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  The foyer. (Photo by Bowman Media Group)

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  The living room. (Photo by Bowman Media Group)

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  The former library is now another living room. (Photo by Bowman Media Group)

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  The family room off the kitchen. (Photo by Bowman Media Group)

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  The kitchen. (Photo by Bowman Media Group)

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  The primary bedroom. (Photo by Bowman Media Group)

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  The guest house’s main living area. (Photo by Bowman Media Group)

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  A view of the pool area. (Photo by Bowman Media Group)

Former “Real Housewives of Orange County” cast member Elizabeth Lyn Vargas has put her La Quinta Polo Estates home on the market after a complete renovation for $8.995 million.

The list price is nearly triple the $3 million she paid for it in February 2021, records show.

“My blood, sweat and tears have gone into this remodel, and a lot of money, and I’m now finally finished,” Vargas said in an Instagram post in October.

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A post shared by Elizabeth Vargas (@elizabethlynvargas)

Built on a 2-acre lot in 1991, the roughly 10,000-square-foot home has six bedrooms and eight bathrooms.

Updates include new flooring, fixtures, interior and exterior paint and kitchen and bathroom remodels, according to TMZ, which first reported the listing, twice.

TMZ reported Vargas initially put the home up for sale at $9.95 million in March 2022. It resurfaced Nov. 10 at its current ask.

While the listing is spare on actual details, before and after MLS photos show its transformation from a red-roofed Spanish style with terracotta to a modern luxury home.

A towering portico leads to the foyer of the main house. Beyond it lies the living area where built-in display cabinets flank the fireplace surround and raised hearth in the all-white space with decorative ceiling beams and marbled floors.

What had been the library off the great room is now another living room.

French doors open the main living areas onto the lush, resort-style grounds that boast a large pond teeming with over 300 koi, a pergola-covered barbecue center and a great room with a fireplace, a swimming pool with a fountain feature, a spa and a tennis court.

There’s also a guest house.

Back inside the main house, a door separates the dining room from the eat-in gourmet kitchen with a waterfall island and a breakfast nook. The kitchen flows into the family room.

At the opposite end of the house is the primary suite. It has two walk-in closets and a bathroom with a jetted tub and a separate shower. French doors open the primary bedroom to a large sitting room, which leads to a home gym with a bathroom.

A perk of living in the gated community is access via private entrance to the nearby polo fields, where tournaments and music festivals are the big draw.

Bravo fired Vargas in 2021 after one season on the show. She’s opted to keep the listing in the Bravo housewife family with Gina Kirschenheiter, Travis Mullen and Dave Archuletta of First Team Real Estate.

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In addition to reality television, Vargas is known as a businesswoman. Her brands include being the founder and president of Newport Beach-based Vargas Spirits, the parent company of Vargas Vodka. She also established the no-kill We Care Rescue Ranch foundation whose work includes raising money for free and low-cost spay and neutering.

According to an extensive new GQ profile, the charismatic Australian actor, 26, also is considered the latest heir to the Hot Young Actor crown, which Elordi acknowledges has been historically bestowed upon some of his own favorite old Hollywood icons, including Marlon Brando, James Dean and Steve McQueen.

But as much as Elordi has become “Gen Z’s favorite heartthrob,” he was curiously evasive about his romantic life in his interview with GQ. This is interesting, considering that his romantic life, up until recently, has consisted of a two-year, on-off relationship with Olivia Jade Giannulli, according to People. She’s the influencer who is still best known as the daughter of Lori Loughlin, the disgraced TV star and the face of the 2019 college admissions scandal.

“Now, Elordi finds himself negotiating his own hassles and concerns that come with stardom,” GQ writer Gabriella Paiella said. “People are paying attention to him, looking for cracks in the façade of mystery. They’re invested in his personal relationships … .”

But as Paiella reported, Elordi “shut down any questions about his romantic life with a cheeky ‘but I appreciate you giving me the space.'”

This GQ interview took place in the early fall. Two months earlier, People reported, Elordi was “officially back together with Giannulli.” The actor and Giannulli, 24, enjoyed a romantic getaway to Italy in June, where they were photographed lounging on a beach near Portofino, another People report said. They also were seen going for a swim and riding on a motorcycle together through a picturesque seaside village.

With Elordi’s request for “space,” it appears that he, and his representatives, know that it would be a distraction for him to acknowledge a romance with a woman who was recently embroiled in a national scandal. After all, Elordi is on the cusp of becoming “a bona fide movie star,” as GQ said. In addition to his performance in “Priscilla,” Elordi also stars this awards season in the drama “Saltburn,” and he’s otherwise very much in demand, including by such auteur directors as Paul Schrader.

Unfortunately for Elordi, Giannulli — whether or not she’s still his girlfriend — comes with serious baggage. Her mother and father, designer Mossimo Giannulli, were arrested in 2019 and accused of fraudulently maneuvering to get her and her older sister, Bella, admitted to USC. Loughlin, The “Full House” star, and her husband were among some three dozen wealthy parents who paid tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in brides to get their children admitted to top U.S. colleges. Loughlin served two months in federal prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy charges, and Mossimo Giannulli served five months.

A photograph of a teenage Giannulli, posing on a rowing machine, became an internet meme. The photo was released by the U.S. Justice Department in its prosecution of her parents. The photo, prosecutors say, was taken to help Giannulli gain admission to USC on the false pretense of being an elite crew team athlete. A legal expert told this news organization in 2020 that prosecutors could have charged Giannulli and her sister in their parents’ schemes. “They were absolutely complicit,” the expert said.

Shortly after news broke that Loughlin and Mossimo Giannulli had been arrested, both their daughters withdrew from USC in disgrace. People began to zero in on Olivia Jade Giannulli, regarding her with either sympathy or annoyance when they learned she never had any desire to go to college; she just wanted to make YouTube videos, showing fans how to put on makeup and giving them glimpses of her privileged Hollywood lifestyle.

During a 2020 appearance on Jada Pinkett Smith’s Red Table Talk, Giannulli addressed the intense backlash she and her family received over the scandal. She insisted she didn’t “deserve pity.” She said, “We messed up. I just want a second chance to be like, ‘I recognize I messed up.'”

Perhaps not surprisingly, Elordi is absent from the Italian photos, though that didn’t stop one of Giannulli’s Instagram followers from asking, “Where’s Jacob?” People magazine also reported that Elordi accompanied Giannulli to Idaho in July to visit her parents, where the Giannulli family was enjoying summer vacation at a lake.

So, Elordi and Giannulli were apparently serious enough in July that he joined her on a family vacation. But it remains to be seen whether she’ll begin turning up with him on the red carpet to promote any of his films, now that the SAG-AFTRA strike is over. Given that she merited no mention in Elordi’s GQ profile, such an appearance in his presence isn’t likely.

Sanchez tells a writer for Vogue that the “10,000-Year-Clock” offers her and her future husband, the second richest man in the world, a way of “thinking about the future.”

The irrepressible Sanchez opened up about the 10,000-Year Clock while flying the Vogue writer on a helicopter tour of Bezos’ West Texas ranch, one of the more than half a dozen luxury properties in his estimated $500 million real estate portfolio, as the New York Post also reported. 

In a new exclusive interview, Lauren Sánchez discusses going to space, giving back, and her high-flying romance with Jeff Bezos. Read the full profile here: https://t.co/qXtkaXgN1C pic.twitter.com/rz2CPDCF27

— Vogue Magazine (@voguemagazine) November 13, 2023

At the ranch, Bezos and Sanchez host holiday gatherings for their extended, blended family, and the Amazon founder launches rockets from his Blue Origin space facility, Vogue reported. The West Texas property also includes a family compound, clustered around a two-story main residence and a swimming pool, “made to appear like a pond with rocky banks,” Vogue writer Chloe Malle, who happens to be Candice Bergen’s daughter, reported.

Bezos, in case you missed it, also recently purchased two side-by-side mansions, worth a combined $147 million, on South Florida’s Indian Creek Island, known as “Billionaire Bunker,” Insider reported. There, neighbors will include the recently divorced Tom Brady and the polarizing former White House aides Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, the latter of whom Sanchez mingled with at Kim Kardashian’s birthday bash in October. Earlier this month, Bezos, who has an estimated net worth of $160 billion, announced on Instagram that he was leaving his longtime residence of Seattle so that he and Sanchez could make Miami their new home base, Insider reported.

Sanchez, though, can continue to regard herself as the face of philanthropy in Los Angeles, Vogue said. That’s because the former TV newscaster and Bezos also have a $165 million Tudor mansion in Beverly Hills, the New York Post said. This past weekend, their good friends Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg, hosted a second, star-studded engagement party for them at their Beverly Hills mansion. Sanchez’s longtime friend, Kris Jenner, and her daughters Kim and Khloe Kardashian, were among the celebrity guests.

Back in West Texas, Sanchez and Bezos posed for glamour images for Vogue’s December cover story, shot by celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz. One photo shows Sanchez and Bezos, in a cowboy hat, sitting cheek-to-cheek in a pickup truck. Another shows Sanchez in a red-sequined, body-hugging Dolce and Gabbana gown, descending a spiral staircase into the subterranean complex that houses the 10,000-Year Clock.

The Daily Beast’s “wealth and power reporter” Noah Kirsch said that the clock, located 500 feet underground, seems to be “a somewhat confusing initiative.” Kirsch also said that the Vogue cover story about Sanchez and her conspicuous consumption with Bezos almost seemed intended to inflame the “eat the rich crowd.”

Malle described how Sanchez landed the helicopter, on the side of the Sierra Diablo mountains, so that the two could descend into the mouth of a cliff to explore the clock. Sanchez insisted that they go all the way to the bottom, to get a better sense of “the engineering feat envisioned with next generations in mind.”

For the website for the 10,000-Year Clock, Bezos said he was working with the its “father,” inventor, entrepreneur and computer scientist Danny Hillis, who pioneered parallel computers and their use in artificial intelligence. Other partners in the endeavor include the San Francisco-based Long Now Foundation, which was created to foster “long-term” thinking with this “Clock of the Long Now,” “an immense, mechanical monument.”

Malle reported that it took over a year to drill 500 feet into solid limestone and quartz to create the space for the clock, and two years for a diamond-cutting robot to slice stairs into the stone. Inside, enormous titanium and stainless gears look like parts to the inside of a giant wristwatch and showcase a 10,000 pound bronze-cased concrete pendulum, Malle reported.

What if we kissed inside the 10,00 Year Clock, a subterranean project in West Texas backed by Lauren Sánchez’s fiancé, Jeff Bezos? pic.twitter.com/bHTBLn9jTL

— Lydia Tárt (@hannahtindle) November 13, 2023

Sanchez tried to explain the concept of the clock, telling Malle that there are five metal anniversary displays that will function like traditional cuckoo clocks chiming at one year, 10 years, 100 years, 1,000 years, and 10,000 years. Bezos probably explained it a bit better by saying that the clock will tick once a year, with its century hand advancing once every 100 years. The clock should keep time for the next 10,000 years, becoming “a symbol” and “an icon for long-term thinking,” Bezos said.

If the concept remains “a bit confusing,” as the Daily Beast reported, Sanchez suggested a more immediate use for the clock, one that could include a visit by the Kardashians and her other celebrity friends. She told the Vogue writer: “Wouldn’t it be cool to have a Halloween party here?”

Pink will give away 2,000 banned books at her South Florida shows this week in partnership with the literary and free expression advocacy group PEN America.

Fans who attend the Miami and Sunrise, Florida, stops of the singer-songwriter’s “Trustfall Tour” Tuesday and Wednesday will receive a copy of some of the books that have appeared on PEN America’s Index of Banned Books.

“I’m a voracious reader, and I’m a mom of two kids who are also voracious readers,” Pink said during a livestream on Instagram on Sunday.  “And I can’t imagine my own parents telling me what my kids can and cannot read, let alone someone else’s parents, let alone someone else that doesn’t even have children that are deciding what my children can read.”

Fans will receive copies of “The Family Book” by Todd Parr, “The Hill We Climb” by Amanda Gorman, “Beloved” by Toni Morrison, or one of the books from the “Girls Who Code” series by the nonprofit that shares the same name.

The singer said she decided to join PEN America and local bookstore, Books & Books, to give away books because she wanted to highlight the rising wave of book bans in Florida.

“It’s especially hateful to see authorities take aim at books about race and racism and against LGBTQ authors and those of color. We have made so many strides toward equality in this country and no one should want to see this progress reversed,” Pink said in a statement shared by PEN America.

Suzanne Nossel, CEO of PEN America, said she was thankful the singer decided to join the cause during the livestream Sunday.

PEN America says its data showed that Florida had the highest number of book ban cases, more than 1,400, and the largest number of school districts, 33, removing books in the last school year.

Clarke is actually Philip Brugglestein, an insecure guy from the Midwest who works in a coffee shop in New York City, and stage and screen star Crudup deftly juggles these two personas as well as 17 other characters in this dizzying yarn written by renowned solo performer David Cale.

“It’s part charm show, it’s part thrill ride, and then it’s a claustrophobic attack in the style of film noir,” says Crudup. “And you just don’t see that very much in the theater.”

A Tony Award-winning stage actor (“The Coast of Utopia,” “The Elephant Man,” “Arcadia”), Crudup is also famous for his starring screen roles in films such as “Almost Famous,” “Big Fish” and “Watchmen” and the TV series “Gypsy,” “The Morning Show” and “Hello Tomorrow!”

As performed by Crudup and directed by Leigh Silverman, the play debuted to thunderous acclaim off-Broadway at the Vineyard Theatre in 2017 and then returned the following year for another off-Broadway engagement at the Minetta Lane Theatre.

“It’s a great piece of writing, and the idea of being someone who is powerless in the world and takes on the persona of someone who is without a worry is a kind of wish fulfillment that I imagine we all would like to experience,” says Silverman. “What would it be like if we could shed our own hang-ups and move through the world with the grace and ease of a Harry Clarke? The seduction of that is, I think, really irresistible.”

“Harry Clarke” is Crudup’s first solo show. When Vineyard Theatre co-artistic director Douglas Aibel first sent him the script, Crudup recalls, “I looked at this, and it was 48 pages of one person talking, and I thought, are you out of your mind? Who wants to do that? And then I tried to go to sleep, woke up in the middle of the night. Almost all of my friends are actors, and the fact is, nobody gets an opportunity like this to open a brand-new solo performance in New York City. And I thought, if you don’t do this when other people imagine that you can, you’re being a baby. So get up off your butt and get to work. And it became one of the more rewarding experiences I’ve had in the theater in my career. It was also the most uncomfortable and demanding.”

“He’s an amazing actor,” Silverman says. “He has the unique ability to play both a high-status person and a low-status person simultaneously. He really understands both sides of the Harry Clarke character and has the ability to play a scared, timid, abused, freaked-out, essentially invisible person, and then the alter ego that that kind of person would create. And also just the ability to hold an audience. I frequently refer to Billy as like a charm bomb.”

This is a return to Berkeley Rep for Crudup, having costarred with Sirs Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart and Shuler Hensley in Harold Pinter’s “No Man’s Land” there in 2013 before taking it to Broadway in repertory with the same cast in Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.”

Returning to the play five years later has been a formidable challenge, but it’s one that Crudup relishes.

“I’ve done theater all of my life, and actually because of this play I had the opportunity to work on two television shows, but that has subsequently kept me out of the theater,” he says. “I’m well aware that if you don’t keep the muscles going, they will atrophy, and I haven’t found a better piece to build up the muscles than this one. So part of it has been putting on a well-worn jacket you love, and the other part of it is realizing that it’s a straitjacket. You’re destined for the mental hospital because of the claustrophobia that comes from getting into this world. But once you embark on this story, the rigor of it takes over. You can’t have any moments of reluctance or insecurity.”

“Doing something for the third time five years later, we’re just different people and different artists,” Silverman says. “Billy’s had a massive television career in the last five years. I’ve done a number of plays and musicals, and I’ve worked on another play of David Cale’s in the meantime. When we agreed to revisit it, Billy said, ‘I never felt like I really got a couple of the characters. I feel like I could do a better job, and I really want to reinvestigate.’ That is the dream, working with an actor that is just as interested and curious in the play as you are and as rigorous in the work and just wants to keep making it better.”

Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.

‘HARRY CLARKE’

By David Cale, presented by Berkeley Repertory Theatre

When: Nov. 15-Dec. 23

Where: Berkeley Rep’s Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison St., Berkeley

Tickets: $22.50-$134; 510-647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org

Haddish’s father left when she was a child, and after her mother suffered a severe brain injury in a car accident, she was put with her siblings in foster care. While there, her social worker took notice of her comedic talents, and encouraged her to channel her class clown charisma into a full on career.

Haddish followed this advice and began performing at comedy clubs, but she has said that it was not an easy climb. There were desperate times when she was homeless, or living in her car, but she didn’t give up. Comedy performances led to appearances on a variety of television shows and then regular roles on such shows as “The Real Husbands of Hollywood” and “Carmichael.”

Her big breakthrough came in a starring role in the 2017 road-trip film comedy “Girls Trip” with Regina Hall, Jada Pinkett, Queen Latifah (a performance dubbed by the New Yorker as one of the “best in the century” so far). Today, Haddish is a successful comedian with several stand-up specials, film and TV roles, music releases, as well as an autobiography under her belt. She was the first Black woman comedian to host “Saturday Night Live,” an appearance that would earn her a 2018 Emmy Award.

While Haddish has come along way, she has continued to encounter challenges and personal issues that have thrown her life and comedy into controversy. She was arrested and charged with DUI in January 2022, and was sued with fellow comedian Aries Spears for alleged child abuse for in connection with several comedy skits the two created involving several kids. The suit was later dropped.

Haddish is on a stand-up tour with friend and “Carmichael” co-star Lil Rel Howery, which stops at Oakland’s Paramount Theatre Nov. 18. She talked to us about her tour and knack for using humor to heal.

Q: What can audiences expect from your show in Oakland?

A: They can expect a really great, straight-up comedy show, because I’m bringing it this time. I’m going to be talking about what’s been going on in my life for the last two years. Digesting this whole Hollywood thing, dealing with grief and making mistakes in front of the whole world has not easy, but what I’ve learned to do is find the joy. Find the funny. So I’m going to teach people how to do that, and how to heal. You can’t heal from something unless you can laugh about it.

Q: You’ve been very open in your comedy about dealing with difficult moments in your life. How do you toe that line between humor and hardship?

A: It’s a conscious effort for me. The thing is, I’m not a victim … . I made choices to put me in certain places. Being a kid was the worst time of my whole existence, because I didn’t really have a choice. I had no power, no voice, no control. Now, as an adult, I have all this power to control my existence, so I’ve decided I’m not anybody’s victim. I’m going to share my experiences, and share the choices that I’ve made that got me in these situations. In my show, I do talk about some deep, dark stuff, but by the time I’m done, I’d hope that people might be walking about of there feeling a thousand times better. They might laugh so hard they lose a little weight.

Q: You joined laughter and darkness with your recent role in “Haunted Mansion.” Your character in the film is a medium, but do you personally believe in ghosts?

A: I believe that there are different dimensions and different realms that affect us in different ways. My grandmother, her physical flesh has passed, but maybe your loved ones are always with you, because she keeps showing up in my dreams, and I’m tired! She made me do a full boot camp last night! She’s getting me ready for success, telling me “Oh, that deal is no good, cancel that deal! Don’t do this, don’t do that!” I’m like, why is it always no, no, no? Where are the yesses, lady? You go back to heaven, I’m going back to sleep. My subconscious is off the chain. So yes … I believe in ghosts.

Q: Did your grandmother tell you to go on tour with Lil Rel? What made you two decide to team up together?

A: Well, Rel and I have been friends since 2004 or 2005. Before the fame, before the big time, we would do shows together. He would come to L.A., or I’d go to Chicago, and we would do little pop-ups here and there. Then, his big movie came out, my big movie came out, and life got crazy. We still talk on the phone for hours though, and I’m just like, “I miss doing our shows! Let’s go on tour!”

He can’t stand me though, because every time I say something, I’m adamant about it, and it always ends up being true. Like when we were younger, I’d be like, “Bro, we’re going to make movies together, we’re going to be in TV shows, we’re gonna be touring the world together.” That was around 2006 when I told him that. Cut to 2023, and it all happened.

Q: Which do you prefer, doing comedy shows or shooting for a movie?

A: Stand-up comedy is way more difficult than doing sketch comedy or comedy movies, because  you’re on stage by yourself. You’re up there, all alone, in the lights. Luckily, when you’re shooting a production, there’s a crew there, so my goal is always to make the crew laugh. If I can make someone laugh during a take, then I win.

With stand-up though, it’s immediate, instant gratification. That’s why its my drug of choice. I hit those jokes hard. I’m scratching and itching for a laugh. Laughter sets off our dopamine, and that’s why people like being around funny people. It gets you high, and I get high on my own supply.

Q: How does it feel when you know that people are enjoying your comedy, or when you see people referencing your jokes in real life, like your iconic “she not ready” bit?

A: It makes me so happy, because I know that joy is spreading. I want that to spread like herpes, or like COVID. If everybody tried to make one person laugh every day, life would be so much better. There would be less hate, less violence, less pain. So when I hear people do my bits, or even if another comedian steals my joke, I’m like, still do it! Go for it! Bring the joy!

Q: With your background, does your success as comedian ever feel surreal, or do you ever get imposter syndrome?

A: No, I don’t think I’ve ever had imposter syndrome. I’ve always just seen myself as a regular person. As a foster kid, as someone that was homeless, struggling, but having this dream and being able to accomplish it, I know I’m being effective. I know there’s other foster kids that are seeing me and saying “If she could do it, I can do it. If she didn’t give up on herself, I won’t give up myself.” If you have that dream, you have to make it happen.

TIFFANY HADDISH

Performing with Lil Rel Howery in the Best Friends Comedy Tour

When: 8 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 18.

Where: Paramount Theatre, 2025 Broadway, Oakland.

Tickets: $52-$102; 510-465-6400, paramountoakland.org/

ATLANTA — When rapper Young Thug goes to trial later this month on gang and racketeering charges, prosecutors will be allowed to use rap lyrics as evidence against him, a judge ruled Thursday.

Fulton County Superior Court Chief Judge Ural Glanville said in court he would allow prosecutors to introduce 17 sets of lyrics they have identified as long as they can show that the lyrics are related to crimes that the rapper and others are accused of committing. Defense attorneys had asked the judge to exclude them, arguing the lyrics are constitutionally protected speech and would be unfairly prejudicial.

Young Thug, whose given name is Jeffery Lamar Williams, was indicted last year along with more than two dozen others. After some defendants reached plea deals and others were separated to be tried later, opening statements are set to begin Nov. 27 in the trial of Young Thug and five others.

Prosecutors have said Young Thug co-founded a violent criminal street gang in 2012 called Young Slime Life, or YSL, which they allege is associated with the national Bloods gang. Prosecutors say the rapper used his music and social media posts to promote the gang, which they say was behind a variety of violent crimes, including killings, shootings and carjackings.

Young Thug has had enormous success as a rapper and has his own music label, Young Stoner Life. Defense attorneys have said YSL is just a music label, not a gang.

Artists on his record label are considered part of the “Slime Family,” and a compilation album, “Slime Language 2,” rose to No. 1 on the charts in April 2021. He co-wrote the hit “This is America” with Childish Gambino, which became the first hip-hop track to win the song of the year Grammy in 2019.

Prosecutors used Georgia’s expansive gang and anti-racketeering laws to bring the indictment. All of the defendants were accused of conspiring to violate the anti-racketeering law, and the indictment includes rap lyrics that prosecutors allege are overt acts “in furtherance of the conspiracy.”

“The question is not rap lyrics. The question is gang lyrics,” prosecutor Mike Carlson told the judge during a hearing Wednesday, later adding. “These are party admissions. They happen to come in the form of lyrics.”

Prosecutor Simone Hylton separated the lyrics into three categories: those that prove the existence of YSL as an enterprise, those that show the gang’s behavior and actions, and those that show that Young Thug is a leader of the gang.

Defense attorney Doug Weinstein, who represents defendant Deamonte Kendrick, who raps as Yak Gotti, argued during the hearing that rap is the only art form or musical genre that is brought into court as evidence of crimes.

He said his client’s lyrics are a performance done as a character, not admissions of real-world things he’s done. But, Weinstein asserted, because of the nature of rap music, with its violence and extreme language, the lyrics will unfairly prejudice the jury.

“They’re going to look at these lyrics and instantly say they are guilty,” he said. “They are not going to look at the evidence that’s actually probative of their guilt once these lyrics get in front of them.”

It’s a signal that this film has stories to share about the 82-year-old folk singer and political activist that have never before been told.

That wasn’t the original intent, Baez says with a wry smile on a recent video call.

“It was going to be about the last tour,” Baez says of a run of 2018 farewell shows. “Then at a certain point, I realized I had to let them in farther than just that. I literally handed them the key, the three directors, to the storage unit. In the film, when I walk into it, that’s the first time I’ve ever been in there.”

With that key, co-directors Karen O’Conner, Miri Navasky, and Maeve O’Boyle entered a chamber of treasures that Baez had forgotten existed.

“I knew that my mom had kept some stuff,” Baez says. “In the back of my head, I knew that. I didn’t know that she kept everything. All of my father’s footage from moving pictures and stills. Every drawing from when I was five on. So we dipped into all of that and used that to make the film cohesive.”

The home movies show Baez, the middle child between sisters Pauline and Mimi, traveling the world on trips her parents took them on. The drawings are used beautifully in the film, her original work getting animated to illustrate different moments.

And there’s more: Diaries and letters and audio tapes that Baez recorded to send home from her travels.

“It’s different having a 21-year-old say to the mom, ‘I’m going to march tomorrow with probably 40,000 people and it’ll be with Dr. [Martin Luther] King,’” Baez says about how the audio letters gave voice to her thoughts as they were then. “Here’s this 21-year-old whose mind is blown by all this going on, instead of me retelling the tale.”

O’Conner was a longtime friend before she, Navasky and O’Boyle directed the film, and Baez gave the trio free rein to use what they wanted and tell her story as they saw fit.

“I signed on for this, so there was nothing I could do about it,” Baez says, laughing. “They did the film. I wanted to leave an honest legacy, and I was serious about it. So it’s warts and all.”

The film will be shown through Sunday at the Smith Rafael Film Center at 1118 Fourth St. in San Rafael.

What about Bob?

Much of Baez’s public life is well known.

At 19, she exploded onto the folk music scene and quickly escaped the confines of genre to become one of the best-known singers of the ’60s. She was with Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington and at countless protests against the Vietnam War. She’s in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, a Grammy winner, a Kennedy Center honoree.

As well, her private life at times broke into the public realm.

Baez’s romance with the then-little-known singer-songwriter Bob Dylan united the two biggest stars in folk in the early ’60s for a time. Her marriage to the anti-war activist David Harris produced her only child, Gabriel Harris, while David was in prison for refusing to report to the military after he was drafted.

The ramifications of both of those relationships are explored in much greater depth in “I Am A Noise.”

Her relationship with Dylan started out like a fairy tale, and the film includes footage that makes their love for each other clear, including one special clip of the two singing Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” when she was already a star, and he still needed to be introduced when he joined her on stage.

“That’s one of my favorite parts of the film,” Baez says. “It was so happy and so innocent. I was already established, but as a ballad singer. I didn’t write for years. So here we are bouncing around upstate New York, and it was really, really fun.”

Fun turned to sorrow in 1965 when on the trip to England that was filmed for the Dylan documentary “Don’t Look Back,” Dylan casually dismissed the significance of their relationship, essentially ghosting Baez even as she occupied the same room as him. Baez admits in “I Am A Noise” that the relationship was both her greatest love and her worst heartbreak.

“It would be different if I hadn’t had a come to Jesus moment about five or six years ago,” she says of finally reaching a place of peace in how she views her time with Dylan. “I was painting him as a young man, probably a 21-year-old, and I put his music on and I started to cry.

“And everything, all of the animosity, whatever (stuff), just vanished,” Baez says. “It just drifted off me and it’s stayed that way. So that’s a different answer than you would have gotten off me 10 years ago. I was still struggling.

“I mean, I still make jokes about him because he’s nuts,” she says, laughing. “But that’s different from holding a lot of resentment.”

Seeing herself

Baez first watched the film as a rough cut, but has since seen it many times at film festivals and screenings. The journey it takes through her life has been revealing in many ways, she says.

“Part of it was an education,” she says. “Seeing my sisters, for instance, say what it was really like, how I really had affected their lives (with early fame and stardom). I mean, I kind of knew it, but because they knew Karen and trusted her, my older sister, who would never get in front of a camera, was willing to say her truth.

“And then Mimi to say hers,” Baez says of her younger sister, who as Mimi Fariña was also a well-known folk singer though never the star that Baez became. “That for me was surprising. I’m grateful for all of it.”

In 1974, Fariña created Bread & Roses, a Marin nonprofit arts organization that brings hope, healing and joy through live music and the performing arts to children, adults and seniors who are disadvantaged, marginalized or otherwise isolated in diverse institutional settings in the San Francisco Bay Area. She spent 25 years at the helm of Bread & Roses, retiring in 1999 just a year and half before dying of cancer at her home in Mill Valley.

Baez and her son for years had a difficult relationship. She was drawn to the road for concerts and protests, and Gabriel grew up feeling the distance between him and his mother, as the film explains.

“My son, I knew pretty much about what had gone on between us,” she says of Gabriel, who appears in the film both as a member of her 2018 band and in archival footage. “He was so forgiving and so eloquent, talking to Karen also. So I learned the extent of his abandonment issues when he was little.”

Other moments bring nothing but joy, she said. Seeing footage of her first trip to France and the red carpets and photo shoots she was part of was fun.

“And the women backstage in Selma, Alabama, after the end of the concert,” Baez says of a moment in 2018 when several women approached her and thanked her for her civil rights activism. “They were just standing in front of the theater, and I went over to talk with them. That was so beautiful.”

Still, at different moments, other more difficult parts of the film might surface for her, Baez says, forcing her to consider anew the history, visible or hidden, of her life.

“I’m still reacting to new things when I see it,” she says. “There are a couple of things that I’d prefer that they weren’t there. And then I look at it. I think this is part of what knitted this whole thing together, so in the end, I am just delighted with this film.”

Secrets and memories

Early on the film foreshadows the secret life it will reveal. As a young singer, Baez wrote in her diaries and letters about a darkness that came for her at times, delivering panic attacks and depression.

Closer to the end, its source is revealed as Baez talks about the intensive therapy sessions she and her sister Mimi separately started more than 30 years ago, which eventually led them to believe their parents had been sexually inappropriate or abusive to them as children.

The film uses letters between Baez and her parents, and audio tapes from eight years of therapy which the filmmakers pulled from her storage locker, as well as drawings Baez made while in therapy and her own more recent interviews.

“I think the answer to that question is I have felt so complete since completing that work,” she says of what has come from mining her memories. “There is one scene in the film, not that it wasn’t true, because it was, but right now it’s very different. That was the scene in Istanbul when I’m having like a mild version of a panic attack, and it’s not representative of me now.”

In a way, the film is a testament to the act of remembrance, and how even in places where solid proof is absent, memories can be true to those who hold them.

“It clearly comes up throughout the film about memory,” Baez says. “Which is why I say even in the film, I can’t prove anything, say, about the dramatic stuff. And all of us, or anybody who writes about their past is going to have their own version of it. I mean, I’ve seen somebody fight about the most petty things. ‘No, I know that dress was blue’ – ‘Uh-uh, I thought it was red.’

“You resist, but those are your distinct memories,” she says. “And so, keeping that in mind, it was a journey through memories, after biting off, you know, what I needed to bite off to get started.

“Those were memories in one way or another that freed me from the darkness of my past.”

— Lifestyles Editor Colleen Bidwill contributed to this report 

NEW YORK — A jury awarded more than $1.2 million to Robert De Niro’s former personal assistant Thursday, finding one of his companies responsible for subjecting her to a toxic work environment.

While the jury found De Niro was not personally liable for the abuse, it said his company, Canal Productions, engaged in gender discrimination and retaliation against former assistant Graham Chase Robinson and should make two payments of $632,142 to her.

De Niro, who spent three days at the two-week trial — including two on the witness stand — has been ensnared in dueling lawsuits with Robinson since she quit in April 2019. He was not in the courtroom when the verdict was read aloud Thursday afternoon.

Robinson, 41, smiled as the verdict was being delivered. After the jury left the room, she hugged her lawyers.

Outside the courthouse, she smiled broadly and at other times seemed to be near tears. She did not comment.

Lawyers on both sides claimed victory.

“We’re thrilled with the verdict,” Robinson’s attorney, Brent Hannafan, said as he stood with his client outside the courthouse. “Couldn’t be happier.”

Meanwhile, De Niro attorney Richard Schoenstein called the verdict “a great victory for Mr. De Niro.”

“He is absolved. He is not liable for anything that was charged against him at all,” Schoenstein said. “There’s a modest award against the company. But, you know, they were looking for $12 million.”

The lawyer said De Niro’s lawyers could try to reduce the award with post-verdict motions to the judge, but he wasn’t sure there would be any. He said he didn’t know if there would be an appeal.

Robinson had testified that De Niro, 80, and his girlfriend, Tiffany Chen, teamed up against her to turn a job she once loved into a nightmare.

De Niro and Chen each testified that Robinson became the problem when her aspirations to move beyond Canal Productions, the De Niro company that employed her, led her to make escalating demands to remain on the job.

Emails in which Chen told De Niro that she thought Robinson was having “imaginary intimacy” with him and wished she was his wife were shown to jurors. Robinson testified that she never had romantic interest in De Niro.

In two days on the witness stand, the actor told jurors that he boosted Robinson’s salary from less than $100,000 annually to $300,000 and elevated her title to vice president of production and finance at her request, even though her responsibilities remained largely the same.

When she quit, De Niro said, Robinson stole about $85,000 in airline miles from him, betrayed his trust and violated his unwritten rules to use common sense and always do the right thing.

At times, De Niro acknowledged from the witness stand many of the claims Robinson made to support her $12 million gender discrimination and retaliation lawsuit, including that he may have told her that his personal trainer was paid more than her in part because he had a family to support.

He agreed he had asked her to scratch his back on at least two occasions, dismissing a question about it with: “Ok, twice? You got me!”

He admitted that he had berated her, though he disputed ever aiming a profanity her way, saying: “I was never abusive, ever.”

He also denied ever yelling at her, saying every little thing she was trying to catch him with was nonsense and that, at most, he had raised his voice in her presence but never with disrespect. Then, he looked at her sitting between her lawyers in the well of the courtroom and shouted: “Shame on you, Chase Robinson!”

Robinson testified that she quit her job during an “emotional and mental breakdown” that left her overwhelmed and feeling like she’d “hit rock bottom.”

She said she has suffered from anxiety and depression since quitting and hasn’t worked in four years despite applying for 638 jobs.

“I don’t have a social life,” she said. “I’m so humiliated and embarrassed and feel so judged. I feel so damaged in a way. … I lost my life. Lost my career. Lost my financial independence. I lost everything.”

De Niro’s lawyers sued Robinson for breach of loyalty and fiduciary duty even before her lawsuit was filed against him in 2019. They sought $6 million in damages, including a return of the 5 million airline miles. The jury flatly rejected the claims.

De Niro has won two Oscars over the past five decades in films such as “Raging Bull” and “The Deer Hunter.” He’s in the Martin Scorsese film “Killers of the Flower Moon” that’s in theaters now.

The EGOT winner’s famous male friends and lovers include Marlon Brando, a friend who wanted to sleep with her, and Jon Peters, the one-time hairdresser who became her boyfriend and enjoyed a short reign as one Hollywood’s most powerful and toxic producers.

To Streisand’s fans, sexism is the reason she became notorious for being “demanding” when she simply had a drive for control and perfection. The 81-year-old star also said she had to combat chauvinism while trying to do her best work, the New York Times said in a story about Streisand’s memoir. For example, Sydney Chaplin, Charlie Chaplin’s son who was her co-star in the Broadway version of “Funny Girl,” took revenge when she rejected his advances by verbally abusing her onstage to the point that she developed stage fright.

But another hurtful moment, Streisand said, came years later when she signed up to co-star with Dustin Hoffman, Ben Stiller and Robert De Niro in “Meet the Fockers,” the 2004 sequel to the 2000 hit comedy “Meet the Parents.” In “Fockers,” Streisand and Hoffman play the free-spirted, hippie-ish parents of Stiller, who wants to introduce them to his fiancee’s conservative father, a retired-CIA operative played by De Niro.

For the most part, Streisand said she had a positive experience on “Meet the Fockers,” the Daily Beast reported about her book. She had always wanted to work with Hoffman—whom she’d known since before either were famous—and had always liked De Niro, who continues to send her flowers every year on her birthday.

But Streisand said she was aggravated to learn about the huge pay discrepancy between her and Hoffman, according to the Daily Beast.

“This was the first time I felt the effect of Hollywood’s unequal pay scale for men and women,” she wrote.

“I didn’t ask what the other actors were making, but I was definitely hurt when I found out that Dustin was getting three times as much as me, plus a tiny percentage, which is significant on a movie that made $520 million,” Streisand said, the Daily Beast reported. “I was given some excuse about how I had been the last to sign, but the only thing that made me feel better was when my dear friend Ron Meyer, who was the head of Universal, gave me a bonus… the first and only time I ever got one. I guess he, too, thought it was unfair.”

But Streisand’s mention of being unfairly compensated for her work — compared to Hoffman — could remind people that the actor, who won best actor Oscars for “Kramer vs Kramer” and “Rain Man,” was accused of being one of Hollywood’s toxic men in 2017, in the months after sexual abuse allegations against producer Harvey Weinstein launched the #MeToo movement.

A total of seven women came forward in late 2017 to accuse Hoffman of sexual misconduct or assault in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, when he was at the height of his career. According to Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and other publications, two of the women said they were teenage girls when Hoffman exposed himself to them, while a third said the actor forced her to have oral sex with him in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., where he was staying while filming “All the President’s Men” in 1975.

Hoffman apologized to one of the women, a writer who said Hoffman harassed her when she was a 17-year-old intern working on Hoffman’s 1985 TV version of “Death of a Salesman,” the Los Angeles Times reported. However, he denied any wrongdoing, saying: “I have the utmost respect for women and feel terrible that anything I might have done could have put her in an uncomfortable situation. … It is not reflective of who I am.”