NEW YORK DIARY ORLA HEALY

Clinton declined to be shot -- with a smoking cigar

Celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz didn't pull any punches last week when she took a gaggle of reporters on a preview of her exhibit ("Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life,") which opened in Washington yesterday. Even though the walls are lined with eye-grabbing, intimate portraits of the likes of Demi Moore, Brad Pitt, QE II and Eva Longoria, the shots that earned the most discussion were Leibovitz' official White House portraits of presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush Snr.

When one reporter sniped that both photographs appeared "superficial" the 58-year-old snapper silenced the room when she dryly admitted: "Sometimes the surface is as interesting as anything else you could photograph."

In another revealing aside, Leibovitz talked about arriving in the Oval Office to shoot Bill Clinton during his first days in his new job.

"When I walked in, he was smoking a cigar and had his feet up on his desk," she said, adding that when she asked him if he'd like to have the lit cigar in the shot, he replied, "Not in your wildest dreams." Cracking how "a different kind of cigar obviously became famous later," the openly liberal Leibovitz admitted she now wistfully views the 1993 photo as "a picture of promise and a picture of regret . . . a picture of all the things that we were promised that we didn't get."

Kennedys are still making headlines

Thirteen years after her death, Jackie Kennedy continues to make headlines.

And if the reaction to reports that best-selling scribe C David Heymann (who penned the bio-turned-small screen hit A Woman Named Jackie) is planning to write a book "about the alleged clandestine love affair between late Attorney General Robert F Kennedy and the widow of his slain brother, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy," is anything to go by, stories about the former first lady still pack plenty of selling power.

Although the rumour that Jackie and Bobby were romantically involved has been floating around for years, until now nobody has declared their intent to report it out.

And as dirt-dishing types point out, Heymann has shown his determination to get to the bottom of murky Kennedy mysteries: in his last book, American Legacy: The Story of John and Caroline Kennedy, he made the unsettling claim -- reported, he wrote, from material given to him from crash site investigators -- that JFK Jr's blood alcohol level was "too elevated to fly," that deadly July 1999 night.

No reaction yet from members of RFK's family.

Jonathan's fiction follows fact

At least bestselling novelist Terry McMillan (How Stella Got Her Groove Back) is still able to fight the person who has written about an ugly episode in her life-story.

The 56-year-old author (whose break-out book Waiting to Exhale was also a box office hit) is suing former husband, 33-year-old Jonathan Plummer, for the tidy sum of $40m (€28m) for what she claims is an attempt to tarnish her formidable reputation.

In his just-published first novel (called Balancing Act) Plummer has written about a young Jamaican man who is seduced into marriage by a powerful, wealthy American woman who then discovers he is gay.

The fictional tears, drama and vitriolic divorce that ensue, McMillan claims, are too close to what happened in their marriage to be labelled fiction.

McMillan and Plummer, who married in 1998 after the whirlwind romance that inspired Groove (the 1996 novel chronicling the relationship between a 40-something American woman and a 20-something Jamaican man), were at each other's throats by 2004 when Plummer came out of the closet.

"It was devastating to discover that a relationship I had publicised to the world as life-affirming and built on mutual love was actually based on deceit," she told Oprah at the time. "I was humiliated."

A nasty court battle ensued as she accused him of knowingly deceiving her while he called her a homophobe. The couple then settled for an undisclosed amount.

This time around, however, sources say McMillan isn't interested in "settling".

Stay tuned.

Minelli sympathy for Britney

Liza Minnelli has been through more than her fair share of public traumas over the last 60 years -- but she still can't get her head around the antics of 25-year-old Britney Spears.

While Minnelli is sympathetic to Spears' obvious plight ("She's got a disease," says the old trouper. "And when you have a disease, you cannot help it. So it's not your fault, but you're responsible for it. I just feel so bad for her because I don't think anybody really understands what's going on."), she admits she's flummoxed by the media fascination with the pop tart's outlandish behaviour.

"The way the press is now, she's getting so much attention. Somebody said to me the other day, 'God, you have to go to jail to get a good review.'

"They used to have clauses and contracts where you can't get bad publicity or you'd get fired. But now bad publicity is good publicity . . . It's an interesting period."