To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > People March 8, 2000 URL: http://www.salon.com/people/col/reit/2000/03/08/npwed Egg on his chest? Online columnist death match! Walls and Drudge duke it out on Page Six; a post-apocalyptic Doors musical? Time to set the stage on fire. Plus: The Muppets return! - - - - - - - - - - - - By Amy Reiter I knew the brawl between online gossipists Jeannette Walls and Matt Drudge would get ugly, but who could have predicted allegations of a smeared egg sex fetish? Certainly not me. The bickering began when Walls printed the well-circulated rumor that Drudge is gay in her new book, "Dish." The scuffle escalated when Drudge accused Walls of a pattern of inaccuracy; and finally took a turn for the preposterous late last week. "My father once warned me against getting into fights with nuts," Walls wrote in her MSNBC column last Friday. "'Passers-by won't know which of you is the crazy person,' he said." Her dad makes a very good point. But nevertheless, Walls couldn't resist taking a swipe or two at Drudge. (Remember when he posted those fake stories about Sidney Blumenthal's wife-beating and Bill Clinton's love child? Well, thanks to Walls, now you do.) "Hello, I'm sorry," Walls tells me. "I'm a bit of a junkyard dog. Don't pick a fight with me, please." What's more, Walls says she finds it "hypocritical that a man who has become a spokesman of the far right has led a lifestyle at odds with the ultra-conservative values he supposedly embraces." And she finds it "ironic that a man whose entire career has been based on revealing the sexual behavior of others has a sexual history of his own that he now seems at pains to hide." And what pains! After Washington landscaper David Cohen confirmed to Daily News columnist George Rush that he did, in fact, date Drudge, as Walls had reported, and after Walls hinted that she had refrained from printing even more "lurid allegations" about him in her book, Drudge seemed to get a little panicky. After a mutual friend of both gossipists tipped off Drudge as to just what these "lurid allegations" were -- a nasty case of pubic lice, a penchant for fully clothed sex in the shower and a bizarre egg fetish -- he began to spread them himself. "MSNBC reporter Jeannette Walls is telling associates that she has obtained information linking Matt Drudge with a sexual preference for eggs," Drudge wrote on Friday in a column that has since vanished from his site, along with his link to standing Walls column ("Oh, that hurt," she scoffs). "He likes to have sex with eggs. He likes them smeared all over naked male bodies." Drudge even went so far as to print Walls' home phone number, work number and e-mail address on his site and to ask readers to share their own "Drudge sex stories." (All false, he says: "How can I be [gay] when I am dating a woman with boobs and rollers?" To which Walls counters: "Hello, 'boobs and rollers'? You just proved your heterosexuality beyond doubt. I'm sold.") But, although Walls says she was "absolutely inundated with phone calls and e-mail ... some from people wishing me a slow painful death," Drudge's distraction tactic may ultimately have backfired. "I know sometimes the best defense is a good offense," she tells me, "but you gotta be careful you're not hitting yourself in the face." Walls stands behind the allegations, which she thinks never would have made it out if Drudge hadn't aired them. "It's all very well sourced," she told the New York Post's Page Six. "If he offers you a bite of his omelet, take a pass." Splat! So what now? Walls says she's ready to back off. "I pride myself as being someone who won't walk away from a fight," she tells me. "But this looks a little bit more like a temper tantrum." Then again, she says, "I am a scrapper. If he wants to pick another fight, honey, I'm up to it." And Drudge? He's playing it a little closer to the vest. Asked to comment on the recent Page Six item detailing the scuffle, he responds: "Page Six rocks! So do you ..." Well, I certainly wouldn't mind if that was the last word on the matter. - - - - - - - - - - - - A real father-daughter bond "We're always comparing perfumes. And because we wear the same size, we also try on clothes together." -- Liv Tyler on her dad, Aerosmith's Steve Tyler, in Australia's New Weekly magazine. - - - - - - - - - - - - Light my fire I guess it really is time to wallow in the mire. In May, a San Diego group will mount a stage musical based on the writings of Jim Morrison. The musical, "Celebration of the Lizard," takes place after the apocalypse, when good and evil battle for domination in the California desert, and includes 40 Doors tunes. People are strange. But people who mount musicals like this are stranger ... - - - - - - - - - - - - Now is the time in Nothing Personal when we dance for joy "Sprockets," the movie, is a go! According to the Hollywood Reporter, Mike Myers has scored a $20 million paycheck to bring his irrepressibly avant-garde "Saturday Night Live" character Dieter to the big screen. (The bad news is that this puts on hold Myers' flirtation with appearing in "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind," Charlie Kaufman's take on the adventures of "Gong Show" host Chuck Barris as a CIA hitman.) The "Sprockets" plot is rumored to focus on Dieter's journey to America to search for his monkey. You know you want to touch it. - - - - - - - - - - - - The truth comes out "Everyone I've seen on TV said he was a hell of a good listener, which he probably was. I think he was a good listener because he didn't seem to have much to say for himself." -- Bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones on the late Dodi Al Fayed, for whom he worked for years, in his forthcoming book "The Bodyguard's Story: Diana, the Crash and the Sole Survivor." - - - - - - - - - - - - Juicy bits And the winner is ... uh ... not the U.S. Postal Service. According to the BBC, the Academy Awards overseers believe that almost four-fifths of the Oscar ballots sent out last Wednesday may be lost in the mail. An Academy spokesman says if the 4,000 missing ballots don't show up soon, they'll have to mail out another massive batch. Hello, FedEx? How do you say "Neverland" in Polish? You may soon find out. Reuters reports that Michael Jackson is jetting off to Warsaw next week to lay the groundwork for building a theme park there. Talk about a tasteless Polish joke ... The lawyers at the National Enquirer sure must be busy these days. Bill Cosby is threatening to sue the tabloid for $250 million unless it retracts its report that actress Lachele Covington accused him of fondling her breast and exposing himself to her. "The story is not true," Cosby spokesman David Brokaw said Monday. "Nothing happened. The authorities never contacted Mr. Cosby, and the first he learned of it was from the National Enquirer." The Enquirer says it stands by the accuracy of the story, which included Cosby's denial. It's time to play the music. It's time to light the lights. EM.TV, the German company that recently bought the Jim Henson company, has announced plans to bring "The Muppet Show" back to the tube. The 26 new episodes in development will mirror the shows from the '70s and '80s, mixing celebrity guest stars with Muppets like Kermit, Fozzie and those crotchety old hecklers. Ich bin Miss Piggy? salon.com | March 8, 2000   - - - - - - - - - - - - About the writer Amy Reiter is a staff writer for Salon People. For more columns by Amy Reiter, visit her column archive.