HEARSAY

News From the Front: Our spies inside Annette Strauss’ campsay the mayor pro tern, who’s laying battle plans against Jerry Rucker and Lee Simpson for the next mayor’s race, is fuming atthe way council members like Lori Palmer and Craig Holcombare allegedly using their appointive powers to further the Simpson advance. “She’s just furious,” said one close to the normallysweet-tempered Annette. “It ruined her trip to their summer placeat La Jolla. She spent the whole time on the telephone to Dallas,making sure Lee doesn’t get too far ahead of her.” We hear thatStrauss and Rucker are both furious with Simpson’s lieutenantson the new council, who reportedly are extracting blood oaths ofsupport for Simpson from the people they appoint to city boardsand commissions. Other council insiders deny the charges, firing salvos at Annette for deserting the steamy budget battles ofAugust in favor of La Jolla’s cooler climes… Nobody took JerryRucker too seriously when he was heard to declare: “The nextoffice I run for will have a militia attached to it.” Imagine our surprise when Jerry and a squad of battle-weary, fatigue-clad combat soldiers laid siege to the elegant penthouses of La Tour. (“Thevalets had a hell of a time parking our tanks,” Jerry was heard tocrack.) In fact, they were real-life Afghan rebel commanders,flown in straight from a firefight in the mountains to raise moneyfrom Dallas fat cats for new guns, bullets, helmets and other armystuff. Led by a top revolutionary leader (who goes only by the nomde guerre of General Wardak), the swashbuckling rebel band wasintroduced by Jerry at a midday news conference, then taken tothe offices of Rucker’s political consultant atop La Tour.



Trash Collecting: Facing a serious social-news shortage whenthe local elite fled the heat this past August, the notoriously cheap Herald broke open the piggybank and dispatched social scribe Nancy Smith to do a little bird-watching at La Jolla, where theannual summer in-migration of Dallas socialites is called “theTexas trash” by the sprout-eating indigenous species.

Blowing the Whistle: Everyone’s talking about that blacklist ofNine Naughty Names of big-bucks alumni sidelined by SMU foralleged recruiting violations. One source says developer Sherwood Blount has been accused of throwing as much as $55,000 toward Mustang athletes… Every Saturday at the InternationalAthletic Club, Dallas Diamonds basketball star Nancy Lieberman works out with the guys in the off-season. In fact, Nancy recently brought ex-roomie Martina Navratilova in to whoop itup with the boys. There’s just one problem: the guys have always played shirts against skins. So far, they’ve let Nancy keep her shirton, but we’ll keep you abreast of further developments.



Bookmaking: Vicki Eisenberg is scoring big against long oddsas Dallas’ sole literary agent. She’s booked six major contracts,including two Joe Bob Briggs volumes for new D columnist John Bloom, plus others for the Times Herald’s Jim Schutze (Dallasrace relations), former News sportswriter Carlton Stowers (Wacotriple murders), Texas Monthly staffer Jim Atkinson (real barsin America) and a novel by Dallas writer Michael Ennis about”the last Viking,” set around the year 1000 A.D. In her spare timeVicki sold the TV rights to the Bloom-Atkinson ax-murder book Evidence of Love to Johnny Carson’s production company, which plans a TV movie for CBS… Australian press lord Rupert Murdoch, in town recently to snap up a $13-million Gulfstream jetfrom Jack and Pat Prewitt’s aviation company. Sources say thetab for fuel and upkeep alone will run Rupert more than $2 milliona year. And they say there’s no money in journalism.