X-asperated



David Duchovny to Gillian Anderson: Don’t blame your paycheck on sexism

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Call it the battle of the X’s. A couple of years ago, X-Files star Gillian Anderson groused that she was making less than costar David Duchovny because of her gender. Duchovny—whose $110,000-per-episode salary is now only slightly higher than Anderson’s—sounded steamed about the issue in a freewheeling interview last month in Britain’s The Guardian newspaper. “If she’s making less money than me, she should blame her lawyer, her agent or herself,” he said. “She shouldn’t blame the fact that she’s a woman, or me.” Duchovny noted that Demi Moore, who is reportedly paid $10-$12 million per film, makes more than he does and asked, “Is it because she’s a woman [and] has breasts?” Duchovny also complained that he has taken more knocks than the Three Stooges on the show: “Mulder has lost every fist fight he’s ever had on The X-Files. Scully has won almost every one. Gillian is 5’2″, I’m 6′; the odds are that I’d probably win more. However, because she’s a woman, Scully can’t lose. You become tyrannized by this notion that women must not only be treated equally, but they must never fail. It makes for bad drama.” Duchovny also bemoaned what he saw as unnecessary sexual-harassment lawsuits, sympathizing with “an employer saying one time, ‘Gee, that girl has nice [breasts].’ I shouldn’t have to lose my business because of that. If you are offended by it, you can say so. But people’s lives are being ruined, and I believe that the cause of feminism is actually being set back.” On the salary issue, Anderson, reached by PEOPLE, backed her costar. “David is right. The issue here is equal pay for equal work.” Duchovny told PEOPLE he stood by the interview, adding generously, “I want everybody to make as much money as possible.”

Farrah Warning



A sobbing Farrah Fawcett—blurting “I really don’t want to do this”—reluctantly took the witness stand in a Santa Monica courtroom Aug. 11 to testify about her very troubled relationship with producer-director James Orr, 45. He’s charged with misdemeanor battery stemming from a Jan. 29 incident that allegedly capped two days of fighting. On the second day of an expected seven-day trial, Fawcett, 51, told jurors that a series of spats Jan. 27 culminated with her slamming a fireplace poker on Orr’s bed, near him, brandishing a heavy drum stand, and breaking windows. She said he responded by hitting her with a bar stool and smacking her head on the ground outside his house. Returning in the early hours of Jan. 29 with an assistant, Fawcett said she struck Orr’s car and house windows with a baseball bat. “I wanted him to accept responsibility,” she said. The pair later forgave each other, but prosecutors, in the wake of the O.J. Simpson case, are now compelled to pursue domestic cases. The worst may be over: The couple recently split.

Tenants, Anyone?

Oscar and Felix, Laverne and Shirley, Joey and Chandler…Danny DeVito and Michael Douglas? Yep; way back when, as struggling actors, they shared an apartment and no doubt argued about who left the dishes in the sink. Here’s a look at other offbeat roomies who later went on to fame, fortune and better housing:

Marilyn Monroe and Shelley Winters



“Marilyn and I lived together for a while when we were in our early 20s,” Winters recalled in interviews. Once, they made a list of men they wanted to sleep with, and Monroe named Albert Einstein. Winters said, “He’s an old man.” Answered Monroe: “That has nothing to do with it. I hear he’s very healthy.”

Jack Klugman and Charles Branson



Klugman told PEOPLE he and the squinty-eyed tough guy were the original odd couple in the late ’40s. “Charlie and I lived together in New York at 113th Street. Charlie was very, very neat. He was Felix. The bathroom was far away, and it’d get very cold, so I’d just use an empty beer bottle. He didn’t approve of that. ‘Nah,’ he’d say. It’s not sanitary.’ And he was the best ironer in the world.”

Robin Givens and Lauren Holly



In 1991, Holly called Givens, her roommate at New York’s Sarah Lawrence College in the early ’80s, a “fun, fun girl. I spent a lot of time with her mom and her sister, and we went on vacations together.”

Robert Duvall and Dustin Hoffman



“When we went to parties,” Hoffman said of their time in New York years ago, “Bob would strum guitar, and I’d do [an imitation of William] Buckley. It was the only thing I knew how to do, but it killed ’em.”

Danny DeVito and Michael Douglas



The pair lived together in the ’60s in both a New York City apartment and a Santa Barbara, Calif., house that, DeVito told an interviewer, “had a swimming pool that looked like the Creature from the Black Lagoon lived in it. There were a lot of people living there. There was a guy who lived in the bomb shelter out back.” Added Douglas: “Nobody knew about chlorine. You walked into that pool and came out with a slime line.”

He’s Got a Script for Success



Home Improvement’s Jonathan Taylor Thomas, who plays Randy Taylor, is opting for self-improvement: He’s quitting the show after seven seasons to concentrate on high school. “Colleges look heavily at the junior year,” says Thomas, 16, who’ll tape three final episodes for fall. His early college choices: Brown, Columbia, Harvard, Yale, or Northwestern.

HOT PROPERTY

BURT’S RANCH OF ROMANCE



Dinah Shore, Sally Field, Loni Anderson—he wooed them all in this rustic, sprawling Xanadu. But saddled with $11 million in debts, Burt Reynolds has been ordered by a Florida court to sell his beloved 153-acre BR Ranch in Jupiter Farms, north of West Palm Beach, Fla. The asking price: $4.65 million. Purchased by Reynolds 30 years ago from Al Capone’s heirs, the spread—where tours were once held—includes two sound stages, an airstrip, seven ponds, a feed-and-hardware store and a petting zoo. It also boasts a treetop guest house (where he trysted with Shore) and a chapel (where Reynolds wed now-ex-wife Anderson in 1988). Reynolds still has his home, Valhalla, seven miles away.

I Want You, Babe



Take dreams of stardom, wrap them in polyester, and you’ve got the L.A. auditions for And the Beat Goes On: The Sonny and Cher Story, an ABC-TV movie expected to air next February. One struggling actor who tried to keep his Sonny side up was Eric Abrams, 38, who warbled a slightly off-key “And the Beat Goes On” and earned a polite thank you for his trouble. “Hollywood is a hard road, and you’ve got to take it with a grain of salt,” he said. Wendy Moore, 28 and a personal assistant to Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley, tried the same salty road and came away confident that she had nailed her rendition of Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time.” “Some of the other girls look like Cher,” she boasted from beneath her freshly dyed black hair, “but they don’t have the body.” Producer Larry Thompson vowed to scour the nation (auditions were also taking place in Chicago and New York City) and said superstars need not apply: “If you cast a celebrity or a star to play a role, sometimes it’s difficult for the audience to get past the star celebrity to get to the characters they’re portraying.” On the other hand, that means Thompson has to do a lot of weeding in search of the perfect flower-power couple. “When I say no to somebody,” he says, “it breaks my heart.”

SUMMER READING

Who: Actor Stanley Tucci



What: The Last Station by Jay Parini



Where: “I was reading it on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard. But that’s all over now. I’m back to work.”



Why: “It’s a great book about the last days of Leo Tolstoy. It was really good—a serious, beautiful book.”