Private Life

He was winding up four days of routine financial meetings in Philadelphia and had told his administrative assistant to confirm his return flight to Los Angeles. He had just finished reading Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind" and was looking for another good book. He was trying to figure out when he could reschedule dinner with actor Vincent Price. And, as he always did whenever he went out of town, Edgar Rosenberg kept in close telephone contact with his wife. "I spoke to him the day before," comedienne Joan Rivers said Tuesday night, her voice filled with disbelief and anguish.

Prince Harry is speaking out for the first time about those naked photos of him that caused a royal kerfuffle over the summer. "It was probably a classic example of me probably being too much army, and not enough prince. It's a simple case of that," the royal said during a BBC interview at his military base in Afghanistan. "Back home all my close friends rallied round me and were great. " VIDEO: Kate Middleton's portrait unveiled The au naturel photos were taken of the prince, 28, in Las Vegas last August  after he lost a game of strip billiards . They were obtained by TMZ and published online, then later published in Britain's Sun tabloid.

Jane Smiley, the California author of a dozen wildly different books, tackles half a century of events in the life of Margaret Early, a plain girl who gets married off to an eccentric scientist, in "Private Life." The pair move to San Francisco, where they suffer a series of internal and external disasters, but the knowledge that Margaret has married a madman is what keeps the pages turning. The Washington Post has called "Private Life" a "quantum leap" for this already accomplished writer, who will sign her latest work.

The Dodgers' new owners have made some nice moves, some intriguing moves and some absolutely blockbuster moves since they took over last May. On Tuesday they upped their game to a completely brilliant move. There's being fan-friendly, and then there is this: The return of Sandy Koufax. Koufax will officially join the organization this season as a special advisor to team chairman Mark Walter. He is scheduled to attend a portion of spring training to work with pitchers and consult with the team throughout the year.

No one accuses Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of being a reluctant host. In fact, as he greets the world leaders jetting in to Italy today for a three-day summit, the billionaire head of government's problem is just the opposite: Eyebrows are raised at home and abroad at Berlusconi's willingness to welcome guests who tend to be young, photogenic women.

Noel Coward has been sighted yet again. In "Private Life," at the Hudson Guild Theatre, Craig Archibald is a suave, troubled Coward woozily waking up at New York's Plaza Hotel while on tour to promote his new autobiography. The production at the Hudson follows the recently closed "A Private Spirit . . . A Celebration of the Music and Wit of Noel Coward," in which Don Snell played Coward at the Tiffany. Where Snell inspired ennui, Archibald projects it.

Responding to a report that Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth W. Starr is investigating President Clinton's private life, Clinton's advocates, including two former White House attorneys, unleashed a furious assault on Starr for conducting "a salacious witch hunt," and demanded that he either renounce it or quit. "Looking into the president's private life is nothing more than prurient excess," Abner J.

She has never married. She has no children. Our attorney general-designate has no nanny problem, no pesky tax troubles. From all descriptions, it appears she has virtually no life at all outside work. How lucky we are! In Miami prosecutor Janet Reno, we at last have the perfect candidate. At 54, Reno, in her unfashionable glasses and nondescript blue dress, is a little dowdy, a little self-deprecating. Not your expensively suited corporate lawyer type.

When he wants a break from the stresses of public office, Gov.-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger will have an appealing recourse: to disappear. Schwarzenegger owns a private jet. He has tens of millions in the bank, a cadre of security guards and a sprawling home in Sun Valley, Idaho. Unlike Gov. Gray Davis, who was often seen traipsing through airports to catch a flight on Southwest Airlines, Schwarzenegger can get away when he wants to do so -- quickly and discreetly.

First Lady Barbara Bush offered a strong defense of private lives, including her own, saying Wednesday that she sympathizes with Wellesley College students who raised questions about her speaking at their graduation, but she thinks they don't understand "where I am coming from." "That's all right," Mrs. Bush said. "I chose to live the life I've lived, and I think it has been a fabulously exciting, interesting, involved life. I hope some of them will choose the same. . . .

Receiving the Cecil B. DeMille lifetime achievement award during the Golden Globes telecast is usually a time for some  benignly pleasant remarks. Jodie Foster, however, used the platform Sunday night to publicly address her sexuality and private life. Introduced by Robert Downey Jr., who captured the freewheeling, slightly needling spirit one might more typically expect, Foster declared what "feels like the end of one era and the beginning of something else. " The actor-director seized the moment for an obliquely playful, complex and emotional speech in the middle of an evening otherwise reserved for glitzy Hollywood puffery.

CAIRO - An engineering student is killed for walking with his fiancee by men reportedly linked to a group called the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. Women are harassed for not wearing veils, owners of liquor stores say they're being threatened, and fundamentalists are calling for sex segregation on buses and in workplaces. Egypt's recent election of an Islamist president has rekindled a long-suppressed display of public piousness that has aroused both "moral vigilantism" and personal acts of faith, such as demands that police officers and flight attendants be allowed to grow beards.

Johnny Carson did not invent late-night television - he wasn't even the first (or second) host of "The Tonight Show," which he captained for 30 years until he quit the business cold in 1992 - but he is the most important person ever to have made it his home. His name may mean increasingly little to younger generations, but late-night is still very much the thing he created, shepherded by hosts formed in his image. Any time a talk-show host plays disaster for comedy, building more laughs on the back of a dud joke than he might be getting with a live one, you are watching the shade of Johnny Carson.

Without Anne Lamott, the entire sub-category of contemporary parent writing - which includes Brett Paesel, Christie Mellor, Ayun Halliday - as well as all those mommy bloggers - probably wouldn't exist. Her 1993 bestseller "Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year" set the standard, acknowledging the doubts and the difficulties, the sense that many first-time parents have of being cast into an alternate universe where simply taking a shower and getting dressed in clean clothes is a moral victory over the chaos and entropy that every infant leaves in his or her wake.

Recently some readers complained about my characterization of Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum as a " weird, pious wackadoo ," charging bias against religious conservatives. Obviously they didn't realize that when it comes to mockery, I'm an equal-opportunity columnist. I've taken plenty of stabs at Democrats over the years, not least of them Hillary Rodham Clinton, whom I've compared to an old sofa. Still, a lot of you thought the Santorum line was cheap and dismissive, and while I'm not inclined to recant (I was talking, after all, about a guy whose anti-gay rhetoric is extreme by any measure, and who seems to believe that married couples should have sex only for reproductive purposes)

Many years ago, when Sen. Ted Kennedy was challenging President Carter for the Democratic presidential nomination, I quit my job at a national magazine in protest of the owner's refusal to publish an article I had edited about the senator's extramarital activities. At that time, there was a general consensus among Washington journalists that one didn't do that sort of thing. ("That sort of thing" being reporting on politicians' extramarital affairs. Having the affairs was OK.) The article, which was eventually published in another magazine, didn't discuss any actual affairs or name any names.

Former Defense Secretary Les Aspin returned to private life Friday, praising his successor and the country's military leaders. "I know that as I leave this job, America's security is in great hands," the former Wisconsin congressman said at a ceremony in his honor at Ft. Myer. Aspin, who chaired the House Armed Services Committee before President Clinton nominated him as defense secretary, resigned two months ago. William J. Perry, who had held the No.

It's not easy for a literary biographer to pin down what makes a writer great. Biographers often recount the details of writers' lives without facing up to the very tough question of what it is that makes their subjects worth writing about. In this life of one of the saddest and oddest of a sad and odd crowd--the late-Victorian poets--Robert Bernard Martin, in a very subtle way, defines what makes Gerard Manley Hopkins great.

Actor James Farentino, whose private life was sometimes as dramatic as the roles he played in theater and on television, died Tuesday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 73 and had suffered from a lengthy illness, said family spokesman Bob Palmer. Best known for his TV work, Farentino was one of the last contract performers with Universal Studios in the 1960s. His nearly 100 roles included recurring appearances in such series as "The Bold Ones: The Lawyers," "Dynasty," "Blue Thunder" and "Police Story.

Chelsea Clinton's transition from an intensely private to a "purposefully public life" became complete Monday night with the former first daughter's debut as a correspondent on NBC's "Rock Center with Brian Williams. " (see video below) Clinton was hired by the broadcaster to tape some of its signature, feel-good "Making a Difference" segments, and her first offering was true to type. She returned to the state her father had governed for more than a decade to tell the story of Annette Dove, whose personal crusade has been to help disadvantaged youth in the city of Pine Bluff, Ark. In the piece is a rare glimpse at Clinton's own personal life.