Grandma's Celebrity Gossip

Another report from our popular California-based guest columnist

Grandma

With Oprah, it’s one tsorah after another. First, her network dumped her as president, then she canceled Lindsay Lohan’s reality show without telling her, and now it’s her stepmother, Barbara Winfrey. 

For 14 years, this yachna was married to Oprah’s father, Vernon, and lived in the mansion Oprah bought for them. Then Barbara divorced Vernon and told him to move out. Some chutzpa she had, but he did. 

Oprah called her, wished her Happy Birthday, and told her to get out of the house by Monday. Now Barbara’s kvetching to “The View” yentas and anyone who’ll listen that she’s homeless. 

In her book, she calls Oprah a shtunk and accuses her of picking food off guests’ plates during meals. This is the kind of shmegegge she thinks is going to sell books? Hoo-ha!

Meanwhile, Oprah considered buying Donald Sterling’s basketball team. He’s the prost graubyon with the big mouth and the nafka girlfriend. About basketball Oprah admits she knows bubkes. But between you and me, I think because her father’s a barber, she has a thing for the name Clippers. 

“Where’s she going to get $700 million?” asked Adele Luskin. “Hah! That kind of chump change Oprah can find between her sofa cushions,” I told her.

A new book on Rose Kennedy puts the kibosh on her as Mother of the Year. Another “Mommie Dearest” is more like it. In her personal letters and diaries, Rose admitted she used to beat her children with coat hangers and lock them in closets. This, mind you, was long before Joan Crawford we knew from nothing. 

And every time Rose caught her husband Joe Kennedy cavorting with chorus girls and the likes of Gloria Swanson and Marlene Dietrich, she would shlep to Europe. There she’d buy a couple hundred dresses and suits at a time. Where she found the space to store all those clothes, what with her closets crammed full of Kennedy kinderlach, I don’t know. 

Go figure.