People

By Belinda Luscombe

Take That, Sigmund Freud

You can't put a price on good therapy. Unless it's TV therapy. Then it costs $1.6 million for half an hour. According to Variety, that's how much KELSEY GRAMMER will make for each episode of the 2002 and 2003 seasons of Frasier--a total of $75 million for two years' work, the most anybody has ever made for a TV acting gig. (Jerry Seinfeld made more, but he was a producer of his show too.) Grammer's people would not comment on the story, noting that the actor doesn't like his salary made public. While $75 million seems like a lot of money, it's worth bearing in mind that Grammer has had to act like a stuck-up, self-absorbed snob for almost two decades (counting his years on Cheers) to earn it. Moreover, it's only 10 times as much as he got when Frasier started in 1993. Most important, it means that after only 12 episodes, he will have made enough money to pay back every American who went to see Down Periscope.

THAT'S SIGNING, NOT SINGING

One of the more unexplored agonies of celebrity life is the sheer repetitiveness of it all. Eric Clapton has to keep playing Layla; Julia Roberts has to keep smiling. And author DAVID SEDARIS has to keep singing the Oscar Mayer wiener song in the voice of Billie Holiday. (He did it on air once and has never lived it down.) So when Sedaris, the only person to rise to prominence by recounting on the radio his experiences as an elf at Macy's, took to the road to promote his fifth book, Me Talk Pretty One Day, he started charging. That is, he puts out a tip jar at his book signings. "I started saying, 'I'll sing it for $20.' And the next night, I upped to $50," he says. Oddly, people ponied up. So he began to widen his alternative-revenue stream. "If someone comes up with a cell phone and says, 'Talk to my mother,' that's $10. It's $5 for signing human flesh or any book I didn't write." He does pretty well; in 10 days he accrued $1,000. Please, nobody tell Gore Vidal.

BASIC INSTINCT, THE SEQUEL: BEHIND THE SCENES WITH STUNTMAN PHIL

SHARON STONE is not all that annoyed at the jokes about KOMO, the Komodo dragon that attacked her husband's foot June 9 during a trip to the Los Angeles Zoo (a visit she'd arranged with the help of her nanny's husband, a lion tamer). But she is a bit miffed that the zoo underestimated the lizard, and that it later made hay of her husband PHIL BRONSTEIN's misfortune. She aired her complaints in a postmortem on the incident with TIME's Jess Cagle. "The zookeeper said, 'Would you like to go in the cage? It's very mild mannered. Kids pet him,'" Stone says. "So Phil gets in the cage, and I took a picture. The zookeeper said, 'Come around so she can get a better picture,' and as he started to move, this thing just lunged at him." After a horrified moment of silence, everyone heard a crunching sound. Bronstein, showing fortitude not seen since St. George, pinned the dragon with the heel of his half-eaten foot so the beast couldn't throw him to the ground and polish him off. "I think he has an unbelievable calm under pressure," says Stone proudly. "And I'm sure this is something he learned during his years in the war zone. You don't become a Pulitzer finalist twice because you're running around being freaked out, you know? He yelled, then he reached down and opened the jaws off his foot." But the dragon apparently hadn't had his phil of Bronstein, and as the plucky editor tried to exit via the feeding door, the dragon lunged at him again, clawing his back and thighs, as about 10 children and four adults watched from outside the cage. Stone used Bronstein's sock as a tourniquet and tried to call for help. She called her sister, a former nurse, who told Stone to get to a hospital and to see an infectious-disease specialist.

But sometimes even a star has trouble getting what she wants. First, says Stone, the zoo sent its own medics; then a fire engine arrived, and then paramedics wanted to take them to a hospital that had no trauma ward. When the apologetic--and panicky--director of the zoo, Manuel Mollinedo, arrived at the hospital, Stone says she told him, "Look, this is all we want from you: we don't want you to do any sensationalized press, and we want you to move the animal into quarantine. "So the first thing the zoo did was a fund raiser with the dragon on display, and they made jokes. What's shocking to me is that they're continuing these visits with animals that are known to be carnivorous."

The zoo has canceled behind-the-scenes visits to the Reptile House and issued a statement saying it "showed poor judgment" in the incident. Bronstein is on the mend. The dragon has not yet hired representation.