Our long national nightmare is over–Chatterbox has gossip. On Tuesday night, as we hear it, birthday boy Kenneth Starr (52 years old and still afflicted with the voyeuristic sexual hangups of an adolescent) decided to play like Monica and treat himself to a night on the town. After volleying all day with the president’s lawyers, Starr showed up at the local tennis arena to see Andre Agassi in the (corporate plug alert!) Legg Mason Classic. Even though a wide array of the capital power elite were present, they gave Starr a wide berth. In Amish terms, he was shunned. The loneliness of the Starr-crossed prosecutor was particularly evident during a lengthy rain delay (the match was eventually postponed) when Starr had only his umbrella for company.
This sad-eyed saga reminds Chatterbox of a story he heard in L.A. last month. It seems that a friend’s children attend the same Brentwood elementary school as O.J. Simpson’s son, Justin. In full denial as ever, O.J. keeps volunteering to coach kid’s sports. (You can just picture soccer Dad Simpson exuberantly shouting in the middle of a school match, “Murder them, team!”) When Simpson offered to do anything to raise money for the school, a few parents debated asking him to sit on the stool in the dunking booth at the annual school fair. Alas, good taste threw cold water on that idea.
Meanwhile, back in New York, Chatterbox hears that there was some skittishness among tenants at Tina Brown’s Sutton Place co-op after the magazine diva left The New Yorker for the speculative tinsel of Hollywood. With Harry Evans subject to the whims of the mercurial Mort Zuckerman and Tina’s future income a trifle iffy, one nervous neighbor actually called the co-op president to ask, “Should we worry?”
As for Chatterbox, he never worries, especially about Tina.
–Walter Shapiro
