By Belinda Luscombe

YOU CAN TAKE THIS NOMINATION AND...

No one would expect the woman who played Thoroughly Modern Millie to throw a hissy fit. But when she was the only one in her Broadway hit Victor/Victoria to be nominated for a Tony Award, JULIE ANDREWS put her foot down. In front of an adoring matinee crowd, she announced that she was bowing out of the Tonys. "I have searched my conscience and my heart, and I find that I cannot accept this nomination--and prefer to stand with the egregiously overlooked," said Andrews, still in costume. Perhaps most overlooked: director Blake Edwards, Andrews' husband, whose career could have used a boost from a Best Musical nomination. Says Tony Adams, a Victor/Victoria producer: "There seems to be a bias against commercial shows." The Tony organizers might have reveled in all the attention were it not for the fact that Andrews was to be the big draw for the televised awards show in June. All that remains is her name as a nominee--against her wishes. There will probably be no Andrews performance or even presence to draw viewers to the low-rated honors. The ruckus, however, has been good for Victor/Victoria: ticket sales have jumped dramatically.

WHEN STERN GOT STERN

Apparently, serving jail time for statutory rape isn't enough notoriety for JOEY BUTTAFUOCO. The unemployed car mechanic started a ruckus when he accused Amy Fisher's father of abusing his daughter. "Diddled" was how Buttafuoco put it on Howard Stern's national radio show. Elliot Fisher took a dim view of this remark and phoned in to deny it vehemently. After that, things got really ugly--even Mary Jo Buttafuoco joined in--and Stern found himself doing something uncharacteristic: restoring sanity.

TOO MUCH IN CHARACTER

The title of comic MARTIN LAWRENCE's 1994 movie, You So Crazy, came back to haunt him when he was noticed screaming and acting up in the middle of traffic at a busy Los Angeles intersection. "He was yelling, 'Fight,' you know, 'don't give up, fight the power,' or something like that," a witness told TV station kcal. Police restrained the star of Bad Boys, who was carrying a handgun in his pocket, and delivered him to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where his doctor diagnosed his condition as exhaustion and dehydration. His publicist said drugs weren't involved and that Lawrence (said to be taking in $5 million per pic nowadays) should be back on the set of Nothing to Lose with Tim Robbins this week.

THREE TALL-ISH WOMEN

They're wearing black, so you know they're serious. CHER, DEMI MOORE and SISSY SPACEK have just wrapped HBO's three-part drama If These Walls Could Talk, the story of unplanned pregnancies in the 1950s, '70s and '90s. Moore produced the series, and Cher's episode is her directorial debut. "I loved it. It was the coolest thing since men," says Cher. "But it was much more exhausting than I thought. I had to sneak away to pee." Cher also plays a doctor who gets shot, which she didn't like as much. "I was afraid of the squibs [the fake bullets]," she says. Let's hope the critics hold their fire.

MAKING UP IS HARD TO DO

JANET COOKE became an instant ethics lesson for a generation of journalists after her 1980 Pulitzer-prizewinning story on "Jimmy," an eight-year-old heroin addict, was found to have been fabricated. Now she has resurfaced in the pages of GQ magazine, telling her story to onetime colleague and lover Mike Sager. Cooke says that as a child she learned to lie as a way of avoiding her strict father's temper. Unfortunately, liars who indulge their vice publicly and get caught don't have many career options. "I'm in a situation where cereal has become a viable dinner choice," says Cooke, who is divorced and works part time at a department store in Kalamazoo, Michigan, for $6.15 an hour. She's talking now, says Sager, to "retrieve her name from the files of infamy," and to rev up her failed writing career. "What I did was horrible," says Cooke. "But I don't think that in this particular case the punishment has fit the crime."

SEEN & HEARD

Back in 1988, when he was just another guy getting off a subway train in Harlem, Samuel Jackson caught his foot in the door and was dragged 300 ft. along the platform. He sued, and has finally been awarded $540,000. To paraphrase Jackson's character in Pulp Fiction, "You will know what my name is when I lay my vengeance upon thee."

HE WANTS TO SERVE

Honesty, they say, is the best policy, but for 1970s tennis bad-boy ILIE NASTASE, in his campaign for mayor of Bucharest, it's the only policy. "Everybody's lying in this city," says Nastase, who clearly isn't going to flatter his way into the job. "I want to be the first Romanian who didn't lie." Nastase, a little chubbier and wrinklier than when he won every Grand Slam title except Wimbledon, but with the same swinging '70s hairstyle, got the notion to run after a friend persuaded him to join the ruling Social Democracy Party last September. "In the beginning it was a joke," he told Time Central Europe bureau chief Massimo Calabresi. But now Nastase is addressing the campaign with the full force of his misanthropic charm."I'm 35 years ahead of these people--just my mentality is enough. Who do they think they are?" Apart from honesty, he has few plans. "My ambition is to do a good job. I never plan anything."