Tinfoil alert:
CELEBS wouldn't be celebs without their own personal paranoia. Elle Macpherson's big fear is radiation in the skies. That's why the supermodel had a special lead-lined cot made for her 12-week-old son, Aurelius, to protect him from supposedly deadly rays while flying on planes. Macpherson's better half, banker Arpad Busson, hefted the weighty contraption aboard a recent British Airways flight from the Bahamas to Heathrow recently, while Macpherson and her older son Flynn wrapped themselves in special foil blankets for the journey. (Page Six)
Psycho alert:
-- SEN. John Kerry might want to tell his wife to clean up her language now that he's running for president. When Teresa Heinz, the widow of Republican Sen. John Heinz III, married Kerry in 1995, she said, "Someone my age who has a professional life doesn't change her name." But now she's conforming to Middle American taste and letting herself be called Teresa Heinz Kerry. "They'll call me Mrs. Kerry, because that's what's natural to them. And I don't tell them to shut up . . . Now, politically, it's going to be Teresa Heinz Kerry, but I don't give a [bleep], you know?" she chuckles. "There are other things to worry about." (Page Six)
The late Roone Arledge on the prima donnas of ABC News (his employees, but they didn't want to act like it):
In "Roone," which comes out May 13 from Harper Collins, he wrote that "There were days when I hated the effing business, hated dealing with the effing prima donnas of both sexes!"
When Arledge, who died in December at the age of 71, created "Prime Time Live" for ABC News in 1989, he said, "More than anything, I wanted my hands around [Sam] Donaldson's neck."
The problem? Arledge was stealing Sawyer from CBS' "Sixty Minutes" and wanted to pair her with Donaldson. Both were getting nearly the same money. But Sawyer would get to say "Hello" as the show opened. "I should say 'Hello,'" Arledge quoted Donaldson as saying. If the former White House pit bull couldn't couldn't open the show, "it would be a dealbreaker," Arledge wrote. "What rational adult - even Sam - would walk away from such an opportunity over a 'hello'?"
Sawyer's arrival also didn't sit well with Peter Jennings, who was only appeased when he learned she wouldn't share his anchor desk, Arledge wrote. NY Daily News