• March 24, 1997
• Vol. 47
• No. 11

Chatter

By Chuck Arnold

NET GAINS
Gwyneth Paltrow, who embodied prim-and-proper Emma Woodhouse in last year's film adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma, now does hard time as a waitress-prostitute in the drama Hard Eight. "Emma would be horrified!" says Paltrow, 24. "I think the class and moral distinctions would be too much for her to bear." But not for Paltrow, who liked playing the gritty character. "It's fun to play a bad person," she says. But Brad Pitt's bride-to-be remains old-fashioned in one way. "I don't know how to use a computer," says Paltrow, "but I would love to learn." Her curiosity might stop short of surfing the Internet. "People tell me there are all these conversation rooms where people talk about me," she says. "So maybe I shouldn't go on the Internet. I don't know that I want to be privy to that."

STUBBLE TROUBLE
As Spin City's mayoral aide Carter Heywood—the only gay African-American character who appears regularly on prime-time TV—Michael Boatman was worried initially about the gay community's response to him because he's straight. "But," says Boatman, 32, "as a friend of mine put it, 'How many gay actors have played straight characters?' " And playing a gay man has helped his marriage to attorney Myrna Forney Boatman. "I finally understand why my wife always wants me to shave," says Boatman, who recently had a kissing scene with Spin star Michael J. Fox. "Every day after rehearsal, Mike and I would end up with beard burns because I have a beard and he would have a 5 o'clock shadow. So now I respect my wife's wishes a little more."

PIG FEATS
James Cromwell, who last year won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination as the pig-loving farmer in Babe, recently helped save a swine from the butcher's block. "When the people at PETA [People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals] heard this pig was being auctioned off, they asked me to contribute," says Cromwell, 57, who happily porked over part of the $1,700 required to save the 245-pound pig, which had been the subject of a 4-H project by students in Ocala, Fla. Cromwell himself returns to hog heaven in August, when he begins filming Babe 2. "The film will come out in 1998," he says, "but there's also supposed to be a third one. I'm doing 2 so I can get to 3."

GLASS ACT
A superstitious Lauren Bacall doesn't want to say much about her Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. "It's a jinx," says Bacall, 72, whose performance as Barbra Streisand's self-absorbed mother in The Mirror Has Two Faces has already won her a Golden Globe award. "When someone brings it up, I just say, 'No, no, no! Let's not start.' " Still, it's nice to finally win her first Oscar nomination in her 53-year film career. "I just got lucky after all this time," says Bacall, who'll be as jittery as an ingenue on Oscar night March 24. "I would have never dreamt I would get such a good part in the twilight of my life." Adds the actress, famous for her cool reserve onscreen: "You thought I was washed up, didn't you?"