The city that never sleeps sloshed through Tuesday’s torrential downpour for Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Andy Garcia, Mary Steenburgen, Candice Bergen, Richard Dreyfuss, Ed Begley Jr., Don Johnson’s sex/divorce/Doing It/makeout movie “Book Club.”
The Paramount Pictures film’s premise is reading — youshouldexcuseit — “Fifty Shades of Grey.”
So had Johnson’s kid told him, early on, in advance, about her scenes starring in that “Fifty Shades” thing?
“No. But filmmaking is a family business. I’d heard the word. I already knew about it beforehand.”
As handsome as in his 1984 “Miami Vice” TV breakout, he said: “Hey, I’m 104 now. I look this way because of Augustinus Bader’s cutting-edge-technology skin-care line. I’m involved with this now. Melanie Griffith turned me onto it, and I went to Germany, where that doctor’s from, to check it out. It makes you look years younger. In LA, they crave the stuff like it’s crack.”
Also looking great — blonder, skinnier, more mascara — Candice: “It’s my last gasp. I’m back in business. I’m thrilled I’m working. I even tried, but not too long, to lose weight.”
So, about the movie: “Makes you laugh. It’s not one of those heavy car-crashing things. And we didn’t have to go to some far off Oxnard, Calif., someplace. We shot eight weeks in LA.”
The movie’s about a book club, so what book is Candice reading now?
“One on D-Day because I’m going to Normandy for D-Day because I want to see what makes America great again.”
Steenburgen: “We filmed two doors from a Brentwood house I once lived in. The light story deals with a woman having a hard time. Her guy’s no longer interested in her so she now goes out to re-interest herself in romance.”
Mary had already seen the finished film, “but tonight I’ll see it with my friends.”
And her latest read? “Gentleman in Moscow.”
And the gentleman in films Don Johnson then said to me: “You could use our cream.”
Wolfe on baseball, ‘Wind’
Tom Wolfe wanted to be “plain folks” — and not be recognized on the street.
Just before writing “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” his office burnt up. Doing a book, he told me, is “an evolution” but he “wrote a book every five years” and thought “Gone With the Wind” the “greatest work ever written.”
Tom Wolfe kept a bike “just in case of a transit strike.” Before bedtime, his habit was to “sip an espresso.” His take on women: “They’re hard-wired at birth.”
What Tom Wolfe really wanted was to play baseball. When relaxed, he talked baseball. He said: “I really prefer playing baseball to writing best sellers. I lived for baseball, but once a coach told me, ‘Don’t come back for tryouts.’ ”
New Yorker off to Hungary
New York businessman David Cornstein, OK’d after unanimous confirmation, is soon headed to Hungary as US ambassador.
He was CEO of Finlay Enterprises, chairman of New York’s Olympic Games Commission, board member of the Battery Park City Authority. This guy’s a lifetime New Yorker.
“It was almost a one-year process,” he said. “Nominees had to attend ambassadorial school in Washington to learn what to expect. There’s lots to understand. It’s not an automatic situation. What I did was study the subject thoroughly, and I prepared for every possible question in advance.
“Unlike the United States, in that country the prime minister is elected by two-thirds of the population.”
A smart-mouth: “Memorial Day, which is coming, stimulates worker productivity.
“A whole afternoon of loud music, bands marching, noisy parades, sloppy picnics, screaming kids and ants on a sightseeing tour through your shorts, workers can’t wait to go back to work.”
Said only in New York, kids, only in New York.