• June 06, 1983
• Vol. 19
• No. 22

Take One

By Rebecca Bricker

Scandal is in the air at the American Ballet Theatre following the New York performance of Giselle by Mikhail Baryshnikov and his former flame Gelsey Kirkland. During a thunderous ovation (Jackie Onassis and Martha Graham were in the audience), Kirkland twice offered a rose to Baryshnikov from a bouquet she received, then coquettishly stepped out of his reach. Next she threw the rose on the stage. Turning his back to the audience, Baryshnikov reportedly shook a finger at his partner before exiting and did not appear for subsequent curtain calls. Later he explained, "I felt it was Gelsey's evening, and I wanted her to have the lion's share of the audience reception. If my motivations were misunderstood, I'm sorry." But insiders say Baryshnikov, who is the ABT's artistic director, was enraged at Kirkland's behavior and vowed to fire her. (He banished her from the company in 1981 for absenteeism.) Kirkland, who returned to the ABT in September, performed several days later sans Misha. Meanwhile Baryshnikov, whose longtime romance with Jessica Lange, the mother of his young daughter, is kaput, has been dancing attendance on his new ladylove, ABT dancer Lisa Rinehart.

Director Peter Bogdanovich, who had planned to move his production company's offices from L.A. to Dallas last year, has raised only about half of the $15 million he hoped to rustle up from Texas investors for his next three movies, including Twelve's a Crowd, in which Peter himself plans to star. "Bogdanovich isn't hot," explains Harry Friedman, president of Big D's new movie studio, the Dallas Communications Complex. Representatives of director-in-exile Roman Polanski, however, have had no trouble lassoing some Lone Star lucre. They reportedly roped in $14 million from a local syndicate for Polanski's long-planned comedy film Pirates.

Elsewhere in Texas, the executive producer of CBS' Dallas, Phil Capice, nixes reports that Oscar-winning (for 1956's Written on the Wind) Dorothy Malone has been signed to fill in for Barbara Bel Geddes, who plays Miss Ellie, the much-loved matriarch of the Ewing clan. Bel Geddes is recuperating from quadruple bypass surgery and will probably join the cast in L.A. later this summer after location filming is wrapped in Texas.

Now that Eddie Murphy has signed on for another season of NBC's Saturday Night Live at $30,000 an episode, word is that comic colleague Joe Piscopo is holding out for more money. "I guess I won't be coming back," Piscopo joked at a recent SNL party. "I'll be cutting Eddie's lawn."...SNL alum Dan Aykroyd—who co-stars with Murphy in John (Animal House) Landis' soon-to-be-released flick Trading Places—is getting into the restaurant biz. His partners are British financier Sir James Goldsmith and restaurateur Isaac Tigrett. The trio will open the Hard Rock Cafe on Manhattan's West 57th Street in November. The Hard Rock Cafe in L.A. (once co-owned by Tigrett) features an entire automobile as part of its decor; the New York version will have the rear end of a Cadillac over the front door.

First came designer chocolates from Bill Blass. Now there's a designer Scotch to wash them down with. Called Glorious 12th, so named after the opening day of the grouse season in Scotland (Aug. 12), it comes in bottles bearing the red-and-green Gucci stripe. Packaged in a distinctive black canister, a bottle of Glorious 12th sells for about $17 and, rumor has it, travels nicely in Gucci's $145 tote bags.