Passages

Nancy Claster, 82, who from 1953 to 1964 played the teacher on the popular children’s TV show Romper Room, died of colon cancer April 25 at her home in Baltimore. Known on-air as Miss Nancy, Claster developed the program with her husband, the late producer Bert Claster, and was cast after the original host bowed out just days before the show’s premiere….

Burlesque and Broadway performer Joey Faye, 87, who played second banana to such stars as Phil Silvers and Gypsy Rose Lee and appeared as the dancing grapes in Fruit of the Loom television commercials during the 1980s, died of a heart attack on April 26 at his home in Englewood, N.J.

Opening statements began April 28 in Los Angeles in film producer Ben Efraim’s lawsuit against actress Pamela Lee, 29. Efraim, who filed suit in 1995, accuses Lee of dropping out of the movie Hello, She Lied after agreeing to star. Lee’s lawyers say their client never signed a written contract to appear in the film….

Former O.J. Simpson defense attorney Johnnie Cochran, 59, is being sued by Advanced Electronics, an L.A.-based company, which claims that Cochran rented eight portable two-way radios for use during Simpson’s murder trial and failed to return or pay the complete cost for them. The suit, filed April 22 in L.A., is seeking back rent, the replacement cost of the radios and other damages. “This lawsuit is ridiculous,” says Cochran. “I never had the radios nor did I ever see them.”…

Meanwhile an Annapolis, Md., company has accused Cochran’s most famous former client of skipping some payments of his own. Forensic Technologies International filed suit against Simpson, 49, on April 15 in L.A. superior court, claiming he owes $59,000 in fees plus interest for litigation-support services (such as preparing visual aids) rendered during his 1995 murder trial.

First daughter Chelsea Clinton, 17, announced last week that she will be attending Stanford University near Palo Alto, Calif., this fall. Clinton graduates from Sidwell Friends School on June 6.

An L.A. man who con-fessed to stealing the car of actress Robin Wright, 31, in May last year was sentenced on April 25 to three years in prison by an L.A. superior court judge. Dackery Williams, 18, and a 16-year-old accomplice, who had been sentenced earlier to six months in a youth correctional camp, approached Wright, pretending to have a gun, and demanded her car keys as she was parking her car outside the Santa Monica home she shares with her husband, actor Sean Penn, and their children, Dylan, 6, and Hopper, 3. After handing over her keys, Wright grabbed her children and fled to a neighbor’s house, where she called police.

Singer Cyndi Lauper, 42, and her husband, actor David Thornton, 42, are expecting their first child in November.

Anita Bryant, 57, the singer and former spokeswoman for the Florida Citrus Commission who lost her job after speaking out against homosexuals in 1977, and her husband, Charles Dry, 58, filed for bankruptcy on April 4 in Fayetteville, Ark., citing debts of up to $10 million.