Elle Macpherson and Vito Schnabel Are Dating?!?!Jermaine Dupri ate French-toast sticks at a Burger King in La Guardia Airport. Forty-four-year-old Elle Macpherson is dating 21-year-old art dealer Vito Schnabel. CNBC has supposedly hired a new stylist to sex up the network’s on-air anchorbabes. Super Bowl winner Antonio Pierce refused a lap dance at Tens the other night to focus on the game. (It clearly worked!) Pedro Martinez became “visibly upset” after being told he’d have to wait for a table at Prime 112 in Miami (particularly because Star Jones came in and was seated right away).
gossipmonger
Gwyneth: Hungry AND Pregnant?Gwyneth Paltrow may have gone to Mount Sinai Medical Center on Monday to deal with pregnancy complications. Pink is teaming up with PETA to help stop horse-drawn carriage rides in Central Park. Billionaire Band-Aid heiress Libet Johnson refused to let her husband, weight-loss guru Dr. Lionel Bissoon, see their adopted child after they broke up. WD-50 chef Wylie Dufresne had BBQ and finger food at his wedding to former magazine editor Maile Carpenter this past weekend. Maroon Five guitarist James Valentine wrote about how much harder he used to party on his MySpace page. 5WPR founder Ronn Torossian has really low standards for the cases he’ll agree to take on. Ed Burns claims that critics in New York hate his films because he didn’t go to an Ivy League school and his dad’s a cop.
gossipmonger
Eliot Spitzer Makes Hilarious Faux PasGovernor Spitzer lauded Kerry Kennedy during a speech his rival Andrew Cuomo was at, knowing that Kennedy and Cuomo went through a bitter divorce after she cheated on him. CNBC “Street Sweetie” Erin Burnett is catching heat at the network for the Men’s Health story she wrote titled, “Eight Things That Would Impress Me,” which made her look like, well, a girl who likes to be around money. New Jersey Net Jason Kidd’s girlfriend, Hope Dworaczyk, is pregnant. Stars and publicists hate working with Men’s Vogue because the magazine double-books covers. Jessica Seinfeld may or may not have plagiarized from a third cookbook. Cindy Adams claims a New Hampshire pollster told her before the primary that Hillary Clinton was gonna win by six points.
gossipmonger
Zang Toi Incorrectly Assumes That Sharon Stone Wants to Meet More Gay DudesSomeone hacked into designer Zang
Toi’s computer and sent out an invitation to clients like Sharon Stone and Ivana Trump asking them to join Gayguyschat.com. Julian Schhabel wore pajamas under his jacket to the Critics Choice Awards. Duh. West Village neighbors of Tom Brady and Gisele are not happy that paparazzi now roam the blocks. Joey Buttafuoco is annoyed that a “friend” of his secretly filmed him having
sex with his second wife and is now selling the footage. Lizzie Grubman is unable to lend support to any of the candidates because she is a convicted felon and thus can’t vote. Barbara Corcoran is now nicknamed “The Usher of the Flusher” after appearing on a Today show segment on luxurious bathrooms.
company town
The ‘Times’ Touches Upon Checkbook Journalism — With Two Fingers, Of CourseMEDIA
• “OK!, the celebrity magazine, could not possibly have purchased all the attention it enjoyed in late December after it got the scoop that Jamie Lynn Spears, the younger and until then less sensational sister of the troubled pop queen Britney Spears, was three months pregnant. Or could it?” [NYT]
• Josh Stein isn’t actually leaving Gawker; Emily Gould will write for Jezebel; Choire Sicha will continue contributing columns; and recently departed Wonkette editor Ken Layne returned after just a few months off the job. Can anyone escape the tentacles of Nick Denton? [HuffPo]
• The Writers Guild plans to picket Jay Leno, Jimmy Kimmel, and Conan O’Brien as the three late-night hosts return to the air. Letterman gets off easy since he struck a deal with the writers and may get a big boost since big stars (like Robin Williams, natch) won’t have to cross the pickets to go on his show. [NYO, NYT]
in other news
If the Spearses Insist on Ruining Their Careers, Who Will Be Left for Bonnie Fuller to Kick Around?Like a junkyard pit bull, Bonnie Fuller has got her teeth in the 16-year-old flesh of pregnant Jamie Lynn Spears, and she is not letting go. Today brings Bonnie’s second Huffington Post column on the subject of Spears the Younger’s pregnancy. Yesterday, Bonnie was pissed off that Lynn Spears was paying too much attention to her daughter’s career to notice Jamie Lynn’s pregnancy. “Were you too tied up lining up meetings with record company executives, TV networks, publicists and tour managers to check on whether you were instilling personal values and self-esteem in your daughters?” she asked. Today, after a poll of Star readers showed that 93% of them believed Jamie Lynn should be fired, she’s pissed that Lynn didn’t pay enough attention to her daughter’s career. “If I’m Lynn Spears,” she wrote, “I would have been very concerned about the possibility that she was pregnant on every level — how it would affect her personally and how a pregnancy could also be a career killer.”
in other news
Nickelodeon to Give Us the ‘Heartbreaking Season Finale’ We’ve Always WantedSince the moment this whole “Britney’s 16-Year-Old Sister Is Pregnant” story came out, we’ve been waiting with bated breath to see whether Nickelodeon would do a “very special episode” of Zoey 101 about it. (“Man, this chem-free dance party is a total abortion. Oops, sorry, Zoey!”) And now it looks like they will! The Nickelodeon brass have confirmed from their offices high over Times Square that they are “in talks with veteran journalist Linda Ellerbee to possibly host the special installment.” Ellerbee, you see, is the brains behind Nickelodeon’s Nick News segments (including “Caring for the Kids of Katrina,” “Faces of Hope: The Kids of Afghanistan,” and “Rachel/AIDS”). We wondered whether Ellerbee, author of children’s books like Girl Reporter Stuck in Jam! and Girl Reporter Snags Crush!, was the right person for the job. After all, how does one host a show warning kids about teen pregnancy that stars a pregnant teen? It’s very hard to seem like you’re not endorsing it, especially since they’re not going to be saying negative things about Jamie Lynn. What a thin line to tread! We weren’t sure Ellerbee was up to the task until we looked at her IMDb page. Turns out she’s done nearly twenty Lifetime Intimate Portraits, including Calista Flockhart, Pat Benatar, and Cloris Leachman. Oh, yeah, she’s got this thing in the bag.
NICKELODEON BIGS EYEING ‘LOVE’ LESSON FOR FANS [NYP]
Related: Hello, Kettle? This is Bonnie. You’re Black.
party lines
Liz Lange Hopes to Use Her Ivy League Smarts to Dress Jamie Lynn Spears
Last night at the premiere of The Great Debaters, we stood back feeling superior as reporters from tabloids asked maternitywear designer Liz Lange about sartorial dos and don’ts for newly knocked-up Jamie Lynn Spears. So, we asked, once they had fluttered off, since the movie was about a college debate team, would Liz tell us what her own school days were like? “I was a very good student,” she said. “I went to Brown early admissions and I was a comparative-literature major there, and I was at Trinity here in New York. I did just about everything — I was on the yearbook, I was on the newspaper of our school.” Oh. That’s fascinating. So, um, speaking of teenagers and just because we’re a little bit curious now, what did she recommend Jamie Lynn Spears wear during the most widely publicized teen pregnancy of our time? “I said I really want to see Jamie Lynn keep it clean and keep it simple and keep it young and fresh,” said Lange, although she didn’t have any plans to work with her yet. “And I’d love the opportunity to work with her and dress her in that way.” —Bennett Marcus
intel
Hello, Kettle? This Is Bonnie. You’re Black.We’re a little confused by Bonnie Fuller’s Huffington Post tirade about Lynne Spears. Just a month ago, Fuller wrote a column on the Website thanking celebrity moms for making real moms feel better about themselves. “Every time that our girl [Britney Spears] cluelessly tries to whitestrip her toddler’s teeth instead of brushing them or runs a red light with the court-appointed monitor and her two sons all strapped in her car,” the tabloid queen wrote then, “working moms across the continent can set back our own personal guilt-meters about our mothering skills.” Aw. Perhaps that’s a little demented, but we can appreciate the sentiment. But today she no longer loves celebrity mothers. She hates them. Specifically, Britney’s mom, Lynne, whom she accuses of not properly teaching her daughters about the birds and the bees, and inadvertently causing her young daughter’s pregnancy. “Were you too busy pushing their careers to ever have this heart-to-heart with them?” the Star editorial director demands. “Were you too tied up lining up meetings with record company executives, TV networks, publicists and tour managers to check on whether you were instilling personal values and self-esteem in your daughters?”
company town
Morgy Says, ‘I’m Too Old to Retire!’LAW
• Robert Morgenthau called a press conference in response to a “Page Six” item about him stepping down after 33 years: “I’m too old to retire.” The man is 88! [NYT]
• Big-time Mayer Brown partner Joseph Collins, who maintains offices in both New York and Chicago, has been indicted for fraud in the Refco case. [Above the Law]
• Which court is the worst “judicial hellhole” in the country? [Law Blog/WSJ]