The ashes of Geraldine Page and a valentine James Dean once gave the Oscar winner are caught in a battle between Page's daughter and her manager.
Actress Angelica Torn, the daughter of Page and actor Rip Torn, told us that her personal manager, Iris Rossi, is holding hostage the remains of her mother. Rossi has several boxes of Page's scripts, clothing and acting trophies, as well as other effects from Dean — 18 drawings and notes he gave Page when the two were lovers. Dean died in 1955 at age 24. Page died in 1987 at age 62.
"She has my mother's gowns — my belongings — and she stopped me from getting them," Angelica said. She also claims Rossi owes her money, but Rossi, a respected figure in the theater community who navigated Angelica's bills, handled her DUI arrest and even took her in when she was no longer allowed to live in her father's Chelsea townhouse, says the situation is the other way around.
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Rossi tells us that Angelica is objecting to a small commission Rossi received for selling the majority of Page's papers and other items to an Ivy League university library. "She agreed to (my fee) in advance and received the bill for it," Rossi told us. "I wrote down every bobby pin."
Rossi says Angelica can have everything back as soon as she settles up.
Angelica, who received excellent reviews onstage as Sylvia Plath in writer/director Paul Alexander's "Edge," raised eyebrows recently with a mass e-mail in which she said she was cutting ties with Rossi "to work with my friend, teacher and prince of peace, Dr. Deepak Chopra."
She also wrote: "We on this planet are poised on the precipice of either human extinction or a major leap in evolution in as little as the next 10 years."
Elsewhere in the e-mail, Angelica declared: "The only solution is to end war. Completely. From the inside of our hearts. One by one refuse to play that game of you vs. me."
Perhaps she'll do the same with Rossi.
