People in the News for January 26, 1998

Monday, Jan. 26, 1998 | 9:16 a.m.

It must be a simultaneously frightening and strangely validating moment for any celebrity or Scott Baio when rumors of one's death sweep through America's newsrooms and not-too-choosy-about-facts websites. First, the shock: Wait a minute, the star exclaims, I'm not dead! After confirming that with his agent, elation undoubtedly sets in: Somebody in America's newsrooms and not-too-choosy-about-facts websites must care! On the day Chris Farley died, rumors of Baio's demise swept a few newsrooms and Internet sites, upsetting his family. "My parents called me, crying," he recalls. "They heard it from my brother, who heard it on the radio. And they're crying and I'm thinking, 'Someone died in my family!' Little did I know it was me." Except that, happily, it wasn't! "After a while I started answering my phone, 'I'm not dead.' " Oh yeah? Prove it! "There's no body," he says.

Carpe diem, hot babes!

Is there any higher tribute a son can pay his father than comparing him to a freakish Dennis Franz TV character? David Milch, co-creator of "NYPD Blue," says he modeled Det. Andy Sipowicz partly on his father -- an erratic surgeon -- and partly on himself, an erratic TV writer. Father and son were both haunted by personal demons: drug addiction, alcoholism, psychological "nonsense": "There were periods when I would write the same 12 pages, word for word, every morning for more than a year," he says. Well, that certainly qualifies you to work here at People in the News -- as long you're not dead and wouldn't wear a bikini in a Mel Gibson movie. We have our standards, after all.

Compiled by Scott Dickensheets