People in the News for June 17, 1997

Tuesday, June 17, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.

Pop culture in the '90s is like a bad-karma ATM machine: Insert your troubled childhood, fleeting notoriety or public humiliation and out come heaps of cash. Tell-all book deals! Talk-show appearance fees! Sole rights to the fact-based movie of the week! The latest withdrawal is by Kelly Flinn, the adultery-committing female pilot recently ousted from the Air Farce and onto the covers of Time and Newsweek. Coming this fall: "Proud to Be," her book on the, er, affair. After running the gauntlet of media notoriety, after suffering public scrutiny of her sexual and moral behavior, after being being written about by George Will, it's perhaps understandable that Flinn wishes to put the whole tawdry business behind her by writing a detailed book about it. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. "This is a very American story and one that no one else can tell," says her publisher, Random House. "It's the story of the American dream realized -- and then gone awry," a story for women who "understand getting mixed up with the wrong guy." So, presumably, the American dream involves going awry with the wrong guy, or something, and it's a very American story because women in other cultures don't get mixed up with ... oh, nevermind. We'll wait for the movie of the week.

Briefly

You sing, you die

We were hoping that if we did an item on Sinead O'Connor, it would be something special. But this is awful: The odd Irish chanteuse has canceled a concert in Jerusalem -- intended to promote the city as a peaceful home for Israelis and Palestinians -- because of death threats. An Israeli extremist is claiming credit for forcing O'Connor to back down, although he denies actually threatening to kill her. While perhaps not as terrifying as Frank Sinatra's vow to "kick her ass" after her infamous pope-photo episode, the threats were enough for Sinead. "I cannot put in danger the lives of my two children, my musicians and my technicians," she says. At a time when extremists in the region already practice literary criticism by death threat, this is, sadly, a very Middle Eastern story.

Compiled by Scott Dickensheets