We're hearing a wild rumor that Jane Friedman was just fired from her perch atop News Corp.'s HarperCollins. If true, this would sure lend a hefty dose of irony to the publishing executive's quote in the Observer today, gleaned from an industry party on the Twentieth Century Fox lot Saturday: "I love being CEO of HarperCollins!" Anyone hearing anything? UPDATE: The Observer quotes a source confirming Friedman's departure, and the Wall Street Journal is reporting the exit as fact. Two strange things about these reports:

New York writer and editor Rachel Kramer Bussel was at Book Expo America, that publishing industry clusterfuck, and snapped two pics of upcoming celeb tomes: Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen's Influence and "laptop samurai/Queen of All Media" Perez Hilton's Red Carpet Suicides. Click to enlarge the covers.

Didn't get enough gay hip hop blind items in the new Terrance Dean tell-all book Hiding In Hip Hop? It's your lucky day, because there's a follow-up documentary on the way! The entertainment industry vet and former down-low brother Dean tells us the entire film—catchily named "X'pos'D" —will be going up on YouTube soon, and that the LOGO network has "expressed interest" in it. It will explore "why the black community is afraid to address the taboo of homosexuality." Maybe because they'll be X'pos'D! The trailer, featuring a veritable library of gay slurs, is below.

Other than contemplate the ongoing federal probe over his prostitute habit, what does former Gov. Eliot Spitzer do with himself all day? Punches the clock at his dad's real estate company, it turns out. According to the Observer, Spitzer is poised to eventually take over for his father, who has been treated for Parkinson's disease. Of course, the job means hitting up bankers Spitzer relentlessly hounded as New York attorney general. How uncomfortable. Hopefully the former john has some experience handling embarrassing and awkward situations! At least he doesn't have to worry about real estate brokers and fellow owners, back-slapping types who apparently share Spitzer's taste for quality poontang:

Guess who's on the cover of the new issue of Steppin' Out, the odd little celebrity magazine produced by Jersey gossip gadfly and Page Six enemy Chaunce Hayden? It's recently arrested former child star Tatum O'Neal! The interview obviously happened before her arrest, making this by far the most fortuitous coincidence of Chaunce Hayden's career. There are several questions about drug use in the interview, because that's what people always talk about with Tatum O'Neal. But she told Chaunce at the time that she felt "good, comfortable, and clear":

Larry Mendte, the first male host of Access Hollywood, is under investigation by the FBI for reading someone else's emails. If he did it, at least he probably saw some thrilling stuff: his alleged victim is Alycia Lane, his cop-slugging, bikini-posing former colleague at Philly's CBS TV station. You can see why he'd be tempted! Early indications are that Mendte's snooping could rank right up there with Insider host Pat O'Brien's sexy drunken voicemails in the annals of gossip show host scandals.

Go figure: It turns out the jilted, crazy wife of Shubert Organization President Philip Smith, who aired their messy divorce battle on YouTube, has a long history of turbulent relationships and public flame-outs involving mostly men. Judging from the profile that just appeared in New York, the wife, Tricia Walsh-Smith, has done two sensible things in her life, starting with her lucrative appearance in close to 500 television commercials, including the Hellmann's mayonnaise ad pictured at left. She also wrote and starred in a popular play in Britain called Bonkers, about "a bulimic ex-model whose husband is always having affairs." Everything else has been kind of a disaster, particularly her many breakups:

So intrepid douchebag Morty White figured that the release of the Sex and the City movie would be the perfect excuse to call up a few of his SATC-loving ex-girlfriends and make fun of them. Isn't he hysterical? "My first call was to Janet. She won the prize for bringing up Sex and the City the quickest-54 seconds into the date, to be exact. We went out on our date in 1999 and haven't spoken since (not including the three messages she left on my answering machine). It took a while for her to warm up to me over the phone, but she finally agreed to play ball:" It begins...

Now that he's a bigtime fancy-pants director, Clint Eastwood wants nothing to do with his role as a rogue cop with a taste for brutality in the Dirty Harry franchise. Kidding! He's totally cool with it. "'At the time in the press, there was a lot of attention to the rights of the accused, and that's not bad or wrong, but nobody thought too much about the rights of the public or the rights of the victim, that's not what the attention was on,' Eastwood said. 'All of a sudden here was a picture about the rights of all the victims, and I think it really resonated with people who were frustrated.'" And Eastwood's not some gun-nut, either.

Joyce Maynard, the writer who had a creepy affair with gross old J.D. Salinger when he was 53 and she a mere 18, is still tattling on the egregiously overrated recluse. And it sounds like he has it coming. "[S]he's taking him on again in 'Going Hungry: Writers on Desire, Self-Denial and Overcoming Anorexia,' a series of essays compiled by Kate Taylor. Maynard, without identifying Salinger by name, discusses the relationship she had after her freshman year at Yale with 'a man who liked that I was skinny and, in fact, taught me new tricks to stay that way. Over the year that followed, the relationship grew increasingly difficult for many reasons, but I suspect his policing of my body and my eating was one of them . . . The experience of having another person - even one I loved - telling me what to eat and forbidding certain foods filled me with frustration . . . '"

How much did President Bush drink? When did he quit? Did he quit? And what else did he do? There are absolutely no definitive answers to any of those questions, and most of the witnesses and parties involved are suspect or worse. Still, with the publication of former press secretary Scott McClellan's book, complete with re-airing of those old cocaine rumors, it might be fun to investigate the out-going president's drug history, as found both in the public record and the fever dreams of conspiracy artists.

At a new condo in the East Village in NYC, a volatile mix of summer weather, a rooftop pool, gays, hipsters, and wealthy young hedge fund yuppies conspired to form a party that resulted, predictably, in drinking, drugs, debauchery, and defecation. Disasters of this type never happened when all members of various disparate cultural groups stayed neatly separated from each other, in neighborhoods segmented by class, wealth, race, and sexual preference. A Curbed tipster gives a brief glimpse into this dangerous world in which ubiquitous money obliterates traditional social boundaries and brings together GayHipYups in search of intoxication:

It's no secret that the gossip business tends to be driven by self-promotion, grudges, favor-trading and image-polishing. But the press release after the jump is enough to make one yearn for the vicious, but still very human, world depicted by Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis in Sweet Smell of Success. The release is headlined "Gossip item, Press advisor, Gossip item, Press advisory, Press" and claims that reality TV star Kim Kardashian was recently "saved from stampede of 13 year olds" at a hotel. It's hard to say what ulterior motive is behind this "gossip" — touting the demographics of the show, perhaps, or deflecting attention from something juicier — but one would hope the likes of Page Six and Us Weekly would at least make celebrity publicists go through the motions of pretending their gossip isn't manufactured. Check the papers tomorrow to find out if they do.

Like CNN anchor Anderson Cooper, ABC weatherman Sam Champion has been inching out of the closet: he's basically out socially (just ask our commenters!) but remains closeted professionally. Michael Musto wrote in Out one year ago that Champion was in a "glass closet... the press still gives a free pass to people like... Champion and... Cooper, helping to keep their glass doors shut so they can lead gay social lives while carefully skirting the issue." And yet here's Andy Cohen, a senior VP at NBC's Bravo, blogging about Champion, Champion's boyfriend, and their fabulous party in the Hamptons Memorial Day weekend:

No question, the Sex And The City movie premiere at Radio City Music Hall is going swimmingly for some people. Fameball Julia Allison and her buddies Mary Rambin and Megan Asha, for example, got inside the hall and snapped photos like the one at left of cast member Sarah Jessica Parker (from Rambin) and now appear to be happily seated next to actress Ashley Olsen. Vogue editor Anna Wintour is present and accounted for. But a line of ticketholders stretching for an entire city block was turned away, according to a disgruntled email tipster, who wrote: "There was a near riot of Louboutin clicking girls to the security windows in the front... Some were in near tears waving their tickets and yelling into their cells." Hopefully the lady from Singapore who bought a fake ticket for $19,000, but then got a free authentic one, wasn't among the crowd, because this would push her over the edge. I told you this was going to get ugly. Full email report after the jump.

File this under "Confirmation of scary news that you already suspected was true": a new survey says that corporations have become so paranoid about leaks (justifiably) that many are now engaged in "systematic snooping" in employees' electronic communications. More than 40% of large companies read employee emails, but that's not all; they're also looking at your instant messages and Facebook pages. Delete! Delete!

How is it humanly possible for the CBS Early Show to be so dysfunctional? And so early in the morning, at that? The show has been a nest of infighting for months, since the times of deposed mean boss Shelley Ross. Now, we hear that more scheming and devious machinations are underway. A tipster says that Zev Shalev, who was named a senior producer for the show in March (and who CBS execs are said to want to take over permanently as the show's top producer), may be in the crosshairs of Michael Rosen, another senior producer who was once described to us as "a tyrant to the staff." Laurye Blackford, a departing senior producer and "mean girl," may also be involved. Of course, anyone who has survived at the show through all of its internal turbulence must be presumed to be an expert Machiavellian corporate backstabber. Beware, CBS staffers! Do you have any more info on the Early Show's drama? Email us, please.

Oh noes! Publicist/stylist/funboy-about-town Kristian Laliberte's Facebook page was hacked and someone's been sending his friends the most horrible messages! "Dear All," he writes. "This is Kristian and this message is real. Sometime between midnight and nine am, my facebook account was hacked into. A similar experience happened with my gmail two weeks ago-where fake emails were forwarded to an unknown address. The perpetrator sent slews of disgusting fake messages to many of my contacts, but I do not know who all received these. I am categorically letting everyone know that this happened and I'm so sorry if you were upset for one moment and caught up in this mess." Clues as to the perp's ID and a sample of the offending emails below.

Today's thinly veiled, lawyer-proofed blind items are brought to you by Page Six and that tragic nutjob at Crazy Days and Nights. Come play!

"Serge Hefez, a practicing psychiatrist, has identified a new mental illness among bloggers: obsessive Balkosis, an unhealthy fascination with the Radar Online Executive Editor, Alex Balk."