Maybe She’d Be Happier Producing At Wjm-TV

We loved her both as Laura Petrie and Mary Richards, but we’ve spurned her as Mary Tyler Moore. And the aging actress understands. As she told TV Guide, “I’m not perfect.”

Then again, she’s paid a high price for all she’s been given. “I have a lot of years ahead, and I think there will be ups and downs and turns and twists. I’ll probably go under again, but hopefully not as far down as I’ve been.”

In her memoir “After All,” Moore shares details of her various troubles, which include the accidental shooting death of her only son, her battle with alcoholism and the collapse of two TV series in the 1980s.

“Now I’ve learned how to get through life,” she said. “I’ve opened up my life to goodness. I take spiritual strength from nature and especially from animals.”

Loose talk

Uma Thurman on her screen image in the film “The Truth About Cats & Dogs” (in Entertainment Weekly): “It’s gotten to this point where women are painted into a corner to play women who are intelligent and should be respected, as if there should be some agenda in roles you play. I thought, ‘What the hell, I’ll play a stupid bimbo.”’

Put the candles on his truck, the cake on his dog

Alan Jackson turns 37 today.

And, as we all know, he was a former Marlboro Man

Tom Selleck is becoming a spokesman for child-rearing. Speaking at a Sunday news conference for Character Counts!, an organization involved in working with children, Selleck said kids need good direction. “It’s very difficult for a kid to do the right thing when they don’t know what the right thing to do is,” he said.

The director borrowed liberally from ‘The Scarlet Letter’

So what does singer/songwriter Ricki Lake Jones think of Ethan Russell’s PBS documentary based on her life? “I read the script and it reads like fiction,” said Jones.

Got a problem? Step up to the rail and talk to Ralph

Things got pretty rough for the filming of “Captains Courageous,” the remake of the 1939 classic, which took place off the coast of Vancouver. “There’s nothing worse than doing movies on the water,” said star Robert Urich. “When you get 45 guys on an 80-foot boat and its pouring rain and there’s no place to go and the galley holds about 10, it’s like, ‘If I give the money back can I go home?”’

Don’t believe us? Catch a showing of ‘The Scarlet Letter’

Novelist Barbara Kingsolver has optioned all of her novels to the film industry, and some “many times,” but none has yet been made into a movie. “I stop the project if I don’t like where it’s going,” she says. “I’d rather see no movies made from my books than see a bad one. And bad movies seem terribly easy to make.”

And Evian spelled backward, of course, is naivE

Paul McCartney is not drinking Evian water. The ex-Beatle is protesting French testing of nuclear weapons in the South Pacific. “It’ll be our little boycott,” he says.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Color Photos

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