Chatter

NO THANKS FOR NOT SMOKING: Mick Jagger wishes his housemate, Jerry Hall, would get back to being the same old draggin’ queen she used to be. Jagger told the Detroit Free Press that “since she has stopped smoking, she has become the shrew of the Western world. She’s impossible to live with without a cigarette butt in her mouth.” Recently, Jagger says he issued an ultimatum: “Either start smoking,” he told her, “or I’m leaving.”

ALL’S FAIR IN LOVE, WAR AND THE NATIONAL LEAGUE WEST: Los Angeles Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda admits he would risk everything for a win. Speaking at a St. Thomas University fund raiser in Miami before joining his team at Vero Beach for spring training, Lasorda recalled running into then Cincinnati Reds manager John McNamara in church before a game. After Mass, McNamara “lit a candle,” Lasorda remembers. “I blew it out. I knew he wasn’t lighting it for a dead relative.”

HIS GAME, HER SERVICE: Tennis star Vijay Amritraj maintains homes in his native India and in L.A. where he has been cast as a regular in The Last Precinct, a comedy crime show to air on NBC. Amritraj says that when he began the nomadic life of a tennis pro, he used to have trouble finding restaurants that serve his spicy native cuisine. But no longer. “I’ve got it down to a science now,” he says. “I look for a fellow countryman, or woman, on the street when I am traveling and ask them if they know of a good Indian restaurant in town. They usually recognize me straight away and invite me to their houses for some home cooking. It works nearly every time.”

HERE LIES A FUNNY FAT MAN WITH A CIGAR: Art Buchwald was named to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, in which he shares membership with three other American humorists: Mark Twain, Peter De Vries and Russell Baker. “I asked Baker, ‘What does it all mean?’ ” Buchwald told Variety. “He answered, ‘One more line in your obituary.’ ”

AND THE WINNER, BY A HAIR: During a visit to the West Coast, film critic Pauline Kael told an interviewer that she has found most recent movie releases “dismaying.” But Kael praised last fall’s feature Sweet Dreams and its stars, Jessica Lange, Ann Wedgeworth and Ed Harris, whose toupee she particularly enjoyed: “It affects his personality. One rarely thinks of actors improving because of false hair. But I feel it cheers him up, and he performs more aggressively.”

“I DO,” HE GASPED: Russell Hitchcock of Air Supply says he was miles high when he met his new bride, Paula Fulmer, a flight attendant. “We met on a plane,” Hitchcock says. “When she asked me what I did for a living, I said ‘Air Supply.’ She shoved an oxygen mask in my face.” Having walked down the aisle Feb. 15, the pop-rock singer added, “In show business, it pays to have someone who can show you where the exits are.”

HE DID SOLEMNLY SWEAR: The day after their wedding 12 years ago, Anatoli Shcharansky and his wife, Avital, were separated. She emigrated to Israel. He began a grueling, public struggle with Soviet authorities as he sought to join her in the West. Before leaving Jerusalem for a long-postponed honeymoon, the newly freed Shcharansky recalled his reunion with Avital in a Frankfurt airport, where he was flown following his release in Berlin. “We were left alone in a room for 10 minutes,” Shcharansky says. “We just sat silently and gazed at each other. After that I remember myself saying, ‘Sorry I am late.’ ” A dozen years earlier, his last words to his bride had been, “I’ll follow you soon.”