But since it's Sopranos actors who are caught up in two of Hollywood's scandals du jour, it looks like the only ones who'll be going to the mattresses are a bunch of lawyers.
On Friday, a federal judge ruled that organizers of New York City's Columbus Day Parade can bar cast members of HBO's mobster drama from participating in this Monday's festivities. Parade organizers and NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg have been butting heads for days over the issue, after Bloomberg invited Sopranos cast members Lorraine "Dr. Melfi" Bracco and Dominic "Uncle Junior" Chianese to march with him in the annual event.
"I'm sort of walking along, invite two Italian-Americans, want to say thank you on behalf of the city," Bloomberg said. "And bada-bing, bada-boom--all of a sudden they're down my throat. Okay?"
(Um, someone's been watching his Godfather DVDs a little too much lately, but okaaaay...)
Parade organizers, aka the Columbus Citizens Foundation, contend that the mega-popular drama portrays the "Italian-American subculture in the most unfavorable light" and asked that Bloomberg be barred from inviting guests to accompany him in the parade. Judge Jed Rakoff approved the filing, and Bloomberg announced on Friday that he would not participate if the parade organizers insisted upon the event marching forward sans Sopranos.
Instead, Bloomberg said, he, Bracco and Chianese will do lunch on Monday in the Bronx.
"It's my honor to celebrate Columbus Day there with the mayor and Lorraine," former Bronx resident Chianese told the Associated Press. "Where you celebrate the holiday is not important. Who you celebrate it with is what counts."
And while that drama about the TV drama continues to unfold, another group of Sopranos cast members have landed on the hit list.
In the new issue of The National Enquirer, Emmy winner James Gandolfini (who, in case you've been locked in a trunk, portrays Tony Soprano) is the subject of an explosive cover story that delves into the details of the actor's messy divorce from wife Marcy.
The supermarket tabloid reveals that the estranged Mrs. Gandolfini's divorce filing accuses her hubby of, among other things, snorting cocaine with several unnamed Sopranos cohorts, being a serial adulterer, flunking out of a rehab stint in upstate New York and being arrested in California on drunken-driving charges.
(Perhaps the star has just been taking the whole method acting thing to heart? After all, his Sopranos wise guy loves nothing more than to knock back a shot or five before indulging in an extracurricular fling...Another girlfriend, in fact, is on the horizon for Tony in the current fourth season of HBO's most popular show ever.)
"If the divorce case goes to trial, Marcy could drag a whole set-load of Sopranos cast members onto the witness stand, engulfing the show in a drug scandal as she tries to prove her claims that her husband did drugs with his fellow actors," states the Enquirer article, which goes on to unspool Gandolfini's counterclaims that his wife is an emotionally unstable woman who threatened suicide and hinted that she might harm their three-year-old son, Michael.
Marcy's attorney, however, tells the New York Post that the Gandolfinis have been in the midst of an amicable period in the divorce proceedings, and that the Enquirer article, which casts more of the marital aspersions on James Gandolfini (who's been linked in the press with Lora Somoza, a director's assistant who he met on the set of The Mexican) than on his soon-to-be-ex, is very upsetting to Marcy.
The Enquirer piece, by the way, is the second article in recent months to boil the braciole of the Sopranos-connected. Last month, star Tony Sirico (a.k.a. "Paulie Walnuts"), was ready to pull his white-winged hair out over an Enquirer story that claimed he was battling throat cancer.
"I had a dead saliva gland removed from my tongue," Sirico told the New York Daily News, after denying he had a cancer scare and threatening to sic his attorney on the tabloid. "[And] I started lifting weights a little too soon after my last operation. Bada-bing, I ripped one of my stomach walls. I gotta get a little nip and tuck."
(Again with the "bada-bing" --do any of these guys watch anything other than The Godfather?!)
Back to the "family" business at hand, PR reps and attorneys for the Gandolfinis refuse to comment further on the couple's divorce or the gossip surrounding it, while HBO reps couldn't be reached to remark about the allegations' impact on the show. (Because the case was filed in New York, all court documents have been sealed per state law.)
But try to spin the situation though they inevitably will, this is a story that's not likely to be whacked any time soon.