Friendship

It was billed as a "shocking tell-all" and a "world exclusive," but the National Enquirer's March 26 cover story landed with a thud. TMZ, Page Six and other major players in celebrity gossip ignored the article in which a masseur claimed John Travolta offered money for sex. FOR THE RECORD: An earlier version of this article used the term "masseuse"; it should have said "masseur. " Five weeks after the issue left the checkout aisle, a DUI attorney from Pasadena put the anonymous masseur's tawdry tale in a lawsuit and it became an overnight pop culture sensation, topping Google News, trending on Twitter and meriting a segment on "Good Morning America.

OKLAHOMA CITY — Kobe Bryant walked over to Derek Fisher , wrapped an arm around his former teammate's waist and patted him on the rear. For one moment during a break in Game 1 of the Western Conference semifinal series between the Lakers and Oklahoma City Thunder, the veteran guards who teamed for five NBA titles could safely resume their friendship. "I asked him if he was good, he asked me if I was good, and that was it," Fisher said Tuesday of his first-quarter exchange with Bryant on Monday during the Thunder's 119-90 victory.

It's a risky world out there for married folks who are friends with a member of the opposite sex. Just ask U.S. Sen. John McCain. The Republican presidential candidate's relationship with a female lobbyist was the subject of a recent New York Times story and, as a result, subsequent newspaper articles, blog posts and radio commentary across the nation. He has firmly denied the relationship was anything other than simple friendship. In his case, the furor centered largely on whether the woman had special political access.

You live in a large and diverse city. You love the idea of its many worlds. But you rarely leave your own neighborhood. And your friends are more or less like you. How do you meet those who aren't? How do you breach your own borders? Marissa Engel, 35, of Hollywood long pondered these questions. Then, last December, she took action. "Host a meal in your own home," she wrote in a post on Craigslist. "Make new friends and have a dinner party without spending anything!"

Of the untold number of deep relationships forged between John Wooden and his players, his friendship with former center Swen Nater stood out. Theirs was a friendship not just of respect and reverence, but also of rhyme. During the last dozen years, Nater sent his coach roughly 120 poems he composed, most of which were inspired by something Wooden had taught him at UCLA. "You try to give back to a teacher if you can," said Nater, 60, now a Costco executive. "He gave you so much, and it's difficult for a student to give back to a teacher.

After Eileen Franklin-Lipsker witnessed the murder of her best friend, she wondered why no one, including police investigators, thought to question her because she was only 8 years old. Now, at 29, she will finally testify, and what she will say, she promises, is that the man she saw commit the crime was her own father. Franklin-Lipsker, who came forward with her accusation for the first time last month, is the key witness against George Thomas Franklin Sr., 50, a former San Mateo firefighter.

Dear Amy: I am a 41-year-old happily married woman with three children. I graduated from college 20 years ago, and I have remained in touch with a friend, "Jerry." He does not tell his wife that we are in touch or that we meet on occasion. Long ago, Jerry had feelings for me. I never knew he felt that way. But his wife (then girlfriend) knew and disliked me. Though nothing improper has occurred between Jerry and me, his refusal to tell his wife about our ongoing friendship doesn't sit right with me. My husband has met Jerry many times.

My father rarely talked about the war. Occasionally, he mentioned something funny a soldier had said in battle, or recalled the bottles of pink champagne his platoon discovered in an abandoned German hotel or described a good luck scarf his lieutenant wore. On rare occasions he briefly recounted more dramatic wartime tales. The one that always intrigued me was the story about Frank, his best friend during the war, and how he had saved my father's life. It was during the Battle of the Bulge.

The man, a thin and gray-haired federal judge, walked nervously up and down the streets of skid row, past drug dealers, pimps and thugs, past rows of men lying like glass-eyed zombies against concrete walls. "Excuse me," he said, pulling out a photograph, "have you seen this man?" He was met by blank faces or angry stares. And, always, one word: "No." He couldn't give up. Down more streets and through urine-soaked alleys. He was the only white person he could see. To Judge Spencer Letts, then 72, this distinction did not matter.

Ryan Lamantia and Walter Wetzel were two very ill young boys -- one with brain cancer, the other with leukemia. One made it, one didn't. And that's where this story starts. The boys met in a hospital during their respective treatments. This Chicago Tribune story tells what happened: "He inspired me to survive my cancer," Walter, now 17, in remission and quite the football player and snowboarder, says in the story. "Seeing him happy all the time made me happy. How could I be upset if he had it so much worse than me?"

NEW YORK - As baseball celebrates the 65th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier for the Dodgers, the new stewards of his old team are working to embrace his family in the incoming ownership group. Sharon Robinson, the daughter of the late Hall of Fame infielder, confirmed Sunday the Dodgers' incoming owners have invited the Robinson family and its foundation to play a significant role with the team. "We hope that we will be involved," Sharon Robinson said.

NEW YORK - The American theater regularly portrays outsized figures we know from history. ESPN routinely packages narratives of athletes we know from sports broadcasts. Rarely, however, does one production seek to do both. Like its subjects, "Magic/Bird," a new Broadway show about the basketball icons, is the most unlikely of pairings. It combines traditional stage drama with slick sports multimedia - all in the service of an intimate story about that most complex of sports rivalries and friendships, the one between Magic Johnson and Larry Bird.

Way back when the world was young and romantic comedies opened at theaters every weekend, "When Harry Met Sally" had everyone talking, and not just because of that famous deli scene. Within minutes of meeting Sally (Meg Ryan), Harry (Billy Crystal) flatly states that women and men cannot be friends, because no matter what sort of relationship is occurring on the surface, deep down all the men are interested in is having sex. Even with the women they don't find attractive. Inevitably, he is proven wrong and right — he and Sally become friends before succumbing to their obvious deep and true love for each other — but for months it was a major topic of conversation.

Lucking Out My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York James Wolcott Doubleday: 260 pp., $25.95 James Wolcott, takedown artist extraordinaire, is a byline that sends shivers of schadenfreude up the spines of fellow writers - at least when he's writing about someone else. A literary journalist who blows raspberries at mandarins, he's a mainstay of Vanity Fair's luxurious editorial lineup, his flashy prose outshining those gleaming, Mephistophelean ads peddling fantasies of the lucky one-percenters, his crap-cutting manner adding a bracing machete-whoosh to the magazine's day-spa elevator music.

John Naber is 55 and Louis Zamperini will be 95 in January, but they have two significant things in common: Both were Olympians and both were USC Trojans. And that is enough. Naber, who lives in Pasadena, was a USC swimming star who won five medals -- four of them gold -- at the Montreal Olympics in 1976. Zamperini, who lives in the Hollywood Hills, was a track phenom at USC. And though he didn't win an Olympic medal, folded on a table in his living room is a swastika flag he tore from a wall and took home as a souvenir from the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

W.S. Merwin's friendship with late Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz began in the 1960s when Merwin first introduced Milosz and fellow Pole Zbigniew Herbert to an audience at a poetry event in New York City. That early meeting was the start of a relationship that flourished over nearly 40 years. Merwin visited Southern California earlier this month to attend the Milosz Centenary Festival at Claremont McKenna College. Over the years, this festival - organized by the Family of Benjamin Z. Gould Center for Humanistic Studies and its director, professor Robert Faggen, a friend of Milosz's - has brought an array of distinguished writers to campus to discuss the legacy of the poet, who died in 2004.

They met when they were 7 years old, their houses 10 minutes apart if they ran the whole way -- both precocious and charismatic, both baseball fanatics, one a shortstop, the other a pitcher. Their friendship should have been simple. But as much as they might have seemed it, they knew from the start that they were not the same: Ronald "Looney" Barron and Tommie "T-Top" Rivers were from different "neighborhoods": two pockets of the city, one in Mid-Wilshire, one in West Adams, claimed by different gangs.

Kobe Bryant and LeBron James have become friends since winning a gold medal together at the 2008 Olympics, two of the NBA's biggest stars on solid terms with each other. But their friendship took a detour during the Miami Heat's 96-80 drubbing of the Lakers on Saturday. It might be only a temporary flare-up, but Bryant and James engaged in trash-talking in the fourth quarter after Bryant was called for an offensive foul for charging into James Jones . It didn't last long, barely one trip down the court, but the fact the Lakers were trailing, 89-70, likely had something to do with it. "Just asked him what he got for Christmas," Bryant said after the game, without a trace of humor.

The scandal lasted just over a week. It began with questions about why 33-year-old businessman Adam Werrity had traveled extensively abroad with his longtime friend, British Defense Minister Liam Fox, signs of his unusually close relationship with a Cabinet minister despite holding no official government position. And it grew as a torrent of allegations emerged about the array of individuals and companies that contributed to Werrity's mosaic of security-related businesses and foundations, which may have supported his first-class travel and lavish lifestyle and suggested he was brokering access to a senior minister for wealthy donors.

In the 25 years since he started making movies with Pedro Almodóvar, Antonio Banderas says one thing hasn't changed: The iconoclastic director is still leading Banderas toward the edge of the creative abyss. And he is still diving in. "Basically what you have to do with Pedro Almodóvar is take a leap of faith as an actor," Banderas said recently, settling into a sofa after a cigarette break in a Beverly Hills hotel suite. "Sometimes you're working with him and you feel like he's pushing you to a cliff.