Gwyneth Paltrow: Something to Crow About

Gwyneth Paltrow | Steve Buscemi | Dudley Moore

Gwyneth Paltrow: Something to Crow About

An Academy Award isn't enough for Gwyneth Paltrow. Now she's after a Grammy.

On Saturday night — from about 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. — Paltrow sang backup for Sheryl Crow during an impromptu gig at New York's hot new music club, The Cutting Room.

Crow, who's in town to start making a new record, invited Paltrow to sing with her after the two reportedly met at a political event last summer. Paltrow had a semi-hit record last fall with Huey Lewis, covering Smokey Robinson's "Cruisin'" for the movie Duets, and has sung every year at the Blue Light Theatre's annual fundraiser, so her appearance made sense.

Joining Crow for a duet on "Sweet Home Alabama" and some other songs was her beau, Kid Rock, who made the scene wearing an Easter Bunny outfit.

"Sheryl knew he was coming, but the outfit was a surprise," her manager Pam Wertheimer told me.

Crow performed a number of her hits and a lot of cover songs for an audience that included Paltrow's parents: producer Bruce Paltrow and mom/actress Blythe Danner (who joined the proceedings once her Broadway show Follies was done for the night).

Also in attendance: comedian Chris Rock (no relation to Kid), plus tennis great John McEnroe, and actor Kyle MacLachlan. Kyle was there as a friend of his Sex and the City co-star Chris Noth, who's a partner in The Cutting Room.

"It was just a night for kicking back and doing a show," Wertheimer told me. "Just let's go and play a gig."

Crow — whose biggest hit was "All I Wanna Do (Is Have Some Fun)" — indeed had such a good time that she told friends she plans to go back next month and do it again.

Fargo Star Not in the Woodchipper

Steve Buscemi's most famous for playing one of the murderers in the Coen Brothers' Fargo. As most everyone in the western world knows, he winds up with one socked foot poking out of a woodchipper at the film's conclusion.

Luckily, that was not his fate on Friday night in North Carolina. He and actor/friend Vince Vaughn — who'd just finished shooting Domestic Disturbance with John Travolta — wound up in a barroom brawl that sounds a little more brutal than what the indie star is used to here in Tribeca's more refined watering holes. He was reportedly stabbed three times.

"He's okay, he's back in Brooklyn," Steve's brother Michael told me yesterday. "He got stabbed in the forehead, I think, and in the cheek. But the media made it sound worse than it was." Both Buscemis just wrapped small parts in Alexandre Rockwell's new feature 13 Moons out in California.

Buscemi, ironically, directs an upcoming episode of The Sopranos, in which violence is only part of a fictitious world.

Dudley Moore: Don't Send Money

Is it possible? A charity that doesn't need money or want press. That's what a representative for the group toasting Dudley Moore last night told me.

Moore, of course, was being feted because of his illness — PSP or Progressive Supranuclear Palsy. A rep from Music for All Seasons told me: "We don't want press. We don't necessarily need money from the public. There are other ways of getting it."

I say — wonderful! A charity that doesn't need our help must be in very good shape. However, a rep for PSP down in Baltimore, told me later: "What? Of course we need money." So we won't write them so fast.

Moore's former film co-stars Mary Tyler Moore (who co-starred with him in the dreadful Six Weeks), plus Chevy Chase, Bo Derek, and others were being counted on for their participation. No mention of Susan Anton or Liza Minnelli.

Strangely, Moore's affliction could soon raise a good tabloid headline — "The Curse of Arthur." That movie's very gifted writer/director Steve Gordon died of heart failure at age 42 one year after the movie came out, in 1982. John Gielgud, the famed actor, is of course also dead now. Both Moore and Minnelli have been constantly afflicted by scandal and illness since the movie's release. And Christopher Cross, who sang the theme song, has pretty much vanished from the music scene.