Ready for the Real Scoop?(celebrity gossip)

No matter whether you support it or not, this war is exhausting business. From Internet rumors to CNN pundits to endless elevator conversations, we should all take a deep breath and think about something else. Like sexy celebrity gossip.

Here's the latest, hottest, most impossible-to-substantiate rumor racing through Hollywood: A hugely rich media mogul and his wife engage in a kinky interlude involving bondage, light sadism and a young lady from Thailand. In an act of monumental foolishness, almost Biblical in its irony, the mogul videotapes the entire session--dirty talk, leather masks, everything.

Enter what I call "Flynt's Law," for Larry Flynt, the impresario of Hustler magazine: any humiliating act, caught on film, audio or videotape, will be revealed in the most excruciatingly painful way. Cheat on your wife, and she will receive the information via color photographs in a newspaper brought to her attention by your children. If you confess to some kind of weirdo sexual fetish to a good friend in a neighborhood bar, the audiotape will be played coast to coast, and your mother will hear it first.

Back to the rumor. Somehow the videocassette slips out of the mogul's house and into the hands of one of America's most notorious pornographers. This is hot stuff, he thinks to himself, and prepares to publish stills from the tape in a multipart, multi-issue format entitled, no doubt, "A Hollywood Sextravaganza!"

Faced with that kind of embarrassment, the mogul calls the pornographer and begs--begs--him not to publish. The two men are, he says, in essentially the same business. They have, he says, many things in common. There is, he declares, no end to the respect and esteem with which he, billionaire media mogul, has for the man who made $100 million selling what ...