Raising Money, Moving Stones

Photographer Michel Comte dashes from one group of serious buyers to the next during the art and jewelry auction, periodically removing his thick-framed glasses to wipe his brow.

It is an exclusive crowd at the Ace Gallery Los Angeles on Tuesday night. Actors, models and artist patrons--many of them friends of Comte--arrive intent on spending thousands for a good cause: to aid war victims in Afghanistan, Ethiopia and Angola.

Comte, along with Geraldine Chaplin and producer Arthur Cohn, is hosting the evening, and as the bare walls of the room echo with the auctioneer’s staccato delivery, he searches the room for friendly faces. He’s a self-described recluse who shies away from the media. (“I’ve only been out once in the last two months,” he says later.)

Circulating through the party, Comte lights on Daryl Hannah near the entrance. He looks up to see his 1990 color photo of Mike Tyson’s arm, holding a dove, sell for $13,000. Then he heads to the back of the room with Uma Thurman, whom he’s known since her teenage modeling days. He huddles with Dennis Hopper, then Macy Gray, and poses for a photograph with Vanity Fair Editor Graydon Carter.

The auctioneer’s gavel sounds: Comte’s black-and-white photo of a bare-chested, barefoot Sting sells for $5,500.

A sexy mixed-media piece, “Bedroom Fantasies,” by Robert Graham, goes for $15,000. Moments later, Julian Schnabel’s 1995 oil on carpet titled “Carpet Painting for the International Red Cross” brings $180,000--the night’s largest sale. (Early estimates have the event bringing in more than $1 million for the International Committee of the Red Cross and the American Red Cross.)

In May, Comte heads to Kabul, Afghanistan. “I’ve seen a great deal of misery,” he says the next day, sitting poolside at the Bel-Air Hotel. But he adds, “When you raise a lot of money, you can move a few stones.”

What Would Nan

the Nanny Do?

Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus worked as nannies for more than two dozen Upper East Side families in New York for seven years.

And they lived to tell in “The Nanny Diaries,” a satirical look at Park Avenue family life.

Their comedy of manners (and lack of) has Manhattanites guessing: Who is Mrs. X, the spoiled and needy mother who employs Nanny not only to prepare Coquilles St. Jacques for her 4-year-old son Grayer, but also to smile at her excuses and admire her taste?

Alas, the authors insist the characters are composites, and a note to readers instructs that “names and characters are the product of the authors’ imagination.”

“It’s a comedy piece--it’s exaggerated,” Kraus says. But, “it reflects the real challenges in the job.”

And one character, at least, became real: Nan, the overworked and underpaid heroine.

Occasionally, “we would wonder, ‘What would Nan do?’” McLaughlin says, adding that the through-the-keyhole perspective of the help has been used by Shakespeare, Chekhov and Tolstoy. “There’s always a nanny figure.”

Among the rules of nannying the two compiled is this (No. 7): “Validate. Validate. Validate: ‘That new Birkin bag was so worth the wait.’” And especially, “‘Oh, no, you were right, there was absolutely no need for you to come to the school play.’”

But the No. 1 rule, according to the authors is this: “Love the kid. Because you’re going to hate everyone else.”

Quote/Unquote:

“The only thing that could prevent this result, would be that the Academy decides, from a feeling of guilt, to repair the damage that was done to Denzel Washington [by not giving him an Oscar] for “The Hurricane.” Outside of that, I can’t see that there would be another reason for Russell [Crowe] not to get it.”

--”A Beautiful Mind” director Ron Howard, giving La Opinion his objective take on why his star will, or won’t, win the best actor Academy Award.