10 NEWS People
Marrying the ‘King of Cool’
Ali MacGraw doesn’t regret marrying the dif-
ficult Steve McQueen, says Jessamy Calkin
in The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). Fresh off her
Oscar-nominated performance in 1970’s Love
Story—one of the era’s highest-grossing movies—
MacGraw landed a role in The Getaway opposite
Steve McQueen, the “King of Cool,” thanks to
her then-husband, Robert Evans, a top exec at
Paramount Pictures. “He was so staggeringly attractive that every
woman wanted to jump into bed with him,” MacGraw says. The
two began an affair their first day on set and married in 1973.
McQueen turned out to be unfaithful, jealous, and often cruel,
and made MacGraw stop acting while also forcing her to sign a
prenuptial agreement. MacGraw says he once told her, “You’ve got
a great a--, but you better start working out now, because I don’t
want to wake up one day with a woman who’s got an a-- like a
70-year-old Japanese soldier.” She’s exercised habitually since, long
after divorcing McQueen in 1978, two years before his death from
cancer. She’s also 32 years sober after receiving treatment for alco-
hol and sex addiction. At 80, she feels much more content than the
insecure, browbeaten woman who was married to McQueen. “I felt
like the real me was standing like a ghost next to the person that
was charming and well-mannered,” she says. “I’ve done a lot of—
excuse the expression—work. But it’s paid off.”
The drug industry’s wordsmith
Naming prescription drugs isn’t a perfect science, as Stephanie
Shubat would admit, said David Lazarus in the Los Angeles Times.
Whereas brand names like Xarelto and Humira are concocted by
marketing experts, their generic counterparts—rivaroxaban and
adalimumab—seem to be conceived out of nowhere. In truth, most
of them are thought up by Shubat and her one colleague at the
Chicago-based U.S. Adopted Names Council within the American
Medical Association. Smushing unique syllables together for about
200 drug applications a year “can be a little strange,” Shubat says.
They try to keep the “stems” consistent for medications serving
similar purposes. Yet there are only so many ways to string let-
ters together, and about 11,000 generic drugs have been named.
“Sometimes I look at license plates for new prefix ideas,” Shubat
says. She has also borrowed the names of cats and dogs, and has
woken up with a new name in mind. She then has to check that
the name isn’t offensive in any language. “We had one that was
suggested by a manufacturer that used the prefix ‘privi,’ which
sounds like an outhouse,” she says. “We didn’t accept that.”
Shaman Durek is Hollywood’s “most in-demand spiritual guru,”
said Eve Barlow in The Times (U.K.). He demonstrates his tech-
nique: “I’m going to charge your energies,” he says, holding out
his hands. “Electricity! Add 70,000. Magnet! Add 70,000.” Five
minutes later...“Do you feel that?” Many do, including Gwyneth
Paltrow, who calls Durek her “soul brother.” The 44-year-old
grew up as Derek Verrett in a rich family in San Francisco, a sixth-
generation shaman with Haitian roots. Though the family urged
him not to, he began training at 12. A bisexual, he recently found
his “twin flame” in Princess Märtha Louise of Norway, the 47-year-
old daughter of King Harald V and Queen Sonja. They have a lot in
common; Louise talks of speaking with horses and angels. Critics
call him a charlatan, and Durek says racist taunting caused him
a half-dozen emotional breakdowns. “People are uncomfortable
with a white woman choosing a dark-skinned man who’s a sha-
man, who’s soul-sexual,” he says. “It stirs the pot.” He’s overcome
adversity before, however, having nearly died of renal failure at- “I went to the other side,” he says, and learned “what this is all
about. We are making it so much harder than it has to be.”
Amit^ Len
no
n/CameraPr
es
s/Red
ux,Getty
,^ NewscomShaman finds a princess
A$AP Rocky returned to the
U.S. last week, calling his past
month in Swedish custody “a
very difficult and humbling
experience.” A Swedish judge
released the rapper pending a
verdict after a three-day trial in
which Rocky said that the man
he and two bodyguards are
accused of assaulting, 19-year-
old Mustafa Jafari, had been
following and threatening him, and that he
acted in self-defense. A verdict is expected
Aug. 14, and Rocky was allowed to return to
the U.S. to await it. President Trump cheered
the rapper’s release, which came after his
administration warned that Rocky’s contin-ued incarceration would cause “negative
consequences” for U.S.-Swedish relations.
Rocky isn’t expected to return to Sweden,
whatever the verdict is.
QOne of Katy Perry’s biggest hits, “Dark
Horse,” is a rip-off, a Los Angeles jury ruled
last week. The pop star was ordered to pay
$550,000 in damages, with her collaborators
and record label responsible for another
$2.3 million. The Christian rapper Flame and
his two co-writers had accused Perry of steal-
ing the beat from their 2009 song “Joyful
Noise” for 2013’s “Dark Horse,” which spent
four weeks at No. 1. Perry, 34, testified she’d
never heard Flame’s song, and her attorney
accused the plaintiffs of “trying to own basic
building blocks of music.” Flame, meanwhile,
said “Dark Horse” was damaging because
it promoted “anti- Christian witchcraft, pagan-ism, black magic, and Illuminati imagery.”
QThe Fast and the Furious co-stars Dwayne
Johnson, Vin Diesel, and Jason Statham
may play chiseled tough guys on screen, but
they have fragile egos, The Wall Street Jour-
nal reported last week. The three macho men
are touchy about how often they are shown
getting hit in fight scenes: Statham negoti-
ated an agreement with the studio that limits
how badly he can get beat up on screen,
Diesel has his younger sister—a producer on
the blockbuster franchise—count and limit
how many punches he takes, and Johnson
has a similar arrangement with editors and
fight-scene coordinators. Diesel once pro-
posed assigning numerical values to head
butts, body slams, and roundhouse kicks to
ensure he was always depicted winning, but
the system was deemed too elaborate.