Most Eligible Woman Had No Inkling
Gale Hayman, one-time partner in the fabled Giorgio boutique on Rodeo Drive, was “very surprised,” to say the least, to open the February issue of Los Angeles magazine and find that she was “L.A.’s Most Eligible Woman.”
She laughs and says, “They came to me and asked if they could do an updated story, they said a profile, and I said sure. It’s good for my cosmetics business.” So it was, thatat fortysomething, Hayman found herself occupying five inside pages, photographed in her signature leopard print, dubbed “queen of the hop” and linked romantically to a French architect, a museum curator, a lawyer, a producer, an artist and even Warren Beatty.
“I don’t take it seriously, you know,” she said of her “most eligible” designation. “But it’s been great fun.” Soon after the article appeared, she adds, “I went to a concert with a girlfriend and she said, ‘Can you believe I’m out with the most eligible woman in Los Angeles--and she’s with her girlfriend at the Michael Jackson concert?’ ”
Hayman says she has taken a lot of ribbing from her friends, but “nothing negative has happened,” no off-the-wall proposals. As a matter of fact, she adds, “I’m not particularly interested in marriage. But you know, you never say never.”
Meanwhile, Hayman, who with former business-marriage partner Fred Hayman launched the successful Giorgio perfume, is readying her Sunset Boulevard fragrance for a leopard-wrapped debut by September. The new fragrance, Hayman says, “is a reflection of the new woman. She’s still strong and assertive, but she’s more comfortable with her new role. She can run a company wearing pink.”
Heiress Gets Bad Press
Christina Onassis, the Greek shipping heiress who died Nov. 19 of a heart attack at age 37, is the subject of largely unsympathetic stories in the March issues of Fame and Good Housekeeping.
The mononominal Taki, a Greek who says he knew Onassis from the time she was 12, writes in Fame: “The real truth is that people like those in the Onassis family are usually unhappy because they are selfish, at times immoral, and pursue power and pleasure without the smallest degree of social responsibility.”
Of Christina, he says, “She did not read, appreciate art or love music. She was a philistine, happy to exchange gossip but never ideas. Her main interest in life was falling in love--in ways that always ended badly.”
Society columnist Suzy (Aileen Mehle), who knew Christina Onassis for 15 years, depicts her as a young woman hopping from Skorpios, the family’s private island, to London to St. Moritz, “always searching for the elusive bluebird of happiness.”
Despite her jewels, yacht, plane, servants and houses, Onassis lived a life of “misery and emptiness,” Suzy writes, addicted to sleeping pills, a compulsive eater whose weight sometimes ballooned to 200 pounds. “The cards were stacked against her,” she concludes, “but couldn’t she have tried to play the hand she was dealt a little better?”
Both authors agree that Onassis had a frosty relationship with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who became her stepmother via her marriage to the late Aristotle Onassis. Christina “didn’t like” Kennedy, Suzy says, and disapproved of the marriage.
Aristotle Onassis had left only a stipend of $250,000 a year for his widow, Taki writes, but to avoid a court battle with Jacqueline, Christina “quickly caved in by coughing up $26 million for the sake of peace and quiet.”
New Look, Old Views
L.A. Weekly, the irreverent tabloid now celebrating its 10th anniversary, today unveils a new look, which new editor Kit Rachlis describes as “cleaner, more elegant, more readable, less grimy.”
Today’s edition happens to include the winter restaurant guide, thus the atypical cover shot of a place setting. “All those people who are fearing that the paper’s going to be depoliticized, this cover is exactly what they’re going to hold up as evidence,” Rachlis lamented.
But readers should have “no illusions that this is an objective newspaper,” he said. “We are a political paper . . . and the politics of the Weekly clearly are left of center.”
Rachlis, formerly executive editor of the Village Voice, says he intends the Weekly to be “both more authoritative and more eccentric, more responsible and wilder . . . more sophisticated and more vulgar, which is to say not afraid of the rude expressions of pop culture.”
Today’s issue includes a piece on Caltech seismologists, a book page devoted to “the whole generation of celebrity magazines,” which is a nice juxtaposition, he thinks, with a music section devoted to the Grateful Dead, “very much a fan’s band.”
The Weekly, available free in about 3,000 Los Angeles County outlets--bookstores, restaurants, retail stores, food marts--has a circulation of 165,000.
A Sticky Problem
UNDER COVER: The February issue of Conde Nast Traveler reports on a sticky problem: a ban on chewing gum sales at airport shops. According to the “Stop Press” column, “uncouth travelers who simply spit their gum out onto terminal carpets as they hurry to and from their flights” are costing airports millions annually in cleaning bills. But a spokesman for LAX shops reports, “We’ve been selling it for years” with few problems and will continue to do so. . . . Actress Susan Sarandon, quoted in the March issue of Fame: “Everything goes to Meryl (Streep) first. It’s the law . . . if other women had the same shots she’s had, they could equal her. Look, she is extraordinarily gifted. But if her household runs as perfectly as her press would have us believe, I’ll slash my throat.” . . .
For the Feb. 13 issue of People, Hedda Nussbaum’s longtime friend, writer Naomi Weiss, contributes a poignant cover story of Nussbaum’s nightmare life as Joel Steinberg’s companion. Steinberg, convicted last week of first degree manslaughter in the death of the couple’s illegally adopted 6-year-old daughter, Lisa, had become “paranoid,” Nussbaum says, as a result of “constant freebasing” of cocaine. Nussbaum, recovering at a psychiatric facility from Steinberg’s mental and physical abuse, says she hopes “to reach out and help battered women,” to tell them to get out before it’s too late. She adds, “I would probably have stayed there until I died.”
