• April 27, 1998
• Vol. 49
• No. 16

Insider

By Nancy Perry Graham

What's in a name? In Hollywood, a new car, an agent, a manager and a shot at selling your screenplay—at least until the police catch up with you. In an eerie replay of the caper that became the play Six Degrees of Separation, a 26-year-old man named Calvin Watkins, who is black, allegedly passed himself off for months as one Tapp O'Neal, the adopted son of Ryan O'Neal and Farrah Fawcett. Weird as it sounds, Tapp landed an agent, Raphael Berko at Media Artists Group, who peddled his script In the Land of Oz and got him into studio pitch meetings. Tapp also tried to lease a $42,000 1998 Lincoln Navigator. The game ended when Watkins allegedly paid for the car with two checks that bounced. Now he's facing a felony charge. What do Ryan and Farrah have to say about all this? "They never, ever adopted a son," says a spokesman for Fawcett. O'Neal's agent didn't return calls.

Although he's a partner in Castle Rock, which coproduces Seinfeld, even Rob Reiner didn't know how the final episode, taped April 8, would end. And it turns out the show's ending might not have been the biggest surprise. Told the next day that Jerry Seinfeld, Jason Alexander, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Michael Richards began crying as they took a final bow, Reiner—who, with his wife, Michelle, had to leave the taping early to feed their infant daughter—couldn't believe that outwardly cool Seinfeld had gone all misty in public. "Really? Jerry was crying?" he said. "Was Jason crying? Really? I'm sorry I missed that."

When City of Angels stars Nicolas Cage and Dennis Franz learned they had to shoot a scene sitting on a 42-foot-high steel girder atop a 38-story Los Angeles skyscraper wearing little more than safety harnesses, they had a simple response for director Brad Silberling and coproducer Charles Roven: "You first." Seems Cage and Franz thought the bosses should see how it feels to perform when you're genuinely scared. So up went Silberling and Roven, who sat for 10 minutes to prove the structure was safe. That gave Cage and Franz the courage they needed to do the scene. Says Roven: "They were great troupers about it."

To most folks, simplifying your life means trading a house for an apartment or streamlining your schedule. To Julie Andrews and Blake Edwards, it means selling many of the gifts they've given each other over the years. That, at least, is the excuse Sotheby's gives for the May 5 auction of such items as a Cartier watch and a diamond pendant that Edwards gave Andrews after filming the movie 10 and a diamond ring he gave her early in their relationship. "Julie and Blake are addictive buyers," explains Andrew's longtime personal publicist. "If we entered them in the Olympics for shopping, they'd probably win a gold medal."

• Contributors:
• Hugh McCarten.