Anxiety rules Alaska, but sex sells: With tourist business slipping after Exxon`s oily catastrophe, Alaskan merchants are calling upon Marilyn Monroe for help. But something is missing from photos of the legendary sex queen, which is their way of making a mountain out of a mole: ”Unless you look long and hard, you probably won`t notice her beauty mark is missing,” observe advertisements in a $4 million campaign paid by Exxon. ”Without it, the picture may have changed, but her beauty hasn`t.” It`s a slick idea, of course, to distract tourists from 730 miles of oily shoreline.
PONS: THEY`LL EAT CROW Undeterred but stung by ridicule, chemists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann skipped the Cold Fusion Phenomena conference at Santa Fe`s Los Alamos National Laboratory and a confab in Utah over a $5 million
appropriation for more research at the University of Utah. ”They feel their time is more valuably spent in the lab getting some of the details people have criticized them for not having,” said James Brophy, university research VP. Cold fusion is far from dead, however. Despite largely negative papers presented at the conference, scientists at Texas A&M University and in Sweden now offer qualified support. ”The results indicate fusion reactions can occur at low temperatures in the electrode material palladium,” said scientists at Sweden`s Manne Siegbahn Institute for Physics. Pons, meanwhile, predicts,
”People are going to have to eat a lot of crow, I`d say.”
VALIUM AND HANK JR. The results pose more questions, but Hank Williams Jr. indeed may have been slipped a mickey prior to his May 6 concert in Baton Rouge. Blood and urine tests taken four days later reveal traces of Valium, ”which Mr. Williams stated he did not take or possess,” said a report by private investigator Bruce Childers, who was hired by the singer after he stumbled offstage, failing to finish a single song. Despite Williams` onetime drug troubles, the report adds, his ”explanation may not seem believable to some; however, in this case, there is evidence that lends support to his explanation.”
JAMES BROWN`S WIFE GUILTY First it was James Brown, again. Now it`s his wife, also again. Adrienne Brown, 39, pleaded guilty in Augusta, Ga., to PCP possession. A week ago, her license was yanked for drunk driving. Meanwhile, her imprisoned ”godfather of soul” spouse, whose trouble over weapons and drug abuse put him behind bars, is 6 months into 6 years in South Carolina.
RADNER`S LAST INTERVIEW A last touch of love: In her final interview before dying of cancer, Gilda Radner praised husband Gene Wilder for caring about ”who I am, rather than if I have hair.” Interviewed March 31, the longtime star of television comedy told Glamour magazine that he ”always treated me normally. . . . I don`t think I could have stood it if anybody had treated me as fragile or as though I had a limited time on earth.” In fact, as Radner polished the final chapters of her upcoming book (titled, ”It`s Always Something”), she told him: ”After I finish this, every woman in the world will be after you. The trouble is, they`re all gonna have some major illness.” Radner died Saturday of ovarian cancer.