People: Jul. 2, 2001

Take That, Sigmund Freud

You can't put a price on good therapy. Unless it's TV therapy. Then it costs $1.6 million for half an hour. According to Variety, that's how much KELSEY GRAMMER will make for each episode of the 2002 and 2003 seasons of Frasier--a total of $75 million for two years' work, the most anybody has ever made for a TV acting gig. (Jerry Seinfeld made more, but he was a producer of his show too.) Grammer's people would not comment on the story, noting that the actor doesn't like his salary made public. While $75 million seems like a lot of money, it's worth bearing in mind that Grammer has had to act like a stuck-up, self-absorbed snob for almost two decades (counting his years on Cheers) to earn it. Moreover, it's only 10 times as much as he got when Frasier started in 1993. Most important, it means that after only 12 episodes, he will have made enough money to pay back every American who went to see Down Periscope.

THAT'S SIGNING, NOT SINGING

One of the more unexplored agonies of celebrity life is the sheer repetitiveness of it all. Eric Clapton has to keep playing Layla; Julia Roberts has to keep smiling. And author DAVID SEDARIS has to keep singing the Oscar Mayer wiener song in the voice of Billie Holiday. (He did it on air once and has never lived it down.) So when Sedaris, the only person to rise to prominence by recounting on the radio his experiences as an elf at Macy's, took to the road to promote his fifth book, Me Talk Pretty One Day, he started charging. That is, he puts out a tip jar at his book signings. "I started saying, 'I'll sing it for $20.' And the next night, I upped to $50," he says. Oddly, people ponied up. So he began to widen his alternative-revenue stream. "If someone comes up with a cell phone and says, 'Talk to my mother,' that's $10. It's $5 for signing human flesh or any book I didn't write." He does pretty well; in 10 days he accrued $1,000. Please, nobody tell Gore Vidal.

BASIC INSTINCT, THE SEQUEL: BEHIND THE SCENES WITH STUNTMAN PHIL