R.I.P., Brett Somers

The comedian who frequently sparred with the late Charles Nelson Reilly on the Match Game TV show was 83; she died Saturday at her home in Westport, Conn.

R.I.P., Jane Wyman

Deliciously evil as matriarch Angela Channing in the Napa Valley-inspired 1980s soaper, Falcon Crest, Wyman was 93; she died today at her Palm Springs home. We are forever grateful to that show for bringing us Lorenzo Lamas as Channing's no-good playboy grandson, Lance Cumson. (Love, love, love that porno-sounding last name!)

R.I.P., Alfred Peet

The founder of my favorite chain of cafes, Peet's Coffee & Tea, died Wednesday at his home in Ashland, Ore., the company said today. He was 87. The Dutch immigrant started Peet's 41 years ago in Berkeley, setting the stage for U.S. consumers to plunge into the premium coffee market now epitomized by Starbucks. (Booo!)

[Photo: San Francisco Chronicle, 2001, by Lance Iversen]

'La Cage' star dies; Ivana to marry boy toy

French actor Michel Serrault, who played zaftig drag queen Zaza Napoli in La Cage aux Folles, has died, his priest said yesterday; he was 79. (That's Serrault, in lavender, with Italian co-star Ugo Tognazzi, who died in 1990.) Czechoslovakian Ivana Trump, 58, wearing a "ginormous" pink diamond ring, is planning to marry her 35-year-old boyfriend, Italian model and occasional actor Rossano Rubicondi.

Montreal pride; Arnie aging, 'Simpsons' rules

You go, sexy French Canadians! More than 50,000 people turned out yesterday for Montreal's first daytime gay-pride parade since 2004, organizers said, a bigger turnout than the 30,000 originally forecast. Very randy Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (left) turns 60 today; more big birthdays here. (It was pretty hot stuff years ago to see Schwarzenegger tell Johnny Carson that he'd taken up bodybuilding as a teenager after looking in the mirror and seeing one part of him was much bigger than the rest.) Chain-smoking TV talk-show host Tom Snyder, 71, died in San Francisco yesterday of leukemia; he lived in Tiburon. The Simpsons Movie grabbed top billing at the box office in its opening weekend, knocking aside bad gayish comedy I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. [Photo: Robert Mapplethorpe]

Soldier porn; Spacey older, Vance still dead

A Fort Bragg soldier is getting the boot after admitting he performed in a video on military-themed gay porn site Active Duty. (That isn't him, left; the soldier wasn't identified). Meanwhile, Kevin Spacey, who isn't a soldier but might be gay, turns 48 today. And Vivian Vance, who played Ricky and Lucy Ricardo's nosy neighbor, would celebrate her 98th birthday today -- if she hadn't kicked the bucket in 1979. (Memo to Sparky: Remove Vance from X-mas card list!)

[Photo: Active Duty]

Mascara-ed to the very end

Gawker notes one of Tammy Faye Bakker Messner's last stops on her strange, strange final journey: The interview the former televangelist and gay icon gave Larry King just 48 hours before she died Friday at 65. Sparky and I caught a few minutes of what was a very sad moment. "You have to admire the fact that she stuck with that look all the way to the end,'' Gawker says.

Tammy Faye's grand reinvention

I first saw the diminutive preacher's wife in 1985, after I moved to small-town Pine Bluff, Ark., to start my newspaper career. At noon, I'd drive home for lunch to watch Tammy Faye and her televangelist husband, Jim Bakker, on their Praise the Lord Network. It was as irresistible as rubbernecking past an eight-car pileup.

With her tragicomic life -- heavy mascara, on-screen crying, those big wigs! -- she was a ready-made reality TV star and gay diva, the new roles she adopted after Jim was convicted on federal fraud charges in 1989 and sent to prison. Indeed, Sparky and I saw her sing on stage at the Castro Theatre in a 2001 traveling show with her co-star, over-the-top film director John Waters. "I refuse to label people," she said in the 2000 documentary, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, the New York Times said today, reporting her death Friday night from cancer, at 65. "We’re all just people made out of the same old dirt, and God didn’t make any junk."

[Photos: top row, far left, in 1987; bottom row, from left: box cover art for Eyes of Tammy Faye; in a fierce blond wig in 2005; on TV again this year, after her cancer returned; bottom inset: an undated TV appearance]

Plus! Jimmy Hoffa was one of his drug dealers

Summer always brings slow-mo days with little to write about. So! What better moment for Time magazine to resurrect that old chestnut: How did big-haired and even bigger-dicked rocker Jim Morrison really die?

The Conventional Wisdom: Morrison, then 27, croaked in a Paris bathtub in July 1971, of what the police said were "natural causes."

The Scandalous New Wisdom: Sam Bernett, 21 at the time, says he ran Paris' hottest club, the Rock 'n Roll Circus, drawing a nightly crowd of stoners. After midnight July 3, Bernett claims in a new book, The End, he found Morrison's lifeless body in the club's bathroom, having overdosed on heroin. "There was foam coming out of his lips," he tells Time.

A doctor at the scene told Bernett that Morrison was dead. Bernett wanted to call the cops for help. But the singer's drug dealers said no, and instead had the body driven back to the apartment he shared his girlfriend. It was then soaked in the bathtub.

Outstanding in her field

Lady Bird Johnson in a field of bluebonnets, the Texas state flower. I love those tough Texas women! [Undated photo by Dennis Fagan]

Leading B.A.R.: North's death mystery

What I'm reading this morning in our little weekly: San Francisco porn actor Kent North (real name: Ben Grey) died in London of a drug overdose that may have been accidential -- or not. People keep fussing over whether to build old folks' housing at the former University of California at Berkeley extension campus near Market Street. Porn actor Mark Dalton's performance in Mark Meets Zeb is a "testament to the persuasive power of his juicy physique." But he's still a schmuck and a jailbird. Plus, Out There's Roberto gets all July 4th on us, celebrating "our steamy melting pot, and the chunks of immigrant beefstud simmering in it." [Photo: B.A.R.]

An obituary we wish for ourselves

Word for word from "Britain's No. 1 quality newspaper," The Telegraph: "Count Gottfried von Bismarck, who was found dead on Monday aged 44, was a louche German aristocrat with a multi-faceted history as a pleasure-seeking heroin addict, hell-raising alcoholic, flamboyant waster and a reckless and extravagant host of homosexual orgies."

A life well led! I mean, we can't all be Mother Teresa, can we?

[Hat tip to Gawker]

Beverly Sills was an 'All-American Diva'

That's how the New York Times describes the former Belle Silverman, who died yesterday of lung cancer at 78. But I liked New York's take: The magazine says Sills was an "impossibly charming public figure who (one got the sense) could shout down an obnoxious cabbie if need be, then go straight to the stage and start trilling. In between stage performances, she was as much a presence on television as pop-music stars were, doing talk shows, variety shows -- even hosting The Muppet Show." Here she is in a Muppet episode on Italian TV (how else to explain why Kermit's voice is dubbed in Italian!).

Cruise, Cole b-days; Lachey battles photos

Frequently lampooned actor, Scientologist and reputed father Tom Cruise turns 45 today. Sparky and I debated this morning whether Cruise has a hot bod. (Sparky: no. Me: not so sure.) Also, Michael Cole -- so, so curly-haired cute in The Mod Squad -- is 62; more big birthdays here. Kinda hot singer Nick Lachey and gal pal Vanessa Minnillo are fighting to stop gossip magazines and blogs (geez!) from publishing photos of them having sex. (And we're not talking about a chaste smooch in a hot tub, either!) Plus, super big-dicked rock star Jim Morrison died 36 years ago today in Paris; he was only 27. Boo!

Mrs. Astor doesn't regret

If she did, she wouldn't be giving a bundle to her no-good son and daughter-in-law. Now 105 and in rapidly declining health, socialite and philanthropist Brooke Astor plans to leave her nearly $200 million estate to family, friends and charities, the New York Times says today. Her will details the disposition of mink and chinchilla coats, a necklace glittering with 367 round diamonds, a Park Avenue duplex -- and the words to be inscribed on her headstone: "I had a wonderful life." Indeed! [Photo: New York]

Longtime Castro tour guide dies

Trevor Hailey had retired from her Cruisin' the Castro tours in 2005 after leading an estimated 4,000 groups through the 'hood over the past two decades. She moved to San Diego, where she died Tuesday after suffering a stroke. Hailey was 66. She started her tours after volunteering as a gay historian. "That's when I discovered we even had a history," she once told the San Francisco Chronicle. "Until then, I thought we'd all sprung full-bloom from rocks." Hailey was the subject of a documentary, Only in the Castro with Trevor Hailey, to be shown today at the Victoria Theatre as part of the Frameline31 film festival, now dedicated to her memory. [Photo: Chronicle]