Spike Lee, age 12, brought home a sod of grass from Shea after the Mets won the ’69 World Series and hid this favorite possession under his bed. After a few days, Mama made him throw it out. “It began to smell,” he says.
Liev Schreiber: “Once as a boy I saw a safe combination being turned and wrote it down and stole it. I had an outlaw youth. At night I’d sneak back into a place I worked. I only took a small amount so they never caught me. When she learned that, it broke my mother’s heart.”
Britney Spears’ mom, called a power-hungry stage mom because she has a convertible and wears designer clothes, got a Lexus one Mother’s Day.
Cyndi Lauper: “I don’t believe I’m less attractive because I’m a mom. Truth is, I was a mother before I had a kid. OK?”
Françoise Gilot, mother of Picasso’s daughter Paloma Picasso: “Always absorbed in my work, I was no slave to my children’s activities. It’s not good to invest too much of your creativity in your children. Mine think I’m aloof. No. I love them more than they know. But I am detached. I don’t weigh on them. Paloma’s career shows she understands I gave her something greater than holding on. I gave her herself.”
Ally Sheedy: “When my mother finally decided to come out as a lesbian, I said, ‘I’m happy you told me, but I already knew.’” Mom Charlotte later said: “I wasn’t hiding it from the world. I just felt it’s too complicated to bring up with my children before they were ready sexually.”
Christina Aguilera’s mom, Shelly Kearns, violinist and pianist, helped her daughter get onto “Star Search” at 8 and later “The New Mickey Mouse Club,” which also spawned Britney Spears, two ‘N Sync singers and Keri Russell.
Tom Cruise recalls that at LA’s “Eyes Wide Shut” premiere his mother was “shaking and saying how incredible it was and what a moving piece of work it was.” Philip Seymour Hoffman was also there with his mother. They then introduced the maternal pair and, said Cruise’s mom: “I love watching films with my son. I can always make him go and get the popcorn for me.”
Tom Dreesen, who’s working Feinstein’s Sunday, Mother’s Day night: “My mom was a bartender and played Frank Sinatra’s music on the jukebox. When I was opening the show for Frank I took her backstage, and she said: ‘Thank you so much for taking care of my son.’ And he said, ‘Your son takes good care of me.’”
David Duchovny: “First time my mother was asked for her autograph she came to me all elated and said, ‘Twenty-five years of teaching and nobody’s ever asked me for an autograph!’ ”
Michael Jordan’s mum, Deloris: “None of my children were spared a whipping. In eighth grade, the school suspended Michael because he left to go to a candy store. I punished him by bringing him to the bank where I worked and made him sit in the car three days doing homework. He was never suspended again.”
Ben and Casey Affleck’s mom, Chris: “My conservative parenting style wasn’t always easy on them. Ben wanted a dog. I made him walk an imaginary dog for weeks to prove he could take care of it.” Says Ben: “My sweet kind mother brought out my female side — empathy, consideration, manners, humility, lack of pretension.” His first big paycheck bought Mom a brand new Jeep.
Matt Damon’s Cambridge College professor mom Nancy Carlsson-Paige, strongly anti-materialistic, about her son on magazine covers: “Hundreds of pages of advertisements for things nobody needs. My beautiful boy is on the cover. Really, at some level, he’s just being used to sell products.”
Hulk Hogan’s ma taught piano . . . Steven Soderbergh’s was a dream analyst . . . Julianne Moore’s, a psychiatric social worker from Dunoon, Argyll in Scotland . . . Paul McCartney’s mum, a midwife . . . Chris Noth’s a former NBC news woman named Jeanne Barr . . . Charlize Theron and mom have matching fish tattoos . . . Toni Braxton’s, a cosmetics instructor . . . Matthew Perry’s mother Suzanne was press secretary to Canada’s former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau . . . Noah Wyle’s, a nurse who dressed him in surgical gauze for Halloween.
Grace Jones’ seamstress mom would buy patterns from Givenchy, which Grace then sewed for herself . . . Brendan (star of tomb-raiding mummy movies) Fraser’s mom sold cemetery plots over the phone . . . Tommy Lee’s mum, Vassilikki Papadimitriou, was Miss Greece in the ’50s . . . Alan Alda’s mother, Joan Brown, was Miss New York lots of mayors ago . . . The one who persuaded ex-radical Katherine Power to turn herself in was Courtney Love’s psychiatrist mother.
Leonardo DiCaprio cast mom, Irmelin, in a small nonspeaking part as a tourist in an opening crowd scene of “The Beach” . . . Directors Peter and Bobby Farrelly’s mother’s a nurse. Her sons cast Mariann in all their films. In “Me, Myself & Irene,” Jim Carrey flashes her at a train station.
Benjamin Bratt’s Puerto Rican wife Talia Soto: “I was born Miriam but needed a more exotic sounding name. At my mother’s instigation, I changed it to Talisa.”
Denzel Washington: “I did all sort of jobs — garbage man, post office, factories, processing plant midnight shift. Only my mother stopped the path of my three closest teenage friends — one murdered, one died of AIDS, the third doing 25 years. I remember what it’s like to have $1 in my pocket. I’ve still got my unemployment book, and I intend to keep it.”