I haven't been so stunned since the O. J. Simpson acquittal, in 1995. I couldn't believe my eyes or ears as I sat in front of the television set and heard the verdict being read in the Michael Jackson child-abuse trial. Acquittal on all 10 counts! Were those jurors simply bedazzled by his fame? That seems to be the way things go in celebrity trials these days, whether it's murder, rape, or child abuse. The force of celebrity in our culture is positively overwhelming.

Come September, barring last-minute postponements, which frequently occur in courts of law, the murder trial of Phil Spector, the rock 'n' roll genius who created what came to be known as the wall-of-sound recording technique, is scheduled to begin in Los Angeles, and I plan on being there to cover it. Spector is charged with the murder of 40-year-old Lana Clarkson, who is often described as a B-movie actress working temporarily as a hostess in the members-only V.I.P. room of the House of Blues, a popular nightspot on the Sunset Strip frequented by big shots in the movie and music businesses. On the night of February 2, 2003, Spector, who had reportedly been drinking heavily—three or four daiquiris and two navy grogs, which contain three shots of different kinds of rum, before he even arrived at the House of Blues—picked up Clarkson at the end of her shift, at two A.M., and took her in a chauffeur-driven black Mercedes to his mock castle in Alhambra, where she died two hours later of "a single gunshot wound to the mouth which severed her spinal cord and incapacitated her immediately," according to the police report. Spector is contending that Clarkson killed herself, which seems unlikely, since he was heard at the time to say, "I didn't mean to shoot her. It was an accident." The murder weapon, a .38-caliber Colt Cobra revolver, was found lying on the floor beneath Clarkson's left leg. Dressed in a black slip, stockings, and shoes, she was slumped in a chair in a rear hallway, with her purse hanging from her right shoulder. There was an empty tequila bottle in the living room. Again according to the police report, Spector's DNA was found on one of Clarkson's breasts.

I had a brief acquaintance with Spector in 1995, when I was covering the O. J. Simpson murder trial, with which he was absolutely obsessed. We had met earlier, in New York at a party that Ahmet Ertegun, the head of Atlantic Records, and his wife, Mica, gave for Spector at Mortimer's restaurant. Spector delighted the high-class group the Erteguns had assembled in his honor with his talent and charm. Although he has since claimed to Ertegun that he doesn't remember me, I had dinner with him at least twice to talk about O. J. Simpson. I even went to a recording session with him. He was wildly unpredictable, utterly fascinating, and rather scary. He always carried a gun. I never saw him pull it on anyone, but he was well known for having done so on many occasions—once on John Lennon— when things didn't go his way.

In a severe blow to Spector's defense, a Los Angeles judge has ruled that four women who claim that Spector threatened them with guns in the past will be allowed to testify for the prosecution, in order to show a pattern of behavior. Deputy District Attorney Douglas Sortino argued that Spector used guns to intimidate women in "an ongoing course of conduct that happens again and again and again." I know one of the ladies, Dorothy Melvin, who for years was Joan Rivers's executive assistant. Their stories are chilling and startlingly similar. In each case they say he was drunk. It always took place after a date, at his residence of the moment. He could go from charming to menacing in an instant, like a crazy person. As if to give credence to that characterization, on the day the judge gave his ruling Spector appeared in court with a gigantic halo of frizzy hair, which looked like a wig to me and which made him look like an escapee from an asylum. Perhaps that will be his defense.

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Yes, I know, everyone is sick to death of talking about Tom Cruise's recent bizarre behavior, but I have to admit that I couldn't get enough of that train wreck while it was happening. I'd always thought of Tom Cruise as having that same aura of mystery about him that the great movie stars of my era—Warren Beatty, Robert Redford, Paul Newman—possessed. They understood that less was more. They made appearances when they were required to, dazzled for a bit on the public stage—with Barbara Walters, say, or Diane Sawyer, or Katie Couric, or Larry King— and then retreated back into their privacy, leaving the audience wanting more. But I was wrong about Tom Cruise. He has thrown off all sense of decorum and become more clamorous for attention than Paris Hilton in his public displays of love for Katie Holmes, a pretty starlet 16 years his junior, who opened in Batman Begins as Cruise was set to open in War of the Worlds. Surrounded by a mob of paparazzi at a premiere, they stopped and kissed and hugged and smiled and stared deeply into each other's eyes as the crowd of fans roared. I watched incredulously when Cruise was a guest on Oprah Winfrey's show, declaring his love for Holmes by jumping on furniture, waving his arms, laughing maniacally, kneeling before Oprah, and yelling, "I'm in love! I'm in love!" I felt that he was playing a part, like the one he played in Magnolia, and he was wonderful in that film, but in this case I never for a moment felt that he was real or genuinely romantic. I'm a big fan of Oprah's, and I know that she is a big fan of Cruise's, but I felt that even she was faking when she gushed and said, "Oh, man, the boy is gone," to indicate that she understood how much in love he was. To me he seemed less like a man in love than a nutcase.

Phil Spector's DNA was found on one of Lana Clarkson's breasts.

He was instant fodder for the comics. Billy Crystal declared at the Tony Awards that he was in love with Katie Holmes. When Cruise started the Romeo-in-love antics on Jay Leno's show, Leno just egged him on. At my son's birthday party recently, I sat next to a beautiful movie star who had the table practically rolling on the floor laughing at her imitation of Cruise on Oprah. Cruise did an interview with Billy Bush on Access Hollywood that played in four segments over a week. For Bush, this was a feather in his cap. For Cruise, it was a mistake. I think it's wonderful that his belief in Scientology is so strong, but I resented being preached at by him. Through Scientology, he claimed, he has helped hundreds of people get off drugs with the use of vitamins, and that is very commendable. But when he told Billy Bush that he gets calls at two o'clock in the morning from drug addicts who need his counsel, he lost me. Would the Church of Scientology really make the number of the telephone on Tom Cruise's bedside table in his gated and guarded mansion available to a street druggie with a needle in his arm? I don't think so.

I found him bitchy when he gave his opinions about Brooke Shields, with whom he once made a picture, and "bitchy" is not a good adjective for a mega-star. Shields has written movingly in Down Came the Rain about her postpartum depression, for which she was successfully treated with prescription drugs. Cruise, in a disapproving voice, said that she had sent a wrong message and that she should have used vitamins instead of drugs, adding, "Look at where her career has gone." I found that inexcusably unkind. I was glad that Brooke Shields, who is starring on the London stage in Chicago, gave it right back to him, twice. She said that he should continue to save the world from aliens, referring to his new movie, and that if he wanted to see her in Chicago the next time he was in London she'd set aside two tickets, one adult and one child, a reference to the age difference between Cruise and Holmes. Go, Brooke! About Katie's conversion to Scientology, Cruise said in Entertainment Weekly, "She digs it."

At this point in his career, Cruise could really use the sage advice of Pat Kingsley, the tough cookie who handled his public relations so marvelously for years. He fired her a year ago and replaced her with his sister, Lee Anne DeVette, a fellow Scientologist, who said she thought her brother was wonderful on Oprah.

On June 16, Tom proposed to Katie atop the Eiffel Tower, in Paris. He gave her a huge diamond ring and announced at a press conference, "Today is a magnificent day for me. I'm engaged to a magnificent woman." It all seemed too contrived. If this couple ever breaks up, as so many couples in Hollywood seem fated to do, all this gooey, over-the-top coverage will come back to haunt Cruise.

It astonishes me that Paramount and DreamWorks, or the great Steven Spielberg, the studios and director behind the $130 million movie War of the Worlds, couldn't convince their star of how unfavorably he was coming off with the public. Apparently unstoppable, the actor went on the Today show on June 24 and gave an interview to Matt Lauer that ended up in headlines and on newscasts for days to follow. Sounding as if he were full of Scientology vitamins, Cruise got right back on Brooke Shields's case, saying that she had been wrong to cure her postpartum depression with prescribed medication. "She doesn't understand the history of psychiatry. She doesn't understand, in the same way that you don't understand it, Matt," he said. Now, what in the hell does Tom Cruise know about postpartum depression that allows him to speak so definitively on the subject? His children are adopted. And he wouldn't stop there. He lectured Lauer on the evils of psychiatry and called him "glib." Talking about drugs for depression and attention-deficit disorder, he scolded Lauer by saying, "You don't even know what Ritalin is ... You should be a little bit more responsible in knowing what it is, because you communicate to people." He insisted that there was no such thing as chemical imbalance. Once he had crossed the line into this unpleasant zone, he seemed unable to speak calmly or moderately. He was suddenly a very angry zealot, experiencing meltdown before an audience of millions.

If Steven Spielberg, the beloved sage of Hollywood, hadn't directed War of the Worlds, I wouldn't bother to rush to see it. Cruise's former wife the great star Nicole Kidman, who is the mother of their two children, has remained elegantly silent during what must be a very distressing period for her.

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A number of our movie stars are appearing odd these days. Maybe "thuggy" is a better word than "odd." Christian Slater, while starring on Broadway with Jessica Lange in The Glass Menagerie, was recently arrested, handcuffed, and perp-walked in front of the cameras on his way to jail, where he was charged with a misdemeanor for allegedly groping a woman's posterior in public. This wasn't his first run-in with the law involving women. Then there's Russell Crowe, a regular on the bad-boy list, who went way too far this time. In 2001, Crowe starred in A Beautiful Mind, a fine film that won Academy Awards for best picture, best director, and best supporting actress. Crowe, however, without whose extraordinary performance the movie wouldn't have been so special, was not chosen in the best-actor category by the Academy. He sat there that night with egg and disappointment on his face. I can't speak for why others didn't vote for him, but I didn't give him my vote because he had roughed up a British television producer at the BAFTA Awards, in London, for going to a commercial while Crowe was reciting a poem he had written that was going on too long. Stars who have reached the point where they make $20 or $25 million for a picture should have learned along the way that thuggery doesn't go over big with the public. Now Crowe is out in a new film, Cinderella Man, made by the same producer, Brian Grazer, and the same director, Ron Howard, who won Academy Awards for A Beautiful Mind. It's a terrific film, and it should have opened big, but it didn't. It opened in fourth place. I don't know if there was a connection, but at four A.M. in the Mercer hotel, in New York, several days before the film opened, Crowe, who was unable to place a call to his wife in Australia, threw a telephone at an employee, "hitting him in the face and causing a laceration and substantial pain," according to the complaint. Crowe was arrested, handcuffed, perp-walked before the cameras, and arraigned on charges of second-degree assault and criminal possession of a weapon—the telephone. In the tradition established by Hugh Grant, after he was busted with a hooker in his car on Sunset Boulevard, Crowe made a guest appearance the next night on the David Letterman show, to express his contrition. The assault charge is punishable by four years in prison. Crowe's next hearing in court is set for September 14.

I found Tom Cruise bitchy—not a good adjective for a mega-star.

I attended the country wedding of my boss, Graydon Carter, the editor in chief of Vanity Fair, who married a lovely English lady named Anna Scott in a very pretty ceremony. A lot of the Hollywood guests stayed for the weekend at the Mayflower Inn, in Washington, Connecticut, where I also stayed. It was like boarding school. At breakfast, you knew everyone in the dining room. The service was at twilight in an old, white clapboard church with a steeple. Cars were parked in a meadow a short distance away, and guests walked up a country lane to enter the church, with all the ladies in summer evening dresses. Carolina Herrera, who was among the guests, designed the bride's beautiful dress. In the church I sat next to David Geffen, the Hollywood mogul, whom I knew way before he was rich and renowned. I rarely see him these days. We watched the guests enter the church. "There's Anna Wintour." "There's Bob De Niro." I asked Geffen about his great friend Sue Mengers, the famous retired agent who lives a reclusive life and has become a sort of cult figure among the new Hollywood cognoscenti.

"Are you staying at the Mayflower Inn?," I asked.

"No. I'm staying at the von Dillers," he replied.

Mengers affectionately refers to Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg as the von Dillers. The next day the von Dillers gave a lunch for the out-of-town guests at Diane's beautiful house, Cloudwalk. Unfortunately, I was stricken with a bad case of the flu and had to race back home and go to bed for the better part of the week.

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I live on a cove off the Connecticut River in a tiny little town, which I fictitiously call Prud'homme when it comes up in my novels. I like the town and the people. I like my house, and I have opened it for the garden-club tour. I speak when local groups request me to, and I give my old movies to the library. When I was asked to pose for a 2006 calendar, along with 11 other men from the town, I promptly accepted. I hoped to be October, which is my birth month. They said they wanted me to pose leaning against my green convertible Jaguar in front of my house, and I said fine. An assemblyman later called me to set up a date for the shoot. At the end of the conversation, he said, "Of course, you'll be carrying one of your books to cover your private parts." "What?," I screamed. "Didn't anyone tell you everyone is posing naked?" he asked. No, no one had told me. I remembered that in England a few years ago a group of ladies of a certain age had posed nude for a calendar. It became such a success that they made a movie about it, called Calendar Girls, starring Helen Mirren. "No way!," I said, "and, no, don't come over to talk about it. No amount of persuasion is going to change my mind." My inflexibility had nothing to do with morality. It had to do with pure embarrassment. I've always felt I was shortchanged in the departments of height and physique, and excessive age has done nothing to improve those factors. As a matter of fact, I'm an inch shorter than I used to be, according to an annual checkup at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. Nevertheless, I'll certainly buy the calendar at the country store when it comes out.