The google-eyed gourmet

Christopher Walken hot to cook and chug castor oil; Marilyn Chambers is back to her old tricks; Carrie Fisher on bonkin' Steve Martin. Plus: Mama Cass, Karen Carpenter and, uh, a brunch-related query.

By Amy Reiter

Jul 27, 1999 | Schnabel on cable? Christopher Walken, kook, rechristened Christopher Walken, cook? Hey, who's in charge of programming here?

The seriously bizarro actor with the uncanniest, deadpanniest delivery on the downtown block is teaming up with artist Julian Schnabel on a new cable-TV cooking show called "Split Screen." The concept: Walken and Schnabel take orders from customers in restaurants (Chinese, Italian, French) and whip up the meals their very own celebrity selves. (Do I smell someone's kinky fantasy burning or what?)

On-show diners had better hope Schnabel, a chef prior to finding fame via paintings featuring shattered plates, is in charge in the kitchen. Walken told New York party promoter and journalist Baird Jones at a premiere fete for "Illuminata" that he's long dreamed of producing a show in which "models would dice the food with their long fingernails." (What'd I say about kinky? The perversity was apparently not lost on party attendee Matt Dillon, who, Jones reports, "seemed to be turning pale at all this food talk" due to a "restaurant phobia that waiters keep putting dead cockroaches in his meals.") What's more, Jones tells Nothing Personal, wacko Walken also believes "castor oil is a great liquid to drink after eating things."

Well, that sure lends a whole new dimension to the concept of galloping gourmet.

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That bad, huh?

"I slept with Steve Martin once and once only, 20-some years ago."

-- Carrie Fisher on her historic Princess Leia-'do-mussing roll in the hay with a certain wild and crazy guy. (It wasn't good for you? Well, excuuuuuuuuse me!)

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Marilyn Chambers: Porn again

Perhaps all these years you've been waiting for just one more peek behind the green door to find out if that fearless sex kitten Marilyn Chambers is still up to her impressive old tricks. (For those of you porn, er, born too late to know, Chambers was the quintessential skin-flick star who brought XXX to the mainstream in the 1971 hardcore classic "Behind the Green Door.")

Turns out, she's still feeling frisky, fine and fired up for a little more action. The San Francisco Examiner reports that the adult-film actress, who will soon add age 50 to her impressive measurements, is fixing to go back into the sex entertainment biz -- live -- after a long (and hard?) hiatus. And talk about a positive mental attitude. "It's like, oh God, life is so great. It's just great. The sex is like unbelievable, unreal," Chambers recently told the paper. (Man, how long does it take for those blissed-out '70s drugs to leave your body, anyway?)

Chambers is preparing to strut her admittedly older stuff onstage at the Mitchell Brothers' San Francisco porn palace in order to earn money to educate her 8-year-old daughter, who, she says, doesn't know what her well-known mommy does for a living. "I'm waiting for the day when kids really rag on her: 'Oh your mom, she's a slut, she's a whore,'" Chambers mused. "You know when she's 14, I'm going to have a really hard time with her." And you thought your adolescence was rough.

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Level-headed in L.A.? Isn't that against the law?

"There's a let-them-eat-cake quality to the fashion that bothers me. I can't in good conscience read in the paper about a Bosnian rape camp and then put on an $8,000 Versace dress."

-- Janeane Garofalo, giving Hollywood fashion fiends a dressing down.

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Juicy bits

True, they won't need those matching black Nikes where they've gone. Still, the San Diego County Public Administrator's office's decision to auction off various and sundry paraphernalia found in the Heaven's Gate compound after the cult members committed mass suicide in March 1997 does seem a little perverse. Despite the objections of former cult members, Mark and Sarah King have gotten the official go-ahead to sell 20 Heaven's Gate arm patches and the dead cult-members' iconic purple shrouds to the highest bidder. Pending court approval, the morbid bidding will continue in September, when all you sick twists out there can snap up the bunk beds where the 39 cult members met their makers after snacking on sedative-spiked applesauce. Be forewarned: You might have to cough up as much as $5,000 for super-sinister leader Marshall Applewhite's bunk bed. No word yet on whether he preferred top or bottom.

Just when you'd finally finished Tom Wolfe's latest long-ass book, turns out you could have watched the whole durned thing on TV after all. "A Man in Full," the miniseries, is headed your way, courtesy of NBC. However, literary dawdlers who want to wade through all 742 pages before seeing the network's take on Wolfe's whopping saga of racial and class conflict in Atlanta still have a little time; the four-part series won't hit the airwaves until November 2000. (Isn't something else happening that month?) "We decided to do the miniseries because nobody could figure out a way to do it in a conventional movie length," Wolfe told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "Of course, I would rather see it in 12 segments, but they aren't doing 'Brideshead Revisited' anymore." He better hope they aren't giving things the "Bonfire of the Vanities" treatment anymore, either.

Monday's item on the "Mama" Cass Elliot ham sandwich controversy has elicited some rather interesting reader responses. (Most of you, incidentally, seem to have ignored the point of the item: that the piggy snack was innocent of big Mama's murder.) One religious-minded reader maintains that the porky demise of Mama Cass (nee Ellen Naomi Cohen) was some sort of "divine retribution" for ignoring the dietary restrictions of kashrut. (Nice God you got there, pal). And another reader sets the deep thoughts to groovin' with what he terms "one of the great ironical questions of my freshman year": "Do you think that if Mama Cass had shared that ham sandwich with Karen Carpenter they would both be alive today?" Whoa ...

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