Hollywood, real and fake, scoops up free stuff at Oscar-season gift lounges
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Stars -- they’re just like us! They eat ice cream. They get parking tickets. And they love free stuff.
Lots of it is given away at Oscar-season gift lounges around town, and no one -- or hardly anyone -- is immune to its charms. Even Candy Spelling, the widow of TV mogul Aaron and mother of Tori who put her Holmby Hills manse on the market for $150 million a year ago, made the rounds. Spelling scooped up sparkly bracelets by crystal heiress Vanessa Swarovski Piedra at the Oscar Suite of 100 Stars at the Beverly Hills Hotel. And she got a set of Twittens -- two-person mittens for folks who like to hold hands in nippy weather -- at the Eco-Oscars ‘Green Carpet’ Hospitality Lounge.
At the Beverly Wilshire Hotel cabanas, Oscar nominee Anna Kendrick cruised booths giving out products by skin care maven Kate Somerville and makeup artist Christopher Drummond, while Jane Fonda showed off the new short hairdo she got to distract people from her recent surgical refreshment, or so she blogged.
At the 100 Stars lounge, Natalie Cole picked up a watch from designer Charlie Lapson and an edgy necklace from Taber Studio. No wonder some people will do almost anything to get invited.
‘These events bring out all kinds of people,’ ‘Moesha’s’ Sheryl Lee Ralph said at 100 Stars. ‘I ran into a man and said, ‘What do you do?’ And he said, ‘I’m a fake actor. I act like an actor, I look like I might be an actor, I tell them things, and they believe me.’ You see how people jockey for position because they all want the stuff.’
Bold-faced names, real or faux, weren’t the only ones benefiting from freebies. At the sustainable Green Carpet lounge at a private home in Beverly Hills, Sally Kellerman had her tresses blown out by hair guru Juan Florentino before posing for a coffee-table book of celebrity photos benefiting Haitian earthquake victims.
-- Irene Lacher
A new Times database puts readers on the sidewalks of Hollywood, using more than a century of archives to track the lives of the stars, including current Oscar nominees Jeff Bridges, James Cameron, Matt Damon, Morgan Freeman, Sandra Bullock and Meryl Streep.