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The Rich & The Famous by Shoshannah Rosenstein Cont'd from Page 91 Continues on Page 93 Britney Spears second bra brings $47,000 US on the auction website
Photo: Singer Britney Spears. NEW YORK -- Britney Spears stripped her charity auction of a jewel-encrusted bra, but still raised thousands of dollars for hurricane relief efforts. Spears auctioned dozens of personal items on eBay, with proceeds going to The Britney Spears Foundation to benefit the Mississippi Hurricane Recovery Fund. On Saturday, she posted a message on her website saying she was "concerned that some of you might be confusing this bra with something that it's not." The 23-year-old pop star said she wore the white stone bra, for which bids had risen to over $47,000 US on the auction website, during her HBO special, but not during her performance of... Baby One More Time.
Photo: Britney Spears stripped her charity auction of a jewel-encrusted bra, but still raised thousands of dollars for hurricane relief efforts. "I feel the correct thing to do is remove this item from the auction because I don't want any of you to feel misled," she said. It was the second time the bra had been removed from the auction. Earlier, an eBay staffer pulled it because it violated the website's policy of not selling used undergarments. The decision was reversed, though, because the bra fit under the category of memorabilia. The auction otherwise concluded with an I Have the Golden Ticket tank top going for $1,200, her ottoman selling for $510, her Chanel high heels for $770, her two-piece sectional sofa for $3,050 and her red-tab jeans for $4,001.
Ashlee Simpson happy to be bland blonde
If the entire clothing rack outside the hotel suite doesn't do the trick, the entourage tells us that we are in the presence of a major celebrity. Ashlee Simpson travels in a pack, with hairstylist, makeup artist and assorted other assistants in tow. They're with her as she breezes into the suite, giggling with her as she spends an extended period in the adjoining bedroom trying to find the right pair of pants and piling on the compliments as she poses for photos. They're all close to her age, they're all friends and their world on this day, and probably many more clearly revolves around the 21-year-old currently topping Billboard's album chart. When the interview starts, though, they respectfully file out. And it's when she's alone that one realizes, despite her fame and growing fortune, the most remarkable thing about Simpson is how utterly unremarkable she is. Sipping on a Red Bull and offering confident, polite and possibly well-rehearsed answers, she is neither especially witty nor as famously obtuse as her sister Jessica, the singing, tabloid-topping reality TV star whose fame preceded hers. She is neither warm nor cold; neither unattractive nor unusually striking; neither as edgy as her early marketing sold her, nor as sexy as the more recent efforts would suggest. She is just... there. The same, really, could be said for her chart-topping sophomore album, I Am Me, which in truth is not as awful as some of its reviews have suggested. Passable in a forgettable sort of way, it is the sort of thing an endless number of young, reasonably competent singers could accomplish in the hands of the right producer. All this is no doubt the sort of assessment that prompts her to insist she never reads her own press. (``I don't know if (critics) sit around and actually listen to the record as if they would be a fan of mine,'' she assesses, not incorrectly.) could reasonably have been expected to be relegated to playing malls, not just visiting them for autograph sessions as she did later Wednesday. In the shadow of her older, blonder sister from the get-go, she briefly appeared slated to become the next Milli Vanilli after the most humiliating musical performance in Saturday Night Live's three-decade history. And yet here she is, mere months after being exposed on national television as a lip-syncher (and questionable jig-dancer), wildly outselling more seasoned artists. Pressed to explain this phenomenon, her brief response at first seems woefully inadequate. "I think that I have a great fan base, and I think that they want to hear my music, and I feel that there's a huge group of people that can actually relate to it,'' she offers, then waits politely for the next question. But there is more than a hint of truth to that last part. Every star geared toward ``teens and 'tweens,'' as Simpson identifies her biggest supporters, will go on ad nauseum about how their fans relate to them.But much as they may try to emulate them, it's hard to imagine there are many 13-year-olds who can actually relate to sultry, oversexed stars like Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and, well, Jessica Simpson, nor to hyper-cute, girl-next-door types like Hilary Duff.
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Ashlee, on the other hand, is sufficiently unimposing that hundreds of thousands of girls can easily imagine being in her shoes the sort of girl who grows up dreaming of showbiz (if she wasn't a singer, she suggests she'd probably be a makeup artist) and somehow beats the odds by actually making it. Perhaps her manager/father, the slightly unsettling force behind both Simpson sisters, identified this selling point. Perhaps she just stumbled into it. But image-wise, it is certainly more important than her back-and-forth shifts from blonde to brunette or rock chick to pop star. She has no great interest in earning accolades (``I never make music to be critically acclaimed''), takes little umbrage at the perception that producers are behind her success (``sometimes they can take your idea to the next level''), and no desire to break free from her family (``they're a great support system''). She is just happy to be ... there. And so long as that's all she is, she'll likely keep topping the charts.-By Adam Radansky Dennis Quaid is the top Hollywood golfer
Dennis Quaid is the top golfer among the Hollywood set. Téa Leoni is the best among the women. Tom Cruise is awful at golf, but he tips the caddies well. Such are the conclusions of Golf Digest, which ranks Hollywood's top 100 golfers in a December special edition, which hits newsstands Tuesday. Quaid, a member of Bel-Air Country Club in Beverly Hills, usually stays at a home on a private course when he's on the road. "There are three things being a celebrity is good for: raising money for charity, dinner reservations and tee times," he tells the publication. Quaid is followed in the top 10 by Thomas Gibson, Tom Dreesen, Matt Craven, Chris O'Donnell, Samuel L. Jackson, brother Randy Quaid, Craig T. Nelson, Mark Wahlberg and Hugh Grant. Leoni tied for 34th with avid golfer Sylvester Stallone. Desperate Housewives star Teri Hatcher didn't make the list, but she has gotten a lesson from Tiger Woods. "I was so nervous," Hatcher said. "All I could think of was, 'I don't deserve a lesson with Tiger Woods.' But he instantly put me at ease and gave me some good pointers." Cruise hardly ever plays golf and was ranked last at No. 100 -- but that doesn't stop him from regularly handing out $100 bills to caddies at Bel-Air. Aniston sidesteps all the tabloid chatter
It was a kind of coming-out party: Jennifer Aniston's first appearance before the world's press since the Brad Pitt Thing and the Angelina Jolie Thing and the Vince Vaughn Thing. Even if she didn't want to talk about it, she was sort of forced to. Aniston was there to talk about her role in her new movie, the one about adultery and shaky marriages and people looking for new sexual excitement in their lives and how sometimes it's difficult to keep art and life separate." She was stuck in a bad situation.... You know how some destructive relationships keep you trapped,'' she said, of course referring to Lucinda, the character she plays in Derailed, which opens Nov. 11. Lucinda represents another kind of debut for Aniston: she's a bored wife looking for an extra-marital relationship, in what the actress describes as a "sexy psychological thriller." It is a role about as far as you can get from her part as Rachel Green on the hit TV series Friends. Lucinda's destructive relationship is with a workaholic husband, resulting in a distant marriage that drives her into the arms of Charles, an interesting stranger she meets on a train. The fact that Charles is played by Clive Owen is more or less gravy, at least until their burgeoning adultery is interrupted by a hotel robber who beats Charles and violently rapes Lucinda, threatening to destroy several lives. Someone asked her if the movie might put an end to her image of America's sweetheart. "Oh God, I hope so," she said with real sincerity, before adding, "I'm not trying to shed anything. I'm just following my instincts and doing work I feel is coming to me. I'm grateful for it." The 500-pound gorilla in the room, though, was Aniston's divorce from Pitt, who has since been linked with Jolie, and Aniston's subsequent relationship with Vaughn, with whom she has been spotted around town, most visibly on a balcony in a Chicago hotel where Derailed was filmed. One reporter noted with some delicacy that she seems to have taken the high road in the tabloid scandal that followed, and asked her how she stays grounded when her own life is derailed, and how she would advise others in the same situation. "I'm not a role model, or the poster child on how to do anything," Aniston replied. "It was my first time at this particular picnic... this is nothing out of the ordinary: people have walked through this stuff all the time." She said she was happy to have work to do -- work that includes Derailed and the upcoming Rumor Has It, in which a woman learns her family was the inspiration for the film The Graduate. She has also finished shooting the romantic comedy The Break Up with Vaughn. If she's being stalked by irony, however, she doesn't show it. Looking comfortably svelte in tight jeans, thigh-high leather boots, a sleeveless black blouse topped by a black jacket, Aniston, 36, said she's not bothered by her sudden appearance on every other celebrity magazine. "I don't look at magazine covers," she said. "It's toxic." Jay Stowes. Continues on Page 93
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Photo:
Reality
television and pop superstar Ashlee Simpson poses for
a portrait in her room at Four Seasons Hotel in
Toronto, Wednesday November 2, 2005.
Dennis
Quaid is the top golfer among the Hollywood set
Jennifer
Aniston.