By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com
Cindy Adams Subject of Annual NYT Old-Gossip Lament
Invoking my temporary relocation “3,000 miles away from the media loop (lucky bastard),” a loyal reader sent The Reeler a link to Monday’s NY Times profile of Cindy Adams. Indeed, I would have missed Andrew Jacobs’s tongue hyperactively coating Adams with sycophantic slobber, delineating the tricks of her trade for anybody who cannot divine them from one of the gossip goddess’s six columns per week.
While Adams admits her certifiable dog-adoring dottiness (only her second such acknowledgment to The Times in, oh, 17 months), and while Jacobs emphasizes her relevance in relation to blogs (only the second such Times writer to moralize about old gossip in, oh, a year), there is some eye opening stuff here:
(Adams said,) “I hate to go out to parties and openings. I’d rather have a quiet dinner with the people who are making the news.”
Mrs. Adams, it should be said, rarely dines alone. During one recent week, she said, her dining companions included Joan Rivers, Barbara Walters, Judge Judy and an erstwhile jurist, Sol Wachtler, the former New York State Court of Appeals chief judge whose career ended with a prison term for harassing a former lover. …
“I don’t judge,” she said when asked about her close relationship to people like Leona Helmsley, Imelda Marcos and Dewi Sukarno, the tantrum-prone wife of the former Indonesian president. “I just report.”
Newsmakers, indeed; this would also inch us incrementally closer to understanding her late-night phone tryst with mover and shaker Matthew Modine, while her reluctance to judge accurately reflects her classic confusion over The Film Snob’s Dictionary‘s assessment of Tom Cruise and Legend. But we all know Adams is being a little disingenuous about how she brings the pain: Do not think for a minute King Kong has forgiven her for squelching his coming out party last year. Non-judgmental animal lover my ass.