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Hollywood Insider Bruce Vilanch on what Cher, Bette Midler, The Golden Girls & more are really like!
By Celebrity Drop
April 6, 2025

Bruce Vilanch is stepping forward to acknowledge his role in producing some of the most infamous television moments of the twentieth century.

He reflects on projects like The Star Wars Holiday Special, Rob Lowe’s dance with Snow White at the Oscars, and The Brady Bunch Variety Hour.

Bruce also shares his family ties to the legendary Bette Midler, discusses the humorous gag he wrote for Cher that she incorporates into her performances, and questions the true nature of Donny and Marie’s wholesome image.

Additionally, discover the reasons behind the tension between Bea Arthur and Betty White, along with an unexpected tale involving Bob Hope.

Don’t forget to LIKE, SHARE, and SUBSCRIBE for more exclusive interviews and behind-the-scenes content from your favourite films. Drop a comment to let us know what you think or who you’d like to see interviewed next!

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TIMECODE 00:00 Start 02;10 He’s not Travis Kelce’s mother 02:54 Journalism 04:12 Child model 05:31 Bette Midler 10:51 Bob Hope 13:08 Donny & Marie Osmond 15:29 Sonny & Cher 18:14 The Brady Bunch Variety Hour 27:08 Star Wars Holiday Special 29:20 The Golden Girls 31:36 The Oscars 38:20 Elizabeth Taylor 40:02 Diana Ross 42:50 Sophia Loren 45:26 New book ‘It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time’ Subscribe for more videos like this: https://www.youtube.com/@celebritydro…

The post Video: Bruce Vilanch Discusses Bette Midler, Cher, & The Golden Girls first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

Bruce Vilanch & Mister D

Mister D: This interview and the next two I put up are gold. Mr. Vilanch has had an incredible life working in the entertainment industry in all types of ways, starting out of the box writing for long time collaborator Bette Midler (yes, I’m saying collaborator) acting, then writing for shows like the Brady Bunch, Donnie and Marie, the infamous Star Wars Variety Special, then on to specials and shows like Dolly, Cher, Bette Midler, and more, then hitting the jackpot as head writer for the Academy Awards for I believe 20 years,, then acting, theater doctoring scripts for certain movies to punch them up, Hollywood Squares, and so much more. And the most tireless advocate for the LGBT+ community. He’s known as probably the kindest man in Hollywood and has collabed with top-notch comedians of our time. And he has been a “special person” in my life, and so has Ms. Midler. I don’t presume to call myself their friend, but each has helped me through some down times in their own ways. And as a boy of 14 who started idolizing Bette and then discovering Bruce, here I am like an obsessed teenager still writing about them at a very young age of 66. I’ve gotten to see more behind-the-scenes stuff than I ever would have imagined, and in Bette’s case met a lot of her inner circle. I think some of them were fond of me, some not so much, but that’s the way life goes, Not that I know anybody in particular that didn’t like me, but human nature you know. But Back to Bruce, These interviews are diamonds and there are so many more. I swear he knows everybody that has passed away that were superstars before Bruce got to Hollywood, but thanks to working at the Academy Awards he’s just a treasure trove of trivia, but he always pulls out a humorous anecdote about those that pass on his Facebook page which only holds 5000 fans. I don’t think he knows who I am cause I’ve sent him reminders if I change my name or switch to a new profile, but that’s okay. We keep up a few times a year. He’s just amazing. I need to clean up this site and I will.

Bruce Vilanch Interview – Chapter One

On his early childhood, family, and education; on television he watched growing up; on when he realized he was funny and on his first professional writing jobs

On writing jokes for Bette Midler’s act; on coming to Los Angeles and on early television writing jobs; on appearing in the feature film “Mahogany”

On writing for The Paul Lynde Show; on working with Florence Henderson on The Brady Bunch Hour; on working for Sid and Marty Krofft on The Brady Bunch Hour

On writing for Donny & Marie; on writing for The Star Wars Holiday Special

The post Videos: Television Academy Interviews – Bruce Vilanch – Chapter One first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

PopGeeks.com
The Flashback Interview: Bruce Vilanch
By JOHNNY CAPS
AUGUST 10, 2021

I first came to know of Bruce Vilanch’s work in the 1990s. Whether it was through the jokes he wrote for Academy Awards hosts like Whoopi Goldberg and Billy Crystal, or through his deliciously saucy answers on the late-90s incarnation of Hollywood Squares, Mr. Vilanch made quite an impression on me. In 2021, with the assistance of Clay Mills of The Katz Company, I was able to set up an e-mail interview with Mr. Vilanch about various aspects of his work. Even in written format, his unique wit comes shining through, and I hope you all enjoy this interview.

Johnny: One of your very first television writing credits was for a variety show pilot for Charo. With Charo as a jumping-off point, when you’ve written jokes for international performers, have any of them had difficulty understanding your style and references, or are they able to pick up on it pretty quickly?

Bruce: Depends on how much English they have and how strong their dialect is, and if they are in the business of making fun of themselves, like Charo.  With her, the more ridiculous the better.  She loves doing jokes that feature her mangling her adopted tongue. In fact, give her that sentence and she will get a three-minute laugh and wind up showing the audience her tongue.  I didn’t write, it, but I was in a movie with Marcello Mastroianni many years ago.  He was extremely suave and pulled-together, and he spoke English, but he felt his accent made him sound like Chico Marx, or the guy on TV selling spicy meat-a-balls.  He didn’t want to be looked on as a clown, so he pretended he didn’t speak English.  On set, we would speak French to each other.  It was an Italian picture of the 70s, so we each learned the lines in whatever language we liked and spoke them that way, as it was all going to be dubbed later.  I think I was dubbed by Mercedes McCambridge.

Johnny: In addition to your work in creating jokes, you’re also an accomplished songwriter, and one of your credits as a songwriter was the title theme for the 1985 Stephen King adaptation Cat’s Eye. That movie was produced by Dino De Laurentiis, so as you have many stories about larger-than-life Hollywood personas, do you have any stories about Dino?

Bruce: Not about that picture, where I wrote the song with Jacques Morali (creator of The Village People), but when I was at the Chicago Tribune, I interviewed Dino at his palatial apartment on Central Park South, with the absolutely gorgeous Silvana Mangano floating in and out and their absolutely gorgeous children making a racket somewhere on the south forty. If I remember correctly, he was about to come to Chicago to shoot a mafia picture, and he wound up asking me more things than I asked him,  and the food was absolutely gorgeous.

Johnny: In 1987, you worked with The Walt Disney Company on two very different TV specials, Walt Disney World Celebrity Circus and Funny, You Don’t Look 200: A Constitutional Vaudeville. What was it like to be working with Disney in the time period when they were well into recovery from the failure of The Black Cauldron, yet still a long way from the top of the entertainment world?

Bruce: They didn’t talk much about The Black Cauldron.  I believe that was a holdover from the previous administration, the last one with a Disney relative in charge, before my people — the Jews! — took over.  At that point, I don’t think Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, both of whom I had worked with elsewhere, were much interested in Disney’s variety TV production.  The Constitution special was a passion project of Richard Dreyfuss, who was making some big comedies for them, and so they got behind it.  Also, it was a nice idea to try to educate an audience about the Constitution in a hopefully entertaining way. There were lots of names, but my favorite was Whoopi, with whom I got to work very closely and with whom I still work with very closely many x’s and o’s later.

The Celebrity Circus was more or less executed by the parks division, as it was a big plug for Walt Disney World.  We all flew to Orlando.  Tony Randall, far too erudite for this sort of carry-on, was the host and we had a fantastic time.  It was wonderful to watch him work surrounded by circus people and Disney characters, and see him cast a baleful eye at all of them.  He was determined to have one of the acts done to classical music, but I don’t think that happened.  On a private note, the Cosby kids were guests on the show, and I got to take a hot tub with Lenny Kravitz and Lisa Bonet, and I fell in love with an elephant trainer, but that may be my YA novel.

Johnny: You’ve written for many Academy Awards ceremonies over the years. Although you’re well-known for your jokes on the Oscars, did you ever write any more serious segments for the show, and if so, which are you most proud of having written?

Bruce: Here’s the sick part.  I remember the jokes.  I don’t remember any of the serious stuff.  I know I did some.  There were always other writers who were not too funny, but very grown-up and elegant when they wrote about the various disciplines.  It’s difficult to come up with something meaningful about sound effects editing, but they did it.  These same writers generally blanched when I told them Martin Short and Carrie Fisher were going to present an award together, and their dialogue was going to be entirely about the fact that they were each wearing the same dress.

Johnny: When I watched the 93rd Academy Awards this year, I found it to be very dry and rather bereft of humor, and I really wish you had been involved in the show to give it a boost of fun. What would you have done differently if you were part of the Oscars writing staff for this year’s show?

Bruce: I would have bought a house for the comic personality who would agree to host the show.  I would have told the new producers that there is a good reason we always give one of the acting awards in the first half-hour.  People want to see stars and emotions.  They are not so interested in the origin stories of writers.  I would have moved the show around a little so it didn’t look like Stork Club night at the high school prom, with a curtain draped over the hoops and the bleachers arranged as nightclub tables.  Does anyone tune in to the Oscars to see a low-key intimate show?

When the highlights of the evening are Glenn Close doing Da Butt and Frances McDormand calling to her pack, I think it’s not unfair to say something is awry.  I actually think the Academy missed a good bet not shooting the whole thing at the new museum, which they are attempting to make a hot SoCal destination like Disneyland and Universal.  Clean it up and put it on worldwide TV.  They will come.

Johnny: Jumping back to the 90s, you were a regular for several years on the late 90s/early 00s revival of Hollywood Squares. What joke, or jokes, would you say were the funniest you had written for that show during your time on it?

Bruce: I know a few jokes I loved.  One of the biggest laughs I got was when Tom Bergeron asked me which television show boldly goes where no man has gone before.  I said: Ellen.  I also mentioned that Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn were going around New York camouflaged as Maury Povich and Connie Chung.  At the time, it was a big laugh.

Johnny: Going forward into the 00s, you did a season of the VH1 Celebreality series Celebrity Fit Club. I’ve asked this question of several reality TV veterans, including Rocky DeMarco and Jeana Keough, and I’d like to ask it of you as well: How much reality would you say is in reality television?

Bruce: The first rule of reality TV is nothing is real.  They have an arc worked out for each person, and they guide you into giving them what they want by having a little meeting with you each week and telling you things to make you mad or upset at a specific person.  Since we were all professionals on that show — it was not The Biggest Loser — we figured out how to give it to them without making fools of ourselves.  They want you to lose it.  It’s good TV.  If you don’t play along, they edit you out or they make you look like a crazy person.  Paddy Chayefsky lives!

Johnny: Platinum, the 1979 Broadway musical you co-wrote the book for, was revived in 2010 by UnsungMusicalsCo. Inc. Were you involved in the revival, and if not, would you have been interested in doing so?

Bruce: I was marginally involved.  Ben West had written a new version of the show, not all that different, and we gave him the right to do that.  My principal worry after Platinum flopped was that I would have to sit under the poster on Joe Allen’s wall for the rest of my life.  I told Joe and he asked how long we ran.  I told him, 33 performances.  He said, “Are you kidding?  You were a smash.  You have to close opening night to get on this wall,  or better, in New Haven!”

Johnny: You’re well-known for wearing humorous T-shirts of various kinds. What’s the origin behind that style, and what shirt would you say is your favorite?

Bruce: I was a portly child with a perfectionist mother who always made me dress a certain way, and I have been in rebellion my entire life.  T-shirts were the perfect out, especially when I moved to LA and discovered you can go almost anywhere wearing one.  My favorite is, undoubtedly, in a very serious font:  Excuse me, you’re standing on my penis.

Johnny: Although we’re slowly making our way back to normalcy, COVID-19 has made an indelible impact on all of us. How has coronavirus impacted your life and work, and how do you hope people will have changed once the saga draws to a close?

Bruce: It’s been a year without pants.  I’m a writer, so I got to sit at the keyboard and pound it out.  Wait, that came out wrong.  I got to write and Zoom, and if I didn’t forget myself and stand up and do a Jeffrey Toobin, I was alright.  Live performing disappeared, so I did a lot of podcasts to exercise that muscle.  I also wrote a musical about a guy in quarantine,  but I can’t talk about it yet.

As for how people have changed once the saga draws to a close…I’m hoping for a comeback for French kissing.  Listen, so much happened between BLM and #metoo and the fall of Orange Julius Caesar. Let’s just hope we have a recognizable planet to inhabit as kinder, gentler people. except for Jake Paul and Lea DeLaria, who should have a YouTube fight that he will never win.

The post Looking Back With Bruce Vilanch first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

Bruce Vilanch went from a bathhouse bestie to a six time Emmy Award winner. Beginning as a Chicago Tribune writer he met a struggling singer named Bette Midler and began writing for her. This led to more writing gigs including the Academy Awards and many concerts.

He performed in an Off-Broadway one man show and on Broadway in the musical Hairspray. On TV he’s judged RuPaul’s Drag Race and starred in the third season of Celebrity Fit Club. In the movies he was the subject of a documentary Get Bruce! and the gay body image documentary The Adonis Factor.

Recently, he visited Chicago for a dedication ceremony in Lake View’s Legacy Walk for activist Vito Russo.

JN: (Jerry Nunn) Hi, Bruce. Do you have a favorite new t-shirt?

BV: (Bruce Vilanch) I always like the ones that are current.

JN: Like a Trump one?

BV: Yes, it would say, “Like his hand is big enough to grab a pussy!”

JN: Are you glad to be back in Chicago?

BV: I love it here. When I lived here in the ‘70s there was no River North. The old Chicago that I loved is here.

This Legacy Walk is unique and something for people to do while they are here. It is important for all people to include it in their itinerary whether gay or straight. People come here for Market Days and IML from all over the world. It would be nice if they could sprinkle a little community awareness into the mix. It is in the middle of the party zone so they can’t avoid it. It will never be the Hollywood Walk of Fame but no one has anything like this.

JN: Talk about Vito Russo. I know he was good friends with Lily Tomlin.

BV: He stayed with Lily when he visited California. I met him through Bette Midler. He was an early fan and saw her at the baths. He got her to do early gay liberation things with him. This was all in the documentary that was about him.

He was a weird combination of activist and film critic. He wanted to recognize the role of gay people in the film business and how they were depicted. He was a pioneer. He was also a big party boy. He was a renaissance man!

JN: I remember when the trailer for Making Love came out and it was the first big gay movie.

BV: It was the first mainstream movie. There were lots of foreign and indie movies before that. At the time it was treated the only way it could have been treated, as a social issue. Hopefully we have come out of that.

When you watch Modern Family where it is one couple of a multiple couple family you realize that it is getting there.

JN: What is your opinion about gay movies these days?

BV: Now everyone can watch a movie on their telephone. We put them out there in the mainstream with film festivals but they are mostly lousy movies. I remember when La Cage aux Folles came out. It was shortly after Making Love. There was a big debate on how we want to be depicted, sensitive muscle men or old queens in drag? That is the community. We run the spectrum. No one is being dishonest. You have to learn to accept that is who we are. Not every Black woman is Diahann Carroll or every Black man is Sidney Poitier. There is a full range of humanity out there. We have to embrace it and own it. If we own it then they can’t mess with it.

JN: What do you think of the show Grace and Frankie?

BV: I love them. It is fun to watch. They are all friends of mine.

JN: Are you planning on watching Hairspray Live?

BV: Of course. I want to see what they do with it. Harvey has rewritten it and shortened it. It looks well cast. I think they are doing it more along the Grease model than The Sound of Music model, which is a good thing.

The stage show of Grease started here at Kingston Mines in Lincoln Park. I was the first one to write about it in 1970. I am very proud of that. I knew it would be bigger than Hair. The creators looked at me like I was out of my mind. It is the biggest thing ever and I said it would be.

The Grease that you see now has had a lot of the sting taken out of it, including the homophobia.

Here it was done in a high school space and we all sat on the floor of the gym on mats. During intermission they threw Twinkies into the crowd, candy not young boys! It was early interactive theater.

JN: Like Rocky Horror?

BV: Yes, kind of like what it became after the movie. It has evolved.

JN: What are you working on now?

BV: I wrote a musical, which we did in the summer in Connecticut. It with all of Petula Clark’s music from the ‘60s. It has an original book, so think Mamma Mia! We want that to happen again.

JN: I was just listening to Petula and thinking why hasn’t someone done a musical about her?

BV: It is not about her. I told her at a benefit about it and she said, “I hope it’s not about me because I am very boring.”

She is not Carole King or Frankie Valli. Her story is not that story. It is not dramatic. So we are using the music to tell another story like Mamma Mia!

The post Bruce Vilanch Visits Lake View For Legacy Walk first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

Bruce Vilanch has enjoyed what I’d call the ideal pop cultural existence: He’s written jokes for about two dozen Oscar ceremonies; he’s costarred in glamorous movies and insane Broadway spectacles (Mahogany, Hairspray); he took up Paul Lynde‘s mantle on Hollywood Squares; he’s become an icon himself thanks to his bright blond hair, red glasses, and goofy t-shirts; most fabulously, he’s relished casual and working relationships with everyone from Bette Midler to Lainie Kazan, the latter of whom costarred with him in the cute indie comedy Oy Vey, My Son Is Gay!! Though that movie was released in 2010, director Evgeny Afineevsky recently tried garnering the film greater distribution with the aid of a Kickstarter campaign. It’s a Bruce Vilanch/Lainie Kazan vehicle, guys. The world deserved to receive and cradle this.

To celebrate that effort, we phoned the awesome Vilanch to talk about working on that movie, the stars who’ve impressed him over the years, and the celebrity men who lived in his “cute boy cul de sac.”

TheBacklot: You shot Oy Vey, My Son is Gay!! back in 2010. What was the set like?
Bruce Vilanch: We shot in Spokane where I’d actually been before, but only for like a night. We were at a studio where they shoot a lot of Lifetime movies. They were very happy to see us because we were the only film to shoot there where no one in the plot had cancer. There were no women in jeopardy either; no one was being chased by her deranged Iraqi vet husband. No Post Traumatic Stress. It was a comedy, and they were relieved they could laugh. It was tremendous amount of fun, though it was the dead of winter, there were blizzards, and we pretended it was spring in New York. That cast: Lainie Kazan’s a riot, and Vinny Pastore, who you remember as Big Pussy from The Sopranos, Jai Rodriguez, Carmen Electra, such an eclectic group. We had a really good time. And it’s a throwback, a ’50s style of comedy.

TB: You’ve known Lainie Kazan for years, right?
BV: She’s an old, old friend of mine. We ended up working on a couple of movies, but we just knew each other for years. This was a chance to really hang out together intensely.

TB: I assume at this point in your life you’ve gotten to work with tons of people whose work you’d admired for years and years.
BV: Sometimes! It depends. In your mind’s eye you think they’ll going to be like their characters onstage or onscreen, but sometimes they’ll be all business. About 23 years ago I did a movie with Charles Durning, and at the time he was a very serious actor who had done all of those gangster pictures. He was a real tough guy. He was playing Santa Claus in this movie, and I was his elf. I was the elf who took steroids. I didn’t know what to expect from him, but he was hilarious and easygoing — and a great actor at the same time. He was nothing like the people he portrayed. One of the leads of the picture was seven years old and from Utah, because we were shooting around there. The second day of shooting, Charles said to me, “I was expecting a seven-year-old kid! Look what I got. Faye Dunaway.” He was going through the same thing I was; he was expecting one thing from his costar and got another.

TB: Do you have a favorite onstage moment?
BV: Oh, Hairspray. Two years of Hairspray onstage. I did Broadway for a year, then toured for a year. It was amazing. First of all, eight times a week with a different audience, it pushes an OCD button you didn’t know you had. Each show is different, and you find yourself making slight variations. I didn’t know that was what it was going to be like. You hear about people doing a robot version of a performance after six months on the same show, but for me, the minute I went out onstage I felt the excitement.

TB: I’m always interested to find out how knowledgeable pop culture historians like yourself stay interested in new media. Are you still excited by new, good movies, etc.?
BV: There are classics that I do watch over and over, but when you discover something that’s new that’s really good, you go completely crazy. You can’t get enough of it. If you close yourself off to the new stuff, then it’s over. You may as well find a Greek island that appeals to you and never emerge. I was watching the Tonys and saw Kinky Boots in Chicago when they were trying it out, and it’s fantastic. It’s a great show and has the same effect that Hairspray has. The audience goes through the roof, because it’s so artfully put together. They fall in love with the characters and want them to succeed. The writers have given them material to soar with. How can you not respond to that? If you become so jaded that you can’t respond to something that’s new, get your rope and do your Prometheus impression. Tie yourself to a rock and wait for high tide.

TB: Speaking of Kinky Boots, did you know Cyndi Lauper is an Oscar away from an EGOT?
BV: I hadn’t thought of that! I guess it’s true. I didn’t know that. They give out so many Emmys and so many Grammys, it’s almost hard to keep track. Now Cyndi’ll write a song for a movie and they’ll give her an Oscar, like Adele.

TB: Does that bother you, the way celebrities can phone in for an Oscar in the Best Song Category?
BV: No, because they’ve set up the category to work that way. The category was established back when there were lots of musicals and people were writing original songs for them. That period is long over. It used to be that people wrote a song for the closing credits, and at least they change that. Now it has to be somewhere in the body of the piece. It can’t be a song that gets tacked on at the end for an Oscar. Now it has to have more of a relationship to the actual movie. They bring top writers in, they write a song for the movie, and it’s not a song that they would write, you know, out of their soul. It’s a song they’re writing on assignment for a lot of money and the chance to have an Academy Award on their mantle. Those are the songs you’re getting a lot of the time. But the system has set itself up that way, so I don’t begrudge [the songwriters]. I mean, you can pretty much carry a movie and be nominated in the supporting category for political reasons and find yourself up against someone who had one four-minute scene and walks away with the picture. That’s the nature of it. That’s what they’ve set up. It’s possible for Judi Dench to win for one scene.

TB: Tatum O’Neal beat Madeline Kahn in Best Supporting Actress, which made no sense since Tatum is the star of Paper Moon.
BV: Exactly. It’s possible for someone nine-years-old to beat someone who had been in the business for 50 years. Tatum O’Neal also beat Sylvia Sidney that year.

TB: I’m glad to see you’re pretty encyclopedic about Oscar trivia still.
BV: [Laughs.] I’ve written 23 of the shows, so some of it does rub off.

TB: Do you have Oscars ceremony? One where you got to nail the perfect joke, etc.?
BV: I wish I could say that, but it’s never one line that makes the show. The Billy Crystal/Jack Palance year lives in memory because we threw away so much of the script and added new stuff as we went along. We rewrote it as we went along. That was pretty successful. There was the year that Quincy Jones produced, Whoopi hosted, and everything seemed to work. A lot of the time, the things you remember about the show are the spontaneous moments, the emotional moments, the stuff that can’t be scripted. That’s what people take away from the show. I thought the Hugh Jackman show was terrific. What I loved was Bill Condon’s idea of bringing out five previous winners in the four acting categories and each one singled out one of the nominees. It was a great idea, but it went by the wayside as it would have to because you run out of Oscar-winners. You run out of people who are willing to actually do that! Even though there are like 84 winning actresses — or less, really, because there are so many multiples — but a lot are dead or disinterested. Which will be the name of my memoirs, Dead or Disinterested.

TB: Right, there aren’t many Eva Marie Saint-types left.
BV: Exactly right. Best Supporting Actor was impossible to cast. There just aren’t that many who are left who would make sense, who the audience would look upon with reverence.

TB: You mentioned Charles Durning earlier, but have you met many legends who were much funnier than you expected?
BV: That’s a great question. Bette Davis? She was funny, but I kind of expected that. I suppose Peter O’Toole because he’s so famous for doing classic roles and big serious things, but later in his career he started doing some really brilliant comic stuff like My Favorite Year where he made fun of himself and that tradition of hammy classical actors. But that was a role, and I didn’t know that offstage he still had that card to play. Offstage, he is an extremely droll storyteller. I expected that he would just be beautiful and stoic. Actually, Laurence Olivier was like that too. I met him late in his life, but though he got kind of quiet, he’d tell stories that were brutally funny and do subtle impressions of other people. That was really unexpected.

TB: Is it possible for you to be starstruck anymore?
BV: Oh, sure. All the big ones of the golden age are gone, pretty much, there are very few left. But I’m starstruck when I meet certain legends. I get can get dazzled when I meet somebody like Lady Gaga, who has created this thing for herself. She’s so smart and so talented. I think it’s more being in the presence of someone like her, you see the wheels turn. That’s pretty fabulous. Anybody who pulls themselves together in what my mother calls “get-ups” — when she walks into a room, it’s hard not to pay attention. I guess anytime you meet somebody you know is genuinely talented and not just artifice, there’s a quality of being starstruck.

TB: My dream is for Lady Gaga to play Laura Nyro in a biopic. She’s be perfect.
BV: Wow. That would be great because Laura Nyro was it for me. I play her music almost every day, and I only met her once for a minute. I was with Bette Midler, we were on tour, and Laura Nyro happened to be playing in town. We couldn’t see her because for some reason are shows were on the same night. So they arranged for a dinner the next night, and that was that. She was everything that I’d heard she was. She was crazy and mercurial, and there were mood swings, and then she was gentle and tender, and then she was manic and nuts. It was all in the course of one dinner. I realized that I was probably better off just listening to the music.

TB: Is there anybody whose jokes make you think, ”Damn, I wish I’d written that”?
BV: Sometimes you hear someone else and think, “They sound so coherent!” I hear myself and think, “You sound like you were grasping for air.” But Cary Grant never sat and looked at his movies — while everyone else said, ‘Cary Grant!’ — he would look at himself and think, my tie’s crooked, a spot of makeup is off or something. I’m always comparing myself to people who for some reason seem more collected when they talk. I used to be the press, so I understand the dynamic.

TB: Selfish question: You were in Mahogany with Diana Ross and Anthony Perkins. Any stories to tell us about the mysterious Tony P.?
BV: Well, I don’t have many Anthony Perkins stories to share because they’re so dark and sexual. [Laughs.] That was a strange movie because it was Diana Ross’ second movie and Berry Gordy fired the director, who was only Tony Richardson. You can imagine the set. We shot everything, then we had to reshoot everything because the picture had to get to Rome, which was prettier than Chicago. Things got rewritten and re-done. This one scene I had, we wrote ourselves. We kept looking down at a piece of paper in front of us, and that’s why we keep looking down — to make sure we knew the lines. The plot had changed. He was a part of that whole thing. He didn’t have too much to shoot in Chicago. I knew him later on when I moved to California because we were neighbors.

TB: Tell me you’ve had some amazing neighbors in L.A.
BV: Over the years, yeah. A bizarre collection. I had tons of people — Julia Roberts and Kiefer Sutherland. That’s a couple no one ever talks about anymore. They almost got married. It was almost Runaway Bride! I was in a cute boy cul de sac once with Scott Wolf, Ian Ziering, Christian Slater, and uh, Paul Reiser. They were all my cute boy neighbors. I would think, “Would one of you mow the lawn with your shirt off? It would liven things up.” But no. No, they all had help. They all had third-worlders who did that. Now Ian Ziering’s a guest stripper or guest host at Chippendale’s in Vegas for a limited engagement, running the show. He’s close to 50, so he’s bulked up. He’s musclebound up there with those guys. He’s in unbelievably fabulous shape. Though he has a small daughter he carries around, so that’s maybe how he stays in shape. He’s a cool guy and a sweetheart.

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