"Isn’t it interesting that there isn’t really a word in French for fun? (Pleasure, yes: The French have got that covered.) It’s a cliché that Europeans sometimes tease Americans for being childlike and perhaps there is some truth to that characterization … Style, as we sometimes forget, is really about fun, plain and simple … This is a season for smiles."

This statement is from the editors of Vogue as they present their ad-huge edition for fall. They whistle in the wind because although you can barely lift it or manage its bulk of advertisements, it still isn’t a patch on 2007’s enormous September issue.

We wOws are all for Vogue’s getting bigger and bigger and back to its previous successful self. And we feel the same about most other publications and the disappearing newsprint of our times. It’s still great to relax in bed and actually hold something to read in your hot little hands and be able to look at pictures that aren’t the size of a postage stamp.


Image: Vogue

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When the popular actress Sondra Lee sent me her memoir, titled I’ve Slept With Everybody, every single person who came in my office and saw the book exclaimed, "Ohmigawd, that’s the title of MY book!"

Sondra went overboard with the title as is her wont. She has been a fixture of the theater, TV, dance scene since she escaped from New Jersey and arrived in Manhattan in 1947, to be "discovered" almost immediately by the great Jerome Robbins and thrust into "High Button Shoes."

Now Sondra details such magical happenings as well as her romantic friendship with Marlon Brando, her marriages, her hits and her misses. She has known virtually everybody in entertainment and vice versa and is fondly recalled as the character Tiger Lily in "Peter Pan" and as Minnie Fay in "Hello, Dolly!"

This is a true theatrical memoir, proving that lots of verve and determination can pay off in an impossible business. Read it for a veteran performer’s funny memories and lots of good humor.

Sondra will be signing her book at Barnes & Noble Lincoln Triangle on September 15 at 7:30 PM. Meeting her will be an inspiration to anyone yearning for a life in show business.

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Bravo to "60 Minutes" for giving their leader and founder Don Hewitt the show’s full hour last Sunday. Don has never come off better than in this appreciation of what his life, his career, even his death means. What a personality he was!

Only two weeks ago, Don was at lunch in East Hampton holding court and behaving as if he intended to live forever. He was eating Nate ‘n Al hot dogs that Nora Ephron had brought and the Daily News publisher Mort Zuckerman was teasing him. "I hope I’m half as sharp as you are when I am your age," said Mort. Don shot back, "You won’t be. You’re not now." Then he asked for a second hot dog and started talking about how boring it had been covering the first steps on the moon when he had been sequestered in a control booth for 12 hours.

As the writer Marie Brenner commented to me, "Don has been a nine-lives guy from his earliest days!"

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I glimpsed the talented Paula Froelich on TV’s "Extra" and asked if this escapee from the Post’s Page Six intended to make a new career. She said she was feeling lucky as she went to the Monmouth racetrack and bet on a horse named "Two Notch Road" that had 107 to 1 odds. It paid off so that $10 turned into $1070. Now she has bought a lottery ticket and is planning her next book plus an MTV pilot. There is life after gossip!