President Clinton's legal defense fund last week announced results for its most recent six months of hat-passing -- a period that began last August when the House received Ken Starr's impeachment referral and ended with the president's acquittal. All that publicity was a boon to the cause: $ 2.3 million rolled in from donors eager to help pay down the Clintons' debts to David Kendall, Bob Bennett, et al.
The celebrity contingent was not as large as one might have anticipated from the level of anti-Starr vituperation one read last year in Daily Variety. Still, for the record: Singers Tony Bennett and Don Henley each pitched in $ 10,000, the maximum allowed. Robert De Niro, despite (or perhaps because of) his own personal nightmare with morals charges (in France of all places), still had $ 5,000 left over for the president, as did horror novelist Stephen King.