TINSELTOWN SPYWITNESS.

Byline: Elizabeth Snead and Jennifer Sklar

'MEOW' MIXER: Forget the high-powered high jinks of Miramax heavyweight honcho Harvey Weinstein. There were far meatier scandals in the old days.

But few are very familiar with the long-whispered-about tale of the mysterious death of Hollywood studio exec Thomas Ince during a party on board the yacht of powerful media tycoon William Randolph Hearst in 1924. Among the party-goers: Hearst and his young mistress, beautiful actress Marion Davies, famous comedian Charlie Chaplin and a minor Hearst reporter named Louella Parsons, who would later become Tinseltown's most-powerful gossip columnist.

After the private sailing weekend, Ince's dead body was removed from the yacht, quickly cremated and an autopsy blamed his death on ``indigestion.'' That's the juicy whodunit detailed in ``The Cat's Meow,'' the new film of lust, jealousy and murder, starring Kirsten Dunst as Davies, Eddie Izzard as Chaplin, Edward Herrmann as Hearst, Cary Elwes as Ince and Jennifer Tilley as Parsons, directed by Peter Bogdanovich.

``Orson Welles first told me the story 33 years ago,'' Bogdanovich said at the premiere party at Alex on Wednesday night. ``I never thought about making a movie of it, but when a script arrived, I thought, 'I know this.' And I understood it. I guess I related to the characters.''

He's not kidding. The acclaimed director and author had a relationship with his ``Last Picture Show'' starlet Cybil Shepherd (who made a brief appearance at the premiere party) in 1971.

Casting this month's ``Vanity Fair'' blond babe Dunst as Davies seems appropriate, but casting Izzard, the British-born transvestite comic, as the womanizing Chaplin, is nothing short of inspired. ``Someone gave me tickets to see his show at Town Hall in New York and I thought he's brilliant, a brilliant actor,'' Bogdanovich said. ``Who better to play an English comic than an English comic?'' Who, indeed? But Izzard dumped the pat Chaplin tics (no bowler hat, 'stache or Little Tramp toddle) to play the troubled comic. And he didn't seek tips from his director on seducing gorgeous blond starlets.

``Lusting after women you can work out, even if you're not rich and famous,'' says Izzard, who calls himself ``a straight transvestite.''

``I've always been chasing after girls in my normal life. I just wanted to wear makeup and a dress while doing it. That's just part of me.''

Izzard's next part is a British soldier in ``All the Queen's Men,'' a period comedy starring ``Friends' '' Matt LeBlanc. ``It's about four soldiers who have to dress up as women and parachute into Nazi Germany to get another Enigma code-breaking machine because apparently you need a set, a matched pair or something.''

He calls the part ``a dream come true. It's off the charts for me to play an action transvestite in a war film because that's what I really am. I wanted to join the army when I was younger.''

After that, Izzard will appear in ``A Revenger's Tragedy,'' a Jacobean piece set in modern time and directed by Alex Cox (``Sid and Nancy''). Then he'll play a German gunslinger in a spaghetti western from the producers of ``Amelie'' that will shoot in Mexico and Spain. No one will ever accuse Izzard of playing it safe.

GENTLE BEN, MACHO MIRA: Love doth make fools of us all. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.

``If you're not prepared to make yourself vulnerable in a relationship and thus make a total fool of yourself, its not going to work,'' says Oscar- winning actor Ben Kingsley (``Gandhi,'' ``Sexy Beast''), who does just that in ``The Triumph of Love,'' the new film fairly bursting with bustles and codpieces, directed by Clare Peploe, Bernardo Bertolucci's wife. ``What I love about the film is that while it's a delightful diversion on one level, on another level its saying very interesting things about disguise, honesty, seduction and love,'' Kingsley says. ``Clare gets it all, and in a comedy she flips all these amazing cards across the table and they are all aces and kings.''

With one pretty amazing princess. When Peploe, who helped adapt the film from the play by Marivaux, first watched ``Love'' performed in Paris three years ago, she saw not a too-mannered period piece but a romantic farce with a delightfully modern heroine who uses both her brain and her body to get her man.

When the beautiful princess (Mira Sorvino), determined to fight a threat to her throne, sees the rightful heir after he takes a dip in the lake, she falls hard for the sexy prince (Jay Rodan) with blue eyes, long brown hair and tight buns (yup, you get to see them, too). So she disguises herself as a young man to infiltrate the estate of the prince's protector, a pompous philosopher named Hermocrates (Kingsley) who runs a strict No Women Zone. To stay close to Cute Buns, the princess must seduce (literally) both the philosopher and his smarter spinster sister, Leontine (Fiona Shaw), all the while making the beloved lad fall in love with her. No easy feat!

``It was daunting,'' admits Sorvino, at the premiere party at the Pacific's Arclight Dome theater, where a string quartet entertained the champagne-sipping guests, including Anjelica Huston, Rachel Weisz, and newly single filmmaker Ed Burns, whose engagement to supermodel Christy Turlington was recently called off. ``I was intimidated by the prospect of having to push so hard to make all of them love me. In the end, I just had to barrel through it. This role is all about confidence and just going for it.''

But Sorvino says playing a go-for-it guy is tough. ``The hardest thing about playing a man is that you always have to forge ahead, always be on the offense and never take no for an answer. That kind of persistence was actually kind of hard to do. It's not natural for women. We kind of back off at a certain point.''

CAPTION(S):

3 photos

Photo:

(1) IZZARD: The part's no drag

(2) BOGDANOVICH: He can relate

(3) KINGSLEY, left, SORVINO: Another triumph

Jean-Paul Aussenard/WireImage.com