Brad Pitt, Gentleman Reaper

Alleged sweeties Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston may have dodged photographers trolling for a togetherness shot at the recent Manhattan premiere of Universal’s “Meet Joe Black,” but at the Tuesday bash in Beverly Hills heralding Pitt’s new film, his arm charm was beyond discreet. She was absent.

Pitt was said to be sporting a different movie-star accessory--a cap covering a chipped tooth, damaged for his role as a boxer in the upcoming Fox film “The Fight Club.” Hey, for $10 million you’d let Hollywood clobber your ivories too.

Pitt ducked out shortly after “Meet Joe Black” began, so we couldn’t inspect his dental work ourselves. The neo-Redford one was, however, there in spirit.

“He’s a real, old-fashioned gentleman, like someone out of another era,” said “Joe Black” director Marty Brest at the post-screening party at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.

“We were talking about the script in pre-production, and I was smoking a cigar,” Brest said. “The door was closed and I was stinking up the whole room. He lit a cigarette, sat on a windowsill and held it out the window. And whenever he exhaled, he blew it outside.

“I said, ‘Brad, what are you doing? You really don’t have to worry about the room.’ He said, ‘That’s all right.’ There’s something very dignified about that.”

*

At 88, the dean of architectural photographers is a busy boy. Tuesday evening, Julius Shulman happily signed copies of his lush new art book, “Julius Shulman: Architecture and Its Photography” (Taschen), at one of his favorite houses in L.A.--John Lautner’s Jetsons-like Chemosphere above Mulholland Drive.

Oh, yes. Did we mention that Shulman is doing five more books on Southern California architecture for his new German publisher (and Chemosphere owner), Benedikt Taschen?

Meanwhile, the Austrian government is maintaining the Rudolf Schindler house down the hill. Shulman said it’s no coincidence that Teutons are coming to the rescue of L.A.’s architectural legacy.

“They don’t live with the gobbledygook of excessive decoration the way we do. When we photographed the [Richard] Neutra Kaufmann house in Palm Springs for Architectural Digest a couple of weeks ago, the editors complained that we didn’t dress up the interiors. The people who live there don’t want to gussy up the house with fabrics that have to be constantly maintained. That’s where the German idea of efficiency comes in. It’s an idealistic and very practical way of living.”