To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > People March 15, 2000 URL: http://www.salon.com/people/col/reit/2000/03/15/npwed Halle on wheels What do savvy Hollywood insiders do when they see Halle Berry's car coming? Run. Plus: Sex and the senior gal Helen Gurley Brown's still milking it after all these years. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Amy Reiter Halle Berry's recent hit-and-run scuffle -- shocking? Not to her old neighbors. They saw the skid marks coming long ago. "She was very well-known in the neighborhood as 'Halle on Wheels' or a 'Berry Berry Bad Driver'" says former "A Current Affair" producer Burt Kearns, who lived around the corner from Berry in Beverly Hills for years. "She was a menace." "There were three celebrities who were well-known in the neighborhood for their cars," Kearns tells me. "One of them was Jerry Seinfeld, who would always be driving a different Porsche. He was very polite; he'd drive very slowly and wave to the neighbors." The second car, he says, belonged to Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt. "He'd be chauffeur-driven in a pink Bentley," recalls Kearns. "And around the time 'The People vs. Larry Flynt' came out, he started sitting in the front seat. He was proud." But it was the third car -- Berry's SUV -- that neighbors learned to fear. "When you saw that car coming, you got out of the way," says Kearns, who often took his dog for walks midday, "because she would drive like this speed-demon through the neighborhood. And many a time, around this little bend, she would come, 60 miles an hour, like Batman in the Batmobile, and brush you back into the wall against the road." The neighbors got used to seeing Berry fly through stoplights, Kearns says, and he remembers particularly vividly the time the actress blew his wife, who was out walking with the couple's infant, right off the road. "She might stop the car, give a dirty look and keep going," he recalls. Kearns says he and his wife now feel guilty that they didn't report Berry's hazardous driving to the police or -- this being Hollywood -- her studio. But hey, the view in the rearview mirror's always 20/20, ain't it? - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Spoken like a true star "I will strive to be starlike in every situation. I will eat at Spago and have an entourage blow smoke up my [rear] and I will get a face lift to appear more youthful." -- Jim Carrey, accepting his ShoWest star of the year award last week, in USA Today. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Wild at heart Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be Helen Gurley Brown. In her new memoir, "I'm Wild Again," the quintessential Cosmo Gal digs around for a new shocker -- there's more? -- and reveals that, at age 24, she was a Hollywood mogul's kept woman. The relationship, for her, was purely pecuniary. "The lovemaking? It wasn't bad, wasn't love, wasn't anything. Not even sure you could call it an affair -- an affair is sexier," she writes. "This was two people copulating." Sound a little like prostitution? Not to Brown. "Come on!" she recently exclaimed to the U.K. Telegraph. "I had been working for six years, I needed a break, and my chastity had come to an end at 20. Why not? He was an experience along the way." The relationship ended when the money dried up. "I wanted financial security," Brown told the paper. "I have no shame about it, and I went into the relationship with my baby brown eyes wide open. And I left him because he did not deliver. He promised stocks and shares and a piece of land he owned on Mulholland Drive, and these things never materialized." So now that she's 76 and retired, sort of, from the magazine she made in her image, with millions in the bank, is she happy? Not really. "Sometimes, I think it would be great to be at ease, at play," she says. "If I have a regret, it is that. I have no idea how to play. What is it like just to relax with friends at a barbecue or a cocktail party? I don't know. I feel more comfortable at a funeral!" Whatever happened to "fun" part of "fun, fearless female"? - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Juicy bits Harry Connick Jr.'s one-upping Oscar the Grouch. The swinging singer tells Teen Movieline magazine that he'd "like to appear on 'Sesame Street' as ... a serial killer." Ha-ha-ha. He's just kidding, folks. Really, he likes the show. "I always see people I like on it," he says. "I'd want to have all the kids and Muppets gather around while I played the piano." Just so long as he keeps his lousy mitts off Big Bird. And speaking of Oscars and things that aren't funny ... Michael Clarke Duncan nearly missed the big photo of all the 1999 Oscar nominees at the Academy's big nominees luncheon earlier this week. Just as the photo was about to be taken, Duncan, who is up for best supporting actor for "The Green Mile," burst in, late and panting. "I got locked out of my house last night," Duncan later explained, saying he'd lost his keys in his limo. "I'm having a lot of trouble with limos," Duncan told the Hollywood Reporter. "If you see me in my Suburban on Oscar night, you'll know why." The English language keeps getting richer. British papers are reporting that Homer Simpson's trademark utterance, "D'oh!" might make it into the Oxford English Dictionary. Bart will be so proud. salon.com | March 15, 2000   - - - - - - - - - - - - About the writer Amy Reiter is a staff writer for Salon People. For more columns by Amy Reiter, visit her column archive.