ordeal to put on. And not without its hitches: A concert with Van Morrison, Steve Winwood, Macy Gray and the Black Eyed Peas only drew half the crowd of last year's free concert with Norah Jones. Some store owners grumbled that the festival wasn't enhancing their bottom line as much as they'd been promised. People waited over half an hour in lines to see films, sometimes not getting in at all. Liz Smith even complained about the chaos at the screening of Dennie Gordon's film New York Minute, starring the Olsen twins.

If this year proved that the Tribeca Film Festival has yet to hit critical mass, it also offered some satisfactions: During the festival, Lions Gate picked up the distribution for House of D, the film written, directed and starring David Duchovny, validating claims that the fest could indeed be a marketplace for independent films. Who still remembers Rocky & Bullwinkle?

"I think that slowly but surely, the film community is embracing the festival," Ms. Rosenthal said optimistically. "I mean, there's still work to be done. It will prove eventually to be a platform to launch pictures."

Like Toronto? Or Sundance? The Transom offered.

"When anyone mentions us in the same breath, I'm flabbergasted," Ms. Rosenthal said. "All I know is that we do what we do." Quod facit, facit?

Well, maybe. But during one of Ms. Rosenthal's many trips to the doctor during the festival, what they do seemed good enough to at least one Tribecan: the doctor's office manager, who had recently gone to the festival to see a documentary.

"She said to me, 'You don't understand. This is like your team being in the World Series,'" Ms. Rosenthal recalled. "And I looked at her. The office manager? Those kind of moments … you just go, 'Wow!'"

These, she said, are the parameters in which to judge the festival's success.

"The world didn't need another film festival," Ms. Rosenthal concluded. "But Tribeca did."

-Jake Brooks

Elephant Men

Indie-film director Jim Jarmusch and White Stripes lead singer Jack White share a fascination with Nikola Tesla. Who? You know-the 19th-century Serbian-American inventor, that contemporary and rival of Thomas Edison apparently inadequately immortalized by the aging hard-rock band Tesla.

At one point, in fact, Messrs. Jarmusch and White excitedly hatched a plan for the former to direct a music video for "There's No Home for You Here," at the time the first single off the Stripes' second album, Elephant. It would've starred Mr. White as Tesla, against Philip Seymour Hoffman's sinister Edison, "battling to the death" with their inventions. One scene would have re-created the infamous turn-of-the-century electrocution of Topsy the elephant, a Coney Island mainstay. And you thought Britney Spears was bad!

But the idea was scotched due to budget concerns. "It became a half-million-dollar video that was just insane," Mr. White told The Transom during a press junket for Mr. Jarmusch's new movie, Coffee and Cigarettes (in the movie, he wheels a homemade Tesla coil into a coffee shop and discusses the troubled life of the inventor over some C&C). "Just the idea of renting an elephant, electrocuting an elephant …. "

"Not really electrocuting an elephant," put in drummer Meg White, giggling.

"We couldn't figure out how to do it cheaply," Mr. White said.

Coffee and Cigarettes is a series of fictional short subjects about the two titular addictions featuring assorted "cool" people: Bill Murray, Tom Waits, Iggy Pop, members of the Wu-Tang Clan and Life Is Beautiful's Roberto Benigni. The two Stripes were showing their support for the flick in different ways: Mr. White was chain-smoking as if afraid to break with the movie's protocol, while the voluptuous Ms. White sported a black T-shirt that read "squrl," a fictitious band from the film.

"I was going to be Tesla's wife, right?" she said, beaming. The two were married, but have since divorced, even though Mr. White likes to assert that Ms. White is his "Big Sis."

"Tesla's friend," Mr. White said gravely. "Sort of his girlfriend. And she was going to be crying and being pulled away from the dead elephant. The whole thing was set up. But it didn't happen. It would have been great."

-J.B.

Did we detect a slight shiver? After three years of rather generic shows with broad commercial appeal-"Rock Style," "Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis," "Goddesses"-the Costume Institute this year has re-embraced a chilly elitism, if not downright esotericism. The exhibit this massive party was promoting, according to official materials, is intended to "explore the body's spatial negotiation of the 18th century interior as a choreography of seduction and erotic play." Say whaaa ?

"It's intimidating," admitted curator Harold Koda, who was holding court for trustees in the Wrightsman.

Out in the Great Hall, meanwhile, about 700 human bodies were "spatially negotiating" an area lit by twinkling lavender votive candles and scented with fresh lilacs, but there was nothing terribly erotic about it. It was sort of like a gigantic Queen Mary cruise ship of Manhattan celebrity, with a few first-class passengers from Hollywood hopping aboard, like Jennifer Lopez. On the starboard side: a crush of actresses, socialites, designers and models so dense that the trains of their gowns formed a perilous obstacle course.

"This is the night they all come out. I must say, they really make an entrance," said Hamish Bowles, European editor-at-large at Vogue , who was clad in a complex ensemble of Hedi Slimane, Katherine Hamnett and Fred Leighton topped by an elaborate printed djelleba from Tangier. "I think it's sort of an Olympic Pantheon-the Mount Olympus of a certain aspect of Manhattan life."

Portward, where people coming through the big doors were steered with an urgency directly correlated to their star power, Vogue editor Anna Wintour played captain in a glittering green Christian Dior ensemble, standing next to beaming "first officer" Renée Zellweger, the actress and recent Oscar winner, whose skin and hair eerily matched her gold-column Carolina Herrera gown.

The formidable Vogue editor-at-large André Leon Talley had abandoned this well-guarded receiving line and was lurking behind a pillar, wearing a billowy haute couture "beating" coat, or monteau battant , with authentic 18th-century buttons that had been made for him by the Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld. It looked like there might be room for several other party guests beneath its capacious folds.

"I'm in the clouds, in this beautiful French coat," Mr. Talley said. "Totally glorious." Asked if the exhibition's decadent subject had any relevance to today, he puffed out a bit further. "I think they lived only for pleasure," he said of 18th-century French aristocrats. "They put all their attention into the art of living, the pursuit of perfection in your interiors and your environment. We don't have time to do that. You know, we have forgotten how to sit down and take a beautiful porcelain cup. We are all into Starbucks, all busy, drinking café latte out of Styrofoam cup, as opposed to Biscuit Porcelain!"

At least these days, Mr. Talley said, the masses can experience good taste.

"I mean, it's what turns you on," he said. "Be it a porcelain cup, or a boiserie -paneled room, or be the minimalism of going to Crate & Barrel and getting lime-green dishes for your summer-porch terrace for lemonade! I love Bed Bath & Beyond. I go there all the time. You always have to keep a balance and keep a steady accord between over-the-top and the reality of the world we live in …. Don't trip!" he called to a guest trying to step over a low-slung velvet rope.

The balance in the great room, of course, listed (perhaps a bit queasily) toward great wealth. Tickets to the dinner were priced at $3,500 apiece, with an after-party for plebeians for $250. "This is about as decadent as fashion gets," said the designer Donna Karan.

But fame was an even more welcome currency, and at times the event seemed more like an exercise in sober product placement than anything else. It was telling, somehow, that the most Moses-parting-the-Red-Sea moment came when Apprentice star Donald Trump showed up (what could be more 18th-century voyeuristic than the rise of the reality show?); that Ms. Lopez paraded up the purple carpet not on the arm of her old-new boyfriend Marc Anthony, but flanked by the designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana-priceless publicity for all parties concerned.

Michael Imperioli, who plays Christopher on The Sopranos , had also been outfitted by Messrs. D and G., in a black pinstriped suit.

"They invited us, that's why we're here," said Mr. Imperioli, who had his right arm wrapped tightly around his delighted-looking blond wife, Victoria, and his left hand clamped on a glass of water. "At first, I heard 'Dolce & Gabbana want to invite you to a costume ball' and I'm like, 'Costume?' I thought it was masks and stuff. Then I realized. I've heard about this party, obviously. I didn't know it was gonna be that event."

Bill Clinton's old buddy Denise Rich was also wearing Dolce & Gabbana-hot pink. "I just bumped into them, and I think they were happy that I was wearing their dress," she said of the designers. "I think this is an amazing event. That would be a lot of fun, to live in that era. I would've loved to have someone on a stepladder putting my hair up. I'm looking around tonight and I'm finding that people are rather understated, and I don't think that's as much fun."

Flummoxed by the apparent period-costume mandate, many female attendees had simply thrown up their hands, like Ms. Von Furstenberg, and gone for simple sheaths, though the model Amber Valletta bravely sallied forth in full Madame du Pompadour mode.

Last year, then-Gucci designer Tom Ford was committee chair, and his late-1990's ethos of raunch and sex had informed the entire wing-ding. This year, no one designer dominated (Mr. Ford was milling around, just another scruffy face from L.A.), and guests seemed reluctant to anoint an heir to the sartorial Zeitgeist . No, not even the knowing, ironic Marc Jacobs, who together with his muse, Lost in Translation director Sofia Coppola, might be described as post-sex.

"It's very different with Marc," said the socialite and artist Ahn Duong, thoughtfully swishing her semi-translucent Christian Lacroix frock. "Marc is so laid-back."

"There's a lot of talk about Narciso [Rodriguez]," said Rory Tahari, the wife of Elie Tahari (both are designers), who was concealing her second pregnancy under a white mink poncho. "But you know fashion-it's so fleeting! I think if I had to name somebody, I would say Narciso or Nicolas Ghesquière [of Balenciaga]."

(Both Mr. Jacobs and Mr. Rodriguez, by the way, showed up in sneakers.)

"I really like Tuleh a lot right now," said the actress Eva Mendes, sipping a Scotch and water. "Stella McCartney-I mean, you can't go wrong with Stella." She accepted an olive from a passing tray. "Oh wow, these are amazing-thank you so much." It was her first time at this occasion, and she was wearing a teal satin Zac Posen. "It's just so easy and fun and sexy," she said.

In fact, Mr. Posen was on many people's lips, his slinky gowns gracing many starlets' hips. Found in the flesh, the young designer showed off a toreador jacket he said was made by the French Army in North Africa. "That's very nice," he said of the accolades. "But I think we're in a different era, and I don't think it's about dominating. Hold on one second …. Natalie !" he screeched, as the actress Natalie Portman walked in, looking like a little lost doe.

Mr. Posen disappeared for a few moments of kibitzing and then returned. "The 90's were more about one's wealth, and now it's about one's empowerment and self-expression," he said, a faint sweat appearing on his upper lip, as his escort, Stella Schnabel (daughter of artist-director Julian), bobbled toward him. "It's different. Women now want to be distinct. The 90's was about … sex."

And what is this era about?

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld was stopped. Could he answer a question? "What do you think?" Mr. Seinfeld said, turning to his wife, Jessica Sklar.

Ms. Sklar wrinkled her nose and shook her head.

"No, thanks," said Mr. Seinfeld, plowing on.

Trumpets were sounding dinner in the Charles Engelhard Court of the American Wing, which according to the mouthwatering press materials consisted of artichoke hearts with poached quail eggs and caviar, accompanied by an insouciant Chablis Premier Cru, Fourchaume, Domaine Boudin 2002, followed by a fillet of beef with Béarnaise sauce washed down by a commanding St. Francis Cabernet Sauvignon 2000. For dessert: soufflés and Veuve Clicquot.

Society dame Carroll Petrie was one of the first to leave this feast. As a young blonde in a strapless black dress and mesh see-through skirt scampered past, her loose ringlets bobbing up and down, Ms. Petrie tightly gripped her date's arm. In a pink Mary McFadden gown with a matching pink shawl, she slowly made her way down the steps to a waiting car.

Streaming up the steps were the many young New Yorkers who had come for the after-party in the Temple of Dendur, the more populist part of the evening, where the pop-funk-soul-rap band N.E.R.D. was scheduled to perform.

On line for the coat check, two girls in their twenties wearing bustiers and poofy skirts- more Victoria's Secret meets Salvation Army than French Revolution- were sandwiched in between exiting older couples in muted silks. One of them, Lindsay Pauly, a business manager at Henri Bendel, had heard about the event through her boss, Tiffany Dubin, who was on the board of the museum.

"She's a socialite, a vintage maven," said Ms. Pauly proudly.. "She goes to this every year and we thought it would be fun to go to the after party since it's not, like, $3,000 a ticket. We did the young working-girl version."

This "'young working girl version" had many incarnations, including a white lace belly skirt and blue heels even Orva wouldn't stock. As socialites in long gowns and mink shawls waltzed outside after dinner for cigarette breaks or to their waiting Lincoln Town Cars, suburban moms in Dupioni "mom" suits looked them up and down admiringly.

A gaggle of female recent Princeton graduates in Betsey Johnson–esque black dresses was watching another Sopranos star, Jamie Lynn DiScala, and her manager husband wait for their car outside at the bottom of the stairs. Then, the inevitable … "I feel like I'm in Sex and the City! " said one.

Mrs. DiScala was trying to avoid having her H for Hilfiger gold off-the-shoulder gown drenched by the rain. "J. Lo and my wife tied for best dressed," Mr. DiScala said with what passes for gallantry these days.

As the limos pulled away, more and more taxis were puling up, and slowly thenight's costly theme attire was yielding to cocktail tube dresses. But a drag queen named Chucky had gamely trotted out full Dangerous Liaisons attire, including a flowing sequined skirt and white wig. He stood with his friend Adrian Rodriguez, who had dressed as the Count of Monte Cristo, watching the fancy guests leaving the dinner. They said they were bridal directors at Elizabeth Arden.

"We're all going later to the Red Door and having cake," added Chucky, chuckling.

Inside the Temple of Dendur, the dance party was just warming up, with socialite Fabian Basabe surrounded by an entourage of lithe young boys in the entrance. The room itself was minimally decorated: a projected illusion of reflected water on the walls, and bright pink and blue lights over the temple itself. It might've been a bar mitzvah.

"The place used to be very decorated, more so than this," said Alan Schoenfeld, a caterer who has attended the party every year for two decades, since he took his now-wife Deborah there on her first date. "This is very minimal, this is nothing ."

There were far more women wearing Asian inspired cheongsams than powdered wigs and boned bodices. "Obviously I am not going to go out and buy some elaborate thing for one night, but kudos to people who do ," said a 30-year-old female banker who didn't want her name used.

Back in the Great Hall, dance party guests were still hopefully monitoring the celebrity exodus. Dr. Lewis Feder, a Manhattan plastic surgeon with offices across the street, was there with his wife-both in black suits. "It's sexy, people want to get dressed up and glamorous and want to be seen," he said. "People don't want to hear about all the problems in the world- they want a little excess."

Nearby, a marriage and family therapist from Cold Spring Harbor named Diane Tiernan was standing with her teenage daughter, Paige, who was keeping a close lookout for the by-now long gone J. Lo and Renée.

Wearing a black strapless dress with a ribbon around her waist, young Paige breathed in the scene.

"It smells good," she said.

and Rita Nakouzi

Met: Sept. 28, 2000 Engaged: Sept. 18, 2003 Projected Wedding Date: May

21, 2005

Touré,

the 33-year-old host of MTV2's Spoke 'N'

Heard and a writer for Rolling Stone

who prefers to keep his last name private, is marrying Rita Nakouzi, 28, a

fashion consultant at Promostyl, at a yet-to-be determined venue in New York

City. Ms. Nakouzi joked that she could change her name to just "Rita" and they

could be a "very modern" couple. "He didn't find that very funny," she said.

They

met "across a crowded room" (as they both put it) at a mini-concert by Lenny

Kravitz for his music video "Again." "It's so funny I'm meeting you," Touré

told the dusky beauty, "because I'm reading Midnight's

Children [which takes place in India]."

"That's

great," said Ms. Nakouzi, who is half-Iranian, half-Lebanese. "I'm not Indian."

Oops .

"I was like: 'Foot in mouth!'" Touré said.

Later that night, he found Ms. Nakouzi again, sitting on

the couch in the V.I.P. room. "Hi," he said, fixing her with a penetrating

gaze. "I want your number, I want your address, I want your cell phone number,

I want your mother's number. I'm getting in touch with you.'" Expressionless,

Ms. Nakouzi obeyed.

"He

broke all the rules," she said. "He called right away." The following night,

Touré showed up at her office in his car and took her out to dinner at La Casa.

"He was such a gentleman," she said. "That doesn't happen in New York."

On the afternoon before their tentatively scheduled

second date, Ms. Nazouki's office phone system shut down, and she waited all

day for her cell phone to jing-a-ling. After 7:30 came and went, the

disappointed damsel left the office, only to run into Touré on the sidewalk

outside. Turned out she'd given him the wrong number, and he'd driven all the

way to her apartment to leave a note, then rushed back to her place of

business. I know this girl , he'd

thought, and she wouldn't give me a

second chance if I didn't make it.

When

he got a four-week gig at a writers' retreat in Italy, Touré invited Ms.

Nakouzi to join him two weeks before the retreat. "I was like, 'This is the big

tester,'" she said. "We had really an incredible trip. Crazy things happen when

you travel. I remember when he dropped me off at the train station, my heart

sank. At that moment, I was like: Wow, I

could really see myself with this guy. "

A

year later, she moved from her one-bedroom in Fort Greene into his duplex in

the same neighborhood. And another year later, Touré surprised Ms. Nakouzi

during a business trip to Paris with a 2.75-carat Asher-cut solitaire on the

balcony of a restaurant overlooking the Eiffel Tower (he'd planned to take her

to a bridge over the Seine, but was concerned about her four-inch Manolos).

"She

has definitely the greatest character of any person that I've ever met-far

stronger than mine," said the author, whose first novel, Soul City , a magical-realist tale about a small African-American

town, is due in September.

"I'm

just in awe of his imagination and his talent," cooed Ms. Nakouzi.

The

kids will get the secret last name.

- Alexandra Wolfe

Jodi

Goldman and Richard Siegmeister

Met: June 21, 2003 Engaged: Dec. 19, 2003 Projected Wedding Date:

Sept. 12, 2004

Jodi

Goldman's husband hunt had taken her on over 100 dates. "I interview people for

a living," explained the dark-haired Ms. Goldman, 36, a human-resources

generalist  who lives in ( gasp ) Fort Lee, N.J. "I approach dating

like a job search."

Though

friends call her the "diversity queen" for her general approach to humanity,

Ms. Goldman was determined to find someone of her faith. "I've met the most

horrendous Jewish guys," she said. "I'd call them up, and the first thing

they'd ask for was my dress size." She had become the court jester of the

office, her co-workers greedily demanding the latest "horror story" each morning.

Not even back surgery in December 2002 could deter Ms.

Goldman from her quest. Immobilized in bed, she spent the entire month surfing

the Web for potential mates. A friend had recommended Greatboyfriends.com,

"where every single man comes with a woman's stamp of approval," and it was

there that she espied Richard Siegmeister, a balding, bespectacled fellow one

year her senior who was taking evening bar classes following his graduation

from Fordham.

Mr.

Siegmeister didn't respond to Ms. Goldman's e-mail. "I had no time to be dating

anyone from New Jersey," he said. "I live in the East Village ."

Ms. Goldman was disappointed but quickly moved on, like

the unstoppable PATH train of passion she was. Later that spring, she found

herself listening to one prospect describing his gastrointestinal distress in

graphic detail the day after their date. "It was the straw that broke the

camel's back," she said. She decided to give that guy from Greatboyfriends.com

another cyber-holler.

By now, Mr. Siegmeister was juggling studies for the bar

with a job as the director of talent contracts and guild affairs for Sesame

Workshop, and he quickly laid down the law. "If you can't deal with my

schedule, then forget about it," he wrote.

His unfazed pursuer drove in from the boonies on a rainy

day for coffee at Des Moines, a restaurant on Avenue A. After a pleasant chat,

they decided to stroll over to Mr. Siegmeister's favorite shop, Toy Tokyo (by

coincidence, Ms. Goldman had spent almost six years in Tokyo, on an exchange

program studying the relationship between Japanese business and

culture)-whereupon she slipped, falling on the wet pavement. "She wasn't

embarrassed at all," he said appreciatively.

Studying

in self-imposed isolation for the bar, Mr. Siegmeister was delighted to receive

a care package from Ms. Goldman filled with homemade brownies, Sesame Street

trinkets, pencils, Japanese good-luck charms and a screwdriver. "She's Miss

Powertool," he said. We'll say!

Post-bar

restorative trips to Florida and Jamaica quickly ratcheted up the intensity of

the relationship. Mr. Siegmeister rejected his mother's engagement ring, a

diamond in a butt-crack-like chevron setting, and got Sandy and Lisa from Owl's

Roost Antiques to reset the original diamond in white gold surrounded by

sapphires. He presented this to Ms. Goldman on the first night of Hanukkah,

along with a handcrafted storybook called The

Story of Richie and Ichi (the nickname given to Jodi by her grandmother).

They'll be married by Harvard professor Shaye J.D. Cohen

at the Lighthouse at Chelsea Piers. "After all that time searching," said the

delighted bride-to-be, "we found one another."

She

escapes from Jersey on May 1.

-Jessica Joffe

Her publisher at Miramax Books, Harvey Weinstein, declined to comment on any instances of his foolishness or fanaticism.

"I'm retired," he said, before turning his attention to investment banker Steven Rattner, whose smile clearly meant "no comment." Mort Zuckerman, the third man in the pow-wow, came through, sort of. "How much time do you have?" he asked.

Twenty seconds?

"Not enough time."

"If you don't embarrass yourself every once in a while, then you're not loose enough," Al Franken chimed in. "So I'm trying to think hard. I know-I made a couple mistakes in Lies and Lying Liars. All of it came from British intelligence. For example, I wrote that Sean Hannity lived up Newt Gingrich's ass from 1993 to 1998-I got that from British intelligence. Turns out Sean took residence up Newt's ass only in early '94, early January of '94, so that was embarrassing."

Soon, Ms. Huffington picked up a microphone and started riffing on President Bush.

"George Bush was supposed to be here tonight, but he just sent a little note saying that the directions were not specific enough," she said.

There followed many hearty chuckles and a few "ho-ho-hos."

"He said he knows we gave him the time and the address, but there was no cross street," Ms. Huffington continued to even more laughter. "And he said, 'If there had been a cross street, he would have moved mountains to have been here, but without a cross street, what can he do?"

Silence.

Ms. Huffington moved on to more serious matters.

"We can win in a landslide!" she said, before adding that "when the house is on fire, this is not the time to talk about remodeling. This is the time to put the fire out. And after we put the fire out and send George Bush back to Crawford, Tex., where in any case he seems to prefer to spend his time … until then, we can't talk about remodeling."

Later on in the sumptuous townhouse once owned by Andy Warhol, swanning among such guests as Kurt Vonnegut, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Tina Brown, Barbara Walters, Barry Diller and Katrina vanden Heuvel, Ms. Huffington said she made a fool of herself back when she was a Republican.

"That was a very bad idea," she said. "But I think there's a statute of limitations because, you know, when I was a Republican, Dennis Miller was still a liberal-he's still funny. And Michael Jackson was still black. You know, it's a long time ago, but I did make a fool of myself. Hi! Welcome! This is [former Howard Dean consultant] Joe Trippi-you can ask him."

Having a smoke outside was Tony Newman, a bearded 33-year-old originally from the Bay Area who is now the communications director of the Drug Policy Alliance, an organization that Ms. Huffington has worked closely with to end the war on drugs.

"We have drugs all over our society," Mr. Newman was saying. "We got weed, cigs, Prozac, Viagra, steroids, everything. But only certain people are going to jail for certain drugs. I smoke weed on the streets of New York every fucking day, and you know how many times I've been stopped by the cops?"

He pulled out some printouts from a new Web site of his, www.whatifIwereblack.com, which featured photographs of Mr. Newman sparking up all over midtown Manhattan. "You would think that it's easy to smoke weed in New York, but 60,000 get arrested for fucking smoking weed in the city," he said.

Mr. Newman called his friend Ms. Huffington an "amazing woman."

"Not only is she a great writer, she's a great organizer," he said. "She basically pulled together a whole fucking range of people tonight-super big shots, grassroots organizers. She's a connector. You know what, she did it incredibly well when she was conservative and worked with Gingrich-ouch! But we have respect, 'cause she knows how to fucking do it, and now that she's willing to come over …. "

Mr. Newman lit up again and went on, talking about a shadow convention that Ms. Huffington had helped put together to address issues that were missing from the platforms at both parties' conventions in 2000.

"Arianna put together an important segment," he said. "She put together activists in the fucking media world. She pulled together activists working together on issues like drug-policy reform like myself. She pulled together these people and said, 'You know what? Basically the house is on fire,' I heard her say, 'it's not time to fucking remodel.'

Basically, the fucking state of the world is in our hands. There is something exciting about that. We got seven months: We gotta fucking bring down George Bush. This guy is a drunk driver behind the wheel and he is going to take us off the cliff. We gotta fucking remove the fucking drunk driver, man. This shit, this is fucking serious. You know, Arianna is gonna continue doing her thing. She's going to go to fucking cities around the country, she's gonna talk to local media, she's gonna talk to campuses. She's fucking articulate. She can articulate our vision."

Back inside, a dozen or so people were surrounding Ms. Huffington.

"He's fantastic," she said of Mr. Newman. "We worked together at the shadow conventions; he was press secretary for my campaign. We were working together on the drug war. Do you have a copy of my book? If you look at the 'New Contract for a Better America,' one of the items is the need to stop fighting this war on drugs."

She had to introduce someone to Joe Trippi and drifted off.

"She's connecting, she's connecting," Mr. Newman said

-George Gurley

Here, Pussy-Pussy

"That girl is a scandal," Vogue magazine's majestic editor at large, André Leon Talley, once said of Texan super-noodle Erin Wasson. "And she has got to learn how to walk."

Though Mr. Talley has ruled over the fashion world with a steely gaze and finger-snap that left many a model a little wobbly on her turns, the spotlight is now turning on his clever clogs, with his stage debut at the Martha Graham Dance Company's City Center revival of The Owl and The Pussycat on April 14. (The piece was originally narrated by Liza Minnelli in 1978.)

And what do you know: The gatekeeper of poise, style and sartorial je ne sais quoi has-how do we say this? Two. Giant. Left. Feet.

As the narrator of Edward Lear's 1871 nonsense ode, Mr. Talley's molasses-coated enunciation provided the backdrop for the Graham Company's dancers (a diminutive pussy performed by Virginie Mécène, Tadej Brdnik's buff-chested owl) as they leapt and slid effortlessly above the footlights at an open studio rehearsal on April 8.

"The ooooowl and the pussseeecat went to sssssea," he intoned over the jingly-jangly music that always seems to accompany Ms Graham's esoteric compositions. And then, in his trademark Manolo Blahnik spats-thud! plonk! stomp!-he strode around the makeshift stage.

It's possible that his large strides and massive clodding was meant to add some gravitas to the rather flitty business going on about him.

"What a loverrrly pussssseeeee you arrrre, you arrrrre. What a loverrrly pussssseeeee you arrrre."

STOMP! PLONK! THUD!

After the performance, Mr. Talley brushed off the idea that he was maybe a little out of his depth with all this prancy modern-dance stuff.

"Oh, nooooo," he said with a flick of the hand. "I feel so good. I've learned how to breathe better. I've learned how to stand, I've learned how to speak slower, and I've learned to relax in my rich delivery. I always speak so fast, almost like ticker tape or like typing on the computer board, and it's just a whole world that's opened up to me."

At tonight's performance, the neophyte performer's fashionista friends-Oscar De La Renta, Ralph Lauren, Anna Wintour-will get to see that new world of Mr. Talley's for the first time.

"Martha Graham was all about grace, gratitude and giving," he told The Transom. "I call it the 'three G's.'"

-Shazia Ahmad

It's Curtains for Tyco

On Nov. 25, jurors in the trial against former Tyco chief executive L. Dennis Kozlowski and former chief financial officer Mark Swartz were shown a videotape of the interior of Tyco's corporate residence at 950 Fifth Avenue.

They craned their necks and cooed as they caught glimpses of the infamous $6,000 gold-threaded shower curtain and $15,000 umbrella stand that became potent symbols of Mr. Kozlowski's corporate excess. But those baubles may now be history.

According to a source who recently toured the 4,500-square-foot duplex, which is listing for $24.99 million, the extravagant items have been removed from the apartment's ornate interior.

"My client and I were looking for them. We started laughing when we didn't see any shower curtain at all. It doesn't have the accouterments that it had before," the real-estate source, who asked to remain anonymous, said.

The 11-room apartment is represented by a quartet of brokers from Brown Harris Stevens, including Elizabeth Sample, Jean Meisel, Amy Katcher and Brenda Powers.

Ms. Meisel declined to comment or acknowledge any details concerning the interior of the apartment. Her partners on the $24.99 million listing didn't return calls for comment.

So where was the infamous curtain? Could it be that the expensive curtain was actually considered a turnoff in Tyco's bid to sell the apartment and recover some assets out of the whole Kozlowski-Swartz scandal?

"A lot of people would do the same," The Transom's real-estate source opined. "When a person is there to buy the apartment, they're there to see the apartment, not the decorations.

"It was source of embarrassment," the source continued. "Why have [the shower curtain] in there?"

A Tyco spokeswoman declined to comment on the whereabouts of Mr. Kozlowski's former baubles or to confirm, if the items were sold, that the proceeds would be returned to Tyco coffers.

"In anything related to that apartment-because it relates to matters that are pending litigation-it is inappropriate for us to comment at this time," said Gwen Fisher, a spokeswoman for the New Jersey– and Bermuda-based conglomerate.

Mr. Kozlowski's lawyer, Stephen Kaufman, was traveling and unavailable for comment.

If Tyco did sell off some of Mr. Kozlowski's ornate decorations, the cash would come in handy, as the company hasn't seen any from the apartment. In November, Tyco listed the 11-room spread for $28 million-a sum viewed as outlandish by real-estate watchers, and one that indeed failed to garner interest among potential buyers. After three months and no sale, Tyco slashed $3 million off the asking price in March, hoping to lure a flush tenant. The apartment has yet to find a purchaser.

Perhaps the apartment's more modest maquillage will help to win over reticent buyers.

-Gabriel Sherman

Mile-High Club

Three days after the final episode of Average Joe: Adam Returns, Adam Mesh and his chosen one, Samantha Trenk, could finally walk down the street together.

On Thursday, April 8, the lovebirds were walking hand in hand through midtown. "It's a good thing we're not married," said a scruffy-faced but smiling Mr. Mesh, holding the hand of his chosen one. "Everyone says congratulations and good luck …. We feel like we've been walking around with just-married stickers on our backs."

That's because 10.9 million people watched as the two paired off in the final episode of the Average Joe sequel. But filming had been completed three weeks before-and the two were not allowed to contact each other in the meantime, lest office betting pools all over America about whom Ms. Trenk would select be spoiled.

How did they ever bear the time apart?

"We talked on the phone everyday," said Ms. Trenk, her head peeking out of a chunky turquoise scarf.

Mr. Mesh was more specific.

"Phone sex," he said. And then, face reddening-as if sensing he'd said something that might get picked up in Star-he added lamely: "I'm just kidding."

The couple only saw each other once for a photo shoot while the show was on television. All they had left to remember each other by was that last plane ride at the end of the final episode, where the loser (Rachel Goetz) drove away in a limo and Mr. Mesh and Ms. Trenk ascended the steps of the jet, which flew off into the sunset.

But Mr. Mesh, who was the loser himself on the first season of Average Joe, didn't even get to relish his maiden voyage with the mile-high club.

"The plane wasn't all it was cracked up to be, right?" he said, casting a conspiratorial eye upon Ms. Trenk. "I mean, it's like-a plane! We went half an hour away, and then instead of [flying] a half-hour back, we got off and drove three hours back."

Ms. Trenk rolled her eyes and added, "Yeah, it was like 4 o'clock in the morning. We could've just sat on the plane for a few minutes, then gotten off."

No pun, The Transom thinks, intended.

-Alexandra Wolfe

The Transom Also Hears …

That if you work for Missy Elliott, you'd better be prepared to have her on your back 24/7. At the April 13 launch of her clothing line, which will be produced by Adidas, the hip-hop star revealed that her signature logo-a queen's crown above the words "Respect M.E."-can be found on birthday suits as well as her new track suits. "I took my dancers yesterday to go get them tattooed," she confessed at a press conference on April 13. "All my dancers are getting it on their backs-Claudine, where you at?" The rapper then brought onstage product manager Claudine Joseph, who gamely pulled up a pant leg to show off her newly inked ankle (the dancers were off rehearsing for the "Ladies First" tour, which also features Beyoncé Knowles and Alicia Keys). "Aww, she's so dedicated!" Ms. Elliott purred. "The crown is fitting for a queen, and 'Respect M.E.,' of course, is the name of the line. Oh, and the M.E., that's me-Missy Elliott!"

-Noelle Hancock

Since he joined the company in 1999, Mr. Villency has been working at rebranding it, moving the image of Villency from an expensive but slightly tacky 70's modernism to a classy, 21st-century luxe minimalism. The plan has meant spiffing up not just the furniture, but himself as well. Leaning back in his chair next to the wafer-thin conference table he designed, Mr. Villency smiled behind his nerd-chic dark-rimmed glasses and said, "I think every single person has a personal brand, and it represents who they are in their professional life. In my case, it's amplified because of the business I'm in."

Mr. Villency's girlfriend, Olivia Chantecaille, knows all too well the pressures he faces. Though it might seem that Ms. Chantecaille's forte is her regular appearances in the "flash" pages of Gotham and New York magazines, a fact that she wishes were better known is that she is also the creative director of her family's high-end makeup line, Chantecaille, available at stores like Barneys and Bergdorf's. She started the company with her mother, Sylvie Chantecaille, the creator of Prescriptives, another line of cosmetics owned by Estée Lauder.

Ms. Chantecaille was with her mother, sipping aromatic tea in a corner booth of the Mercer Hotel. She is pretty, and so slender as to seem fragile-but get Ms. Chantecaille talking about her company and her steely resolve becomes apparent. Like her boyfriend, she considers herself the public face of her family's company. In her case, the responsibility may be even greater because Chantecaille doesn't advertise, relying instead on word of mouth.

Ms. Chantecaille knows that she hasn't made it to the level of the Lauder cosmetics dynasty yet, but she likes to think that she and Estée Lauder's granddaughter, Aerin Lauder Zinterhoffer, the company's vice president for advertising and a kingpin of the New York social circuit, could be in the same league: "I think people kind of think of us together, kind of like the makeup sisters."

Ms. Chantecaille is not the only one who looks up to Ms. Zinterhoffer. Seeing the 33-year-old, placid-faced Mrs. Zinterhoffer gliding between the dinner tables at the Neue Gallerie benefit and posing for Bill Cunningham in an Ungaro gown-all the while becoming an instrumental part of her family's cosmetics empire-seems to have flipped a switch in her fellow socialites' heads.

Ms. Zinterhoffer may be the closest thing to the Brooke Astor of her generation. "If Aerin Lauder is on the benefit committee, I'll be there, even if it's like $500!" a perky blond socialite-in-training gushed at the recent INF Neuroscience Benefit at BLVD. "That's how I know it's legit, if Jane [Lauder] or Aerin are on the invitation." Like Mrs. Astor, Ms. Zinterhoffer's name is synonymous with upper-class elegance; she attracts the right kind of guests, those who would go to the New York Public Library spring benefit but could skip Paris Hilton's birthday party. But the difference between Ms. Zinterhoffer and Mrs. Astor is that the latter didn't have a product to hawk-and that divide says everything about how New York society has changed.

From Nadja Swarovski, heir to Swarovskicrystals,toElisabeth Kieselstein-Cord, whose father owns the jewelry company of the same name, to Charlotte Ronson, Ann Dexter-Jones' daughter and a designer who started an accessories business with a line of bejeweled flip-flops, young Manhattanites with social ambitions know that their status will be lifted substantially should they succeed in having their name attached to a product. You can do this two ways: either by becoming a player in the family business, revitalizing it if necessary, or by starting a product line of your own.

To be an "It" Kid now means having, at the very least, a line of purses. (Even Paris Hilton has one.) Ideally, the business and the socialite benefit equally. "It creates such a buzz around the product itself-like this bag line that Nicky Hilton was a part of is this nonexistent bag line, but garners all this attention," said Lily Rafii, the creator of Felix Ray, a handbag line. (Ms. Rafii said she purposely avoided using her own name in her product, instead naming Felix Ray after a Van Gogh painting. Still, she said, "people come up to us all the time and ask for Felix Ray. Especially at that Super Saturday out in the Hamptons-people would come up and say, 'Is Felix here?'") But if your name does not yet have cachet, Ms. Rafii pointed out, putting it on a product can also help you be labeled a socialite.

Never before has the phrase "You are your own salesman" resonated so loudly in New York society.

"When I go out, I represent-hopefully-what I do, in that I'm a person who works and takes my business seriously," said Ms. Ronson. "I want to have a business that represents myself well. I design for myself what I would wear and what I would want to put out there and a certain brand," she continued. "I know a lot of my friends have started companies already and are going into their own things. You see, everyone has their own style and product that they want to represent. If you have some kind of passion, you can just go for it rather than work for someone else."

Just 10 years ago, it was embarrassing to have a job if you were high society; now it's embarrassing not to, and if a profession is out of the question, then running a business becomes a raison d'être. The youngsters on the scene today have seen what became of the third generation of DuPonts and Busches, who have fallen off the radar.

The idle young socialites who appeared in Jamie Johnson's controversial documentary Born Rich represented the last whimpers of a dying breed. When model Cody Franchetti said he answers the question "What do you do?" with "I'm rich or I'm kept," viewers cracked up. Mr. Franchetti and the kind of "kept" aristocrats who hide beyond the gates of garden parties may as well be from the Middle Ages. In fact, anyone who doesn't have his or her own publicist seems old-fashioned.

Today, New York's nightlife is market-driven. Often Barneys, Bergdorf's, Bendel's and even Barnes and Noble host cocktail parties for some product line or other. All along Madison Avenue, waiters carrying canapés walk past mannequins at cross-promotional book parties in retail stores. "Ten years ago, seeing Norman Mailer with Claus von Bulow walking around the cosmetics counter in Lord and Taylor was hilarious," said a publicist, referring to a party that Mr. Von Bulow once threw in honor of the author at the New York department store. "Now it happens all the time."

Born Rich producer Dirk Wittenborn, who is 52, said going out in New York used to be for the "experience." "I wanted to have a certain life," he said. "I wanted my life to be like a French movie. Today, kids want their lives to be like an awards ceremony. Young people were completely unaware of the power of youth and beauty back then, the way it affects other people-that was what was charming about youth in the old days. Now they're schooled in its value, they know exactly how it fluctuates from day to day, and they market it."

The belles of yesteryear didn't work for the family company or hire their own publicists. Posing for photographer Slim Aarons was as public as they would be, unless they made it into Cholly Knickerbocker's society pages. Nan Kempner, C.Z. Guest and Pat Buckley were in their prime at a time when commercial talk was oh-so-gauche-and their dinner-table topics haven't changed with the times. "I never know who's the head of what company," said Nan Kempner from her Upper East Side apartment. "It doesn't interest me what people do," she added. The concept of going out to a product launch or store opening was foreign to her. "When we used to go out, it was always to see my friends and have a good time," she said. "Studio 54 was the best, full of interesting people. Every day was New Year's Eve. We would usually start at somebody's house for dinner, then go on down to Studio and dance the night away."

Author Gay Talese pointed out that nowadays, "we're in this vigorous period where to be a worker is not class-defined. You have to be rich and do something. There are two von Furstenbergs in our society; there is the Princess von Furstenberg, and there is the designer. And who of the two is more revered in society? The designer-she's rich and married to Barry Diller. The country now cares more about the people who work, and the rich have to work for self-worth." Mr. Talese laughed and added, "There are not many people in what would pass for the Lotus Lounge of 20th-century America. You used to have the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson-what did she do?-and now you have Sarah Ferguson as the face of Weight Watchers."

Photographer Patrick McMullan, who has been photographing this world since the glory days of Ms. Guest, said that now, "a person needs to stand out, and associating with a brand that is in the family became a natural way to have a win-win strategy."

It has certainly been a win-win situation for Mr. Villency, who was named one of Gotham magazine's 100 most eligible bachelors of 2002. "Everyone is very aware of what their public standing is, even among their social friends, and I think your job is important to everyone," Mr. Villency said, smiling just enough to seem friendly but not cocky. He went to high school at Dalton and graduated from the University of Wisconsin before he started working for his father when he was 23. Now, at 28, Mr. Villency is at the helm of the ship. "I really want to establish this as the first premium lifestyle brand of home furnishings," he said. To do that, he has revamped everything from the company's logos and typography to its magazine ads. And as his company's spokesman, he finds that the line between self-promotion and product promotion has become a little blurry.

"People associate me with my brand essentially because I'm a spokesperson and my last name is Villency," he said. "Just like any other spokesperson, the head of the company is like a symbol of the company- like Anna Wintour and Vogue -so it's a real natural association." He continued, "I think that there's been so many brands built on the faces of giants-Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Giorgio Armani. Just like Tom Ford changed Gucci, and he's not Gucci-he became the face of the brand just because he was such a powerful force. And that's kind of what happened with me: People saw this change and naturally started associating me with it."

Mr. Villency said it has become "progressively more difficult" to separate his social persona from his professional one. But it's far from a hardship. "It's just part of the hand I've been dealt. I've been incredibly lucky. My philosophy is-I guess the same way that lifestyle branding, like Armani with a simple black logo in their ad, is not a hard sell, it's 'Here's what we are, here's our logo, here's what we stand for, and you make the decision'-I think I'm very much the same in my own personal life: Here's who I am, here's how I dress, here's what the furniture looks like, here's what the company's doing, and you make the decision."

He met Ms. Chantecaille a year ago at a dinner party. It was a conversation about their respective family businesses that sparked the romance. As she sat at the Mercer Hotel, Ms. Chantecaille demurely recalled the moment. "We had both left the office at 9:30, and we were like, 'You have a family business? I do, too!'" Since then, their businesses have thrived.

When Ms. Chantecaille goes out at night, she said, she doesn't consciously think about her brand, "but it comes up all the time. The most exciting part is when you go out and someone opens their bag and are like, 'Look, I have your products in here!' And that's fun. And it's not people I know-maybe I've just met them or something-but when you see someone's face light up, and the smile on their face, and they're like, 'Thank you sooo much'-that's when it's really fun."

Ms. Chantecaille and her mother were leaving for Milan the next week for a whirlwind trip, stopping in Paris and London to meet with the press before heading back home. Ms. Chantecaille caught her mother's eye. "I think family businesses are a wonderful thing, especially in America now, because I think children are really losing touch with their parents," she said, pushing her Jackie O. sunglasses back on her head. "They're not for everybody, obviously, but I encourage them a lot. Everyone has their own thing, so I don't think in a family business you have to sort of feel like you're living in the shadow of a parent. You don't feel like you have to follow in somebody's footsteps. Look at Sofia Coppola. She's a brilliant example."

Her mother concurred. "I don't trust anyone with colors, and I trust Olivia with colors. She has a very logical mind."

Besides being in charge of the creative side of the company, Ms. Chantecaille oversees publicity and marketing as well. "I don't think of it as work," she said. "When it's your company, it's very different. It's like having a child. You will sacrifice anything for that child." She said the city was the perfect environment for her business. "New York is a city that challenges people and tests them to reach their potential. It's like a trainer. It's like if you go to a gym without a trainer, it's like whatever, whatever-a couple reps of this, 20 minutes at the Stairmaster reading a magazine or something. But if you're with a trainer, there's no way you can read anything. You feel amazing afterward because you were pushed. And you were like, 'I could do it, and I feel great about myself, because I didn't know I could do it.'"

Sometimes the "trainer" that is New York pushes her too far. "The energy here is amazing, but that's why we like to go out to East Hampton," she said, "because you need a breather from time to time. But then we're so happy to come back here." Ms. Chantecaille enthused about the New York skyline, "the amazing people" and how "you can meet the right person and come up with an amazing idea-something you never knew you'd come up with."

One idea that has helped Ms. Chantecaille and Mr. Villency is having publicists for their companies promote the couple as a unit. Their names have been popping up everywhere from Page Six to the Palm Beach Post .

It may work, but some people find the new pre-eminence of publicists in society off-putting, to say the least. "The idea of hiring publicists in order to get a lifestyle is frightening," said Mr. Wittenborn. "That's what godparents or grannies used to do. They want to get in the mix, and get in the mix with an advantage-a product they can lend their fabulous selves to."

"P.R. has become so huge," Lilly Rafii said. "Everybody has a P.R. person. I know of people who don't even have a product to sell who have a P.R. person-which is kind of pathetic."

"The concept of advertising was always really cheesy," said Mandie Erickson, the director of Seventh House P.R. and the daughter of Karen Erickson, who started the fashion P.R. firm Showroom Seven and created Erickson Beamon jewelry. "It was one step away of being a used-car salesman. Yet in the last 10 years, it no longer has that feeling. Everyone's trying to market something, launch something. I think even publicists have turned into socialites in their own right."

Benefits, of course, are an important part of the new marketing-driven nightlife, and socialites are expected to do more than sit and look pretty at the table. As Ms. Chantecaille put it, "I think from a brand perspective, we try to support causes that we personally feel strongly about, and associate ourselves with charities that support the brand as well, that are truly personal to us." The Central Park Conservancy is one of her charities. "Being from Manhattan, and our brand being very naturally based, I believe strongly in the park, because the park is an important part of the city."

As young Manhattanites like Mr Villency and Ms. Chantecaille march forward into this brave new branded society, going out has become almost indistinguishable from working. Socialites know that promoting their brands is not just good business-it's a means to social survival. One thing is certain: If you want to even be considered for a committee these days, lounging on lawn chairs in Southampton isn't going to cut it. Now, you pick out a publicist and some purse designs and plan a party at Polo!

The griping has approached its boiling point in the case of Ms. Hesser, who has shown an unpredictable hand with The Times ' precious stars, not to mention its journalistic guidelines: First she took a star away from Drew Nieporent's formerly three-star Montrachet, saying the Tribeca pioneer "even smells old"; then she awarded three to Jean-Georges Vongerichten's "fancy street food" emporium Spice Market. Shortly thereafter, on March 31, the paper was forced to run an Editors' Note stating that-oops-Mr. Vongerichten's glowing blurb for Ms. Hesser's recent book, Cooking for Mr. Latte , should have been 'fessed up to in Ms. Hesser's glowing review. ("Amanda Hesser's charming personality shines as the reader experiences the life and loves of a New York City gourmet," Mr. Vongerichten enthused on Ms. Hesser's book jacket. " Cooking for Mr. Latte is perfectly seasoned with sensuality and superb recipes.") Even the Village Voice has weighed in, calling for the Times to "strip Spice Market of its stars and start from scratch."

Upon hearing of Ms. Hesser's review of Montrachet, Mr. Nieporent-who has been one of the leading voices of the New York restaurant scene for the past two decades-was apoplectic. "I've added too much to the landscape of New York dining for someone to come in and say, after 19 years, somebody else was right, but now they're wrong!" he said later. "When you're interim, you don't rock the boat. You don't knock somebody's head off." Ms. Hesser declined to comment.

The way in which Mr. Nieporent got the news of his downgrade didn't help matters. Ms. Hesser appeared on New York 1's NY Close-Up on March 16, the evening before the review hit newsstands. NY1's Sam Roberts asked her on-camera, "When a restaurant goes from a three-star to a two-star, does it really have an impact?" Ms. Hesser giggled. "I guess they'll be disappointed!"

Mr. Nieporent and his staff huddled around the television in his storefront office between Nobu and Tribeca Grill, two other restaurants he owns watching her pixilated image, flabbergasted.

Mr. Grimes wasn't exactly beloved by the city's restaurant industry-many considered him sensationalist, too transfixed by his fine-tuned prose to appreciate or even understand the joys of the table-but now his controversial tenure seems like the good old days. "Having an interim reviewer is not fair to a community that lives on longer than the reviewer does," said chef-about-town Rocco DiSpirito, whose Flatiron showplace Union Pacific was downgraded to two stars from three on Feb. 11 by Ms. Burros. "People tend to be less fair at the beginning and end of their tenure."

The Times , for its part, is pooh-poohing complaints about its interim critics. "Our consistency in the matter of restaurant criticism is assured by our trust in the people we put in the chair, for however long they are asked to sit there," said Dining section editor Sam Sifton. Besides, Mr. Sifton pointed out, the paper uses many different movie and book reviewers, and "readers learn to take each on his or her own terms, not expecting total conformity to a single standard of taste."

As for the recent changing of the stars at traditionally first-tier restaurants, Style department editor Barbara Graustark pointed out that the stars awarded to restaurants will inevitably evolve. "Stars aren't ranks awarded permanently, the way the Army awards somebody, say, a colonel's insignia," Ms. Graustark said. "A star is part of the review. The reviewer writes the review and has no obligation to heed an earlier reviewer's reaction."

Former Times restaurant critic Mimi Sheraton, author of Eating My Words , a book about her experiences in the job, said interim critics were "inevitable." "If they have not found anyone who they like, who wants to work for them, they have to have a critic, and after all there are at least three movie critics," she said, adding that "all reviews are controversial."

But this stretch of interim critics has seemed particularly rocky. Besides the controversial star-removals from two of the city's culinary institutions, there was an unfortunate error that had to be corrected when Ms. Burros awarded Bread Tribeca two stars on Jan. 14, and only one was printed in the paper. Bread's owners, Luigi Comandatore and Bob Giraldi, were furious. The paper let Mr. Comandatore and Mr. Giraldi run an ad saying "A Missing Star Is Found" at a bargain price. The Times has also printed the retraction twice. "I would trust that, in the future, they would be more accurate," Mr. Giraldi said. "Mistakes happen even to the esteemed New York Times . It's unfortunate that Marian had to go through that." Perhaps, he said, there was even a bright side: Given all the controversy, now the industry knows more about Bread Tribeca than ever before. "But sometimes mistakes alter people's livelihoods," he added. "In the end, it got corrected. I know we have a two-star restaurant."

The once high-flying, now suddenly beleaguered Mr. DiSpirito's situation has not come to such a happy ending. After the hubbub died down from his much publicized and criticized reality-television show, The Restaurant , Mr. DiSpirito decided to completely renovate Union Pacific, which had received three stars from Ruth Reichl in 1998. On Jan. 23, Ms. Hesser wrote a Diner's Journal piece singing Mr. DiSpirito's praises. "With the menu, Mr. DiSpirito has made the vital leap from frustrated artist to man with a plan-and his fame has certainly attracted good talent to his kitchen," she wrote. But two weeks later, Ms. Burros came out with a devastating review, dropping Union Pacific's star rating down to two. Ms. Burros wrote that it looked like the chef was spending more time at his "television-created spaghetti parlor" than Union Pacific, and included details such as "silver cloches cover main dishes (sadly many of them are dented)." She had to wait, she wrote, an hour and 40 minutes for her entrée.

"I remember the night she was referring to," said Mr. DiSpirito. "I myself was very concerned because her guests were almost an hour late. While her description is accurate, the reason for the delay is entirely her guests' fault." He said her review has cost him a million dollars in sales. "If that isn't personal, what is? After the TV show there was a backlash-the food community thinks, 'He's not a serious chef anymore.' We were counting on a good review after an extremely beautiful renovation to compensate for the stupid economy we're living through. Now we're slow, we're a lot slower than we projected."

As for Mr. DiSpirito's accusation that her negative review had something to do with his television show. Ms. Burros said, "I never saw that program. The review had to do with the quality of the food." Ms. Burros said she chose to review the restaurant because "it was redone and recast; he was now off his spaghetti-restaurant program and back paying attention to this other place and that makes it relevant."

Mr. DiSpirito was not convinced, "I think I was punished."

Not surprisingly, conspiracy theories are also circulating about Ms. Hesser's review of Montrachet. One restaurant-industry insider opined that she chose to review Montrachet because "she had a premise and she was looking for a restaurant to write it on. She thought, 'Let me write a downgrading review of a restaurant that's been around for a while.'" Another theory making the rounds is that Ms. Hesser was getting back at Mr. Nieporent for writing her an angry letter after she allegedly misquoted Montrachet's sommelier in an article about Wine Spectator magazine's awards. Mr. Nieporent said he found it odd that Ms. Hesser barely mentioned wine in her review, when his restaurant is known for having one of the best wine cellars in the country. The angry letter, he said, was the only explanation he could think of. "People said to us, 'Your mistake was writing her the letter, not somebody above her.' I would understand if we got a two-star and it was a two-star write-up, and it meant two stars, but where at any moment in the history of this restaurant has there ever been a blip on its reputation?" He was even more aggravated with Ms. Hesser after her Spice Market review. "They didn't even bill themselves as a three-star restaurant," he fumed.

Even apart from the three stars, Ms. Hesser's Spice Market review caused a stir for failing to mention the restaurant's chef, Gray Kunz, while ladling on the praise for Mr. Vongerichten, the owner. "I don't know why she didn't put him in there," said Mr. Vongerichten. "When she called for the fact-check, we told them Gray Kunz was with us, but I can't control what people write. The review was more about the food. With a review like that you can please everybody. She should have mentioned him but she didn't." He said that since the review the food world keeps buzzing with gossip about him and Ms. Hesser. "The last thing I heard was yesterday I slept with her, and who knows what's going to happen tomorrow." he said. "I met Ms. Hesser one time five years ago and I don't even know what she looks like. New York is like a small village."

Just why is it taking so long to fill the paper of record's restaurant critic's spot, anyway? The Times doesn't think the wait has been too long at all. "This is a very important position, which is typically held for a considerable period of time, four to five years," said Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis. "It behooves us not to rush the process."

The Times reportedly approached four different writers to fill the position-Bill Buford, former New Yorker fiction editor and author of Heat: An Amateur Cook in a Professional Kitchen ; Jay McInerney, author of Bright Lights, Big City and a columnist at House & Garden magazine; Julian Barnes, British former television critic and author of Flaubert's Parrot ; and Michael Bauer, food critic at the San Francisco Chronicle -and all turned it down.

Clark Wolf, president of a New York–based restaurant consultancy, thinks the paper's Dining Section needs to come down off its high horse. " The New York Times can be a little puritanical about food. Food is the largest industry in the world and the most powerful topic there is. Everything else in The New York Times will be useless, but try not eating."

What will really be the test of The Times is whether or not their reviews continue to have influence in a rapidly changing restaurant scene. A review that was once ominous may now merely be just one more voice amid the din. On Saturday, April 3, Montrachet's two back rooms were still packed at 10:30 p.m., and its parmesan-encrusted Chilean sea bass and kiwi and passion-fruit croustillant still felt like an experience, a special occasion, that no review could ruin. At another restaurant slighted by Ms. Hesser, Asiate, the chef, Nori Sugie, was still receiving gift cards and flowers for his pan-roasted scallops, and there was still a line outside the door all weekend. And despite the storm he's weathered, Mr. Nieporent remained upbeat: "We will survive because we're every bit as good as when we opened that restaurant."

-Alexandra Wolfe

He Kilt Connery

Sean Connery looked pretty damn robust in his tartan-plaid kilt and W.W.E.-sized sporran as he shook the hands of well-wishers who crowded up against him. The Scottish actor had just left the stage of the Highland Park Dressed to Kilt fashion show at Sotheby's East on York Avenue where he'd kicked off the evening's festivities by noting in his buttery burr that "a lot of good whiskey has been flowing and I just hope you've had your fair share." But as he walked the gauntlet of gladhanders back to his seat, ceremonial dagger tucked into his tall socks, a fair-haired man wearing a kilt and mischief in his eyes called out to the former James Bond: "I said you were dead!"

Though Mr. Connery didn't seem to hear and soon disappeared behind a door, he was being hailed by Phil Cunningham, Scotland's famed accordionist and composer.

Mr. Cunningham, who was wearing a powder-blue suit and vest, explained that approximately three years ago, in the hours before a concert in Madrid, Spain, he was watching a Spanish-language television newscast and saw Mr. Connery's picture flash up on the screen. At that moment, Mr. Cunningham said, "I decided I could speak Spanish and that the news was that Sean Connery had died." So Mr. Cunningham went onstage that night intending to pay tribute to his fellow countryman. "We played a slow tune for him," Mr. Cunningham said. "You should have seen it-4,000 people in Madrid waving their cigarette lighters because they think Sean Connery has died."

Unlike Franco, however, Mr. Connery was very much alive, and some time later a few of Mr. Cunningham's musician friends were at a party at comedian Billy Connolly's house. Mr. Connery was there too, and when they filled the actor in on what had happened in Spain, Mr. Connery decided to call up the man who declared him dead.

"They had me on speaker phone," Mr. Cunningham remembered. "And Connery said to me: 'It would serve you well to stop laughing and listen to what I have to say, you little shit.' Mr. Cunningham distinctly remembered the "little shit" part of the conversation, but he said Mr. Connery was not really angry. "He was just winding me up," Mr. Cunningham said, adding: "I'll never wash my phone again."

Speaking of wind-ups, partygoers noticed that up in the windowed V.V.I.P. booth overlooking the kilt-heavy fashion show (high point: Jimmy's Downtown restaurateur Jimmy Rodriguez channeling his inner J. Lo in an all-red kilt and suit and a floppy red hat), Mr. Connery seemed to be getting along quite well with Scotland's First Minister Jack McConnell, contrary to press reports across the pond that the two are feuding. Mr. Connery reportedly had snubbed Mr. McConnell's attempts to meet him here in New York during Tartan Week (of which Dressed to Kilt was part) because he reportedly felt that Mr. McConnell has been slow to use him to promote Scotland abroad.

-Frank DiGiacomo

When You've Got Lemon ….

In 1972, President Nixon was a little paranoid. It was the first year that 18-year-olds could vote, and because it seemed that American 18-year-olds liked rocker/activist John Lennon, and Lennon's politics were left of Nixon's, 18-year-olds might therefore not vote for Nixon. Thus, to prevent such a crisis, Lennon should be kindly removed from America, thank you very much.

And, because American politics even from last century seem the stuff of great fiction, this whole magilla is now being played out at the DR2 Theater in Ears on a Beatle , a play by Mark St. Germain which opened on March 28 and stars Dan (the dad from The Wonder Years ) Lauria as a hardened F.B.I. agent on Lennon's trail and Bill Dawes as his young protégé. The characters are fictional but the facts-and F.B.I. documents on view in the theater's lobby-are real.

But a little ways uptown, there's a real character who played a major part in this now fictionalized event and is largely left out of the play, although he consulted on its production. He's Leon Wildes, the immigration lawyer who bucked the F.B.I. and made it possible for Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, to stay stateside.

In January 1972, Mr. Wildes was asked by a friend who was Apple Record's attorney to talk to Ms. Ono and Lennon about their immigration woes. He suggested that Mr. Wildes go meet them at their Greenwich Village apartment. "Why can't they just come to my office like everyone else?" he asked his friend. His friend explained they were important people.

When he went back to Forest Hills later that night after his first meeting with the celebrity couple, his late wife asked why any client would get such special treatment.

"I said it was a man named Jack Lemon-he's with some singing group and his wife is this bright Japanese lady," he recalled.

"He called her 'Quasimodo,'" said his son, Michael Wildes, who is now the mayor of Englewood, N.J.

"And my wife said, 'John Lennon!' Where have you been? How could you get so stupid!"

Stupid is the last thing Mr. Wildes ever was. While other lawyers had shrugged off the Lennon/Ono case, he devoured it. Their main reason for wanting to stay in America was to look for Kyoko Cox, Ms. Ono's daughter from a previous marriage. While visiting the child the previous year, her ex-husband absconded with her and hid in a maze of communes throughout the country. Two courts had ruled in favor of Ms. Ono having custody of the girl, but she couldn't actually be found. (Now a Colorado schoolteacher, Ms. Cox remained completely out of contact with Ms. Ono until the late 90's when she had her first child and tracked her mother down.)

The couple's largest problem when it came to their inability to stay in this country, however, was Lennon's inability to get a visa because of a conviction against him in England for possessing cannabis resin (better known as hashish). Cunningly, Mr. Wildes-who admits he had no idea what cannabis or hashish were during that first conversation over a cup of "tay" in the Lennon/Ono kitchen-suggested that cannabis resin might not be written into the law that kept convicted drug possessors out of the country. It wasn't. Yet this English conviction was the basis of the effort by President Nixon, F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover and U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond to deport Mr. Lennon.

Or Mr. Lemon.

"One of the first times I left their place in the village, I asked a long-haired cab driver who this guy was and he said, 'You really don't know? He's the biggest name in music …. More people will know John Lennon's music than Beethoven," he said.

Mr. Wildes also had the feeling that it'd be unlikely in a high-profile case involving a couple looking for a small child for the government to let one of the spouses stay without the other. He was wrong. Obstacle begat obstacle and soon he realized that his phones were being tapped and documents he was filing with the courts were going missing. He got permanent residence for Ms. Ono, but it took three suits against the government and five years to win permanent-resident status for Lennon. Lennon, Mr. Wildes said, had an amazing sense of humor throughout the ordeal. One time, he bent down and shined the prosecuting attorney's shoes. "But there is no question they were trying to violate his First Amendment rights," he said.

"When I read the play today, I thought, you know, since 9/11, I have this uneasy feeling that our rights-our constitutional rights, our civil rights, our civil liberties-are in jeopardy because everything is being done in the name of security," he continued. "The whole immigration department has been turned over to the homeland-security department and they're not interested in immigration and they'll hold up an application for an extra year till they get together to check out, [for instance], a little old lady from Israel. It's the same feeling I had during the Watergate years."

Although he still looks like a buttoned-up square, Mr. Wildes listens again and again to the full collection of Beatles LP's and records from Lennon's later days that the late musician personally gave him. "His music is his personality coming through in an artistic way," he said. "He wasn't my normal kind of friend, and I was certainly not his normal kind of friend … but I loved that man."

-Anna Jane Grossman

Mr. Slimane's invitation to this brave-and loud-new world began with a tactually interesting all-black envelope that looked like a sheet of those perforated strips that you rip to open express-mail envelopes. The details of the soirée (for the Dior Homme boutique on East 57th Street, which opened on Feb. 7) were printed on the envelope, which made the cardboard slick found inside appear pretty useless-although, in retrospect, it contained a clue about what to expect: a black-and-white image of a ribbed runway flanked by walls of large and small stereo speakers.

And walls of sound were exactly what invitees first encountered upon entering the loft space at 545 West 22nd Street. Wailing acid guitars and organ-rattling bass-and-drum rhythms-courtesy of D.J. Spencer Product-assailed the ears, while Mr. Slimane's lighting scheme messed with the eyes. The center of the room, where most of the guests were gathering in clumps, was kept murky, save for the periodic, jarring explosions of the paparazzi's flashbulbs, while, on the left side of the room, some of the more extroverted guests were lounging on red-lit mattresses raised on a stage-like platform. On the right side of the room, a dozen or so lithe, dissolute men and women posed on what looked like a raised runway bathed in white.

They were the bartenders.

In order to get a drink, you had to get one of them to crouch down to your level. What happened next was a high-volume game of telephone: You shrieked your order to the bartender, who rose, sauntered over to a team of bottle jockeys pouring drinks below stage level, repeated the shriek and, eventually, returned with the goods. Later in the evening, some of the lazier hirelings began lounging on the runway/bar, making it easier to order, but just as easy to get a snootful of ass when the order-taker turned away to get it filled.

Into this super-sized sensual feast came model Helena Christensen, musician David Byrne, actor-director Vincent Gallo, socialite Fabian Basabe, artist Andres Serrano, model Sophie Dahl, Elle fashion-news director Anne Slowey, Vogue creative director Grace Coddington, and P.S. 1's Alana Heiss and Klaus Biesenbach. Most gathered in small clumps and, after realizing that a) trying to hold a conversation above the din was both painful and tiresome, and b) it was too dark to scrutinize what anyone but the bartenders or the red-lit exhibitionists were wearing, many of the guests seemed to drift into a speechless altered state. It was like watching a bloodless version of the "Bela Lugosi Is Dead" sequence in The Hunger.

And there near the entrance observing this tableau was Mr. Slimane, looking pale and fragile-a little like the David Bowie character in that movie.

"What kind of mood did you want to convey with this party?" The Transom asked the fashion designer, holding our digital recorder as close to his mouth as possible. It didn't quite work. Mr. Slimane could be heard saying-in a hoarse voice, naturally-that he "DIDN'T WANT TO DO ONE OF THOSE OPENING-STORES PARTIES"-by this we think he meant a typical store-opening party-but the music drowned out everything else. And when we asked him about his idea to have the bartenders standing on the bar, he replied: "ALL THE WORLD IS ABOUT STAGE, SO I WANTED TO EXPERIENCE THAT IDEA WITH THOSE BARTENDERS."

At his last Paris show, Mr. Slimane made a similar point, lighting the crowd around the runway more than his clothes, and this time he seemed to be playing with light and sound. Mr. Slimane glanced across the room to a third stage that had been set up with a drum kit and microphones, and said that he was looking forward to seeing Sonic Youth-the art-noise band fronted by Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore-perform later.

"I JUST THOUGHT I WANTED TO BE AT A CONCERT OF SONIC YOUTH," Mr. Slimane said.

The Transom then suggested to Mr. Slimane that his shindig seemed to be about seeing and hearing, but not talking.

"IT'S JUST ABOUT ENJOYING," he replied.

And, of course, selling. With so many parties built around marketing an image or a product these days, the superficial, narcissistic nattering of hundreds of opinionated, drink-swilling New Yorkers was really beside the point. Which is why Mr. Slimane's soirée felt like a taste of the future, in which the marketer saturates the consumer with his message, leaving room for nothing else.

A week earlier, the folks at Cargo-a magazine that represents a future in which advertising and editorial content become increasingly indistinguishable-had achieved a similar but much less art-directed effect at a party celebrating the publication of their first issue. Once again, the music was cranked to conversation-killing levels, leaving a visual frieze of human still-lifes involving such manly pursuits as shaving.

Nadine Johnson, who helped plan the Dior party, said she wasn't at the Cargo affair. But she could speak on the subject of Mr. Slimane: "He's into art, music and light," Ms. Johnson said. "I know that Hedi was very conscious that it was going to be a loud party, because the night before he said to me, 'Do you have your plugs?'"

-Frank DiGiacomo

Chat 'n' Chew

Bill Boggs, the talk-show host who credits himself with inventing the art of conducting interviews while eating, has something to say. But first he has to finish chewing.

"Mmmmm," he intoned at Osteria del Circo one recent afternoon as his gleaming choppers did overtime on a particularly hearty chunk of some brown piece of something. "Bison!" he said. (Swallow.) "Very healthy. Probably better for you than chicken. Did you know that?"

The Emmy-winning Mr. Boggs, 6-foot-1 and rakish in a tan-and-coiffed game-show-host kind of way, is full of such interesting information and is currently imparting it to audiences every Monday night at the Triad Theater in BillÊBoggs' Talk Show Confidential, his one-man show that opened in December.

The hour-long jaunt down memory lane covers the highlights of the many shows Mr. Boggs has hosted and produced and touches on the "truth" about dozens of what he estimates are the 8,000 celebrities he's interviewed (a.k.a. "the egomaniacs I've been coddling all these years").

Television hosts as stars-or wannabe stars-are nothing new. You'd be hard-pressed to find one who doesn't aspire to be the guest on someone else's show. The crop of spotlight-seeking hosts has only expanded since the mid-90's talk heyday, where anyone with a first name could land his or her own hour of TV chat. In recent years, talk maven Maury Povich's fertility problems with anchor and talk queen Connie Chung constituted news, while Oprah Winfrey-only slightly more recognizable than Katie Couric's colon-started a magazine that has her mug on the cover every friggin' month.

But Mr. Boggs, who'll admit to his age only in NBC years ("Older than Matt Lauer, younger than Chuck Scarborough"), is kind of late to follow this trend. He was a television presence for decades before he started pairing chat with chew. When his parents discouraged him from pursuing acting, he began his television career in the 1960's in his native Philadelphia, moved on to become a local celebrity with his own talk show in North Carolina, then came to New York in the mid-70's and hosted Midday Live with Bill Boggs, which aired on the late WNEW (Channel 5) for 12 years. He went on to host and produce shows on half a dozen major networks.

While his peers might often be better recognized on the street than the people they're interviewing, Mr. Boggs remains happily on the periphery. He's familiar-looking, but not traffic-stopping; accomplished, but not boastful. A woman, he said, recently stuck her finger in his face at a party and pronounced, "You don't know who I am, but I'm going to make you squirm! I know where you live! My friend Gina lives in your building on 78th and Park!"

Mr. Boggs looked back at her unfazed. Twice divorced, he now lives with Pip, a dachshund, on Central Park South, and told her so.

"Oh, you're not Tony Roberts?" the woman said.

But Mr. Boggs hails from another era of television host: the host as quiet gentleman. And though he's now seeking a small ration of celebrity, his present show shines its light more brightly on his many interview subjects over the years than on himself.

In his show, he talks about them-from Margaret Mead to Arnold Schwarzenegger-as if he were talking about his childhood baseball hero or an oft-ogled pin-up girl.

"Often in the middle of an interview, I think: 'Wow! I can't believe I'm interviewing Sophia Loren! Or Sean Connery!' There's this little boy's voice," he tells the audience.

He was nearly spitting with excitement when he related to us how singer Peggy Lee invited him to talk at her bedside after an interview-an anecdote he left out of the show due to time constraints.

"I sit down next to her, and she takes my hand and is caressing it, and suddenly I think: 'Am I supposed to sleep with Peggy Lee?'"-he took a sip of water (timing is everything!)-"'Because if I'm supposed to, I don't want to! I'm not in the mood!' That line always gets a laugh." (He admitted to us that he's had liaisons with a few of his 8,000 guests, but declined to name names-except to say that Lee and he were never intimate.)

He talks about having Dr. Spock fall asleep on his show and about the time he tried to cajole the bulge-battling duchess, Sarah Ferguson, on his Food Network show, Bill Boggs' Corner Table (a show that still periodically airs) into eating a Twinkie on-camera. (She checked the food's fiber content and politely declined.)

The idea of eating and interviewing, which he perfected on Corner Table, was originally given to Mr. Boggs by his friend, the comedian Marty (Igor) Feldman. On a beach one morning, Feldman-stoned and probably suffering from the munchies-suggested melding afternoon talk television with food. (Ironically, Feldman died shortly thereafter following a bout of food poisoning.) The gimmick worked.

"We have a lifetime of familiarity of sitting at a table, eating and talking," Mr. Boggs said, scanning the dessert menu. "And when it's on-camera, you can capture some of that relaxation-that comfort people associated with eating at a table."

But as so often happens-and despite his parents' early warnings-the stage beckoned once he'd perfected on-screen table talk. So he jumped at the chance to sing in Our Sinatra, the Off Broadway review, in 2001. Its producers removed a few songs to give Mr. Boggs time to share his various Sinatra stories-from disguising himself as a busboy while a teenager so he could see Sinatra perform at Atlantic City, to having him as a guest on his own show.

Later that year, he did some stints as a "guest celebrity" on a cruise ship and developed a presentation about his career for the passengers.

"It was so much fun! And I realized I needed-needed-to have the traction of something really creative in my life. I needed a performance outlet, needed to get onstage," he said, scooping up some pineapple sorbet. "Wait, I have to have a bite. Mmmm."

The pretty young waitress came over, and Mr. Boggs introduced himself to her. There was no glimmer of recognition on her face, but he didn't seem to mind.

At a Drama League luncheon a year and a half ago, John Houseman Theater founder and artistic director Eric Krebs encouraged the host extraordinaire to develop a show, and offered to put money into it.

"So last March, I went home to my mother's house in Philadelphia and sat down at the table, where I used to do my homework, and I sketched out the outline of the show. And that was it," he said.

Mr. Boggs is arguably at his finest at the show's end, where, while showing photos from his career, he recounts to the audience words of wisdom he's collected from the august types he's known. Like a child presenting treasured and cataloged shells, Mr. Boggs recites the maxims and aphorisms while beaming. Pushing his plate away, he repeated part of the monologue.

"Sinatra? He said to me, 'Sometimes you have to scrape bottom to realize how wonderful life can be.' … Burt Lancaster put his arm around me and said, 'You will live many lives, Bill, many lives, and just be the best person you can be in each of them.' Tommy Tune? 'Every day is a student of yesterday.' Then there's Duke Ellington, who sat me down at the piano while playing with one hand and said, 'Be happy in this moment Bill, because this moment is your life.'"

In the Triad audience at one recent performance, talk-show host Richard Bey-who, unprompted, stood up to salute the rest of the theatergoers-was seated next to sexpert and radio talk-show host Dr. Judy Kuriansky. At the line about Ellington, Dr. Judy, for perhaps the fourth time, sighed an audible "Uh-huh. Absolutely."

When reminded of this moment at lunch, Mr. Boggs cringed.

"I know!" he said. "The whole time, she's going, 'Oh, yes … oh, yes …. ' And I'm thinking, 'Dr. Judy, shut up! This is my show.'"

-Anna Jane Grossman

I Want My QVC

"I'm one of those New York fancy chefs," narrates chef Rocco DiSpirito at the beginning of his reality-TV show The Restaurant. Now, the "fancy chef" will not only be on NBC arguing with his publicist at the gas station and driving his Mitsubishi S.U.V. to his mother's apartment in Queens; he'll soon be selling his cookware on QVC!

It's no secret that other high-profile Manhattan foodies thought Mr. DiSpirito was selling out by turning himself into a mini-industry on TV. When Mr. DiSpirito tried to film a chef demonstration at the Four Seasons, owner Julian Niccolini wouldn't allow the cameras into his restaurant.

"I'm running a real restaurant here, and we're going to focus on serving great food to nice people, not on a TV show," he said after the incident. Mr. DiSpirito has told reporters, "If there's people who think I'm no longer an artist and I've sold out, I'd say that the good chefs sell out every night: Their dining rooms are sold out every night."

Mr. DiSpirito just keeps on selling. On March 10, he celebrated the publication of his new book, Flavor, and the launch of his line of cookware on the Home Shopping Network at Rocco's on 22nd Street. He started the afternoon by dividing the crowd of QVC staffers and journalists into groups of four. Each group stood around its own table setup, equipped with omelet pan, eggs and garnishes. Mr. DiSpirito demonstrated how to make a fluffy omelet in five minutes or less and everyone else followed along, a demonstration he will repeat on the Home Shopping Network on March 29. Afterward, he treated his already-stuffed guests to a lunch of mushroom broth, salmon and cheesecake.

When the TV cameras stopped filming Mr. DiSpirito preparing the food in an un-chef-like navy V-neck sweater and blue Oxford underneath, The Transom asked him how other chefs felt about his upcoming QVC appearance.

"Well, I've only heard it thirdhand," he said. "I've heard some remarks that sound bitter. No one's ever told me to my face that they're jealous.

"I think that there's competition-rivalry-in every world," he pronounced.

Mr. DiSpirito will remind one who has a hard time imagining Anthony Bourdain or Jean-Georges Vongerichten competing for that QVC slot that different chefs ply different orbits in the foodie solar system.

"I wouldn't be surprised if there are people who love what I'm doing, as there are people who can't stand it. I think everyone chooses their own path. I may be making the biggest mistake of my life-I have no idea. But you gotta take risks and move with it and see what happens."

-Alexandra Wolfe

Thanks in part to this bargain flight, Palm Beach is back, baby-in a way it hasn't been since its 1950's heyday. Sure, elderly "snow birds" are still walking two by two into Charley's Crab for dinner at 5:30 on the button, but now, across Ocean Boulevard, 20-year-old surfers are shaking the saltwater out of their hair and former Limelight regulars are pulling up their bikini straps. Worth Avenue no longer reeks of Old Spice, but Marc Jacobs and Issey Miyake. The swerving cars on Royal Poinciana are more likely to be tipsy twentysomethings leaving cocktail parties than bottle-blond biddies looking for their privet hedges. The so-called "Bright Young Things" are packing Club Colette, the Everglades Club and the Institute of Contemporary Art. They party at Trump's Mar-a-Lago, dine in Las Vegas–style restaurants at the chintzy new City Place, and raise their martini glasses at social benefits like the Preservation Ball.

Socialite Sale Johnson has a house there overlooking two golf courses and a pond. "It's a totally refreshing, regenerating kind of thing," she said. "It's a recharging of your batteries." She said Palm Beach was a nice respite from Manhattan nightclubs-which are "filled with people from Long Island and New Jersey" on the weekends-and the new money of Miami's South Beach. She'll go to the latter "if there's something special like with Jay-Z, because Jay-Z's a friend of mine," she said, "but usually I just stay in Palm Beach."

Psychiatrist-socialite Samantha Boardman agreed. "The generation that was originally going to Miami has been stolen away by Palm Beach. Maybe Miami's aging," she said. "The perception of Palm Beach as a retirement community-as God's waiting room-is gone. Now it's fun and young, with couples like the junior Fanjuls and Donahues living there full-time. It used to be the butt of everyone's joke to be wheeled around down there with the old ladies whipping out their fur coats when it's 70 degrees." Now, she said, there has been an influx of new money into the area, with "huge houses and fleets of private planes."

Jeffrey Podolsky, the New York editor of Tatler magazine and a convert to the pleasures of Palm Beach, cited "two major weddings"-publicist Liz Cohen's and Marjorie Gubelmann's-as tipping points of the last year's youth movement. "As much as Palm Beach is still the bastion of big money, old and new, some of the young beautiful things have given a face-lift to the town," he said. "Now they're in the forefront of a new society that Palm Beach needs."

Ms. de Woody said when she moved to West Palm four years ago, all of her friends were "shocked," but this year it's getting really popular.

"It's kind of like the Hamptons," she said. "People are seeing all the parties going on this year. There's a lot of money this year, and a lot of events going on." She mentioned several New Year's parties and Dennis Basso's birthday at Club Colette.

Of course, there are grumblers.

"You just have grotesque people clogging the roads," said Dirk Wittenborn, producer of the documentary Born Rich . "I saw a guy driving this vintage Aston Martin, and I see he has a giant Havana cigar, and he lit it, and he tried to flip his sun visor but caught his cigar on the visor and burned it. Palm Beach is perfect for that."

He said it was characteristic of how "all the old WASP resorts now have new rich people."

The reasons for the surge of interest in Palm Beach among New Yorkers are at least partly financial. After all, as Martha Stewart has taught us, being rich is no excuse for being a spendthrift. When Bloomberg raised the real-estate tax 18.5 percent at the end of 2002, Palm Beach became even more attractive for its lack of a state personal-income tax, and more and more young people decided to take advantage. By becoming a resident of Florida-which you can do spending roughly half your time there-a 35-year-old investment banker's income could increase by a double-digit percentage. And he'll get more bang for his buck: A mansion on Ocean Boulevard broadcasts wealth much more effectively than an apartment in the Time Warner Center that no one will ever notice.

Newcomers must first navigate the financial and social implications of being "on the island" versus "off the island." Owning a house on the island of Palm Beach still has more Old World cachet than having property in West Palm. But with West Palm expanding by the day, and with more land available, new-money New Yorkers are beginning to notice. Business 2.0 just ranked West Palm among the best places for high-paying job growth in the country.

And jetting down in a private plane or paying $800 on American is no longer the hip way to get to Palm Beach. JetBlue (average round trip: $250) has become a "winter Jitney" of sorts for the high-society set. JetBlue spokesman Gareth Edmondson-Jones said that in just the past year, passenger numbers have increased by 35 percent. The airline started with two flights a day between J.F.K. and West Palm and now has 11. Delta's discount airline, Song, is another option for low-cost flights there.

At two and a half hours, the flight takes no longer than the Hampton Jitney's trek along the Long Island Expressway. But instead of cell-phone squawkers and share-house frat boys, Neue Galerie committee members mingle with Wellington polo players, and Manhattan art dealers air-kiss Wall Street power players. "It's like the equivalent of when people knew each other on the Concorde to London." Mr. Podolsky said.

"I take pride in it," Ms. Boardman declared of the cheapie airline. "There's a sense of fun in traveling. Everyone's in the same class, eating Terra Blue chips and looking forward to their daiquiris. It's like they're all on their way to the clubhouse!"

And the JetBlue terminal at J.F.K. has become a clubhouse cafeteria of sorts, with Town and Country and Quest magazines prominently stocked at the Hudson News kiosk, flanked by palm trees. In the middle of the terminal, well-manicured hands pull Hermès wallets out of their pastel Jelly Kellys to pay for smoked-salmon cream-cheese maki at Deep Blue Sushi. Forty-year-old women smile through collagen-enhanced lips at the cheery ticket-checkers. They strut down the walkway to the airplane, past jazzy paintings of women stepping out of JetBlue jets and into a tropical setting where dashing men in suits photograph them as if they were old movie starlets.

At the beginning of a morning flight on Feb. 27, the pilot introduced one of the attractive young stewardesses.

"Abby, our resident celebrity, will be walking up and down the aisle giving out headsets," he said in a Mr. Moviefone–esque voice. "She was on ER last night. She played a cadaver. She was also on Sex and the City , but we won't be telling you what she did in that!"

Abby blushed as she walked past the rows of seats in a form-fitting navy suit, a navy polka-dot scarf tied pertly around her neck.

"Anyway, she'll be walking up and down the aisles with headsets, and she'll be tickled pink to give you one. Abby's also an excellent pillow giver-outer. She's good at blankets, too, but that's Debbie's job."

Thirty-year-old women smirked in their shearlings and single men in baseball caps craned their necks, but not a single blue-hair could be seen shaking her wattle. Later, the other stewardesses, Molly and Debbie, passed out the Terra Blue chips, chocolate-chip biscotti, Doritos and Animal Crackers. "It's easy, the service is great, and the cost of the flight is the amount you'd spend at a club one night in New York," Ms. Johnson said.

Despite the avowed eager ness of the Palm Beach jet set to get away from the scene up north, savvy businesses back home know better. WithsuchrestaurantsasCafé Boulud, Chez Jean-Pierre and Cucina Dell'Arte opening, young people in Palm Beach have more New Yorky places to go.

Lining the upper level of City Place-a cross between a Las Vegas mega-mall and Disney World-are trendy new restaurants, notably Tsunami, an Asian-flavored offshoot of East Hampton's NV Tsunami. Like many Hamptons nightspots, Tsunami functions as a restaurant by day and a dance club by night. And Resort, the 2003 summer "It" spot in Amagansett, is opening an outlet in West Palm in the spring.

At night, Palm Beach's restaurants are impromptu parties unto themselves. On Friday, Feb. 27, about a dozen prominent New York partygoers sat around a table at Bice, another restaurant with a New York counterpart. Young socialites Celerie Kemble, Lulu de Kwiatkowski, Katherine Cohen, Fernanda Niven and Boykin Curry had flown into town earlier that day and descended en masse upon the traditional eatery. Later, they went to Cucina Dell'Arte, the new hip Italian restaurant that becomes a hopping bar after 10 p.m. on weekends, where Forbes heir Miguel Forbes stood at the bar in khakis and a red sweater, chatting up two blondes.

Eighties music blared from a static-ridden sound system, but no one seemed to mind. As the night progressed, more and more men in their 30's and 40's wearing starched polo shirts piled around the wooden bar. Some ordered tropical drinks while others knocked back beers.

And when the sun rose on their hangovers, they worked through the pain and the dehydration with a few rounds of upscale golf. The first thing you notice about Donald Trump's new nearly 200-acre golf course, Trump International, which sits about two miles from Palm Beach International Airport, is the massive, gaudy crystal-and-gold-leaf chandeliers that line the halls of the clubhouse. The 240 members each paid a $300,000 initiation fee and will pay yearly fees of $15,000. Mr. Trump plans to expand the club by adding another nine holes to the course and approximately 100 members to the club.

Two million cubic yards of dirt were moved to build Mr. Trump's golf club, and an entire farm of royal palm trees was reportedly planted on the grounds. The course was designed by Jim Fazio, brother of Tom Fazio, one of the most prolific course designers in the nation. The men's and women's locker rooms have pine and mahogany lockers with engraved nameplates. The former has its own dining room and billiards table; the latter, a card room with flowing pink drapes. The head golf pro, Lee Rinker, knows all the members by name, and on Feb. 27, he waved to former Miami Dolphins quarterback Bob Griese as the gridiron great was leaving.

Golfing is one draw; horseback-riding is another. On the riding circuit, equestrians from New York fly down every weekend to compete at Wellington in the show ring or on the polo field. Ms. Johnson flies to Florida with her teenage daughter Daisy, who is a competitive rider, on a regular basis. Standing outside the show ring at the Wellington horse show, Mama Johnson described a recent dinner she attended at Jane Holzer's Palm Beach home.

"She's, I think, one of the more fun people here," Ms. Johnson said. "Last time, it was a very mixed group of people-from Jim Palmer to Gabriel Byrne to Ashley and Rusty Holzer to Mark Badgley of Badgley Mischka."

Ms. Johnson also hobnobs with the horse-showing crowd, which includes entertainment celebrities like Bruce Springsteen, Lorraine Bracco and Glenn Close, whose children ride.

"They rent here every weekend," she said.

On Saturday around 3 p.m., while the horsy set was hitting the saddle, Range Rovers and Mercedes started rolling down Dixie Highway, the shopping strip known for its antiques, and extremely popular despite its depressing strip-mall-laundromat ambiance. Two new restaurants have opened there, Rhythm Café and the Tea House, both of which have a funky décor-artsy without the fartsy. It's a place where shoppers come to play the name game as much as to browse the bamboo book shelves.

Back on the island, young women in white pants, silk halter-tops and matching Birkin bags peeked into such stately Worth Avenue stores as Isabel's and Kassatly's. With their bright contrasting colors-one promenader braved a peacock-blue sweater paired with tangerine Capri pants-the denizens of Worth Avenue looked like they had taken a Ralph Lauren or Hermès display case a bit too much to heart. They were wearing all the clothes that usually end up on the sale rack in New York-the outfits even Muffie Potter Aston might put in the back of her Southampton closet. Many of the men were dressed like little dollies, with plaid shorts matching their pink (or salmon) shirts, little neckties and peekaboo handkerchiefs. They can wear bow ties at 3 in the afternoon, whether they're 6 or 60.

Lilly Pulitzer's new line, complete with hot pants, miniskirts and tankinis, caters to the new Palm Beach bimbo, and even Steven Stolman, famous for his tablecloth-patterned Jackie O. dresses, has targeted a lower age range with his dresses' diving décolletage. "Now, instead of Belgian shoes with no socks, it's Diamante sandals and wearing Indian-inspired funky Allegra Hicks costumes," Mr. Podolsky said.

Since the 1920's, Palm Beach, however snobby, has had its reputation for harboring eccentrics. Terry Allen Kramer comes to mind. So does the late Listerine heiress Sue Whitmore.

"It has always been a sunny place for shady people, with a darker underbelly, and now the darker underbelly is very appealing," Ms. Boardman said. "Southampton and Lyford Cay is so much more of a homogenous group. In Palm Beach, there is sort of this acceptance of difference. You'll have these old farts' houses and these brand-new, hideous monstrosities right next to each other. In New York, they would never see each other."

She seemed to think about this for a second before she added, "I mean, it's not that different-it's not like the Avon lady is knocking on your door!"

Forget the speculation about whether Ms. Polier actually had an affair with the Presidential candidate, Senator John Kerry, which both have denied. Forget that her parents first said unflattering things about the Senator to the British papers and then a few days later, pledged to vote for him for President. Forget that the Malvern, Penn., native looks a bit like Monica Lewinsky.

The point is that somewhere on the assembly line of media sausage production-whether it be in the land of Drudge, Fleet Street or ABC News-the switch got flipped that identified Ms. Polier as a bona fide news story, one that would make the world forget about Janet Jackson's 40-year-old breast.

What happened next is what happens-and what will happen-to every child of the digital revolution who has ever filled out a user profile, I.M.'d her friends with idle gossip or programmed her browser to accept cookies: An army of reporters and gossip columnist went to their keyboards, called up their favorite search engines and began to construct a digital doppelgänger of Alexandra Polier from her Friendster profile, her Associated Press and Columbia News Service bylines, and every little crumb and clue she had left behind in the bottomless storage vaults of the Internet. What cracks were left were filled in by the thick, spittle-moistened glue of dozens of bloggers who knew someone who knew someone, or didn't know anyone but had a great theory. DudeMan News, Frappy Doo Forums, SpinReport.com, nutsanddolts.com Rantburg.com and, speaking of sausage, Sirlinksalot.net, were right in there with Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, The Wall Street Journal , Andrew Sullivan, The New York Times and ABC, offering what little information they had about Ms. Polier and creating a buzz that recalled a certain green-hued porn film starring Paris Hilton.

On Feb. 17, if you plugged "Alex Polier" into Google's search engine, it produced 1,020 hits. On Nexis, it pulled up 111 articles. The name "Alexandra Polier" spawned 434 Google hits and 93 Nexis articles.

Clues to Ms. Polier could also be found on the Columbia News Service 's Web site. In the spring of 2002, for instance, Ms. Polier wrote "The Return of the Food Confessional," an article about New York Times food columnist Amanda Hesser and her beau, Mr. Latte. "We first learned of 'Mr. Latte' last fall when Amanda Hesser publicly admitted that the affair had begun. She kept his identity a secret as she tried to reconcile his cheeseburger desires with her filet mignon lifestyle. We cringed as she described their first dinner party, her exacting tastes almost driving them apart." Ms. Polier also wrote articles on Bowlmor Lanes and the Westminster Dog Show.

The problem is that, as with so much information that's found in a environment encrusted with irony and cynicism and much colder than the medium cool of television, the data about Ms. Polier can be interpreted in many different ways.

Take her Friendster profile. In the "About Me" section, Ms. Polier described herself as "just another hot piece of ass with a philosophy degree and a love for old movies." (Later, she lists such celluloid classics as Die Hard , Clueless and Jerry Maguire among her favorite films.) She listed her occupation as "journalist/socialite" and indicated that "I'm afraid of death, hospitals and insects," "I can't spell" and that she wants "to travel the world reporting on injustices while taking the time to enjoy and umbrella drink when appropriate."

Under "Status," Ms. Polier filled in "Open Marriage," and in a section where friends of the Friendster subject can provide testimonials, someone named "Yaron"-presumably her fiancé Yaron Schwartzman, whose family home Ms. Polier is reportedly staying at in Kenya for the moment, wrote: "I know alex in the old testament way, and I can tell you is more fun then when the jews left Egypt and moses banged down his staff, and … well, let me put it this way, she isn't kidding about the open marriage thing. She always happens to have lots of cute slightly unbalanced girlfriends which should make most of the men on this site very happy."

There has been some speculation that the profile is fake, but the Friendster site indicates that it was created in May 2003, which would suggest that, if it is a hoax, it's a well-planned one. Most likely, Ms. Polier's Friendster profile is composed of the same kind of flip, narcissistic boasts found in the yearbooks of wide-eyed college graduates who, speaking of Clueles s, have no idea that dumb, unguarded comments made in the last wicked rush of responsibility-free youth have a way of boomeranging later in life-especially in a culture where practically everything is digitally stored and easily retrieved.

And with Ms. Polier obviously unwilling to elaborate on the Internet trail of personal information that she has left behind her, the information is open to all sorts of misinterpretation in a media that loves to be both puritanical and prurient at the same time.

But perhaps the generation most vulnerable to the pitfalls of the digital age will also be the most cognizant of its ramifications. An article in the Columbia Spectator headlined "Journalism Students Rule Out Rumors" recounted a group of Columbia J-school students-including a blogger named Saheli Datta ('04)-attempts to determine whether the Alexandra Polier who graduated from the master's program in 2003 was indeed the woman who had been linked to Sen. Kerry. After tracking down her clips and being stonewalled by a dean who denied them access to a photo of Ms. Polier, the students reached this conclusion: "the flimsy, inconsistent reports weren't worth the reputation of a classmate." According to the Spectator , Ms. Datta even attempted to "rehabilitiate [ sic ] the Google searches of the name 'Alex Poiler' by posting links to the AP stories written under that byline."

"It's sad," Ms. Datta told the Spectator . "She was such a strong Google search; she had a great set of articles. I hope it's not going to be a big story."

About a Playwright

"It's very weird doing an interview about a play," Paul Weitz said as he picked at his pear salad at the West Bank Cafe. "Usually with a film I have an angle that I'm trying to define for people. There's something to sell. But a play is harder to talk about somehow."

Mr. Weitz, 37, was referring to Roulette, the play he wrote which opens Off Broadway at the John Houseman Theater on Feb. 18, and tells the story of a family man who tries to imbue his life with meaning by playing Russian roulette every morning. Act I ends with a literal bang, and Act II finds the brain-damaged dad convinced-to his family's horror-that his suburban home is a casino.

Playwrights are notorious for dreading the question "But what is it about?", but after thinking about it briefly, Mr. Weitz related his lead character's duality to his own bifurcated life as both screenwriter and playwright.

"I think it's about the idea that there are only two modes of being: incredibly shy and introverted or ridiculously extroverted," Mr. Weitz told The Transom. "And I think anyone who writes theater has a perverse inclination towards solitude and at the same time fancies themselves fascinating enough that people will want to watch what they have to say. I identify with it at that angle, but …. "

Mr. Weitz never finished his sentence, but we'll take a crack at it: There's a more extroverted part of him that loves the slick, sharp-elbowed world of writing and directing major studio movies. With his sibling, Chris Weitz, Paul directed American Pie , a film that has since spawned two sequels (on which the Weitz brothers are listed as executive producers).

And though theater may be Mr. Weitz's true love, nothing pays the bills quite like Hollywood.

"My original intention was to be a playwright, but then I realized I couldn't bum off my father for the rest of my life-I was going to have to make a living if I was going to have any self respect," said Mr. Weitz.

Dad was John Weitz, the former Office of Strategic Services agent, fashion designer, author and raconteur who died in 2002 at the age of 79. Mom is the actress Susan Kohner, who was nominated for an Oscar for her role in Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life .

Much like a game of roulette, Mr. Weitz has circled back to where he started: Roulette is playing on the same block where he once worked at a long-since-closed book shop selling theatrical books while he was working on writing plays after college. "My dad was an incredibly gracious guy and had a certain amount of dough, but it was incredibly embarrassing bumming off him," he said. So he went west and started writing screenplays with his brother. Their first big project was working on the script for Antz , and they've been working in L.A. steadily since, earning a 2003 Oscar nomination for best screenplay adaptation for About a Boy .

Still, New York's siren song kept pulling. Although he just had his first child in Los Angeles and is preparing to direct a film that he and his brother wrote, Synergy , with Scarlett Johansson, he's been spending a lot of time in Gotham tweaking his play.

"There's no replacing the thrill of getting a reaction from an audience and the fear the audience isn't going to like it …. That's a weird thing about being a [film] director-sitting behind a camera quietly and not being able to give any feedback while the actors are doing their stuff. So I can totally see why people would go back to theater after having success in film."

The play was done as a reading at Vassar last year, and Susann Brinkley, the Ensemble Studio Theatre's executive director, made moving it to Manhattan her pet project. Mr. Weitz was initially afraid the play would be staged for the wrong reasons. "I was at first kind of reluctant because I knew it'd be easy to get it produced because I'd had success in film," he said. "In terms of fantasies, it'd be neat to do a bunch of plays and be able to look up on my bookshelf and see copies of them. But I could see all sorts of scenarios where I'd be horribly embarrassed." Mr. Weitz said he even "used to have a lot of nightmares about going to a play of mine and realizing that it was a horrible play and that it was also not the play that I'd written.

"With film there's an illusion of control," continued Mr. Weitz. "You can't control how the audience will react, but the whole thing is just less embarrassing because if someone in the audience doesn't like it, they can just leave and the performers aren't right there to see."

Judging from Roulette , Mr. Weitz doesn't keep his theatrical and cinematic tendencies neatly compartmentalized. With short chunks of action, the play feels like a movie script, while the staid, suburban-household set, workaday costumes and stereotypical stock characters (dumb jock son, rebellious alcoholic daughter) make Roulette feel like a show on the WB. It may also have something to do with the familiar cast, which includes Saturday Night Live star Ana Gasteyer, child Oscar winner and X-Men co-star Anna Paquin, Proof Tony nominee Larry Bryggman and The Cooler co-star Shawn Hatosy. Grant Shaud (Miles from Murphy Brown ) was in the cast at one point, but dropped out in previews due to illness.

While theater seems like the purer form of his ahhh- t, Mr. Weitz finds it easier to define the purpose of his film work like the American Pie trilogy, the teen-pleasers full of toilet humor and sex. "On the surface of it, one can't imagine anything more frivolous than American Pie , but we did sort of have an agenda, which was to make it less misogynistic than films in that genre tended to be-to have the female characters have more of a say. There's an acknowledgment of female sexuality," he said.

So, we begged, did he write Roulette with a similarly focused agenda? Will the audience take something away from the main character after Roulette closes and can't be rented on video?

"He's someone who is faced with all this stuff that people want from him and all the things he's faced with and decides to detach. The only thing that makes him feel anything, or makes him excited, is the concept that he can to some degree control whether or not he's going to continue living," he said, pausing. "God, I dunno. It all sounds so pretentious."

-Anna Jane Grossman

Graceful Gisele

Clumsy models, don't look to Gisele Bündchen for sympathy. At the party to celebrate the publication of Backstage Sexy, an artsy spank book featuring Victoria's Secret's fearsome foursome Tyra Banks, Gisele Bündchen, Adriana Lima and Oluchi Onweagba, Ms. Bündchen broke away from a half-hour huddle with Miramax co-chairman and Leonardo DiCaprio employer Harvey Weinstein, to tell us what she would have done if she would have been the poor unfortunate mannequin who took a spill on the runway at Oscar de la Renta's fall show.

"Stand up, have a smile on your face, and keep walking," Ms. Bündchen said.

Not that the Brazilian bombshell has ever committed such a fashion faux pas "Never! I've slipped before but have never fallen, thank God!" she told The Transom. "That would be bad."

What could be worse? While former Saturday Night Live cast members Dan Aykroyd and Adam Sandler, and Jackass' Johnny Knoxville made themselves at home in the Casbah-like downstairs cubbies of Spice Market, Jean George Vongerichten's new meatpacking-district restaurant, New England Patriot Tom Brady chatted up models Mini Anden and Bridget Hall. (His girlfriend, model-slash-actress Bridget Moynahan, was nowhere to be seen.) And when a member of his posse informed him of our request for an interview, Mr. Brady leaned over, looked The Transom up and down, and shook his head. Let the self-loathing begin.

-Noelle Hancock

Working Italian

Diehard fans of The Soprano s will remember that, before James Gandolfini's Tony Soprano was mob boss, there was a boss with an equally fey surname. Lou Falsetto. Just kidding!

The original mob boss was the character Jackie Aprile-father to the later-introduced Jackie Junior. Aprile, who died of cancer in the third episode of the first season, was considered a formidable boss-a good guy-and has been mentioned in more recent episodes as something of an Abraham in the HBO crime-family Bible. Unlike what might've happened in HBO's other grim series, Six Feet Under -where dying is pretty much just the beginning of a three-season contract-Aprile, played by the bear-like Michael Rispoli, hasn't been on the show since. But we've found him! He's working as a masseur on Vandam Street. Rather, he's acting as a masseur in a play.

Whether rubbing someone out or, er, rubbing someone down, Mr. Rispoli seems to be good at playing helpful types. "On The Sopranos , I was sick, people came to me, asked me things, and then I died," he said. And now he's playing a guy who gives back rubs? "Yes. This is my first time playing a masseur."

Mr. Rispoli, 43, a graduate of the distinguished Circle in the Square Theatre School (other alumni include Kevin Bacon, Benicio del Toro and Philip Seymour Hoffman) has the titular roll in Magic Hands Freddy , a play by Arje Shaw which opens at the Soho Playhouse on Feb. 19. It's a play about a working-class Joe (Mr. Rispoli) trying to cope with his academic brother meddling in his life. The sophisticated sib is played by 42-year-old Ralph ( The Karate Kid ) Macchio-who still looks like he's 18-and while Mr. Macchio's name recognition might trump his costar's, we're pretty sure Rispoli could take him in a fight.

"I'm a blue-collar cop or cook," Mr. Rispoli said. He was referring to the parts in which he usually gets cast. His roles almost always play into what many people think of as every Italian stereotype-brutish, brash, corrupt, working-class, etc. "I'm fine with that. Hey, I'm working. There's a big difference between being a working actor and being an actor trying to work," he said. "I support my wife and family [who live upstate], and thank God.

"No, I'm not going to be hired to play the Connecticut prep school teacher. But what's the stereotypical Italian?" he said. "A guy who wears gold chains and silk shirts?" Uh … yes? No? It should be noted that Mr. Rispoli was, in fact, wearing a gold chain under his T-shirt as he talked at a diner across the street from the theater. Changing the subject, he put two Sweet 'N Low in his iced tea and said he grew up upstate, the seventh of eight kids. We asked if he felt like he had been raised in a stereotypical Italian family.

"Stereotypical? What's your family?" he asked. "Is your family a stereotypical Jewish family?" Uh … yes? No?

"Well, there's drama in every family," he said, noting that the Italian Anti-Defamation League has had molto problems with The Sopranos but probably will like Magic Hands Freddy . Then he offered to buy us our coffee, and we felt like maybe we hadn't lodged our foot as deeply in our mouth as we'd thought.

"Italians?" he said, smiling. "We can laugh at ourselves."

-A.J.G .

Well, she got that much right.

Looking pert in an orange turtleneck and suede pants, Ms. Corcoran was supposed to be headlining an evening of business-themed comedy to benefit N.Y.C. YMCA children's programs. But somewhere along the line, she decided to ignore the topic and focus on an uncomfortably personal subject: the shortcomings of her past and current husbands.

The evening began giddily enough, with an army of brokers-mostly women in pearls and pinstripes from the Corcoran Group, the real-estate firm she founded but sold in 2001 to NRT-in the audience, whooping with anticipation.

But then Ms. Corcoran began her act. "I told [my first husband Dale] one night in bed-when you're not supposed to attack a man's confidence-that 'Dale, the reason I'm not getting pregnant is that your damn sperm is too slow!'" she said early on.

"I left him immediately," Ms. Corcoran continued. "Three years later, Dale had three kids, and I was on my hands and knees at Mount Sinai's in-vitro clinic, begging my baby sister for her eggs!" The audience murmured uncertainly.

Ms. Corcoran regrouped, moving on to the subject of her current husband, Bill Higgins, a former Navy captain who was sitting near the front.

"I proposed to Bill. He said yes, and then-I should have seen this as a bad sign-he wouldn't sleep with me for seven months. He said I wasn't ready. I was so ready, I wanted to attack the dog!" Ms. Corcoran said. "But I shaved my legs for seven months, every morning, because I didn't know when the big night was going to be. He was a perfect gentleman, but I waited. Then I married Bill, and Bill immediately slept with me!"

Ms. Corcoran went on to describe Mr. Higgins quitting his day job, purchasing 13 digital cameras and putting on 50 pounds, which was achieved "peanut by peanut" with M&M's.

"Bill chronically complains about not getting enough sex," she said at one point. "Anybody have that problem?"

The square-jawed Mr. Higgins, looking husky in a navy blue jacket with gold buttons, called out from the audience: "Not anymore, hon!"

"Last week I went to bed, and picture this: Bill's lying in bed, electronically wired," Ms. Corcoran continued. "He's got wraparound black goggles over his head, he's got a camouflage helmet on his head, and he's got these suction cups with wires. And he's wired into this black electronic box, and it's beeping and blinking-beep, beep!" She never explained the purpose of her husband's getup, but raced for the punch line. "And what does he say? The same thing every guy says: 'Ya wanna have sex?' And I said, 'No, thank you!'"

Ms. Corcoran paused during the uncomfortable silence that followed, then said: "Oh, shit, man-I'm getting off this stage!"

But she didn't.

Instead, she described her habit of smacking Mr. Higgins around and inspiring him to invest in hockey padding. Around that time, Ms. Corcoran pointed at a silver-haired gentleman in the audience. "Hey, you, would you want to be married to me?" she asked. The man stared at her, wide-eyed. "Noooo!" Ms. Corcoran said. "Neither did Dale. Neither does Bill!"

Once the squirm-inducing performance came to an end, the M.C., David Moore, returned to the stage and said: "How many people think that Bill's going to get laid tonight?" That got a laugh.

-Sheelah Kolhatkar

Melanie's Yarn

"It's the Chita-fer!" said the hulking song-and-dance-man-cum-TV-actor Jerry Orbach, swooping in to embrace Broadway veteran Chita (Anita before Rita) Rivera in the press room at the Drama League's annual "Musical Celebration of Broadway" on Feb. 9. The black-tie gala was held at the Pierre hotel in honor of Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffith. Both had stints on Broadway last year-him in Nine, her in Chicago-but entered the room like the movie stars they are. Anna in the Tropics spark plug Daphne Rubin-Vega preceded them, telling the shutterbugs that her sleeveless black dress was from a thrift store. Then Ms. Griffith-whose arms were covered in gold glitter-struck a pose. And where had she gotten her black sleeveless? "Versace," she said.

However, Ms. Griffith added that she is capable of enjoying more simple sartorial pleasures as well: She likes to wear sweaters knit by Mr. Banderas, who explained to a cluster of reporters that he learned to purl when he broke his "esternon" (sternum) on a film set in Spain in the early 80's. "Were you born then?" he asked The Transom. Alas, the ladies from Hoy then pulled the duo away for more intense questioning, but Ms. Griffith didn't let her honey talk to the fawning journalistas for long. Her flack, a fleck of glitter on her nose, was giving the "wrap it up" signal with her finger. "You have to be done now," Ms. Griffith told them, dragging Mr. Banderas over to talk to the English-speaking television reporters.

Ms. Rivera-who's currently working with Terrence McNally on a musical about her life-then bounced on by to rave about Mr. Banderas. She played opposite him in Nine. "Antonio's a nice, nice, nice guy, on top of being a sexy, sexy, sexy guy! And he's so professional! And charitable! And giving! Everybody falls in love with him, not just because he's … what he is," she said. But did she know that Mr. Banderas really knew his way around a yarn store? "Who told you that lie?" she said.

-Anna Jane Grossman

Simmons Says

What better place for a hip-hop impresario to explain his political intentions than a fashion show? And that's just what Russell Simmons did at Marc Jacobs' fall show at the Lexington Avenue Armory on Feb. 9. On Feb. 4, the hip-hop baron crashed a summit hosted by the New York Society for Ethical Culture, which had been organized to brainstorm ways to oust President Bush in the next election. "The shit y'all doing is corny!" the hip-hop impresario had told the crowd, which included financier George Soros, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner, Miramax co-chairman Harvey Weinstein, actors Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, socialite Anne Cox Chambers and fashion heir Alex von Furstenberg. "You have to at least include people. We are not included!"

"I was just trying to get the inner circle to know me," Mr. Simmons told The Transom, his omnipresent baseball cap cocked to the side. "This is one little group, and they're great and they're smart and they have good ideas. I'm a fan of what they are doing, but I just want to be a part of it. We've had a lot of great discussions since then, and I think it's going to be fantastic." In the meantime, Mr. Simmons said he was narrowing down his presidential choices. "Obviously, I'm not a big fan of Dennis Kosevic"-we think he meant Kucinich-"and Sharpton. Oh, and I was with [Bill] O'Reilly last Friday night, and he told me I should vote for the Tin Man and Toto!" Mr. Simmons laughed. "Tin Man and Toto! That was a very good line for him."

Mr. Simmons wasn't the only one in a jaunty mood. Later, as Karolina Kurkova and Giselle Bundchen frisked down the catwalk, the Strokes' Albert Hammond Jr. and Nick Valensi swigged from bottles in brown sacks they'd smuggled into the show, while giggling models wriggled in their laps.

-Noelle Hancock

Just Like J. Lo

If you found yourself walking out of the local cineplex screening of Gigli while trying to whisper breathily about your "pussy" just like Jennifer Lopez did, then have we got the art exhibit for you! On Feb. 14, 32-year-old video artist Candice Breitz will unveil Becoming at the Sonnabend gallery at 536 West 22nd Street. The show will be composed of seven split-screen TV monitors. The front of the screens will feature seven female Hollywood actors-including Ms. Lopez, Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan-emoting for minute-long loops. Playing behind those loops will be black-and-white loops of Ms. Breitz lip-synching and otherwise imitating their words, expressions, gestures and Hollywood tears.

"It's a minute of Cameron Diaz talking nonstop about how to trap a man, or Julia Roberts talking about how to lose a man," said Ms. Breitz excitedly about her first major show in New York. "In those romantic comedies, it's all about getting the man, thinking about the man, marrying the man, breaking up with the man."

Ms. Breitz's show will be all about becoming the celebrity. "Our expressions are taught to us from Hollywood-people watch how she looks when flirting, breaking up, manipulating a man. It's a series of conventions that's manipulating our culture," she said. By juxtaposing footage of herself against the polished celebrities on the other side of the screen, Ms. Breitz explained, she'll be saying that "I'm not as beautiful as they are; it's awkward for me to act like they do. We're never going to be like them."

The artist said she actually came up with the idea from the MTV show Becoming, in which a suburban teen is treated to her idol's stylists, makeup artists and coaches. "They'll take a kid to Britney's hairdresser, and the sad thing about it is, she is allowed to become Britney in every way-clothes, looks, everything-but never can have her own voice. At the end, they pipe in Britney's voice when she starts to perform," said Ms. Breitz. "It's all about the idea of never quite being able to become the star."

-Alexandra Wolfe

Liberace Lives!

Johnny Depp, Robin Williams and Dustin Hoffman may get another shot at playing the flamboyantly dressed Vegas mainstay, Liberace. The British team of director Don Boyd (My Kingdom) and television writer and novelist Reg Gadney have co-authored a screenplay based on the flamboyant pianist's turbulent trip to Britain in 1956, and producer Barry Krost said that he has two major studios interested.

"I'm waiting to hear," said Mr. Krost, who produced the 1993 Tina Turner biopic, What's Love Got to Do With It? Entitled I'll Be Seeing You after one of Liberace's signature songs, the film is built around two stories. The first deals with the pianist's 1956 trip across the pond, when, at the height of his popularity, the Daily Mirror outed him as gay; Liberace eventually sued the paper for libel and won. The second is a coming-of-age story about a talented adolescent boy who plays the piano and worships … Liberace! The two eventually meet, demonstrating what Mr. Boyd referred to as "a powerful appreciation of what love and friendship can mean in the context of hero worship."

Both Mr. Krost and Mr. Boyd, who is attached to direct the script, say that it's far different from the Liberace film that reportedly was to be directed by Philip (Quills) Kaufman and had everyone from Mr. Depp to Mr. Williams to Mr. Hoffman allegedly interested in the role. (That project has since languished in pre-production at New Line Cinema.)

"It was a very different project from ours," said Mr. Boyd, who last worked with Mr. Gadney in 1989 on Goldeneye: The Secret Life of Ian Fleming, a made-for-TV movie about the creator of James Bond. "I think it was much more biographical, and they cover a much larger period of time."

Mr. Boyd said they're considering eight to nine "A-list" actors to fill the rhinestoned shoes of Liberace, but Mr. Boyd did say that Mr. Depp "would make a brilliant Liberace-truly brilliant.

"I really think we will attract that kind of star," Mr. Boyd continued, admitting that Mr. Depp is probably rather busy these days. "[The role] challenges the [actor's] range. It deals with [Liberace's] private life; it deals with his public life. They have to play piano, they have to sing, they have to have that charisma-and all of those things are combined in this extremely human story."

-Jake Brooks