“Audrey Hepburn would have been 80 years old on May 4, if you can imagine such a thing!” writes Pamela Keogh, the author of What Would Audrey Do? (It’s just out in paperback. This one is a bestseller in Great Britain.) Let me think. When I first met Audrey, she was enacting a sprite in the play “Ondine” and we were in Chicago back in the early ’50s. She was totally adorable and in love with her leading man, Mel Ferrer. She went on to become one of the world’s biggest stars in spite of this marriage.

And the last time I saw Audrey, she was on the arm of Ralph Lauren in the Metropolitan Museum at some fashion evening. Glamorous and serene, by then she was a distinguished representative for UNICEF. Her early death in 1993 has always been a heartbreak.

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Hundreds of workers are toiling in Burbank on the sets for Michael Jackson’s coming stage concerts to be seen this July in London. And “MJ” – as everyone refers to him instead of saying his whole name – is omnipresent, personally on hand overseeing the hundreds of workers. 

After the sets are done, they’ll be shipped to England and reassembled for the already-sold-out concerts. Do you wonder how Michael Jackson can make a “comeback” after all he’s been through and all that has happened since he beat the rap at a much-publicized pedophile trial?

Well, he has Philip Anschutz, a Denver billionaire, as a producer. Mr. A. once owned the Southern Pacific Railroad. His company, AEG, also owns the Staples Center in Los Angeles.

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To give Mel Gibson his due, he and his wife of 28 years, Robyn, have been estranged since his August 2006 drunk-driving arrest in Los Angeles. So it’s a free country for adults and I suppose he is entitled to a little female companionship after three or four years as a separated male. But it’s slightly surprising as he surges into his multimillion-dollar divorce.

At least Mel always has the courage of his convictions and is now out in public, holding hands with his new love – Russian singer Oksana Grigorieva.  


© Getty Images

The British press is presenting this beauty as something of an “opportunist.” The Richard Eden column notes she once lived with American businessman Alan Bergman for two years. “We were practically married,” says he, describing her as “exceptionally beautiful and very talented.” Evidently she was married when she met Bergman and left her husband. But while with Bergman, he says, “She got a better offer from Timothy Dalton … If she is with Mel, he is more famous than Timothy Dalton and who knows what that will mean. Maybe she will get into a film and that will thrill her.”

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If you are one of those people who can sit through Samuel Beckett’s  “Waiting for Godot” and still say to one and all, “But what does it mean?” be prepared for the new version, after 50 years, on Broadway at Studio 54 Theater.

The inventive director, Anthony Page, has presented his four super, super-talented grand actors – Nathan Lane, Bill Irwin, John Goodman and John Glover – in a brilliant outing where this quartet outdoes itself in blazing outbursts of not just talent – maybe genius. I have seldom seen such matched performances. They bring Beckett back to comic and tragic life in a manner I can hardly believe.

And John Goodman is larger than anybody’s life, fabulously costumed and unforgettable as the whip-snapping oligarch, Pozzo. Meanwhile, his slave, John Glover, who is known as a fine character actor, deserved something special for his turn as a shivering packhorse being urged on by the perils of despotic pseudo-aristocracy. (He won a Tony nomination. His big speech, which sounds like something out of James Joyce, is punctuated by various inspired droolings and nosebleeds.)