Luther Vandross, whose own physique loomed largish until he took off more than 100 lbs. in a diet he began last summer, favors big sports heroes. Really big. When he was asked to name his faves, Vandross offered up Hulk Hogan. Andre the Giant and Bruno Sammartino. "In other words, wrestling is one of my favorite sports," says Vandross, 40, whose most recent album, Power of Love, won two Grammy Awards earlier this year. "I used to take my nephews and my brother-in-law to Madison Square Garden every month. I'd put Aretha Franklin's Greatest Hits on my Walkman, so I'd see Bruno in the ring body-slamming, and I'd have Aretha in my headset body-slamming. Oh, my world was complete!"
RUBY AND THE BARD
Where was Danny Aiello when President Kennedy was shot on Nov. 22, 1963? In New York City's Port Authority Bus Terminal, his place of employment as a dispatcher for the Greyhound line. "I was never a great Kennedy fan," says Aiello, 58, who plays Jack Ruby, the nightclub operator who fatally shot Lee Harvey Oswald, in the new movie Ruby. "But when his life was snuffed out, it left this tremendous emptiness. The assassination also made me interested in politics." As for retelling the Dallas story so soon after Oliver Stone's JFK, Aiello says he doesn't see any conflict. Asks the actor: "How many times is Shakespeare repeated?"
AND THEY CALL THE REMOTE CONTROL MARIAH...
When Mariah Carey performs on MTV's Unplugged show later this season, homeowners across the country may have to unplug their TV sets if she sings her hit song "Some-day." The sultry powerhouse likes to reach the high notes, which do not go unnoticed, even by inanimate objects. "One lady told me her daughter was playing that song over and over," says Carey, 23, "and the high note that comes at the end made her garage door keep opening and closing."
DOWN ON, AND OUT OF, L.A.
"When there are a million incredibly beautiful blondes right here [in Los Angeles], you don't have to fly me in," says auburn-haired Australian actress Judy Davis, 36, whose own career has been built on not playing bimbos. Her two most recent film roles, as a drug-addicted Bohemian in Naked Lunch and as a repressed spinster in Where Angels Fear to Tread—both art-house movies—are typical. "It's not that I'm uninterested in commerce—I wouldn't mind being in the next Martin Scorsese film—[but] you want to be in work that excites you," says Davis, who shuns L.A. for Sydney, where she lives with her husband, actor Colin Friels, and their son, Jack, 4. Davis says that on her first trip to L.A., "the journalist who came to interview me wore an open-weave shirt with nothing underneath [and] brought the biggest dog in California. I decided, rashly, that this wasn't my town."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
