Verdict on Stars’ Jury Exemptions: Not Guilty! : Celebrities: ‘Doonesbury’ creator Garry Trudeau pokes fun at actors who get excused from civic duty, but the reality police deny his scenario.

If you’ve recently tried to wriggle out of jury duty, you probably realize that it’s not as easy as it used to be to come up with a legitimate excuse.

Unlike employment as a police officer, being a celebrity does not automatically qualify a person for an exemption from showing up at the courthouse. Still, you aren’t likely to find yourself rubbing shoulders in the jury box with the likes of Julia Roberts or Kevin Costner.

In his “Doonesbury” strip last week, Garry Trudeau had a little fun at the expense of both Hollywood and the judiciary system by creating a new character who refers to himself as “Max Lovett, Court Clerk to the Stars.”

Lovett, according to the strip, is the guy to see if you are summoned to fulfill your civic obligation by serving as a juror-- and you happen to be famous. Lovett tells Zonker--who is trying to get a surfing exemption--that he has excused “most of the biggies. Julia Roberts, Dustin Hoffman, Beatty. I once exempted John Travolta so he could do ‘Saturday Night Fever.’ ”

Zonker is impressed when Lovett lets Lily Tomlin off the hook, telling her, “Be sure to get back to me as soon as you wrap.”

“I would love to serve on jury duty,” the real Tomlin deadpanned. “Except that I would miss Court TV.

Gazing at a photo of himself in the company of Glenn Close, Lovett recalls that the actress was exempted “so she could do ‘Fatal Attraction.’ ”

“She thought the cartoon was very funny,” said a spokeswoman for Close.

Actually, it has been almost a decade since Close was called for jury duty in New York City and found herself arguing with a clerk who was not sympathetic to the demands of a leading role in the hit 1984 Broadway play “The Real Thing.”

“The guy there kept insisting that she had to serve,” said the spokeswoman. “She kept trying to explain that she couldn’t shut down the play.” Fortunately for Close, a more “compassionate” clerk overheard the argument and made a computer entry exempting the star for five years.

Lee Salem, editorial director of Universal Press Syndicate in Kansas City, which distributes the “Doonesbury” strip to 1,400 newspapers, said Trudeau based Lovett on a real person.

“What prompted this was he had heard stories of a legendary clerk in New York who the celebrities would look up because in exchange for a picture, he would let them out of any obligation for jury duty,” Salem said, speaking for Trudeau, who does not grant interviews. “He was speculating what a similar situation in L.A. would be like.”

William Wallace, secretary to the Los Angeles Office of the Jury Commissioner, said he knows of no such “clerk to the stars” on this coast, but he acknowledged that celebrities have an easy time avoiding jury duty if serving would pose an “extreme financial burden.”

Extreme financial burden?

“If you were Kirk Douglas, and you were used to making $175,000 a year and you had to miss some of that money, that would still be a reduction in your income,” Wallace explained. “That’s the general look at it.”

One celebrity who doesn’t fare so well with Lovett is Robert Urich.

“I checked with your agent, sir, and I’m afraid you’re going to have to serve,” Lovett tells the actor, informing him that his television series has been put on hold. “Bummer, no one told him,” Lovett confides to Zonker, who has just noticed that even Dale Evans was able to wrangle an exemption.

Urich could not be reached, but Evans’ secretary, Francy Williams, said keeping celebrities off juries makes good sense. “What a farce it would be if celebrities were on the panel,” she said. “Everybody would be star-struck and not even listening to the prosecuting and defending attorneys.”

So does the Doonesbury strip mirror what goes on in the courthouse? “It was pretty amusing,” Wallace said. “But it’s just a comic strip that doesn’t pertain to reality. Absolutely not.”