SULTRY Bianca Jagger has come a long way since the days when she was just Mick’s wife bareback riding a white horse through the stoned revelers at Studio 54. In recent years she’s even had the good sense to blow out the torch on her affair with the ethically challenged New Jersey Democratic Sen. Bob Torricelli.
I’ve come to like Bianca in her incarnation as a human-rights activist, but the press conference she just gave in London following a week spent with U.N. workers on the West Bank demonstrates the danger inherent in trying to be an international do-gooder. Bianca railed against the Israelis for not cooperating with the now aborted U.N. probe of what happened inside the Palestinian refugee camps, at Jenin. (She didn’t acknowledge that many of the “fact-finders” were blatantly biased against Israel.)
“If the Israeli government feels that it has nothing to hide on Jenin, then it must open the doors and allow that fact-finding mission to come,” Bianca told her captive audience. “I have witnessed firsthand the prevention by Israeli military forces of relief workers from delivering vital aid to those in need.”
Dear, Bianca: The Jenin “massacre” claims have totally unraveled and the U.N. realizes it was on a wild goose chase all along. But regardless of that, this is a war – one started by Palestinian suicide bombers – and there are casualities in war. I guess I’m not really surprised that Jagger and so many other international celebrities are showing pro-Palestinian tendencies. The politically correct New York Times, Jewish-owned as it is, is said to have lost several hundred subscribers in the past few days, due to a campaign by some Jewish readers to punish it for what they perceive as its willingness to report Palestinian propaganda.
I am surprised, though, that my old friend Vanessa Redgrave isn’t on the scene waving the PLO flag. It’s almost 25 years now since I first reported Vanessa’s championing of Yasser Arafat (it got her booed at the Oscars at the time) and she joked that I had made her the most unpopular woman in America.
Her apparent silence may mean that Redgrave has learned the virtue of shutting up when a truly complicated crisis comes upon us.
A Dunne deal
THE brilliant Stephen Sondheim has composed some shows based on gory material (witness the “Sweeney Todd” opera and the one about presidential assassins), so maybe he’ll get together with true-crime writer Dominick Dunne for his next effort. Sondheim, with an entourage of adoring young fans, was at the premiere party for the revival of his “Into the Woods” and told Webster Hall art curator Baird Jones that he’s known the acclaimed writer forever. They were both at Williams College together, where Dominick, a returned hero from the Battle of the Bulge, was two years his senior. “We used to get together for singing all the time at the Williams’ music club, Caps and Bells,” Sondheim recalled.
Gore-y details
LINES kept getting crossed yesterday, but as far as I can make out, Al Gore wants us to know that he hasn’t been totally reduced to bargain-basement status while fund-raising in California this week. I mentioned a couple of cut-rate $250-a-head affairs for the former Veep, but this press office says there was a full-on $5,000 a ticket reception on the schedule. I’m glad to hear that the man who went so close to winning the White House hasn’t been reduced to municipal dog-catcher status.
Gumbel grumble
PERISH the thought that Bill Clinton would ever be in denial, but his spokesperson was busy on the phone yesterday, trying to douse the rumors about the former president embarking on a TV career. I reported the stories floating around about him “considering” moving to CBS to take Bryant Gumbel’s “Early Show” spot. The Los Angeles Times immediately upped the ante by having Bill “considering” a $50 million-a-year offer from NBC to become some kind of white-guy Oprah. Now all of this (as we’ve made clear) is at the speculative stage and may come to nothing. But, given that if Elmer Gantry was preaching today he’d be doing it in front of a TV camera, I don’t understand why Clinton’s people are being so touchy.
On another front, the spokesperson insists that Bill’s Monday night speech here will not be a major international policy statement. That will surprise the people at the InterFaith Center of New York, which is staging the first annual James Park Morton Awards dinner. Guest speaker Clinton, through his mouthpiece, says all he’s going to talk about is how people of different religions should try and get along. It still sounds to me like an attempted solution to the Middle East crisis.
On the short list
The Kennedy clan has always been alpha-male dominated, but I thought JFK’s daughter, Caroline, would have broken the mold. So it’s interesting to read in the June issue of Glamour an excerpt from Ms. Schlossberg’s upcoming memoir, “Profiles of Courage in Our Time.” She manages to include only one woman in her saga of current heroes, California Congresswoman Hilda Solis, who came to political power after the Los Angeles riots. One would have thought she could have found a few other women worthy of putting on her glory list.
The cold facts
MEMBERS of Congress, some of whom have a lot to learn about courage in the face of adversity, had a special screening the other night of George Butler’s “The Endurance,” the stirring documentary about explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ordeal in the Antarctic. The host was GOP Rep. Jack Kingston (he’s a member of the bi-partisan delegation going to Israel this weekend) who said that coming from Georgia, he’s always had an interest in Shackleton’s epic because so much of it happened in the ice-bound region known as South Georgia.