WEDDING REDUX FUSS

Bruce Springsteen may have been born to run, but he can’t quite outrun gossip.

Especially about his midnight marriage to actress Julianne Phillips early Monday morning.

The New York Daily News reported “some really startling news” Wednesday: The pop music superstar and his new bride were planning to stage another wedding ceremony Wednesday night.

“Ridiculous,” said a spokeswoman for Jon Landau, Springsteen’s manager and one of three best men at his Lake Oswego, Ore., wedding. “There are no plans for another ceremony at all,” she said by phone from New York.

But wait.

The Associated Press, in reporting the Daily News story, claimed that the Daily News had called the Monday wedding “phony.”

“Ridiculous,” said Aileen Mehle, author of the Daily News article, by phone from New York. Mehle, who writes under the pseudonym Suzy, said “I’ve always maintained that it was a real wedding. It was always legal. I never, never said it was a phony wedding. You don’t have a phony wedding in a Catholic Church. I’m a Catholic and I know.”

Meantime, in Oregon, a deputy for the Clackamas County clerk, who asked not to be identified, told The Times that the couple’s wedding certificate showed that they were legally married on Monday. The certificate, the deputy said, was signed and dated by the Rev. Paul Peri of Our Lady of the Lake Catholic Church.

While the Daily News article did not use the word phony, it did say that the Monday ceremony was “a sort of dress rehearsal” and a “ruse.”

Mehle said that the Associated Press was “rotten” for what she believed to be a distortion of her article.

Walter Mears, executive editor of Associated Press, said by phone from New York that “the Associated Press is not rotten. If you read that (Daily News) column . . . it really is not clear where you come down. I don’t regard this (the use of the word phony) as a major issue.”

Mears added that the wire would issue a revised story later in the day making it clear that the Monday ceremony was legal.

Mehle’s insistence that there was another private ceremony for Springsteen, 35, and Phillips, 25, in the works was sharply denied by Landau’s spokeswoman.

Nevertheless, Mehle said that was the case and listed her sources as “Julie’s (the bride’s) closest friends and associates.”

“That’s (the possibility of a second wedding ceremony) 100% false,” said the spokeswoman for Landau. “How can someone believe this?”

She said that Landau told her by phone Wednesday morning that he had heard about the Daily News article, and that he said, “I witnessed (the real wedding). I was there. I saw him get married.”