People and Events

Feminist attorney Gloria Allred said there were five naked men in the shower at the Friars Club of Beverly Hills when she marched into the health facilities on Monday, as threatened.

According to club official William Sarnoff, there were only three men in the place and only one of them was undressed because he hadn’t heard about it.

So much for not reading the club bulletin.

Allred said she announced that she was going into the shower area and that only one of the men failed to put a towel around his waist. “He had his back to me,” she recalled.

It’s hard to say who presented the more startling sight. Allred showed up in a red, white and blue 1890s bathing costume, complete with parasol. She said she visited the steam room, sauna and whirlpool as well as the exercise room. The men were “very cordial,” she said.

Allred became a member of the previously all-man club a year ago. She and four other women won the right to use the health facilities (with prior notice) in last week’s settlement of an anti-discrimination action they filed with state Board of Equalization.

“Hopefully, she won’t use it too much,” Sarnoff said. “She wanted to make her point and she did.”

Allred said, however, “I’ll be back soon. I think they have now seen it doesn’t lead to the decline anf fall of western civilization to have a woman in the sauna.”

Allred probably was ready for a steam. She had spent part of the morning persuading the county Commission for Women to vote unanimously to ask the Board of Supervisors to ban stripteases in county offices during working hours.

Thousands of country music fans had to wait a couple of hours without explanation at the Country Fest ’88 in Irwindale, where Rosanne Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis were scheduled to close out the two-day bash Sunday afternoon.

Cash never showed. The word backstage was that she is pregnant and had fallen ill. But no one told the increasingly impatient fans.

It was the non-appearance of another kind of cash that bothered Perkins and Lewis.

They finally took the stage for abbreviated sets--but only after satisfaction of their complaints over being paid by check rather than cashiers’ checks or real money as, they said, their contracts provided.

The show went on when the sponsoring radio station promised to make good if the promoter’s checks bounced.

The big HOLLYWOOD sign was draped in a 449-foot-long red, white and blue seat belt Monday to launch Buckle Up, America! Week.

A few celebrities, such as Michele Lee of “Knot’s Landing,” chairwoman of the Committee for Safety Belt Awareness, were on hand for the click and to talk about the need to buckle up in automobiles.

But the vinyl “seat belt,” some jaundiced-eyed observers were rude enough to note, did not really look capable of keeping the sign from going through the windshield.

Parrot thieves appear to be on the prowl.

Jill Lauren Newman says someone broke into her Van Nuys home on April 29, making off with a VCR, a stereo set and some jewelry--as well as her 4-year-old yellow-naped Amazon parrot, Billy.

“I’ve had him since he was a baby with no feathers,” said Newman, who is a bird trainer by profession. “He thinks I’m his mommy.” She said Billy sings such songs as “Old McDonald Had a Farm,” “Happy Birthday to You,” “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” and something called “I Wish They Could All Be California Birds.”

The distressed Newman is offering a $500 reward.

In the meantime, Lew C. Daniels has turned his search to the harbor area of Los Angeles, where the cops have just found the van that disappeared April 7 from his Fontana home--along with his electronic gear and his double-yellow-headed Amazon parrot, Herman.

Herman, who is 15 years old, may not possess Billy’s song repertoire, but he says “Hello, Herman!” and trills “Lolita” ad nauseam.

“There was a heck of a bond between us,” said Daniels, 53. Since his divorce, he added, Herman has become a real pal. “The Amazon parrot has a tendency to bond with just one person at a time. I’ve had him for 10 years.”

As for anybody else who comes around, Daniels cautioned, “A couple of people went in for stitches. He has a powerful beak.”