Maybe She Just Makes ‘Em All Tongue-Tied

If you’ve been wondering what celebrities really think about the softball questions TV news crews lob at movie premieres, we point to no less an authority than Raquel Welch. After she’d entered the theater for the premiere of “Unzipped,” she turned to her escort and said: “They always ask the most stilted questions. You’d think they’d get better at it. I mean, they’re out there enough.”

Class Knows No Boundaries: The words Beverly Hills have always been magic in terms of real estate. So much that we can only speculate on where the boundaries of Beverly Hills-adjacent lie. Probably somewhere near Torrance.

The latest attempt to rub shoulders with the right turf comes from the oh-so-adjacent--but still L.A.--Hotel Nikko. The luxury inn describes itself in ads and on its phone answering machine as “at Beverly Hills.”

Where it’s at, so to speak.

Tickets Were for Sale? : And speaking of Beverly Hills, the final numbers are in on one of the summer’s bigger benefits, the reopening of the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Calling the black-tie evening a success depends on how you read the numbers. The Academy Foundation of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences is happy because it has received a check for $144,100. But tickets sold for $1,000 each and there were an estimated 1,200 guests at the party.

Either much of the crowd was comped (400 tickets were given to the media), or expenses ran pretty high to explain the low net.

Until the Cows Come Home: Your Social Climes staff members are urban people, of course, but sometimes we long for the country. And so we read American Cowboy magazine.

According to the magazine, the wide open spaces are more like Hollywood than we knew. Texans are using beepers to call cows. The idea is to train a few steers to associate the noise with feeding, and then all a high-tech cowboy has to do is dial-a-steer. When these cows turn for home, the others follow.

The magazine doesn’t say if the cows are sufficiently annoyed to trample the first cellular telephone-equipped cowboy they spot.