Spencer Morgan

ST. PAUL—His name may sound unfamiliar, but Andrew Breitbart has built a career helping to create the Drudge Report and the Huffington Post, while also overseeing his own news-aggregation site breitbart.com—and becoming prominent in a largely underground movement of conservatives in Hollywood. Next week he plans to launch a new site (www.breitbart.com/bighollywood) that will give voice to this rogue community in the entertainment industry. 

“I don’t have a set goal of saying like, ‘Jean-Claude Van Damme and Donny Osmond are going to be blogging on my site and you’ve got to come in,’” he told the Transom on Monday evening at the Republican National Convention.  read more »

The scene at a screenwriters’ “boot camp” in Chelsea was not funny. Around 40 or so people had coughed up $400 for four days of seminars, culminating in a final pitch session Sunday afternoon. The room was packed and had the dank air of an AA meeting. Instead of telling gruesome, true-life stories of battles with the bottle, each person got up and tried to sell the crowd on the sheaf of romantic comedy—a wedding photographer gets amnesia!—or action—Die Hard meets Memento!—he or she had been perfecting. The writers, whose median age appeared to be late 30s, introduced themselves first: waiter, bartender, PA, grip, Off Off Broadway theater producer.  read more »

On Sunday night, as Hurricane Gustav bore down on New Orleans and Republican Party elders scrambled to muffle all sounds of revelry from the Twin Cities, Sammy Hagar, the former Van Halen frontman, stood before a microphone at the legendary Minneapolis nightclub First Avenue. He was wearing plaid board shorts, sunglasses, and a logo T-shirt from Cabo Wabo Cantina, a bar he owns in Mexico. Hagar, who had just ripped through a set of his old standards, including “I Can’t Drive 55,” told his audience—several hundred Republican notables—that his band had just come from a gig in Houston.

“The hurricane is going to hit down there and that’s a big shame and all,” Hagar said.  read more »

DENVER—"There's my girl!" Chevy Chase bellowed as Madeline Albright walked into the backroom of the Vanity Fair-Google party on Thursday, August 28. The towering comedian, who was clad in a blazer, T-shirt and jeans, bent down to embrace his old friend. They discussed plans to get together—Mr. Chase promising an e-mail from "his people"—mugged for the cameras, and agreed that Barack Obama had nailed his speech. "If we're seen together, you're in trouble," joked the funnyman.

After a hearty laugh, conversation returned to the speech. Ms. Albright said that while the presidential candidate is incredibly charming in person, she was also pleased with the "diplomacy" of the speech.  read more »

Celebrities probably should've been warned that Denver may be the friendliest city in the country. Over the course of an hour or so the other day, four different paparazzi dropped by the coffee shop on the corner of Champa and 18th streets. The conversations went something like the following:

Paparazzo: Have you had any celebrities in here today?

Barista #1: Yes we have! Steven Spielberg was in earlier. He ordered a caramel macchiato.  read more »

Last night the much-discussed Hollywood contingent here in Denver, who have been lending their "visibility" to myriad events and causes all over town, congregated in the V.I.P. section of the Black Eyed Peas concert. Members of the Creative Coalition's hard-working band of entertainers—Alan Cumming, Tim Daly, Anne Hathaway, Spike Lee, Barry Levinson, Josh Lucas, Matthew Modine, Susan Sarandon—were joined by various showbiz colleagues including Jessica Alba and Hayden Panettiere in the balcony area at the Fillmore Auditorium, as Fergie & Co. shook their rumps on stage below.

Meanwhile, local nightclub impresario Jesse Morreale wondered if the glamorous crowd would have enough energy to return for another after after party at the Rockbar.  read more »

Police are gathering in force at the perimeter surrounding the Pepsi Center to prepare for the arrival of an estimated 5,000 protesters, who had been encouraged to march earlier at a free concert by political rap-rockers Rage Against the Machine.

One Denver police officer, standing at the intersection of Auroria and Speer, said: "There are supposed to be 5,000 hostile individuals coming toward us."

Other officers on the scene said they believed the protesters would attempt to breach the security perimeter that stretches for blocks around the Pepsi Center.

Protests encouraged by the group, which vocally opposes the party system, have taken place at earlier conventions. Confrontations with police became violent during the Los Angeles convention in 2000.

DENVER—Wednesday afternoon at the Denver Art Museum, Jennifer Lopez, Capitol File and Viacom honored Marian Wright Edelman for her work with the Children's Defense Fund. Before the awards presentation began, the Daily Transom spied the singer Rufus Wainwright, wearing a plaid blazer, striped T-shirt and sandals.

"I'm gay and out and proud, but in saying that I feel that the gay community could be a little more engaged," Mr. Wainwright said. "You can even spell it out. E-N-G-A-Y." Har!

"I guess one of the reasons I'm so vocal is to get some of my community out there because especially gay men-and those are the only ones I can really speak for-they tend to get a little into the lush life and the dance, the DJs, the disco music, and it's fun and everything, but unfortunately I'm a huge pessimist right now.  read more »

DENVER—“I think the most interesting thing I’ve seen so far is all the secret deals that have been going on,” said the actor Josh Lucas at the Going Green event hosted by Bank of America on Monday night. The American Psycho star is at the Democratic National Convention, making the rounds of the Creative Coalition circuit of events. “It’s been happening everywhere. ‘I’ll give you two tickets to the J.Lo party, you give me two tickets to see Fergie on Thursday.’ It’s been happening everywhere. It’s like serious drug dealing going on.”

Earlier that day, Mr. Lucas had been in an SUV heading to one of the many events sponsored by the  read more »

DENVER—After hosting a lunch in support of helping diabetes patients at the restaurant Panzano, the Creative Coalition gathered its merry band of New York-based celebrities into a back section of the restaurant to get on with the showbiz-oriented non-profit's lesser known agenda this year: a documentary, called Poliwood, featuring their historic voyage to the Democratic National Convention, directed by Barry Levinson.

The scene in the backroom featured a pep talk from a frumpy looking guy with a bad toupee on refining the rhetoric of Democratic talking points, followed by a Q&A among the actors in attendance, including Susan Sarandon, Anne Hathaway, Josh Lucas, Richard Schiff, Giancarlo Esposito and others.  read more »

A while back, a friend of mine boasted that he was spending time with a hot transsexual. Now, my friend—let’s call him Ryan—is quite the ladies’ man. Despite his perplexing androgynous style—tight jeans, guy-liner, the occasional wig—Ryan always shows up with a gorgeous young woman on his arm.

Now he was dating a tranny, and talking about it as casually as if he’d recently begun incorporating onions in his scrambled eggs. He went on and on about how she was “totally fucking hot, man. Probably one of the hottest transsexuals in the world; it’s probably between her and some Thai boy.  read more »

The hair-product maven John Paul DeJoria, dressed in a black suit with a black T-shirt underneath, was assessing the hair of Denver during a luncheon hosted by the Creative Coalition this afternoon at Panzano, the downtown restaurant.

“The people of Denver have the nice looking hair,” said Mr. DeJoria, who is the co-founder of Paul Mitchell hair-care products. “I wish they would grow it a little bit longer. I think this is an excellent market for Paul Mitchell.”

Denver isn't such an easy city to get around, especially when the Pepsi Center belches forth its thousands into a relatively small network of streets to fight for cabs.  read more »

DENVER—For all the talk about celebrities flocking to Denver, there weren't too many of them in evidence at a highly anticipated “post-gavel” party last night at Tamayo in the LoDo neighborhood of Denver. Word of mouth on the party, thrown by GQ and co-sponsors, Maker's Mark (bourbon!) had the affair pegged as the big do of convention week, and at around 10 o'clock the streets of “Lower Downtown” were crawling with bloggers in smart party dresses and gentlemen who'd put some product in their hair.

They packed the place, mostly journalists and political types. Dan Abrams was there. So was actor Tim Daly.  read more »

This summer, New York’s best-paid living artist, Brice Marden, and his wife, painter Helen Harrington, have been busy refurbishing the latest addition to his real estate empire: the run-down old hotel he bought in Nevis, the island in the West Indies, in 2006.

“It’s a beautiful old place, but I mean, seriously, who goes to Nevis?” said a source familiar with the layout, which consists of around a dozen cabana huts. “They’ve got all their friends moving there. They’re trying to turn Nevis into the next St. Barths or whatever.

“I think they want to build up the value and then sell it,” the source added, who noted Mr.  read more »

It was the summer of 1984. A few nuns were strolling the streets of La Romana, a resort town in the Dominican Republic, when they heard a baby’s screams coming from a dumpster. The news soon reached the bronzed ears of the city’s most renowned resident, Oscar de la Renta, who at the time was mourning the death of his first wife.

On a recent Thursday afternoon, Moises Oscar de la Renta, now 24, picked me up in a Lincoln Town Car he had hired to run some last-minute errands in preparation for a camping trip he was taking that weekend with two attractive young women.  read more »

Statuesque social darling and Alberta Ferretti publicist Annelise Peterson has been exercising her inner rock star this summer, spending her weekends writing and recording ballads in a dank, makeshift recording studio in the East Village. And according to her producer and co-writer Kenyon Phillips, the girl can sing.

"She's done about five sessions," said Mr. Phillips, who is 32. He recently finished recording his first album with his band Unisex Salon and has since opened up his recording studio, a converted bedroom in his apartment, to a variety of friends and aspiring artists. "I've known [Annelise] since she was 14 and I've always known her to be a great singer.  read more »

John Follini is a 58-year-old contractor from East Patchogue, L.I. He’s spent his life building barns, mending roofs and fences, installing light fixtures—doing the general upkeep required in sprawling homes along Long Island’s North Fork, in towns such as Bellport, Mastic-Shirley and Brookhaven. His forearms are invariably sheathed in a moist film of dirt; he has a gray mustache, a great muscular back. Like most accomplished Long Island contractors, he is a crack shot with a bow and arrow.

His father, who was also in the construction business, taught him to hunt when he was five. Grandpa Follini got in the way of a shotgun while serving as a guide on a bird hunt in East Hampton; he showed young John the pellets in his knuckles.  read more »

This week we published our second profile of the great actor Steve Guttenberg, a sequel – back by popular demand! – to the "The Goot Is Loose", which came out two weeks ago and set off a veritable firestorm. In case you haven't had your fill, without further ado, we present the Goot's own MySpace page.

Quick preview: "Who I'd Like to Meet: Pauly Shore and the divine Bernadette Peters... I always wanted to tap that ass straight 'Hightower' style." (For the uninitiated, that's a reference to the Police Academy movies.) General Interests: "Working out, chasing down perps, helping out the senior citizens in my community, oh ya and crushin' some ass." And of course, his favorite book: "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret" got me through some really dark times."

My editors told me I was crazy. Nuts. As in meshugge. After writing a column two weeks ago about the actor Steve Guttenberg’s move to New York and his hopes for finding true love—a column which they’d O.K.’d under protest—I went back to them last week and announced that it was absolutely essential that I go back to the Goot, as Mr. Guttenberg sometimes calls himself, for more. The original column, I pointed out, had received more than 170 comments on our Web site; Drudge had linked to it; some TV suits had contacted Mr. Guttenberg about a reality show. Clearly, there was an untapped wellspring of American passion for this wonderful actor; in the decades since he first sprang into the national consciousness in the Police Academy movies, he’d remained a lightning rod.  read more »

Since July 13, a steely group of distinguished New York fashionistas—clothing empress Donna Karan, newly appointed Vanity Fair editors Ingrid Sischy and Sandra Brant, and underwear genius Calvin Klein—have been traipsing through the deserts and jungles of Africa.

Longtime partners Ms. Sischy and Ms. Brant are old friends with Ms. Karan. Mr. Klein, 65, is a new addition to the BFF posse.

The foursome will be returning at the beginning of August, and the three-week luxury excursion will explore Ethiopia, Rwanda, Kenya and Botswana.

“[Ms. Karan] said the final leg of the trip will be in the jungle,” said the source.  read more »

“It’s kind of a different way of life, because you can really just live your life one loop at a time,” said Gunner of his life caddying at a very exclusive private Hamptons golf club which is often bathed in a nice ocean breeze. He’s 25; back home in Glasgow, he’s studying to be a dentist. “You always know you’re going back out the next day. So it’s quite a surreal environment. ”

“It’s just something you do between sessions,” said Coco, Gunner’s 22-year-old friend from Glasgow. By “between sessions” he means between bouts of drinking.

While the work itself—digging around for balls in the fescue, lugging two sets of golf bags, praying for the moment when you put that flag in the 18th hole—might at times feel like grunt work, the way of life in the shack—two long pine planks that run along either side of a covered tent, tucked away behind a well-groomed hedge—is rarely dull.  read more »

To its surprise, the Transom ran into designer Christopher Ciccone—SMACK!—outside the Rouge Wine Bar at Paris Commune in the West Village. Madonna’s short, paunchy but sensual brother had flown in from London early that evening and was flying to Los Angeles the following morning—part of the whirlwind press tour surrounding his book, Life With My Sister Madonna (Simon Spotlight Entertainment, $26).

Wearing jeans, black sneakers, a tight black T-shirt and a veil of cinnamon-inflected cologne, he was there to see aspiring Broadway star (and dear friend) Ryan Raftery’s one-man show, Ryan Raftery and Friends: A Solo Act.

“There are plenty of things I left out of the book, and things that the lawyers and editors took out,” Mr.  read more »

About two years ago, Steve Guttenberg walked into the showbiz haunt Crustacean on Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills.

“I walked in and the maitre d’ made a big deal for me,” said Mr. Guttenberg. The Goot—as he’s known to his friends—appreciated the show. To hear him tell it, eating in public in Los Angeles is a dangerous business for an actor whose last box office hit was Three Men and a Baby in 1987.

“All of a sudden, the maitre d’ says, ‘Get out of the way!’” said Mr. Guttenberg. “And they literally threw me to the side and Tom Cruise came in.  read more »

Captain Stefan Barr said the scallops at the Gramercy Tavern could use a little more salt. He’s been back only a few months from his second tour in Iraq. For 10 years, he was one of the few, the proud, or, as he puts it, “the best”—a Marine. Now he lives in Soho.

Yes, there are soldiers walking among us, dining right next to you, tucking into those same $20 scallops. Some of them probably look just like you or me. Mr. Barr does not. He is 6 foot 5. He has a chest like a well-fed pterodactyl, with long, sinewy arms and giant hands that could easily reach across the table and pop my head off like a cork.  read more »

After Clay Felker passed away Tuesday morning in Manhattan, The Observer spoke to some who knew him well.

Robert Benton

The first time I ever screamed “fuck” in front of a room full of women was when I got mad at Clay at the Esquire offices. We were having this argument that went up and down the hall and I reached my wits end; I just said, “You fuck!” It came out of my mouth before I knew what I had said. Clay could drive you crazy, but you never stopped caring for him.

Milton Glaser

We were once in Paris.  read more »

The Bear Stearns man, the lifer, the one they would have put on the cover of their recruiting pamphlet if they had one—Bear Stearns wants you!—he’s a self-made man. Daddy didn’t put him through Harvard Business School, and if he did, you better keep that to yourself.

Ace Greenberg—the man who put Bear on the map and defined the archetype, Missouri-educated on a football scholarship, started as a clerk, kept his nose to the grindstone, became the CEO—Ace isn’t interested in your business degree. “I want them to have a PSD degree,” he said. “A poor, smart, and deep desire to be rich degree.  read more »

On Tuesday, June 24, just before 2 p.m., the Transom stepped into an elevator and all of a sudden found ourselves gazing at dreamy Top Chef contestant Sam Talbot.

Holy smokes! Er, who’s gonna win Top Chef season whatever?

“I don’t know,” said Mr. Talbot, who wore a tight black V-neck T-shirt that revealed bulging biceps, accentuated by a necklace with a giant shark tooth.

Shucks. So, what else is going on?

“I just opened a restaurant in the Hamptons.” Right, right—that seafood joint, the Surf Lodge. Does he surf? “No, I wakeboard,” said Mr.  read more »

Morgan Freeman and his wife, Myrna Colley-Lee, were the first to arrive. They stepped out of a town car in front of the French restaurant Tocqueville on East 15th Street and made their way to the empty bar area. Neither knew what to expect; the hostess, Ruda Dauphin, had called it a “salon.” They were offered flutes of Ruinart champagne; the Oscar winner asked for vodka on ice.

Ms. Dauphin is a petite, stylish but tough lady who grew up in Brooklyn. Her father was in the shmatte business. She wanted to be an actress, and she married the director Claude Dauphin and they moved to Paris.  read more »

Italian playboy turned workaholic entrepreneur Lapo Elkann recently took on the appointment of Global Ambassador to the biggest hospital in the Middle East, the Chaim Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer, which treats roughly two million Jewish and Muslim patients.

“My companies, they all start with an ‘I’ and end with an ‘I,’” said Mr. Elkann, founder in the past year of both Italia Independent, the lifestyle brand, and Independent Ideas, the advertising agency. He was watching a soccer match at a sports bar on Bleecker Street, hours before he was scheduled to catch a plane to Paris. After a few days there, he was planning to visit Italy for four days, followed by a trip to Iceland, where he’s working on yet another mysterious venture.  read more »

The block of West 11th Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues is lined with brownstones and London plane and Chinese scholar trees as tall as the brownstones they shade. Their leafy branches overlap, creating a cozy green roof over the block, as well as a considerable mess to clean up—one of the trees has a pair of birdhouses attached to its trunk.

Henry Codin has been sweeping the block for over a decade. To some he is known as the Mayor of 11th Street. The city is filled with these neighborhood characters, like the Godmother of East 10th Street, or the homeless twins of East 12th Street between Third and Fourth avenues—they are identical, but one is far grumpier.  read more »

“I’ve been too high lately to be terrified of anything,” Liam McMullan said as he loped down Broadway on a recent afternoon to audition for a remake of the movie Fame. Twenty years old, he wore jeans, a purple T-shirt, beat-up Chuck Taylors and a Batman fanny pack containing a jar of marijuana, a bottle of Excedrin for the migraines he been getting lately, and a cell phone and iPod.

When he was 2 years old, Liam was featured in a VH1 special on children with wild parents—his are nightlife society photographer Patrick McMullan and the artist Laurie Ogle. His godparents are Village Voice gossip columnist Michael Musto and Mudd Club DJ Anita Sarko. His parents brought Liam to Warhol’s Factory when he has 3 weeks old. They never married.  read more »

Rip Torn, paragon of masculinity among actors and for the public who have seen him in Men in Black, Larry Sanders and recently as Don Geiss in 30 Rock, was telling a story. He was standing on the southeast corner of 23rd Street and Ninth Avenue, wearing black cowboy boots, black Wrangler work pants held up by suspenders, a blue striped shirt, sherbet orange vest and a dusty black fedora.

“I’ve seen people die, but never go from alive to dead that quickly,” he said.

It had happened on this same corner; Rip Torn was hiding behind a lamppost with Norman Mailer, who would one day try to bite off his ear. But that was later. The soon-to-be-dead guy in the story Mr. Torn was telling was someone unfortunate enough to be flushed out from a hiding place under a car by four armed men in dark suits.  read more »

Six boys in a cabin. Four strewn about on bunks, affecting casual repose, though their eyes were fixed on two boys at the back of cabin. Something about to go down. We were all around 12. A short, pudgy-but-proud choirboy from Ohio was adamantly refusing to share even a few granules of his enormous supply of Kool-Aid. His confronter, a Canadian beanpole with a long nose shot out from under a perfect bowl of orange hair, wasn’t having it. The noble, carrot-topped weed had shared many homemade treats with “Ohio,” as well as the rest of us.  read more »

Actress Lindsay Lohan’s father, Michael, was on the phone from his house in Southampton, none too pleased about ex-wife Dina’s new reality show, Living Lohan, which premiered  read more »

On Thursday, May 8, the Directors Guild of America held its annual Feature Directors dinner in the lobby of the guild’s national headquarters at 7920 Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. Catered sushi and an open bar, of which many members took full advantage, helped assuage the grim mood that continues to hover over Tinseltown.

A source at the party overheard writer-director Deborah Kaplan, who last helmed 2001’s Josie and the Pussycats, telling pals that she wasn’t concerned with the looming Screen Actors Guild strike. She penned Made of Honor, the recently released romantic comedy with Patrick Dempsey, and has five other scripts in production.  read more »

I’m getting married this summer and thought it might be a good idea to speak with some gentlemen who I suspected could give me some pointers.

It was raining on a Friday morning when I met Bo Dietl at his office on the 50th floor of One Penn Plaza. Despite some shreds of cloud, Mr. Dietl—a homicide detective turned security consultant and media darling—had a clear view of the city below and, off in the distance, in the middle of the choppy harbor, the Statue of Liberty.  read more »

God willing, at this very moment someone is scrambling eggs on a stove in an apartment overlooking the East River while at the same time gazing up at someone’s buttocks, pressed against a see-through Plexiglas bathtub, sunken, by design, into the floor above.

In the early 1980s, the late Paul Rudolph, noted architect and onetime dean of the Yale School of Architecture, incorporated such a tub into his dream apartment on the top three floors of 23 Beekman Place. The tub was still in working condition a few years ago, when hotelier and noted bathing enthusiast André Balazs had his birthday party there. “Of all the incredible bathtubs I’ve heard of in this city, that one takes it,” Mr. Balazs said.  read more »

Socialite Allison Sarofim is also getting involved in movie production.

Ms. Sarofim, who grew up in Houston, moved to New York seven years ago. Her father is the famous Egyptian-born financier, Fayez Sarofim, a.k.a.  read more »

At around 7:45 p.m. on Monday, April 28, writer Carl Bernstein was mingling at the cocktail hour before the PEN Literary Awards at the Museum of Natural History, Coca Cola in hand, looking very healthy. “I ride a bike and listen to a lot of music,” he said. “I mostly listen to classical but also rock.  read more »

Move over, Paul Sevigny, there’s a new party in town: Julio Santo Domingo’s mysteriously named Sheik n’ Beik.

The venue changes from week to week. On Thursday, April 17, it was Kush Lounge on Christie Street. The week before it was Le Royale on Seventh Avenue. But fear not: Mr.  read more »

According to a source, socialite Olivia Palermo’s longtime dream of having her very own jewelry line is finally coming to fruition this summer. “I think she chose her favorite pieces from a selection,” said this person. “I think that it will bear her name, and of course she will be the face of it.”

Ms.  read more »

Dita Von Teese, 35, née Heather Renée Sweet, grew up in Rochester, Mich., and currently resides in Los Angeles. She began stripping when she was 18 and has since become a modern-day burlesque icon and ambassador for brands such as MAC and Cointreau, the latter of which installed the porcelain-skinned seductress in Suite 1204 at the Ritz-Carlton on Central Park South on Monday for a marathon session of photos and interviews.  read more »

The revelation that Eliot Spitzer was a connoisseur of $1,000-an-hour prostitutes hit New York like one of those bolts of lightning in a cartoon that splits open the pavement in two perfectly perforated halves. No one could believe it. Now, a month after he ’fessed up and resigned, a crater in the proverbial town square continues to smoke and belch. For example: His 22-year-old hooker du jour, Ashley Dupré, becomes a millionaire off downloads of her song on MySpace and is offered six figures to pose for Penthouse. District Attorney Robert Morgenthau publicly defends his former prosecutor, saying, “I think he has been punished enough.” Mr. Spitzer and his wife, Silda, meanwhile, lay low. And men and women, couples and singles, are left to wonder: Just how many men in New York are paying for sex?

Last Thursday I went to Starbucks with one of Manhattan’s former top-dollar madams to get some answers. We met first at her attorney’s office to set the ground rules. No names. Let’s call her Jane!  read more »

Princeton sophomore Roby Sobieski, the younger brother of actress Leelee Sobieski, is defending himself against charges that he is racist.