Take One

While producers and agents line up hoping Oliver North goes Olliewood, there’s one drill that will await the photogenic colonel should he decide on some 8 X 10 glossies: He’ll need to have his choppers overhauled to attain one of those million-dollar movie-land smiles. Some viewers glued to North’s testimony during the Iran-contra hearings may have wondered, “Is he lying through his teeth?” But others asked: “What’s with his teeth, anyway?” Dr. William Tanner, a Beverly Hills dentist whose opinion has bite with patients such as Dolly Parton and Joan Rivers, says North may be congenitally missing two teeth, and his ivories are a horror. Observes Tanner: “Usually people have two front teeth which are flat. The two next to them are also flat, and then come the two canines, which are pointed. North’s two front teeth are flat, but the next two are missing. So when he smiles, you just see the pointed canines, and think, ‘Hey, those are fang teeth!’ It’s what Hollywood has always done with the Frankenstein pictures. Pointed teeth make you look fierce.” Tanner says that if North were his patient, he’d suggest that the colonel file down the points and reshape the corners. “It would look more pleasing and take away that dagger-type look,” says Tanner. So far, North is tight-lipped on the matter.

Come fall, Ronny Cox, who plays a villain in the hit film Robocop, checks into St. Elsewhere as Dr. John Gideon, the sympathetic new head of the show’s hospital, St. Eligius. It seems that Ed Flanders, who played the avuncular chief administrator, Dr. Westfall, finally made good on his annual threat to leave the show.

Did First Lady Nancy Reagan help save the Department of Education job of Madeleine Will, wife of columnist George Will? An investigation by the Inspector General’s office revealed that Mrs. Will, 41, kept an assistant on the payroll for four months after the woman left the department. (Some of those interviewed said she was fired; others claimed she left after refusing to accept a reassignment.) The report also showed that Mrs. Will gave the employee a $1,253 annual merit raise two months after the woman departed. To avoid further embarrassment to herself and her office, Mrs. Will, who denied any wrongdoing, wrote out a personal check for $12,022.40 to reimburse the government. The talk is that Mrs. Will managed to hang on to her $77,500 job as an assistant secretary for education only after Mrs. Reagan, a friend, made a personal appeal to Will’s boss, Secretary of Education William Bennett. Bennett’s office, however, denies there was any interference from the White House. “There was no communication whatsoever,” insists a spokesman.

Travelers arriving at the Williamsburg, Va., train station were apparently so happy to pull in that they ignored the couple locked in the mad clinch beneath the camera lights. It happened to be Isabella Rossellini, 35, and director David (Blue Velvet) Lynch, 40, real-life lovers who were also filming a farewell scene for the movie Phoebe. Lynch, who will play a butler named Willy, is making his acting debut and had to audition like any other commoner. “Directing is nerve-racking, but nothing is more anxiety-producing than auditioning,” says Lynch.

Pope John Paul II has stirred up quite a flap among a group of flight attendants who are unhappy that the Pontiff will fly TWA when he visits the U.S. in September. TWA was struck for 10 weeks by its 5,000 flight attendants last year. The company eventually rehired 700 of the attendants but cut their salaries and benefits by 44 percent. The New York-based Independent Federation of Flight Attendants published a letter of protest in the Italian newspaper II Messaggero, saying that by flying TWA the Pope would be offending working class rank-and-file union members. “If John Paul II must fly with TWA, we feel that at least the Vatican could help us to obtain a fair contract,” the letter said. That, however, might take divine intervention.