Wedded Bliss? Channing Says Otherwise

News of the blond, the beautiful and the O.J.-adjacent

Gentlemen may prefer blonds, but Carol Channing says her husband of 41 years preferred the company of his friends, especially Beverly Hills glamour photographer Wallace Seawell.

The frothy-haired stage and screen actress claims in freshly filed divorce papers that during their four decades of marriage her husband, Charles F. Lowe, 86, spent more than $1 million on Seawell--because of their “personal relationship.”

Seawell, Channing contends, lives in a $3-million mansion furnished with an additional $2 million worth of antiques collected during jaunts around the globe. She suspects that she has paid for some of those trips.

Channing has hired divorce-lawyer-to-the-stars Neal Raymond Hersh, who filed papers in Los Angeles Superior Court to end what Channing describes as a passionless marriage. She is asking the court to give her control of her finances and claims that Lowe is spending “like a drunken sailor.” She also asked the court to force Lowe, who is her business manager, to account for every penny spent during their union.

Channing, 77, says her husband’s true loyalties became painfully clear to her last year, when Seawell allegedly hit her over the head with an antique porcelain vase. Her husband told her to apologize to Seawell, Channing says.

Meanwhile, she says, Lowe has been abusive toward her, often snapping, “Oh, shut up” and “What do you want?” When he holds on to her arm in public, she says, he pinches her--hard enough to leave bruises.

They had sex only “once or twice” during the first months of their marriage, Channing says.

Calls to Lowe’s attorney were not returned. But Lowe has denied to the Associated Press that he abused his wife or mismanaged her money. As for his relationship with Seawell, Lowe told AP: “Wally Seawell, he’s out every night with a different woman. I can’t believe that she would say that.”

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SAY CHEESE: Some pictures may be worth a thousand words, but a picture of Mick Jagger kissing Uma Thurman is worth $600,000, a jury in Beverly Hills has found.

The jury deliberated two days before returning the verdict in favor of photographer Russell Einhorn. He had claimed in a lawsuit against the Viper Room that Jagger’s bodyguards interfered with his property rights by wrestling him to the ground and taking away his film.

Einhorn, 37, was at the West Hollywood club Oct. 1, 1996, shooting pictures of a friend who played in the band the Wallflowers, attorney Ronald W. Macarem said. “He didn’t know Mick Jagger was going to be there kissing Uma Thurman,” the lawyer added. “Someone tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘Hey, get this!’ ”

The weeklong trial featured expert testimony from Kevin Smith of Splash News and Pictures, a service specializing in celebrity scoops. He told jurors the shot could have been worth up to $1 million on the international market.

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GONE IN 60 SECONDS: Nearly nine years have passed since filmmaker Toby Halicki was killed in a freak accident while making the sequel to his 1974 cult classic, “Gone in 60 Seconds.” And still the battle over his estate continues, despite this handwritten notation in the margin of his will:

“Split the money, guys, and have a good time. No probate.”

This week, Halicki’s widow, Denice, will go before a Superior Court judge, seeking an accounting of where her husband’s millions went.

A former model and actress, she says the legal battles over her late husband’s estate have taken a huge financial and emotional toll. She says the legal war has generated more than $1 million in administrative costs and lawyers fees.

And she is charging that the administrator, J. Patrick McCarroll, mismanaged the estate.

“The court-appointed administrator took a $14.7-million estate and ran it into insolvency in a matter of 19 months,” Halicki said in a telephone interview, echoing allegations contained in her legal filings. This was accomplished, she said, “through a disastrous combination of incompetence, indifference, mismanagement and personal vendettas.”

But one of McCarroll’s lawyers defended him, saying he did the best job he could with a difficult estate plagued by 65 claims from creditors, a general economic downturn and squabbling between the co-executors, Denice and her husband’s brother, Felix.

“Denice and Felix disagreed from the beginning about everything,” said Valerie J. Merritt, an attorney for the administrator. “They were very suspicious of each other. That has made each of them terribly suspicious of any action Mr. McCarroll took that would appear to benefit the other.”

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“I AM NOT A CROOK”: Jill Shively, whose 15 minutes of fame as a potential witness in the O.J. Simpson case began and ended with a $5,000 check from the television tabloid show “Hard Copy,” is suing author Joe Bosco for libel.

In her Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit, Shively seeks unspecified damages from Bosco, who allegedly quoted a prosecutor calling her a “felony probationer” in his book “A Problem of Evidence.”

She says in legal papers that she has never been arrested. She blames the misinformation on a spiteful former boyfriend, who she says passed it on to Deputy Dist. Atty. Peter Bozanich, who was overheard by Bosco.

Shively, you might recall, claimed to have seen a scowling man resembling Simpson driving erratically in Brentwood on the night Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman were slashed to death. But her “Hard Copy” moment damaged her credibility as a witness.