



The hooker under Lenny Kravitz's bed

A tale from beneath the mattress; Andreessen's dogs' wonder diet; the struggles of Ivanka Trump. Plus: Platform shoes kill!

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By Amy Reiter Sept. 20, 1999 | Lenny Kravitz would like to dedicate this next song to the 13-year-old hooker he kept under his bed when he was 16. Fer real. On an upcoming episode of VH1's "Storytellers" series, the retro rocker admits that his song "My Precious Love" was inspired by a working girl he met when he was "doing some really crazy stuff" as a teenager. Kravitz says he "instantly felt some sort of bond" with the young lady, whom he met at a nightclub. "But it wasn't like an 'I want to be with you' bond; it was a 'you're my little sister' bond." After finding out that she had "an occupation on the street," he says, he decided to keep her, er ... wanted to help her. So he stole her away "while the person who was, shall we say, controlling her at the time was gone, getting something to eat." Kravitz took his new friend home and introduced her to his pet dust bunnies. "She lived for a month under my bed without my parents knowing," he says. His mother, Roxie Roker, who played Helen Willis on "The Jeffersons," was none too pleased upon discovering a real live girl amid the forgotten marbles and loose change under her son's bed, but ultimately helped him help the girl get her life moving "in the right direction." Well, we're movin' on up ... - - - - - - - - - - - - Lifting a leg to the old employer "I use them as Frisbees with my bulldogs. They love to chase them across the yard and try to eat them." -- Netscape founder and erstwhile America Online tech bigwig Marc Andreessen on the many uses of AOL promo disks. - - - - - - - - - - - - Papa's made o' green; Mama's oh so mean Ivanka Trump's money woes? Sounds like an oxymoron to me, but according to the 17-year-old modeling progeny of Donald and Ivana, things aren't as cushy in her world as you might think.



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"I'm working now," she told the London Telegraph last week. "I make money because I have to pay for everything apart from my [Choate] school fees. My mother even makes me pay my own telephone bill."

Ivanka says that while her father "would spoil us rotten" if left to his own devices, her mother "is pretty strict. She's the one who always draws that line. You know she came from a Communistic [sic] background and, although she didn't grow up poor, she understands the value of money." And the suit-wearing trees it grows on ...

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Juicy bits

Tennis stars Steffi Graf and Andre Agassi were spotted in close proximity from coast to coast last week. Holding hands at a New York restaurant one minute and kissing in a Beverly Hills store the next. But has Steffi stopped to think of the effect her increasingly public fling with Brooke Shields' ex is having on her own recently rejected beau of seven years, race car driver Michael Bartels? "Michael and Steffi had so many plans," Bartels' pops, Willi, recently sniffed. "Now all my boy has left is the Alsatian dog Steffi gave him."

People don't kill people; platform shoes kill people. So proclaimeth the British Standards Institution after the recent death of a Japanese nursery school teacher, Misayo Shimizu, was blamed on her 5-inch-high cork-heeled sandals. BSI director of standards David Lazenby -- the Dr. Koop of the slip-on set -- has vowed to take action against this "epidemic of killer shoes," which he says is responsible for more than 200,000 injuries in the U.K. alone, and "to discuss the development of shoe safety guidelines." Are you listening, Baby Spice?

A vast West Wing conspiracy? Richard Bey says it's all President Clinton's fault that his syndicated TV talk show got yanked off the air back in 1996, after an episode featuring Monica precursor Gennifer Flowers and American Spectator editor in chief R. Emmett Tyrrell. Bey recently told the New York Post that, even though his show had high ratings and he himself had a brand-new contract, "the day after [the Flowers episode] airs, I'm called into the office and told that we're going out of production." Still, Bey admits, he has "no proof of anything. There's no smoking gun here." But if there were, I'd advise him not to inhale.

salon.com | Sept. 20, 1999



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About the writer

Amy Reiter is a staff writer for Salon People. For more columns by Amy Reiter, visit her column archive. Sound off

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