Scoop

Otherwise Engaged

Leo DiCaprio and Gisele Bundchen say they’re not going to the chapel, despite what you read in the press

• FOCUS
• Blame it on an overeager press corps, an enigmatic diamond sparkler and the subtle nuances of the Portuguese language. But for the record, rumors that Leonardo DiCaprio, 26, is engaged to Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen, 20, are bunk. “She’s not getting married,” says Bundchen’s exasperated agent, “not, not, not!” DiCaprio’s rep also denies the rumors.

So why did so many sources—from the tawdriest U.K. tabloid to the usually gossip-resistant Washington Post—print news of the pair’s clandestine betrothal? Proposal rumblings began in October, when Bundchen appeared on the catwalks of Milan sporting a diamond ring after a visit from DiCaprio. (Her agent said at the time she bought it herself.) Next the couple and their respective parents reportedly spent New Year’s together in Malibu in what seemed suspiciously like a meeting of future in-laws. But mere speculation exploded into breaking news when, according to a translation in a British tab, Bundchen told the Brazilian magazine Veja that the actor “is my fiancé. I never went public with it before because I don’t think it’s anybody else’s business.” What she had actually called DiCaprio was her “namorado,” which, correctly translated, simply means “boyfriend.”

Bundchen, who has been celebrating Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro with four of her sisters (DiCaprio is in Rome filming Martin Scorsese’s gangster epic Gangs of New York), seems clear on matters. “For sure, I am not getting married,” she recently told reporters at a fashion event. “Not for now. I am only 20 years old, and I have a great deal of time ahead of me.”

A Clinton Comes of Age

Chelsea Clinton chose to celebrate her 21st birthday in style with 45 friends, a handful of Secret Service agents, two headline-making parents and a flute of Veuve Clicquot champagne. “They wanted to keep it low-key,” says a source of the bash held Feb. 24 at New York City’s Hudson hotel, where guests ate salmon, sesame chicken and a triple-tiered white cake. The former President shot pool and mingled with pals Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen. After dancing to a mix that included James Brown tunes, the elder Clintons ducked out after midnight, leaving Chelsea and a small band of revelers—including her beau, Oberlin College student Benjamin Cahn—to enjoy an unchaperoned nightcap at the hotel bar.

TRIAL UPDATE

Good news: Puffy Combs did not fire a shot, a guard testified.

Bad news: Puffy looked “frightened.”

Face Time, Mobster Style

Like a pinch of fresh herbs in a lovingly simmered marinara, it’s the deftly cast bit players in The Sopranos who imbue the HBO Mob drama with its realistic zest. “Let’s put it this way,” says series star Dominic Chianese (Uncle Junior). “If you’re looking at a tree in a garden, there should be flowers around it, and they should match the rest of the garden.”

That landscaping is easier envisioned than executed. Open Sopranos auditions last summer drew more than 13,000 hopefuls to Harrison, N.J., but only seven got bit parts. Surely there must be a more efficient way for movies and TV shows to find their born-for-the-part gangsters.

Enter John “Cha Cha” Garcia, a Manhattan cafe owner who has been supplying faces for Mob flicks for 20 years. Delivering “real characters in life,” Ciarcia counts among his stalwarts former boxing champion Vito Antuofermo (above, fourth from left), who played the owner of a sanitation business in The Sopranos last season, and Ciarcia’s own mother, Marie, 89 (above). “You looking for a mourner?” asks Ciarcia. “Hire my mother. She has been to, like, 2,500 funerals.”

• Carey: He’s Been Framed!
• Visualizing Drew Carey without his Coke-bottle specs is like imagining Pamela Anderson without her…tattoos. Simply can’t be done. Which may be why the famously myopic comic still wears his trademark black-rimmed frames—with nonprescription lenses—even though he spent $4,900 on LASIK surgery last July. Los Angeles-based Dr. Robert Maloney, who performed the procedure, says the operation gave Carey 20/20 vision. And how has life changed for the patient? “Now I can see myself naked in the shower,” replied the comic.

POP QUIZ

with Noah Wyle

The line between reality and show business thinned a little recently when Noah Wyle, who plays Dr. John Carter on ER, was named spokesman for Moving Past Trauma, a program that educates the public and emergency-care workers about post-traumatic stress disorder(PTSD). The illness can affect those who witness or experience physical abuse, major injuries or the loss of a loved one. Scoop checked in with Wyle, 29, for an update.

How’s life at ER?

We’ve been shooting nights out in Fillmore, Calif., a train wreck episode [it aired last month]. I’m doing my first double amputation. I cut a guy’s legs off.

Congratulations.

Thank you very much!

So what’s up with post-traumatic stress disorder?

It’s always been misnamed combat fatigue or shell shock or, in women, hysteria…women are twice as likely to suffer from it as men. Only recently have we been able to diagnose it and figure out a course of treatment. That is what I find most gratifying about this: tangible results.

What about PTSD touches you?

I’ve been doing a lot of work with the medical relief organization Doctors of the World, and I got to go to refugee camps in Macedonia during the war in Kosovo two years ago. I saw what the face of this looked like.

Pardon the change of topic, but how’s domestic life? [Wyle wed makeup artist Tracy Warbin, 33, last year.]

We’re very, very happy. With any relationship, you go through highs and lows, but it just gets better. It’s so easy to quit a relationship, but character grows from weathering storms.

That invites the question, what kind of lows or storms?

Anything. You don’t throw out a tube of toothpaste unless you squeeze it all out. Whatever the stupid fight is. You can either make it about toothpaste or you can make it about something else. If you keep it about toothpaste, you’ll sleep better.

Do you squeeze the toothpaste?

I was raised to squeeze from the very bottom of the toothpaste tube and roll it all the way up to the top, getting every single last drop of toothpaste. My wife wasn’t raised that way.

How do you and Tracy come to a happy medium?

We have two tubes of toothpaste.

ON THE BLOCK

MARTINA’S MANSE

Tennis great Martina Navratilova won 18 Grand Slam singles titles with relative ease. Selling her 100-acre estate outside Aspen, Colo., for her $8.5 million asking price is proving a little more difficult: It’s been on the market for five years. The three-bedroom, 7,229-sq.-ft. house features 24-ft. windows overlooking Mount Hayden, a horse barn, a three-car garage, two ponds—and an abundance of elk, deer, fox and raccoons living nearby.