Catch her in Carnegie Hill. (ABC/Donna Svennevik)

When we saw that Nightline co-host Cynthia McFadden had sold her three-bedroom co-op at 129 East 69th Street last week, we wondered where she would be moving. Like the 11:35 p.m. time slot on ABC, a pre-war co-op in a white glove Lenox Hill building is prime real estate.

The answer is Carnegie Hill (and, if you're watching ABC, it's 12:35 a.m.). The famed journalist tells The Observer that she and her teenaged son are upgrading to a four-story brownstone on the Upper East Side neighborhood.

"It has beautiful qualities—squeaky stairs, old fireplaces, a great kitchen. It's a wonderful place to entertain," said Ms. McFadden, who had just come back from Washington DC after interviewing Hillary Clinton. (If you're wondering whether Jimmy Kimmel has ever interviewed Hillary Clinton the answer is no, he has not.)

When Ms. McFadden is not speaking with the former Secretary of State and possibly future POTUS, she's planning to do a lot of cooking and gardening in the new place.

"Work has me on the road a lot, but I'm really a homebody," she said. "You'll find me with dirty hands in the backyard."

Ms. McFadden told us that the she bought the new place under ask, for some $5 million; it was listed with Brown Harris Stevens brokers Ann Jeffery and Daniel Kessler. Corocoran broker Sharon Baum, who sold Ms. McFadden's co-op for $3.23 million, represented her in this transaction.

Besides a bigger kitchen and a garden, the newswoman had another reason for making the change.

"The house is not huge, but it seems huge to me. I have a teenaged son, so this allows him to escape," said Ms. McFadden. "I just hope he'll allow his mother to come up to the fourth floor to fumigate."

kvelsey@observer.com

That's solidarity! But Ms. McFadden always was irreproachably committed to her career.

Although our collective mental image of the late night newswoman is in front of the bright lights of Times Square, Ms. McFadden selected a more soporific setting for her home, buying the eleventh-floor spread for $3.18 million back in 2004. Nine years and many major news event later, she has sold the apartment for $3.23 million, city records show.

And no, the buyer is not Jimmy Kimmel. It's private equity power couple Susannah and Thomas Carrier. They Carriers are not just good at investing, they're also good at bargaining. The couple convinced Ms. McFadden to settle for less than her very reasonable $3.45 million asking price. A $50,000 increase over nearly a decade of ownership isn't very good appreciation for Manhattan real estate, but the history of price adjustments indicate that she was motivated to sell. We all know how news reporters hate a stale story.

Ms. McFadden listed the apartment with Corcoran brokers Sharon Baum and David Enloe last May. She tried a $3.9 million ask during the first month before quickly dropping it down a little, then a little more. Was it the dining room wallpaper? With the exception of that wacky print, the eight-room apartment is a  classic Upper East Side spread, with a wood-burning fireplace in the master bedroom, a red-paneled library, grand windows and "a gracious central gallery."

There's no new sale under Ms. McFadden's name, so it's unclear if she, like Nightline, will be moving to an adjacent spot or another time and place altogether.

kvelsey@observer.com

The test versions were prepared for ABC and Disney executives, who will consider whether to further develop an expanded version of the show. Nightline has done hour-long episodes in the past, as when its founding host, Ted Koppel, conducted celebrated news-breaking panels in Israel and South Africa, but the show has never owned an entire hour of regular late-night real estate.

In its current incarnation, the show has three hosts: Cynthia McFadden, Martin Bashir and Terry Moran. One of the pilots featured Ms. McFadden as the solo anchor of the broadcast. In the other, Mr. Bashir joined her behind the anchor desk.

Mr. Moran’s absence from the project may be explained by the fact that he lives in Washington, D.C.

Disney executives in Burbank, Calif., gave permission for the pilots in January. Nightline executive producer James Goldston relayed the news in a Jan. 18 conference call with his staff.

Were ABC to pick up the longer version, the extra time would fill the slot currently held by Jimmy Kimmel Live, the network’s underperforming answer to David Letterman and Jay Leno’s talk shows on CBS and NBC. According to Nielsen, Mr. Leno averages about 6.1 million viewers a night, Mr. Letterman 3.9 million, and Mr. Kimmel—confined to a later, less-attractive half-hour—1.8 million.

Nightline averages some 3.5 million viewers and actually beat Mr. Letterman’s Late Show on a handful of momentous nights this past summer and fall. But the talk shows, which charge a premium for commercials, are far more profitable enterprises.

Nightline still loses a small amount of money for ABC—although not nearly as much as it did when Mr. Koppel was running things, two sources said. Given the fixed costs of putting on a broadcast, a majority of Nightline’s senior management believes that the extra advertising revenue from stretching the show to an hour could put the program in the black for the first time in a long while.

Two sources said that Mr. Goldston described Mr. Kimmel’s show as losing “buckets of money” during the conference call.

Still, one ABC News executive urged caution. “I would not read a whole lot into this,” the executive said. “We are always experimenting and trying things. This is an idea that bubbled up from Nightline, and it would not be unusual for the network occasionally to look to Nightline to do an hour here or there, and it also is a potential hedge against a writers’ strike down the road.”

The ABC writers’ guild has been without a contract for over two years, and the network sees the threat of a strike as distant but feared.

Aside from anchor adjustments, the hour-long pilots filmed Feb. 9 looked a lot like the regular show, the three sources said. Ms. McFadden and Mr. Bashir took turns introducing a slate of pieces that had already appeared on the program. Leading the fake broadcast was a piece by veteran correspondent John Donvan on South Carolina schools. Also included was an interview that Mr. Bashir conducted with Forest Whitaker, a piece by Jessica Yellin about a company whose employees are all nice to each other, and a story about giant rabbits. There were a few other tweaks and innovations, including a contribution of some sort from a star of the Australian version of American Idol. The sources had difficulty precisely explaining the singer’s role.

Nightline hasn’t always had luck with test pilots in the past. In early 2005, the network tried out a few unconventional ideas, which drew snickers when they leaked to the press. One featured a nightclub-like setting, complete with smoke machines.

When Mr. Goldston took over in the summer of 2005, he brought considerable but measured change to the critically beloved news show. He went from one anchor and one topic per half hour to three anchors and multiple topics. He moved the show, which had always been produced in Washington, to New York, where it was filmed live out of the Disney-owned second-floor studio at 1500 Broadway.

The new Nightline has paid more attention than the old version to popular culture, with Ms. McFadden scoring a big get early on with Angelina Jolie. One of Mr. Goldston’s innovations has been to use celebrities as a vehicle for telling serious news stories—as in a piece following Hotel Rwanda star Don Cheadle around Africa.

Purists have reacted badly to the new version. Washington Post critic Tom Shales, who panned the 1979 debut of Nightline and then reversed his opinion in print weeks later, also panned the second generation when it debuted, calling it a “sallow shallow shadow of its former splendid self.” Mr. Shales hasn’t retracted that opinion—nor have other critics—but he did laud the new Nightline a few months later for pressing on in its tenuous commitment to the coverage of foreign news.

Viewers, meanwhile, seem to enjoy the new Nightline—certainly more than they enjoy the midnight talk show that follows it. Nightline’s audience has grown steadily in the last year and a half, and on its best nights, it has occasionally topped five million viewers.

You weren't around, you say? Well, here's Ms. Smith in the Aug. 28 edition of her column: "YOU CAN read 'Kate Remembered,' the boring and self-referential Scott Berg memoir on Miss Hepburn, but why not instead read Town & Country this month, carrying its vintage Kate conversation with her pal, the late director George Cukor. (You may have gathered I don't approve of the vain and narcissistic Berg, and I don't believe for one minute Kate 'collaborated' with him on his self-indulgent little book)."

And in a quote that was picked up by a number of newspapers, Ms. Smith pronounced Mr. Berg's book, "Self-promoting fakery …. Hepburn would have despised it and his betrayal of her friendship."

Well, as you might have guessed, Mr. Berg noticed Ms. Smith's dispatches. When The Transom attempted to contact the author to ask him why he thought the columnist had her knickers in a twist over his book, he issued a written statement via his publisher, G.P. Putnam's Sons.

"Over the last two months, I have been truly shocked at Liz Smith's professional behavior-or, more accurately, her lack thereof," Mr. Berg wrote. "My family and friends have reacted with utter disbelief at the level of personal disdain conveyed by Ms. Smith toward someone she barely knows; (indeed, beyond my appearing at one of her Literacy Volunteer events, I've met her but a few times.) And I've heard that people I don't even know are shocked by her personal assault on my reputation, one that stops just short of character assassination.

"I truly-evidently, naively-expected a higher standard from someone who allegedly shares my deep respect for my subject, especially as I wrote about Katharine Hepburn with nothing but the utmost love and admiration," Mr. Berg continued, adding: "I am unaware of any personal ax Liz Smith has to grind; but her columns certainly make one highly suspicious of her motives in this matter. Whatever the explanation, she seems to have given me more ink this summer than she's given Liza Minnelli and David Gest! And she's spelled my name right."

Mr. Berg may offer no motive, but speculation among followers of this brouhaha is that Ms. Smith's anger toward Mr. Berg has something to do with Ms. Smith's close personal friendship with Primetime Monday anchor Cynthia McFadden who, like Mr. Berg, and Ms. Smith, for that matter, was close to Hepburn. Some contend that Ms. McFadden wanted to write a remembrance of Hepburn herself. Others suggest that the contretemps stems from Mr. Berg's portrayal of Ms. McFadden in the book.

There is one point in Kate Remembered where Irene Selznick, the widow of David Selznick, informs Mr. Berg that Ms. McFadden has "taken over" the room he stayed in when he stayed at Hepburn's East 49th Street townhouse. And, indeed, there are moments in Kate Remembered when Mr. Berg seems to be bending over backward to show there was no rivalry between him and Ms. McFadden. He also chronicles Ms. McFadden's 1989 wedding to Hartford Courant publisher Michael Davies at Hepburn's childhood home, Fenwick. After the wedding, during which Ms. McFadden smeared the first-cut piece of wedding cake all over Hepburn's face, Hepburn told Mr. Berg that "she thought it was unfair for Cynthia to marry Michael, that Cynthia was more concerned just then with her career than with pleasing a husband and that that was no way to enter a marriage." Mr. Berg writes that the more Hepburn talked, "the more I felt she was talking about her own marriage to Luddy"-Ludlow Smith, her first husband-"And the more she talked, the angrier she got." Finally, Ms. Hepburn utters a single word, "Pig."

Earlier in the book, when Mr. Berg asks Hepburn why she married Smith, whom she largely ignored, she says: "Because I was a pig." (Mr. Davies and Ms. McFadden have since divorced.)

When we reached Ms. Smith, she told us she didn't want to hear Mr. Berg's statement. "I'll read it in your column," she said. But she denied that her salvos at Kate Remembered had anything to do with Ms. McFadden. "My reaction to Scott Berg's book has to do with my love for Ms. Hepburn, not my regard for Cynthia or her family or anyone else," she said. "This is my supreme personal reaction. I think all of Ms. Hepburn's close friends and intimates are dismayed by the book" in part, she said, because "no one in Ms. Hepburn's group of friends even knew he was doing this." She added: "I did what I think was the very last interview Ms. Hepburn ever gave, at the time of her book, Me. So I'm certainly entitled to be disappointed in a Pulitzer Prize winner whom I have admired in the past, writing such a boring stupid book of betrayal."

Ms. McFadden, who has since been named the co-executor of Hepburn's estate, could not be reached for comment, but a friend of the TV journalist told The Transom that though Ms. McFadden has "been approached numerous times through the years about writing a book about Katharine Hepburn, she's made it clear that she has neither the time nor the inclination." The friend also said: "Cynthia could care less about how she was portrayed in the book and like many of Hepburn's close friends was only upset by the deceit that Scott engaged in with Hepburn about his intentions to write a book or biography."

In his statement, Mr. Berg wrote that over the two decades that he kept in close contact with Hepburn: "Despite our deepening friendship-maybe because of it-she never lost sight of the fact that I was a professional writer, a biographer. Countless times she spoke of my writing a book about her, insisting only that it never be published during her lifetime. On several occasions she suggested that I publish my account of her life as close to her death as possible. I always thought that was because she wanted to set the record straight about her life right away, before other books put other versions out there."

And though he could not be reached to respond to Ms. Smith's comments, the final paragraph of his statement states: "I will long take comfort in my surety that Katharine Hepburn would have thanked me for my memoir-all the laughs and even the sad parts-because it is loving and honest … and because it preserves the stories of her life for generations to come."

-Frank DiGiacomo

The League of Extraordinary Nerds

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's … a group of crime-fighting Oxford dons!

November will see the debut of a new comic book from G.I. Joe publishers Image Comics. Heaven's War focuses on the Inklings, the scholarly cabal that was centered around Chronicles of Narnia author C.S. Lewis, Lord of the Rings scribe J.R.R. Tolkien and poet and War in Heaven novelist Charles Williams. The group, which used to meet at the Oxford pub Eagle and Child, shared an interest in theology, philosophy and fantasy.

Heaven's War imagines that the writers were up to something much more than Guinness-fueled navel-gazing. According to an advertisement in the Previews catalog published by Diamond Comic Distributors Inc., the book will be set in 1938, with the world hovering on the brink of World War II when "a secret angelic battle is waged in the heavenly realms to determine mankind's fate." The Inklings are pitted against the infamous occultist author Aleister Crowley, who "plans to manipulate those angelic struggles and thus shape the world according to his will."

In order to stop him, the Inklings "must decipher a landscape of sacred geometry to intercept Crowley at the threshold of heaven."

We're not making this up.

What prompted the desire to turn a group of dead fountain-pen-wielding scholars into superheros? It could well be Image Comics' attempt to cash in on the success of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Alan Moore's D.C./A.B.C. comic about Allan Quatermain, Captain Nemo, Dr. Jekyll, the Invisible Man and Mina Murray (née Harker) from Bram Stoker's Dracula, who band together in 1898 to save the British Empire from evil. Extremely successful as a comic, League was adapted into an eponymous movie starring Sean Connery that was released this summer to mostly negative reviews and bad box office.

Eric, a marketing manager at Image Comics whose voice-mail messages promised to return calls "as soon as superhumanly possible," did not, in fact, return calls.

-Rebecca Traister

Annoyed With Lloyd

New York party-planners, don't invite Susan Sarandon and new Daily News columnist Lloyd Grove to the same shindig just yet. The Transom caught up with Ms. Sarandon at the opening of fashion house Akris' flagship store on Madison Avenue on Sept. 17 and asked what she made of former Washington Post columnist Mr. Grove's move to her hometown. "It's unfortunate that you have to start attacking people's children in order to make a name for yourself," Ms. Sarandon fumed, referring to a March 18, 2003, Post item Mr. Groves had written that quoted Ms. Sarandon's mother, Lenora Tomalin. Ms. Tomalin mentioned a breakfast-table imbroglio in 2000 in which Sarandon's 13-year-old son asked if she had voted for Bush. Ms. Tomalin told the reporter that she wouldn't discuss politics with a 13-year-old that has been "brainwashed" by his parents.

The item prompted Ms. Sarandon's other half, Tim Robbins, to approach Mr. Grove at Vanity Fair's 2003 post-Oscars party and threaten, "If you ever write about my family again, I will fucking find you and I will fucking hurt you."

"It's a pathetic legacy to leave-that this would be your job," Ms. Sarandon continued at the Akris party. "They must be such unhappy people. I feel bad for them. I don't hold a grudge."

Mr. Grove called Ms. Sarandon's comments "nonsense." "[Ms. Tomalin] had some things on her mind. Unprompted by me, she said them. Even though she's not a celebrity she thought what she had to say was important and I agree," he said. "She should take the issue up with her mother, not me." After 19 years at The Post, where he wrote his column "The Reliable Source" from 1999 until almost two months ago, Mr. Grove's News column will begin on Sept. 29. "At some point there will be peace, which is Susan's hope, I think," he said.

-John Gallagher

Bring the Pane

"I've lived in two different places in New York," Drew Barrymore said at the premiere of Duplex, a comedy about living in New York City, on Sept. 18 at Clearview Beekman Theatre. "I tended to weirdly get places with no windows and I didn't realize it in the beginning, and wondered why I was severely depressed by the lack of light in my apartment." Ms. Barrymore is reportedly shacking up at the Mercer Hotel with Strokes beau Fabrizio Moretti while she awaits renovations-more windows?-to a new Union Square pad. But she wasn't letting on to any of it. Wearing an off-white Chloé car coat with black trim to match her dyed-blond hair, she told The Transom: "The next place I get, hopefully, will be full of light."

-Jake Brooks