“Without an ever-present sense of death, life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs,” wrote Muriel Spark.

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So many insightful tributes have been written to the memory of Natasha Richardson.

I want to recommend especially Candice Bergen’s heartfelt words, Joan Juliet Buck’s touching anecdotal account of Natasha more than rising to an occasion and Julia Reed’s and Marlo Thomas’s remembrances of her. You can still read these on wowOwow.com.

Personally I tried to write about this tragic death of someone so beautiful, so real, so human and found myself unable to even begin to do her justice, so I gave up. But I did love a tribute to her by Marc Peyser in the March 30 Newsweek. He called her "Tasha," her private nickname, and brilliantly dubbed her THE UN-DIVA!

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And now for something that may be beside the point but in the interest of setting the record straight, New York sources in forensic pathology say:

The press always gets everything wrong. Natasha’s body was not subjected to an autopsy. The family objected; they felt they more than knew the cause of her death and so the procedure did not happen.

Likewise, press assumptions that “the show must go on,” wherein Natasha’s famous mother, Vanessa Redgrave, was to appear in an April 27 one-night-only performance of  "The Year of Magical Thinking" to benefit UNICEF are again wrong. The event has been canceled.


Richardson and Redgrave © Getty Images

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Over six months ago I ran into Bruce Willis and he introduced me to Emma Heming, whom he has now married in a private Turks & Caicos ceremony. At the time I thought I had never seen Bruce so happy or so revealing.  He kept holding me close to his chest and murmuring, “I am so in love with this girl; she is the best thing in the world!” (It was an odd feeling to be caressed by Bruce while he spoke so feelingly of another woman. He’s 54; she’s 30.)   

The world never ceases to wonder that Bruce and his first wife Demi Moore, their children, and Demi’s new young husband, Ashton Kutcher, all remain close friends and have been at each other’s weddings.

People who think divorce always spells dysfunctional doom for all concerned simply are not tuned in to the 21st century.

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Here’s an odd bit: Letters of Prince Charles’s to a girlfriend long ago just sold for about $35,000 on eBay. In one missive, the then 26-year-old heir to the English throne said: “I shall just have to get married as soon as possible and then all these people might relax … I still think my solution of marrying a girl from each commonwealth country is the best one.”

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An anonymous buyer just paid almost $4 million for the six-by-eight-foot "Pearl Carpet of Baroda." It was said to have been made for the tomb of the Prophet Mohammed about 100 years ago and consists of studded pearls set in gold and silver along with rubies, emeralds and sapphires. It has been in the family of the Maharajah of Baroda ever since its completion. Sotheby’s conducted the auction in Dohar, Qatar.

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Dropped by Pete’s Tavern, a place O. Henry made famous, down below Gramercy Park the other eve and had a fantastic meal. The manager, Declan Gaffney, was all excited. "Guess who came in? We about fainted!"

I was thinking to myself, "Oh, a sighting of Lindsay Lohan … or J.Lo … or Beyoncé." But no, it was Joyce Randolph, formerly of TV’s “The Honeymooners” who had graced Pete’s with her presence. Just as good.


Image: NYMag.com