Former Bush assistant secretary of defense, James Shinn, and his wife, Masako, an artist, have bought a ninth-to-11th-floor unit at 2 East 70^th Street originally listed for $19.5 million last February. But even a coveted address overlooking the Frick on Fifth Avenue couldn't prevent the price from parachuting to $14.95 million. The couple quietly paid $11.75 million for it this fall. 

"It's really like having a townhouse inside of a building," said Prudential Douglas Elliman broker Daniela Kunen. More cryptically, another broker familiar with the apartment said: "It's like a vertical railroad car apartment."

The late doctor pioneered the microscopic diagnosis of melanoma, while continuing to insist the disease was not caused by sun exposure. He was only the apartment's second owner, and was apparently so averse to change that he kept the original 1927 bathroom sinks. "He preserved as much as he could," Ms. Kunen said. "He maintained and lubricated it. He's a real purist."

The Observer first spotted the sale when the Shinns sold their five-floor Italianate Lenox Hill townhouse for $13.65 million. That was a $1.35 million loss compared to what they paid in 2007, but the stealthy military man seems to have known exactly what he was doing.  

lkusisto@observer.com 

Under the tent, wait staff wandered between partygoers with plates of maple bacon. Wax likenesses of Bono and Tina Turner were donated by Madame Tussauds and positioned for Poloroids. There was an ice cream stand, a photo booth, a caricature guy and an extensive seafood table with a large dripping seahorse ice sculpture.

I met Ms. Smith by the front opening of the tent (near the ice cream stand). She was wearing a white and blue polka-dotted jacket and slipper shoes with tiny etched devils in them. She smiled, shook hands, and hugged most of the arriving guests, cameras snapping. I asked Ms. Smith if she thought she'd make her usual Fete de Swifty numbers in light of all the Wall Street commotion.

"We'd like to make over a million dollars, I don't know if we will, but maybe. We do get better every year. Of course though, with economics as they are ..." She shook her head slightly.

Then I asked her about Lehman Brothers.

"You know, I don't even know what to say about that. It's so horrible. I'm so furious because they let it happen again. They talk about regulations ... They've been warned over and over for months ...for years. Oh! Here's my friend Dina!" Ms. Smith wandered off to hug Dina.

Around 7:30 the lights in the tent dimmed momentarily and Mayor Bloomberg appeared with Ms. Smith on the small central stage inside the tent. He addressed the party.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I want to welcome all of you to my favorite annual fund-raiser in a tent on 73rd Street! We had the U.S. Open a couple of weeks ago, tonight's Swifty's. We have the Mets ... the Yankees final game at Yankees Stadium on Sunday night. I'm sure you'll all be there, but tonight I want to say thank you to you for supporting the Mayor's Fund, so thanks, New York!" He then introduced Ms. Smith as "one of the most wonderful women [he has] ever met" and she took the podium to speak:

"Ladies and gentlemen, we're all here, we're eating and drinking, we're rubbing elbows, we're exchanging cards. But I think we'd all be very proud if you could visit one of the anti-violence centers in Queens and the Bronx—I mean in Brooklyn, we're gonna build one in the Bronx, we're gonna build a lot of them. I have a feeling we need one right here in Manhattan. But anyway, that's the serious part of this. It's just great, the mayor is so wonderful to work with and if there were more men like him in America, we wouldn't be in the dilemma we're in right now!" The surging crowd exploded, applauding, and Mr. Bloomberg took the microphone again to thank several people and Ms. Smith again.

"You know, " he said, "not everyone is as lucky as us ... and Liz does a good deal for people, as much as anybody I ever met."

After a photo op and an announcement about the raffle for two stadium seats from Shea, the crowd dissipated and the Daily Transom found Ms. Smith again near the front entrance. She called us over to meet Joan Collins, who was in the middle of being whisked away somewhere else. Ms. Collins wore an open-ruffled bodice-type shirt and trim skirt. I asked her if she had any particular reason for attending.

"Well, why does anybody come?" Ms. Collins said, smirking, walking away. "For fun and for friends and to celebrate Swifty!"

(This year's honorary chairs: actress Nicole Kidman, designer Calvin Klein and Law and Order SVU's Mariska Hargitay. None of which were present. There were reports that Ethan Hawke and Debbie Harry showed, but they are not confirmed.)

It’s easy to feel superior to Joan Crawford. There are her Great Lady affectations, that pissy upper-crust speech reeking of noblesse oblige. “My audience always deserves the best I have to give, and I give them everything I have,” she tells Charlotte Chandler in Not the Girl Next Door, a new oral biography. “I like to remember people on special occasions. I’m sure there are people it doesn’t mean much to, but if one lonely person was cheered, it was well worth the effort.”

And there is the truth that, left to her own acting devices, she tended to apply a shade too much pressure. Top it off with the half-mad portrait in her daughter Christina’s scabrous book, conveniently published after mommie dearest was dead and the will that disinherited her daughter had been made public.

But …

Am I alone in finding something poignant in this driven, now unfashionable creature? Am I alone in thinking that, at her best, she was extraordinarily effective?

Take, for instance, Grand Hotel (1932). Or The Women (1939). She’s sexy, sad and touching in the former; sexy, rowdy and funny in the latter. Or the star turn of Mildred Pierce (1945), or the unclassifiable bizarrerie of Johnny Guitar (1954), or her ravaged vulnerability in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). And that’s not even taking into account fascinating, audacious failures like A Woman’s Face (1941).

Crawford’s best work was always about the damaged soul beneath the mannered surface of a hard woman. She didn’t do irony, and she didn’t hold herself aloof from her material; she responded to her parts the same way her public did—ardently.

From the beginning, she cast her life as openly aspirational. Crawford was a girl from the wrong side of the Texas tracks, and her first two husbands were Douglas Fairbanks Jr.—as close to a crown prince as anybody who’s ever come out of Hollywood—and Franchot Tone, a smooth and sophisticated New York charmer.

Clearly, the woman was desperate for standing, for status. So it follows that Crawford’s great crime as far as posterity is concerned is wanting it too much—the desire to be beautiful, sexy, a star, to dominate, leaks through her pores. It’s the same trait that makes it hard to take Tom Cruise—a better actor than he’s usually given credit for—entirely seriously.

We like our movie stars to be casual about their stardom, so we can comfort ourselves that the only difference between them and “those wonderful people out there in the dark” (i.e., us), is good luck—not ravenous ambition and carefully harnessed and nurtured talent.

In Not the Girl Next Door, the wise old George Cukor shows his unerring grasp of psychology—not just of movie characters, but of the actors who played the characters. “The time [Crawford] really came alive,” he told Ms. Chandler, “was when the camera was on her. As the camera came in closer she had an expression on her face of wanting it intensely. She glowed from within. Her skin came to life. Her head fell back. Her lips parted. … It was utterly sensual, erotic. … She was married many times and had many lovers, and I was never in her bedroom, but I’m certain no man ever saw the look on her face that she had as the camera moved in.”

Ms. Chandler’s book is the same mixture as her earlier books: an oral biography, with co-stars, ex-husbands, etc., commenting on the subject at hand. Not cross-checked by documents, but invaluable nevertheless. As, for example, Crawford and Fairbanks’ particularly honest remarks about their lusty, short-lived marriage.

Crawford was always quotable, always revealing, although not always intentionally. Here she is, talking about returning to MGM to make Torch Song in 1953, after an absence of more than 10 years:

“As soon as I was on the set, I knew I hadn’t been forgotten there. I can’t begin to tell you how wonderful being there made me feel. I was afraid that no one would remember me. I can tell you I was deeply worried that maybe I wouldn’t be remembered. By then, there were all those wonderful technicians. Not only did they remember me, but I remembered them, every single one.”

Perhaps Crawford had experienced Gloria Swanson’s performance in Sunset Boulevard so intensely that she was unintentionally paraphrasing one of its core moments, when Norma Desmond returns to Paramount and her beloved Mr. DeMille.

Or perhaps Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett penetrated to the need for recognition that lies at the core of the actress’ heart.

Perhaps both.

Scott Eyman reviews books regularly for The Observer. He can be reached at books@observer.com.

I will also miss Shelley Winters, my next-door neighbor, who inspired the famous line “I’m not hungry, I’ll just pick.” It seems like only yesterday that I was sharing five desserts with the blond bombshell at Elaine’s. On a perennial diet between Oscars and love affairs, no plate of food at an opening-night party was safe in her presence. Shelley had a heart as big as her girdle, and the Actors Studio will be poorer without her. She was one tough broad, who made the label respectable. A few days after Shelley took the cab, ex-husband Anthony Franciosa followed. A few years ago, she spotted him at a party and said, “You look familiar—do I know you from somewhere?”

If you called Glenn Ford a Method actor, he would probably have reached for his Colt .45, but that’s exactly what he was. The screen won’t be the same without his cool, sweet mix of Mr. Nice Guy and “Don’t tread on me.” As a ghetto teacher in Blackboard Jungle, a Communist agitprop merchant in Trial, a gunslinger or a sheriff in dozens of westerns, a harassed single parent in The Courtship of Eddie’s Father or Silly Putty in the hands of Rita Hayworth’s Gilda, he was a master of moment-to-moment realism who made every moment ring true, during an ego-resistant career that was miraculously quiet by Hollywood standards. I’ll miss him too, probably because he looked so much like my own father. He died at 90.

The final bow of the sensational Maureen Stapleton has left me wordless. From her Oscar-winning performance as the Jewish Communist labor leader Emma Goldman in Reds to pulsating hits by Woody Allen and Neil Simon, she played comedy and drama with equal honesty, relish and emotional intensity. Privately, she was always unpredictable. She once showed up at my apartment four hours late for an 8 p.m. dinner and spent the rest of the night on the sofa. And she was one of the funniest women on the planet. At the movie premiere of Bye Bye Birdie, after everyone toasted the star, a drunken Mo stood unsteadily and announced to the press: “I guess I’m the only one here who doesn’t want to fuck Ann-Margret!” Then she passed out on the floor, to tumultuous applause. What a character. When God finished designing Maureen Stapleton, he threw away the key.

The alluring Italian-Austrian film star Alida Valli, a great artist whose career was effectively sabotaged by Hollywood, died in Rome at age 84. What a life! After her mother was murdered by Mussolini’s Fascists, she starred opposite Orson Welles in The Third Man and got whisked off to Hollywood by David O. Selznick, who crowned her “the new Garbo,” then cast her as an implausible Polish burlesque queen in a B picture with Frank Sinatra. What America lost was postwar Europe’s gain as she was “rediscovered” by Visconti, Bertolucci and Antonioni. She married the songwriter who wrote “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth,” landed in a sex-and-drugs scandal involving the son of an Italian foreign minister, and ended up in trashy horror films playing various witches, vampires and ghouls. I hope she’s found peace. She sure earned it.

We reluctantly bid adieu to Oscar-winning funny man Red Buttons, who returned to Broadway with a one-man show in 1995 that was still knocking them in the aisles at age 76. It was one last curtain call for Dennis Weaver, who went from selling pantyhose to a 50-year career in acting, nine years of it as Chester on Gunsmoke. Best work: the frustrated motorist pursued by a homicidal truck driver in Steven Spielberg’s Duel. Another television staple who turned off the test pattern: Darren McGavin, a set painter at Columbia who found his way into fodder like Mike Hammer and The Night Stalker, but who also appeared in Macbeth and Death of a Salesman.

I hated to see Jack Palance go. The gravel-voiced villain, born Volodymir Ivanovich Palahniuk in the coal mines of Pennsylvania, worked as a professional boxer, bomber pilot, sportswriter and cattle rancher before he landed with a splash on the screen, terrorizing the pioneers in Shane. Hedda Hopper described him as “a man who could play Frankenstein without makeup,” but although his face could frighten horses, he was actually a sensitive vegetarian who wrote poetry and painted landscapes. Ironically, he will probably be best remembered for the night he finally won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 1992 and shocked the world by dropping to the stage at age 73 to do one-arm pushups.

Other reliables who signed off: Dana Reeve, who sublimated her own career to take care of husband Christopher (a.k.a. Superman), then died 10 months after he did; Jane Wyatt, everybody’s favorite Emmy Award–winning TV mom on Father Knows Best; brainy, perky Phyllis Kirk, star of House of Wax; lanky, durable Arthur Hill, who won Broadway’s coveted Tony Award for the original production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; ageless veteran Barnard Hughes, who won the Tony in 1978 for Da; Bettye Ackerman, a hospital regular on Ben Casey; Chris Penn, the younger, lesser-known brother of Sean Penn (he was only 40); Jack Warden, a former dockworker, boxer and merchant mariner, who played gruff but engaging characters in more than 100 movies; veteran Asian-American actor Mako, who triumphed in works as versatile as Stephen Sondheim’s Broadway musical Pacific Overtures and last year’s film adaptation of Memoirs of a Geisha; Kurt Kreuger, the tall, blond, blue-eyed heavy who specialized in playing handsome Nazis in World War II epics with Bogart, Flynn and Tyrone Power; French character actor Philippe Noiret; Edward Albert, active conservationist, musician and actor son of Eddie Albert, who rose to fame as the blind mama’s boy opposite Goldie Hawn in Butterflies Are Free; bumbling comic actor Don Knotts, who always looked like he just stuck a finger in a wet socket; and Frankie Thomas, the all-American boy next-door who played the teenage sleuth’s hapless partner in crime in four Nancy Drew movies and won fame on his own as star of the TV series Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. He died at 85 and was buried in his signature Tom Corbett costume. It was also adios for Billy Crystal sidekick Bruno Kirby; Joseph Bova, the unforgettable Prince Dauntless opposite Carol Burnett in the 1959 musical Once Upon a Mattress; Jack Wild, who played the Artful Dodger in the 1968 film Oliver!; Arthur Franz, whose popular best-buddy image in Hellcats of the Navy wiped the floor with co-stars Ronald Reagan and Nancy Davis; Robert Sterling, handsome actor and husband of both Ann Sothern and Anne Jeffreys, whose attractive virility enhanced MGM movies in the 40’s, as well as the 50’s hit TV series Topper, in which he and Jeffreys played two fun-loving ghosts; Jean Byron, who was a living-room regular as Patty Duke’s mother in the 1960’s; Osa Massen, 91, Danish-born femme fatale in 1940’s Hollywood movies like A Woman’s Face with Joan Crawford; Justine Johnson, the soprano who, as the fading opera star, sang “One More Kiss” in the original Broadway cast of Follies; Anne Meacham, elliptical cohort of Tennessee Williams and star of many of his plays; French sexpot Annette Stroyberg, who drained the blood from Elsa Martinelli’s neck in the lesbian vampire flick Blood and Roses and was one of the five wives of horny French director Roger Vadim (between Brigitte Bardot and Jane Fonda); and Peter Boyle, the tap-dancing monster in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, who went on to become the grouchy dad on Everybody Loves Raymond. Did you know that John Lennon was the best man at his wedding?

The lights dimmed this year for Dick Cavett’s actress wife, the smoky-voiced, Mississippi-born, Tallulah-talking Carrie Nye. Dry as a martini without the olive, this underrated actress was one of the greatest Amanda Wingfields (The Glass Menagerie) I ever saw on a professional stage. And what a sense of humor! I was once engaged to interview her at the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival in New Orleans. The night before, I slipped on a broken sidewalk and, on the day of the big event, I looked like the victim of a Chinatown Tong War. Gamely, I appeared onstage with my eye injury camouflaged by dark sunglasses. Out came Carrie and Dick in dark glasses, to tumultuous laughter and applause, and we all went on with the show like three blind mice. She was a Southern belle without a plantation of her own who made Scarlett seem like a cotton-pickin’ amateur.

The notes in Broadway musicals will sound flatter without Joan Diener, the busty, big-voiced beauty who scored as Dulcinea in Man of La Mancha; Elizabeth Allan, the lovely singing star of the Sondheim-Richard Rodgers show Do I Hear a Waltz?; and Isabel Bigley, the original Tony-winning Sarah Brown in Guys and Dolls. Where will we be without their high C’s? And where will we be without Cy Feuer (Guys and Dolls, Can-Can, Little Me) to produce musicals with taste, or the fabulous Betty Comden to write the songs? She died on Thanksgiving Day, after more than 60 years of witty, memorable lyrics composed with her late writing partner, Adolph Green. With movies like Singin’ in the Rain and stage shows like Wonderful Town, On the Town, Bells Are Ringing and Peter Pan, their praises will be sung forever. For years, people thought Comden and Green were married to each other. “Not true,” they used to joke. “Right now, we’re seeing Nichols and May.”

Dance is out of step with the last pirouette of luscious Moira Shearer, the Titian-haired ballerina who made film history in 1948 as the star of The Red Shoes, and the final Terpsichore of Katherine Dunham. Where is the joy without the swirl and twirl of Fayard Nicholas, the surviving half of the acrobatic Nicholas Brothers (his younger brother Harold died in 2000). Their “Jumpin’ Jive” number in Stormy Weather was declared “the greatest dance ever filmed” by Fred Astaire, but prejudice limited their exposure. As late as 1948, when they shared the screen with Gene Kelly in The Pirate, Southern theater owners refused to show the picture. “If I was white, I coulda danced with Ginger Rogers,” Fayard said. They will not be forgotten.

The important film directors who framed their final shots include Robert Altman, Richard Fleischer, Gillo Pontecorvo and Vincent Sherman, 99, the Warner Brothers perfectionist in the days when they still knew how to tell stories. He was famous for eliciting powerful performances from strong-willed women like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, both of whom he loved—on camera and after work. The writers beside whose deft touch today’s incomprehensible scripts seem like faded faxes, at last sent their old Smith-­Coronas into storage: playwright Wendy Wasserstein, Jay Presson Allen (Cabaret), Joseph Stefano (Psycho), Leonard Schrader (Kiss of the Spider Woman) and Joseph Hayes (Desperate Hours).

Gordon Parks, the first black photographer at Life magazine, and Sven Nykvist, who turned Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen movies into high art, sent their cameras to that screening room in the sky. And don’t forget the contribution made by Joe Rosenthal, the A.P. war photographer who snapped the historic shot of American troops planting the flag on Iwo Jima. Clint Eastwood didn’t.

A number of valued posts were vacated in the music world. Opera will never resonate with the same fire and passion after the loss of feisty conductor Sarah Caldwell, lyric soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Australian queen of operatic parody Anna Russell, and Wagnerian diva Birgit Nilsson. Movie music will never top Malcolm Arnold’s theme from The Bridge on the River Kwai. Pop music lost the Grammy-winning jazz and gospel icon Lou Rawls. The rhythm is off the downbeat without soul king James Brown, “Fifth Beatle” Billy Preston, Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett, 60’s teen idol Gene Pitney and my dear friend, the swinging Ruth Brown. Country and western lost a jubilant twang with the fadeout of Buck Owens. Jazz will struggle along without trumpet whiz Maynard Ferguson, conga drummer Ray Barretto, virtuoso Duke Ellington drummer Dave Black, Kansas City pianist Jay McShann and record mogul Ahmet Ertegün, who produced many of their greatest hits. Pop charts sagged with the loss of Eileen Barton and Georgia Gibbs. Another nail in the coffin of big-band swing accompanied the last eight bars by Benny Goodman vocalist Martha Tilton and swinging Stan Kenton jazz alum Anita O’Day. As indestructible as she was inimitable, Anita survived abortions, divorces, arrests, jail sentences, nervous breakdowns and addictions to nicotine, booze and heroin to become the queen of bebop. “O’Day” was pig Latin for the “dough” she made and wasted in a career that spanned the ages of 19 to 87. Her 1981 book High Times Hard Times lived up to its title, but she was elegant in hats and gloves even in the lowest dives.

Broadcasting will seem pale after the values of talk-show host Mike Douglas, Wall Street reporter Louis Rukeyser and 60 Minutes’ Ed Bradley; journalism will be tamer without R.W. Apple Jr., Oriana Fallaci and A.M. Rosenthal; and the world of literature will be dull as a rusty fork after William Styron; lurid, violent potboiler czar Mickey Spillane; charming author Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, whose family stories became a popular book and movie called Cheaper by the Dozen; British sophisticate Muriel Spark; crime novelist William Diehl; and Jaws’ Peter Benchley, who made everyone afraid of the water till the end of time. We heard the final filibusters from politicians good (wise, down-home former Texas Governor Ann Richards, President Gerald Ford, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, U.S. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick) and bad (Serbian butcher Slobodan Milosevic and Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, and let’s forget about Saddam Hussein in a New York minute, O.K.?). Heavyweight champ Floyd Patterson hung up his gloves; Oleg Cassini designed his last fashions; economists Milton Friedman and John Kenneth Galbraith left me worried about money; Edna Lewis baked her final pecan pie; crocodile hunter Steve Irwin survived more wildlife perils than Tarzan, only to be killed in a freak accident by a stingray; Coretta Scott King did her last good deed; Betty Friedan tutored her last feminist; Aaron Spelling surrendered his crown as the Titan of Tasteless TV; and Florence Klotz, Broadway’s most flamboyant costume designer, dazzled her last audience with museum-quality gowns that knocked our socks off.

Like I said, a terrible year—let’s hope that 2007 is more cheerful. To all and sundry, go and be well.

Ms. Dunaway’s Crawford is one of the most reckless and extreme performances any star has ever dared. Ms. Dunaway goes at the role as if she were exacting revenge for every indignity and slight, every pass made by some Hollywood sleazeball, every ounce of worry expounded over a wrinkle or a bit of sagging flesh, that she or any female star has ever endured. She wants to stand, bloodied and unbowed, on the corpse of the star system—which, of course, is a way of making sure she’s a bigger star than ever. In Mommie Dearest, Ms. Dunaway both tries to slay the demon of stardom and incarnate it. That this terrifying and astonishing performance is regarded as camp says more about the squeamishness of audiences than about the conflicted fearlessness of its star.

You don’t go to a movie like Mommie Dearest out of innocent impulses. Audiences wanted to see the physical and verbal abuse Crawford’s adopted daughter, Christina, had detailed in her memoir, published in 1978, the year after Crawford died. But the book’s brand of tabloid kicks is simply the flipside of fan-mag puffery. The movie supplied those moments—the infamous nighttime rampage over the “wire hangers” in Christina’s closet; Crawford’s obsession with cleanliness and order. But Ms. Dunaway gave audiences something they didn’t want: a sense of how they helped create the monster before them.

When Ms. Dunaway’s Joan, her face contorted in rage and smeared in greasy cold cream, leers out at us brandishing the wire hanger she’s about to beat Christina with, it’s a Bizarro World recasting of the preceding scene: Joan greeting the fans and reporters outside her house after she wins the Oscar for Mildred Pierce. She tells the crowd that they and they alone are responsible for giving her this honor. But if the adoring fans put that Oscar in Crawford’s hand, they are complicit in putting the wire hanger there as well. Not that the movie blames anyone but Joan for her explosions. But it understands her rage as coming from her fear of losing the public’s adoration.

You don’t have to know anything about Crawford’s early scrabbling life as a waitress and shopgirl (and the movie doesn’t tell you about it) to empathize with the particularly American hunger in Ms. Dunaway’s performance. It’s the hunger for acclaim and security, the gratitude for achieving it, the fear it will go away and the resentment at whatever threatens it. That’s what those wire hangers represent to Joan: a return to the dreariness she clawed her way out of. Everything Joan does to herself—the skin scoured in scalding water; the face held in bracing bandages while she sleeps, then submerged into ice upon waking; the punishing exercise regimen; the rigid discipline in everything from studying a script to autographing photos; the fawning supplication to photographers and celebrity scribes; a life in which every moment is lived as “Joan Crawford”—all of these are Joan’s sacrifices to the gods of stardom. And like anyone who believes in the gods, she lives in fear of their wrath. When she’s summoned to the office of Louis B. Mayer (Howard Da Silva), who dismisses her from her MGM contract after years with the studio, you understand what she has to be afraid of.

As the child Christina, Mara Hobel gives a very creepy performance; she’s less a child than an automaton playing Joan’s idealized notion of a child. Ms. Hobel’s two big confrontation scenes with Ms. Dunaway go right to the heart of the worst parent-child eruptions you’ve ever been party to, the kind where each side knows exactly what buttons to push to wound the other. (The older Christina, played by Diana Scarwid, has become more subtle and accomplished at striking back.)

Those scenes are a specialty of Robert Getchell, the screenwriter whose best work (Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Sweet Dreams) understands the barbed emotional slapstick that takes place between parents and children, husbands and wives. Getchell wrote the original screenplay, and everyone I know who has read it has, to a person, called it one of the best film scripts they know. But the script was reportedly rejected by the original star, Anne Bancroft, and then not reinstated when she left the project. It was then worked on by Tracy Hotchner, and finally cobbled together by the director, Frank Perry, and the producer, Frank Yablans. Maybe that’s why huge swatches of the story seem to have been cut in the last half. Perry’s direction is, at best, serviceable: He brings it no imagination or sensibility to dovetail with its star. The upside is that nothing distracts from Ms. Dunaway—though now she may wish it did.

After Mommie Dearest opened to mocking reviews in the summer of 1981, Paramount quickly began selling it as camp, which is how they’re selling this new “Hollywood Royalty Edition” DVD. As a promotional gag, I was sent a pair of marbou-trimmed rubber kitchen gloves and a bottle of cleanser with “Mommie Dearest” on the label. (To their honor, both John Waters and John Epperson, the drag performer known as Lipsynka, don’t condescend to the movie in their bonus commentary).

Treating the movie as a campy, queeny bitchfest is easier than submitting to the power of Ms. Dunaway’s performance, which, in terms of what we expect from our movie glamour queens, is the emotional equivalent of watching her commit seppuku. As a widely circulated tape of a phone message she left for a Vanity Fair reporter makes clear, Ms. Dunaway loathes the film and resents the ridicule it brought her. That Ms. Dunaway did her finest work in a film about a woman who turned herself into a monster out of fear of rejection, only to wind up ashamed of a performance that should have brought her honor, says as much about that fear as anything in Mommie Dearest.

Ms. Smith, now 82, originally of Fort Worth, Tex., has lived in New York City since 1949, but she still retains a thick, honeyed twang. She has written her column since 1976; it runs in the New York Post. Frank Sinatra once famously called her “a dumpy, fat, ugly broad.”

And this September, on the retirement of Variety’s Army Archerd after 52 years, instead of hiring some young punk, the Hollywood industry rag began a new institution: a weekly “In New York” column by Ms. Smith.

So what’s she up to? “I write all the time,” Ms. Smith said. “I think that people who have their health, who like to work, still get up every single morning just like everyone else. They’re still ambitious; they live in a state of attention, like everyone else, that the world is coming to an end and ‘Am I going to be fired?’ and ‘Will I cut the mustard today?’

“Peggy Lee said, ‘Success is loving your work,’ and I believe that’s true. If you love your work, you want to go on working. Retirement is just anathema as an idea to me. My whole identification with my own ego, my personal life and whatever my place is in New York City’s recent history is tied up in my work. I can’t imagine not getting up every morning and reading all the papers and magazines and trying to catch up on what’s going on,” she said.

Her columns seem, from the outside, a daunting feat. “It’s sort of like riding a tiger,” Ms. Smith said. “You can’t dismount. I think the routine of deadlines is very healthy for intrinsically lazy people like me.

“Also,” she added, “I’m very much aware that my energy is just a gift that I didn’t deserve. You know, anybody can get sick or have a heart attack or a stroke—even young people.

“And I think older people are all younger now than they used to be: 60 is like 40 now—though I won’t say 80 is like 60.” Ms. Smith laughed. “They do the same things that young people do—they just don’t stay out all night dancing in Tribeca. I don’t do that anymore.” Instead, she confines her nightly activities to the only slightly earlier-ending charity circuit.

In the decades that Ms. Smith has been writing, both the presentation and the manufacture of gossip have evolved.

“The celebrity craze has engendered a lot of interest in gossip, but I don’t think gossip ever changes that much—it’s just very hard for the standard print media to beat the bloggers,” she said. “Frankly, I don’t read the blogs, because I’m afraid I’ll believe them.”

Ms. Smith rarely plays the nasty heavy in her column, though she confesses to having thrown her weight around now and then. “I don’t need to do what everyone else is doing,” she said. “I’m not talented at doing that anyway. Besides, in my paper alone there are other places you can read that. And in the Daily News, and the 5,000 weekly magazines that have inflicted themselves on us every Monday, with all the same story. And they all look so much alike! You can’t tell People from Us Weekly or Fame Weekly or whatever the names are.

“I try to keep up,” she said, “but I confess I can’t. Half the time, I don’t know who people are talking about. I read Page Six, but I would say I don’t know 40 percent of the people they’re writing about.”

It’s true that, for anyone with a sense of history, today’s gossip landscape makes very little sense. “The studios used to manufacture someone like Clark Gable or Joan Crawford, and you didn’t know much about them, and what you did know probably wasn’t even true,” she said. “They had mystique. There are so many venues now for writing—and that’s why they all get written about, and you get so sick of them. The public has developed a very short attention span for real news. Four days later, they’re ready to junk it and move on to the latest tragedy, tsunami, accusation or whatever.

“Technology is driving us all over the edge—I can’t imagine what’s going to happen,” Ms. Smith said. “The only reason I’d like to just keep living on and on, if I had my health, would be just to see what’s going to happen. I’m enormously curious—which I suppose is why retirement wouldn’t suit me. I’d just become an insatiable news junkie, and I’d die somewhere hunched over the keyboard. So I would much rather be working and going out and dressing up.”

Speaking of which: “Honey, can I go? I just put on some lipstick and everything,” Ms. Smith said. “If you need something, I’ll be writing at home over the weekend about Truman Capote for Harper’s Bazaar.”

Imagine my surprise, then, to find myself on a rainy January afternoon in 1979 sitting on the floor of her old townhouse in Turtle Bay, after years of explaining how I was not the kind of old-fashioned journalist who asked movie stars for their brownie recipes, while she dished brownies out of a battered old pan and shared the secrets of her kitchen. She was 71 then, an elegant old trout of boundless energy and surging spirit who made the young film stars of the day look like a pile of dead sea moss. The occasion was a TV special of The Corn is Green , and the interview was her idea. She was at an age when work was scarce and one appearance took on the status of a major event. Right up to her death last week at 96, millions of people still cared very much what she said and did because she represented precision, order, character, taste, standards, integrity and determination-qualities as rare as Christmas bluejays.

I am not presumptuous (or lucky) enough to pretend we were close friends, but we met several times through the years, once at George Cukor's house. Again one night after the curtain fell on Coco , when Angela Lansbury and I drove her home and sat in front of the fire while she poured tea. On weekends, she chopped her own wood in Connecticut on the same land where she was born and raised, lugging it back to Manhattan in the trunk of her car, and kept the fireplaces blazing all winter. When the sparks flew out on the rug, she shoved them back into the hearth with her bare hands between mouthfuls of tiny toasted sandwiches filled with oozy butter and orange marmalade. Once in Spain where she was filming The Trojan Women in a godforsaken dump called Atienza, I drove three hours north from Madrid past hydroelectric plants and empty gas stations until the road hit the parched and open plains, arid and dead as the Dakota badlands. Following a lonely telephone cable in the Castillian mountains, the car began to climb. Up past the castle walls of ancient Roman ruins, through dwarfed Hieronymus Bosch villages where crones draped in black raised sunburned arms to chase the ravens from their granaries. When the exhausting trip ended, I was on the top of a mountain surrounded by a herd of bearded goats, a band of gypsies from the nearby caves leaning against a rock and eating a stolen melon, and Katharine Hepburn, bent over a washtub, shampooing Vanessa Redgrave's hair. She charged the film company $5.00 for doing it. Nearly blinded by the rubber tire smoke from the burning of Troy, she hobbled up and down hills between scenes like a rabbit collecting fossils, and learned Spanish, which she flunked at Bryn Mawr. Everyone in the cast suffered from sunstroke, diarrhea, nausea and every kind of local disease imaginable, except for Kate, who nursed them all. "I'm working as hard as any human being can," she said, wiping bloodshot eyes. "The climate hates me, and there is no money, but I am hired to deliver the goods no matter what the circumstances, so I'll do the best I can. I owe it to the people who have supported me through the good years and bad. Spencer taught me to play the material, come hell or high water, never jazz it up. He never even seemed aware of whether the role was good or not. Life was difficult but acting was his relaxation. For me, life is a thrill, but acting is difficult. I come to it with a driving anxiety and I am very hard on myself, so who needs critics? Spencer never read the reviews, he'd just hear about them from friends, the way I do. Also, I am mad about the business but I refuse to assume the responsibility of selling the damn thing. When I started out, the press knew nothing about me, where I came from, who I slept with, why I wore trousers. I made up a lot of stories that were absolutely loony. Now they know a little more, but I still don't do interviews. The questions are idiotic. I know what makes a good story or a funny photograph, I am not a fool. But I cannot divide my concentration, and I hate talking about myself. It's a bore."

A few years later, in Turtle Bay, she was an easier, softer porcupine, but just as prickly. This is what I remember: "It's a wonderful thing to have a high aim in life, a real ambition. Today all you see is self-pity and 'I'm so misunderstood, poor little me, I'm such a failure.' No humor in anything. And everyone getting kicked around by society with an excuse. I will not accept excuses and I will never give one. You're either on time or you're late. You either remember your lines or you don't. You either pay your bills or you go to jail. I'm sick and tired of a whole generation of kids who say 'I'm tired' or 'I'm nervous' or this and that. If you're tired, give yourself some gas and climb that hill. Why you can't do something is of practically no interest at all to me, unless you say you've got a size-eight foot in a size-five shoe and can't take another step. To this I say take off your shoes and hop on my back and I'll carry you the rest of the way. But it's a poor habit in life to blame anyone but yourself for anything.

"I was brought up by two freedom-loving parents, the eldest of six children, and we were taught to express ourselves as long as we were interesting and could hold the floor. But if we were bores and there were other fascinating people in the room, we damned well learned to keep our big mouths shut. My parents were funny, vigorous and right on top of all the new thinking, but I was mightily snubbed as a kid by many, many people, which put a good chip on my shoulder to get ahead and show that I was worth something."

George Cukor said she swept through Hollywood in 1932 like a typhoon, insulting everyone in sight-a freckled snotty eccentric who wore men's clothes and fought senselessly with everyone in sight. She was an immediate star. "I had to or they would have had me playing whores or discontented wives married to weasels and bores. I have now lived long enough to watch women go out of style and all that's left is moron sex. Maybe they'll get tired of men committing violent, brutal acts and have the women commit them too, but that's not much of an ambition. I wouldn't play hatchet murderesses or alcoholic mothers or loonies when I was young, and I won't play them now. So the parts aren't there for a woman my age. What happened to Bette Davis' career is heartbreaking. If you've been on the screen for 100 years you shouldn't show your face too often."

On Golden Pond was still to come along and win her a fourth Oscar in 1981, but for the last 30 years, she mostly retired to Turtle Bay and stoked the fire. "Either you're a fireplace person or you're not and I've never trusted anyone who wasn't. Stephen Sondheim, who lives next door to me, complains because the smoke gets into his living room. A most disagreeable man. I don't think he's a fireplace person."

She was not a vitamin or health-food nut. She ate a lot of sugar and "anything else I damn well please. I deny myself nothing. I think what you should eat is perfectly obvious. I just don't care to eat those things, so I don't. We live in an era of making a great deal out of very little. They make a big deal out of diets. I've never been on a diet in my life. They make a big deal out of acting, and I've never found it that complicated. Spencer used to say, when they get too high and mighty about actors, remember who killed Lincoln."

She didn't smoke. She was a strong believer in ice baths, played tennis, walked a lot, never watched any of her old movies on TV because she ate dinner at 5 p.m., went to bed at 7, and got up at 4 a.m. A starchy, no-nonsense New Englander who loved snowstorms, she dove into a Connecticut lake every day that was eight degrees above zero. "I used to do it just to irritate people. Now it's become sort of a lunatic ritual." Money? "I didn't come from money, but I've made enough to be independent. I can tell you honestly it means absolutely nothing to me. I give most of it away. I only keep enough to live comfortably and keep myself from having to borrow. I mean, a year from now I won't have to come up to you and say 'Look, I was nice to you and gave you a good interview once-can you spare a thousand dollars?' I'm protected from that in my dotage. But what I've done with my life has never had anything to do with money. You are defined by who you are inside, not by what you're worth at market value. Spencer Tracy and Laurette Taylor, my favorite actors, were like baked potatoes. One look at them and you just knew they'd taste as good as they looked. Me, I'm more like the Flatiron Building. All I can say is I could never be anyone else, I don't want to be anyone else, and I've never regretted what I've done in my life even though I've had my nose broken a few times doing it." The last time I saw her was at Radio City Music Hall in 1988, when we both appeared on the last of those Night of 100 Stars TV specials produced by Alexander Cohen. I had just finished an awkward dress rehearsal that required me to descend a staircase and goose-step my way off the stage in a chorus line of Rockettes. The crowded stage parted like the Red Sea as Kate the Great, wearing tennis shoes and supported by a cane, made a beeline straight for me! "I knew if I lived long enough," she said in the voice of Alice Adams, "I'd see it all. You dancing with the Rockettes! Now I've seen everything!" That was the day she pulled me aside and gave me the best advice I've ever had: "Watch your back, kid. You're opinionated and truthful and they're not always gonna like it. I repeat what my father told me. 'Kate, you're stubborn as a horse with blinders on, ignoring trends, true to your own beliefs no matter what anybody says, and you'll probably end up alone. Pause. And thank god for that. Because in the end, when all is said and done, you'll have the satisfaction of knowing that in this life, you at least made one person happy'!"

Audrey was the Hepburn women wanted to look like. Kate was the Hepburn they wanted to be like. Nobody really knows why, although whole books have tried to analyze her strange and powerful influence on her own time. "Lies, all lies. I never read them because they would just make me mad. All I have to do is make seven phone calls and there's nobody left for these writers to talk to who knows anything at all about me. So they write terrible books about me anyway, and make the whole thing up." I think the thing that made her special was her daring, giddy, fearless mix of humor and horse sense. By remaining intensely guarded about her privacy, she got standing ovations when she entered a theater. The press hounded her in the street with cameras ready, as though she were Garbo. After Joan Crawford's death, a fan who obviously had not read the papers approached her and asked, "Aren't you Joan Crawford?" Hepburn snorted. "Not any more, I'm not!" and stalked away.

Katharine Hepburn, a first edition in an age of Xerox. Gone at 96, but still stalking.

You could consider doing what Joan Crawford did when she lived in Manhattan: simply cover your window sills in removable fitted sheets of easy-to-clean white plastic laminate. At least that's the tip that Carleton Varney, Crawford's interior decorator, shared with me recently in the East 56th Street office of Dorothy Draper & Company, where he is president.

Mr. Varney is the world's leading authority on the war on gunk, as carried out by Mommie Dearest. He ought to be: He oversaw the decoration of three subsequent Crawford apartments, and his 1999 book, The Decorator , is a roman à clef about their relationship. I grilled him about the eternally fascinating, wire-hanger-hating harridan and got oodles of spring-cleaning tips–and a whole lot more.

Mr. Varney met Joan Crawford in 1965, when she was just about to vacate her massive Fifth Avenue apartment at 2 East 70th Street, overlooking the Frick Collection, and move to a smaller pad at the Imperial House on 69th Street and Lexington Avenue. After the death of her husband, Pepsi Cola chairman Alfred Steele, Crawford could no longer afford the staggering–for 1965–$3,000 maintenance (i.e., the first wife got the life insurance). Precocious Mr. Varney was only 22 when he got the life-changing commission to decorate the new apartment. Pepsi-promotin' J.C. was in her late 50's and still shooting the occasional movie: She had just completed Trog –one of the most retarded movies ever made–when they began their collaboration.

"I was the cosmetician, and she was the director," said the dapper Mr. Varney as we chatted from either side of a coffee table which had belonged to Crawford. "She blocked out the floor with tape in each empty room and walked around as if she was playing scenes."

But it wasn't all smooth sailing. The move to humbler digs wore on Mommie Dearest's nerves and upped her vodka intake: She drank from "a large plastic barrel-shaped glass with a fly-casting symbol on it," according to Mr. Varney's 1980 memoir, There's No Place Like Home: Confessions of an Interior Designer . But Mr. Varney enjoyed the challenge. In fact, he even confessed to feeling an amorous frisson toward the aging movie icon. "It was an unusual feeling, a combination of the emotions a man has when he looks at a desirable woman and those he has for his mother." Eeuw !

I ask Mr. Varney if there was ever any hanky-panky. "No!" he said. "But I used to take out Christina. In fact, I know Joan would have loved to have had me as a son-in-law." Double eeuw ! (F.Y.I.: Mr. Varney is divorced with three kids, one of whom–Nicholas Varney–is opening a jewelry boutique at Bergdorf Goodman on Feb. 25.)

Though the still-attractive Joan had graduated from cracking Christina over the head with Bon Ami containers, her obsessive compulsions, according to Mr. Varney, raged throughout their relationship. Guests were asked to remove their shoes chez elle , and Joan herself wore floor-protecting rubber flip-flops. She always carried a box of Kleenex with her in case her pooches pooped on the floor. Furniture and lampshades were all protected against the sooty metropolis. "There were more objects wrapped in plastic in Joan's apartment than in an A&P meat counter," recalled Mr. Varney.

In his memoir, Mr. Varney dismisses analytical theories about Joan's Lady Macbeth-ish tendencies, claiming that she simply "enjoyed being neat, clean and tidy" and that "her mania never prevented her from living well. If you disregard the bother of having to 'break the seals' on rising from a plastic-covered couch in warm weather."

Mr. Varney's loyalty continues to this day. "I never saw the movie," said Mr. Varney, referring to the 1981 classic Mommie Dearest . (Call me warped, but I never thought that the movie was such a terrible indictment of J.C. What's so great about putting expensive frocks on wire hangers?)

"I always remember her being very kind to Christina," said Mr. Varney. "But I admit, Joan wasn't easy."

Neither, I have the distinct impression, is Mr. Varney. At 60, he has the same curmudgeonly commitment to his oeuvre and his persona that he once observed in Crawford. "Always remember, Carleton, I invented me," he recalls her once telling him. After half an hour with Mr. Varney, one could easily imagine him trotting out the same line. A tall (he used to be a model) Wildean character in a flowing foulard, he has a biting wit and a Crawfordesque capacity for hard work. Whether launching a resort-clothing collection in Miami Beach, working on a Broadway show (called Dorothy of Oz , it will hit the boards in 2003 "if all goes well"), running his eponymous clothing and houseware boutiques in Florida and Ireland, or whomping up the décor at Palm Beach parties, Carleton Varney is the epitome of the wouldn't-know-how-to-retire-if-they-could New Yorker. He has decorated the Carter White House, the Breakers hotel lobby in Palm Beach, rooms at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia and Au Bar in New York. He has written countless books on decorating, and has penned a syndicated column since 1969 called "Your Family Decorator." Mr. Varney changed the name from "Ask Dorothy Draper" when he took it over after La Draper passed away. He had already–in an ultra-Crawfordian takeover–negotiated the company away from her when she was going ga-ga.

Despite their hideously acrimonious parting of ways, Mr. Varney remains a fiercely committed admirer and proponent of the Dorothy Draper style: i.e., gaudy, blowzy chintzes, screeching lime-green plaid carpets, white-gloss paint work and patent-leather upholstery. His 1988 book, The Draper Touch , is a fascinating read. Caution: It may cause you to have an anti-minimalist freakout. If you start to crave oversized chintzes, original Dorothy Draper designs are still available through Ellen Ford Ltd. (232 East 59th Street, 759-4420).

Or better yet, go the whole hog and commission Carleton Varney, the man The Washington Post once called "a Laura Ashley on acid," to vanquish the 90's design austerity from your life. He can be reached at Dorothy Draper & Company (758-2810).

And custom-cut laminates for your window ledges can be ordered from P.D.I. Inc. (620-3840).

P.S.: Another of Mr. Varney's clients was Ethel Merman, the foghorn-voiced legend who was also eccentric, though not about cleanliness. According to Mr. Varney, Ms. Merman kept a Christmas tree in her entryway 365 days a year. On her deathbed, Ethel told her decorator, somewhat enigmatically, "Get on the boat before it leaves the pier."

Needlepoint that!