A friendship breaks up over makeup. . . . George Clinton's sound man claims funk music made him deaf. . . . and Charlie Sheen says he got stiffed for his Lamborghini.
The role of Cricket in the 1960s television show "Hawaiian Eye" made Connie Stevens famous, but cosmetics made her fabulously wealthy after she reached a certain age and the offers for dramatic roles stopped coming.
The 59-year-old entertainer, who starred in the 1960s in "77 Sunset Strip" and has more recently been seen hawking her skin care products on the Home Shopping Network, is scheduled to testify this week in Los Angeles Superior Court.
Stevens is being sued by her former manager, who says she cheated him out of his share of the millions she made off her Forever Spring cosmetics line.
Lawyer Barry Langberg says his client, Norton Styne, had a verbal agreement with Stevens for 10% of the line's profits.
But Stevens' lawyer, Howard Rosoff, told a jury as the trial started last week that she never promised to include Styne in the cosmetics deal. Stevens maintains that their arrangement covered only her entertainment ventures, which were in a slump when she launched the skin care line in 1989.
Styne, who also was a personal friend and named Stevens the godmother of one of his children, is the son of Broadway composer Jule Styne, who wrote the score to "Funny Girl" and "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes."
But the friendship has grown strained since Norton Styne sued Stevens in 1994. Her lawyer told jurors that Styne did not contribute a nickel to the venture at a time when Stevens was having trouble making her mortgage payments.
"Forever Spring is blood and guts and hard work and risk and jeopardy," Rosoff said to the jury.
But can it get rid of crow's feet?
PUMP UP THE VOLUME: Funk-meister George Clinton's former sound engineer says in a lawsuit that he suffered permanent hearing loss after working briefly with Clinton's band, the P-Funk Allstars.
The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, seeks damages of $2 million. The documents accuse Clinton and his management company, We B Funkin', of negligence and allege that they failed to provide workers' compensation insurance as required by the federal labor code.
"They kept telling him, 'Turn it up, turn it up, turn it up,' " said Jason Matison, attorney for John Schumacher, the sound engineer. Matison said his 38-year-old client is "almost completely deaf."
