Like they say, everybody dumps a buddy sometime
Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis barely spoke during the last 10 months of their decade-long partnership, Lewis writes in a new book. The longtime friends shocked showbiz when they broke up in 1956 after starring together for years in movies, radio and nightclubs.
But he wanted to grow as a comic actor, while Martin wanted his own TV show, Lewis says in “Dean & Me (A Love Story).”
After their final show at New York’s Copacabana Club, he writes, “(W)e closed the book on 10 great years – with the exception of the last 10 months. Those were horrific – 10 months of pain and anger, uncertainty and sorrow.”
Twenty years later, Frank Sinatra called Martin onstage while Lewis was doing the Muscular Dystrophy Telethon in Las Vegas, but the former partners didn’t reconnect.
Lewis, now 79, says it took the 1987 plane crash death of Martin’s son, Dean Paul “Dino” Martin, to bring them close again. Martin died in 1995 at age 78.
Guess it was in their star signs
Antonio Banderas received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Tuesday, 16 years after he arrived as a penniless young actor.
He remembered returning to his hotel each night and gazing out the window at a billboard: “I could see the face of a beautiful woman, blond, pensive, with the New York skyline behind her. On the billboard was written, Melanie Griffith, ‘Working Girl.’ “
Griffith, who received an Oscar nomination for that film, married Banderas in 1996. His latest movie, “The Legend of Zorro,” opens Oct. 28.
His prints were all over it
Rapper/actor Sticky Fingaz has been arrested for leaving an unlicensed handgun in a hotel room.
Staff at a Manhattan luxury hotel found the 9mm pistol after Sticky (aka Kirk Jones) checked out Monday night.
In the FX network’s TV series “Over There,” about the Iraq war, he plays a character named Smoke who enlists in the Army to avoid a prison sentence.
Rolling out the welcome diplomat
Following in the footsteps of Norman Mailer and Carole King, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright will make a guest appearance on the Oct. 25 episode of the WB’s “Gilmore Girls.”
Albright, secretary of state under President Clinton, filmed a scene with Alexis Bledel, who plays Rory Gilmore, involving the ongoing estrangement between Rory and her mother, Lorelai (Lauren Graham).
Said “Gilmore Girls” executive producer Amy Sherman-Palladino: “If you think she seems brilliant and sassy strutting around the Middle East, you should try talking to her in person.”
Hey, gramps, your clock is ticking
Ashton Kutcher, famed for his pranks on MTV’s “Punk’d,” is turning his May-December romance with Demi Moore into a sitcom.
The former “That ‘70s Show” star has sold Fox an idea for a comedy series called “30-Year-Old Grandpa,” about the complications that ensue when a young man becomes the stepfather to kids close to his own age.
Kutcher, 27, married the 42-year-old Moore in a ceremony last month attended by her three daughters, aged 11 to 17.
The birthday bunch
Actor William Christopher (“M*A*S*H”) is 73. Musician Tom Petty is 55. Actress Melanie Mayron (“thirtysomething”) is 53. Actor Viggo Mortensen is 47. Rapper Snoop Dogg is 34. Actress Jennifer Nicole Freeman (“My Wife and Kids”) is 20.