Abc News Should Study This Labor Flap Of Sam’s

You’ve read, no doubt, about Sam

Donaldson’s labor problems. They involve the firing of Gilbert Salas from his job on the ABC new correspondent’s New Mexico ranch.

But maybe you haven’t heard everything.

Salas had worked for 27 years on the 11,000-acre spread that Donaldson bought in 1992. After Salas hurt his back, Donaldson paid $514 of the ranch hand’s medical bills.

Donaldson claims he paid Salas $3,906 in severance pay. “I carried him long months after I think any other rancher would have,” he says.

But Salas’ ex-boss, the woman who sold Donaldson the ranch, disagrees. “When somebody works for you, you take care of them,” said Pat Joyce. “Sam does things a lot different.”

Salas and his wife live now in an unheated two-room shack.

Loose talk

David Letterman during the Oscar telecast: “One of the pictures nominated tonight for best foreign film, as you know, is ‘Eat Drink Man Woman.’ Coincidentally, as I understand it, this is also how Arnold Schwarzenegger asked Maria Shriver out on their first date.”

And if you want it, he’s got a watch for you, too Christopher Walken turns 52 today.

Which is longer than many people can stand the real thing

The quote: “I’ve been in a married state of mind for the last 10 years.” The speaker: “NYPD” star Dennis Franz. The occasion: His announcement that he is marrying Joanie Zeck, his lover of 13 years.

Then again, put-downs are par for Hollywood’s course

Who’d have thought that Jack Nicholson, of all people, would be so thin-skinned? We’re referring, of course, to David Letterman’s Oscar-telecast skit on Monday in which he banged a golf club onto the hood of a New York cab - an obvious reference to Nicholson’s having done something similar to a private car in real life. Said a pal of the apparently angry movie star, “This was an audience of his peers at the Shrine. That’s the worst place to put a proud man down.”

Maybe the show’s doctors can revive Vincent Vega

Fans of the television show “ER” may be impressed with the news that “Pulp Fiction” director Quentin Tarantino has been signed to direct the medical series’ penultimate episode of the season. “There is something cool about doing something and then seeing the finished product two weeks later,” Tarantino said. “It’s a totally cool show.”

And, no, we don’t think ‘sunbathing’ is a euphemism

A second try at marriage for Paula Abdul and Emilio Estevez ended, so goes the report, when she caught him sunbathing with an unnamed topless woman.

The star is dead, but the story is just beginning Now that the sad story of Easy-E dying of AIDS has passed, stay tuned for the sequel. Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where the rap star died on Sunday, apparently has received “calls from lots of hysterical women saying they’d slept with him and are now scared they might be infected with HIV.” Easy-E fathered seven children by six different women.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Compiled by staff writer Dan Webster