TRYST AND SHOP
Actresses Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly pair up to outsmart a mobster in Bound, the romantic thriller with a twist: the romance is between the women. "I get the girl. I get the money. It's a win-win situation," says Gershon, 31. Win-win also describes doing same-sex love scenes. "We said, 'We will not smoosh our legs together because then all this cellulite will show.' A guy isn't going to say, 'I don't want you to look chunky so I'll block you.' " Their pillow talk was unusual too. Asked what they discussed during breaks from their trysting, Gershon says, "the shoe sale at Barneys. Sometimes I would get so taken up with Jennifer's energy and the shoes—she's a power shopper—that it would be tough to get back into character. I'd be thinking, 'Do I need new black heels?' "

LADY IN WAITING
Fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi has now met Princess Diana twice, most recently at Super Sale, an event in Washington benefiting breast cancer research. "It was humid, and I was very nervous," says Mizrahi, 35, "so I began to sweat, which is the least cool thing to do when you meet a princess." Still, this latest brush with royalty went better than the first. "Last year in Manhattan, I sat at Diana's table at the Council of Fashion Designers Awards dinner," he says. "I had explicit instructions—be at this place at that time—but I thought, 'Oh, the princess is not going to be on time! I can be late.' It's about being cool, right? Well, it did not go over at all. Not at all. The only person who came later than me was Kate Moss, and she's English so she should know better."

NABOB OF NEGATIVISM
Veteran 60 Minutes correspondent Mike Wallace turned 78 this year, as his colleague Andy Rooney, a feisty 77 himself, was only too happy to remind him recently when Wallace received Iona College's Thomas Paine Award for excellence in journalism in New Rochelle, N.Y. "Chris Magrin, who runs the Thomas Paine National Historical Association, read letters from the President, the governor, the mayor of New York City and a congressman," Wallace says. "Then Andy Rooney got up. He said, 'After all of those politicians, there's another note I received. It says, "You're doing a fine job. See you soon, Spiro T. Agnew." ' " Says Wallace: "The joint just fell apart."

A FIENNES ROMANCE
"There's probably a bit of me in Moll Flanders—I'm a survivor," says British actress Alex Kingston, 32, who plays the title role in Moll Flanders, PBS's miniseries (airing Oct. 13-14), based on Daniel Defoe's 1722 novel about a woman who becomes a prostitute and a thief and marries five times. Last fall, Kingston separated from actor Ralph Fiennes after two years of marriage. "I put my career second and him first," she says. "In any marriage you have to be sensitive to your partner. It doesn't matter whether you are an actor. A relationship unattended has a shelf life of 10 hours." So why didn't hers last? "It's not difficult if the person you are with remembers you are there, but if they forget they're married, it hurts," says Kingston. "I promised myself that I'd never have another relationship with an actor, but I doubt that's a promise I can keep."