Want to Talk? Send in the Clown

Few can resist the lighthearted antics of a clown, not even an 86-year-old nursing home resident who hadn’t spoken in five years. Dennis Gilliland, 31, was clowning around at the nursing home in Lake Worth, Fla., singing Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman” when he bent down and asked one woman: “What’s your name, honey?” After she replied, “Mary Henry,” he dedicated the next chorus to her, changing it to “Pretty Mary,” Henry, who hadn’t talked since 1982, did her best to sing along. “We all just about lost our teeth,” said Jacqueline Rubins, director of nurses at the Crest Manor Nursing Center. “To us, it was quite a miracle.” Gilliland, of Memphis, said he didn’t realize what had happened until he saw the looks on the others’ faces. The clown, who tours with the South Florida Fair, was raised by his grandmother and said he visits nursing homes and hospitals wherever he performs as a “way of paying back the people who have given me my opportunities.”

--Murderous mementos from the career of a flamboyant lawyer who defended some of the most notorious murder suspects in England will be sold by Christie’s at a London auction house. The “Black Museum” collection that belonged to defense attorney Edward Marshall-Hall, who served as the model for novelist and playwright John Mortimer’s “Rumpole of the Bailey,” includes about 20 guns and knives from the Green Bicycle murder case, the Peeping Tom murder and many other cases in which Marshall-Hall won acquittals in the early decades of the century. The Green Bicycle case involved a girl shot in the head while riding her bicycle, while the Peeping Tom murder involved the slaying of one of a pair of men who spied on courting couples.

--A jury in West Palm Beach, Fla., exonerated Burt Reynolds’ goose, refusing to award damages to a tourist who claimed a fowl attack caused her to fall and injure her back. Selma Binderman, 67, had taken her grandchildren to the petting zoo at the actor’s Jupiter horse ranch in 1984 when the attack by the goose occurred. Binderman’s lawyer, George Vogelsang, asked the jury for $200,000, saying Reynolds was negligent for not warning about the bird or protecting Binderman “from being molested.” The case went to trial after Binderman rejected a $38,600 settlement. “She gets nothing,” Reynolds’ lawyer, Alan Espy, said.

--Frank Sinatra is recuperating at his Palm Springs home after abdominal surgery Jan. 13, a follow-up operation to the removal Nov. 9 of a section of large intestine. “He’s doing fine. The surgery was successful,” said Lee Solters, publicist for the 71-year-old entertainer.