Roll out the green carpet

Although he’s married to a committed activist, Larry David, who with his HBO series “Curb Your Enthusiasm” has elevated the selfish lout to an art form, says he didn’t give a whit about the environment until it affected him personally.

At a May 6 fundraiser for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which for more than 30 years has helped write and defend environmental statutes such as the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act, he explained his transformation in a delicious comic bit.

“How did I go from Larry David, radical narcissist, to Larry David, radical activist?” he asked. “Tuna.”

It seems that as a child growing up in Brooklyn, David had no affinity for nature. (“The greatest compliment was to pick up someone’s fake fruit and try to take a bite out of it.”) But as a creature of habit in adulthood, for lunch he relied on a tuna sandwich on rye with lettuce. Then he heard about the dangers of mercury in tuna. “Now, the lunch decision is the hardest of the day,” he complained to the packed house at the Wadsworth Theatre.

David was also recently diagnosed with a melanoma on his face, which he said was caused “by ozone depletion.” “It was benign,” he said, “but I didn’t tell people, because it was the first time anyone felt sorry for me since they published my income six years ago.”

Tom Hanks hosted the evening of comedy and music, which raised $2.6 million. Guests arrived via a “green” carpet, among them Leonardo DiCaprio, who walked in separately from his longtime date, Gisele Bundchen, perhaps to avoid paparazzi overload. Once inside, the audience snacked on Pirate’s Booty and watched Will Ferrell revisit his George W. Bush character from “Saturday Night Live.”

The show featured films highlighting the work of the NRDC, including the role its lawyers played last year in helping to halt construction of a new terminal at the Port of Los Angeles, and a keynote speech by NRDC President Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It ended with a singalong of “This Land Is Your Land” led by Willie Nelson and Sheryl Crow.

A tequila-soaked dinner followed in a tent next door -- the kind of party with so many boldfacers that David was asking Jack Black for autographs for his kids, and Crow and her beau, Lance Armstrong, could barely move two feet without someone new wanting to meet them.

Hanks said he had no choice but to become involved when he learned of the council’s work through the event’s creator, co-producer and NRDC trustee Laurie David, who managed to corral a major industry crowd, including Jeffrey Katzenberg, Jerry Bruckheimer, Joel Silver, Rob Reiner, Ray Romano and Les Moonves. “Yeah, Laurie can be persuasive, like a Greyhound bus can be persuasive. You either climb on board or get out of the way,” Hanks said.

In the valet line, as guests climbed into their shiny cars where gift boxes of Ralph Lauren fragrances were waiting on the front seats, the woman of the hour, dressed in a clingy chartreuse Versace dress, was saying her goodbyes.

“I could have raised $3 million if I had more seats,” Laurie David said. “Next year, we need a bigger theater.”