They’re Rich and TOO Famous

So you thought you had tax worries. Consider now the plight of some celebrities who recently discovered they owe anywhere from $5,000 to more than $200,000 to the state of New York. Singer Deborah Harry, for example, owes $241,354 from royalties on her recordings, the New York Post reported, and transsexual tennis player Renee Richards owes nearly $33,000. The Post said that most of the assessments came from the New York state tax department’s Los Angeles bureau, which examines celebrity sheets, gossip columns and booking charts to find out about the incomes of stars on the West Coast. The Post also said New York is claiming almost $289,000 from the estate of jazz great Duke Ellington and more than $91,000 from the estate of singer Brook Benton, who died Saturday. The paper said also that Irving Berlin owes $5,500, although a secretary for the songwriter denied it.

--Liberty University’s class of 1988 will be ushered out into the world with the words of Marine Lt. Col. Oliver L. North ringing in their ears. The Rev. Jerry Falwell, chancellor of the Lynchburg, Va., school, said that North will speak at commencement exercises on May 2, the day after he is to retire from the service. Liberty officials said North’s speaking engagement will be his first since the Iran-Contra scandal surfaced in November, 1986, and he was fired from the White House staff. Falwell is heading a petition drive to get President Reagan to pardon North for his involvement in the Iran-Contra affair, in which North, former National Security Adviser John M. Poindexter and two arms dealers have been indicted on conspiracy charges.

--French presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has been dogged by accusations of racism, has another critic in his ex-wife. She says he is both anti-Arab and anti-Semitic. “I have always lived in the anti-Semitism of Jean-Marie Le Pen. . . . He completely denies the existence of the (Nazi) gas chambers,” Pierrette Le Pen said in an interview in the French edition of Rolling Stone magazine. She also said her ex-husband used racial slurs in referring to Jews and quoted him as saying of Adolf Hitler: “Uncle Dolphie didn’t go far enough.” Pierrette Le Pen, who left her husband in 1984 after 25 years of marriage, said in the interviews that she is willing to divulge family secrets to get back her personal possessions, including the ashes of her mother and family photos. Le Pen, whose National Front Party has 33 deputies in the 577-seat National Assembly, is running fourth in voter opinion polls.