You can suck up to Beyonce all you want. But if Bey doesn’t want to come to your event,it’s not happening.

TIME Magazine put Beyonce on their cover last week and named her the Most Powerful something in the world. It was all to promote the TIME 100. But at last night’s dinner reception for the annual issue, Ms. Knowles was too busy to put on  a frock and come uptown.

Mind you, Beyonce is not on tour and doesn’t live in New York.

From the looks of things, a lot of the TIME 100 didn’t show up. Pharrell did, because he was paid, and he played, for the audience.

The writers of the song “Frozen” came, because seriously, that’s the last we’re going to hear from them.

Most of the Hollywood crowd stayed away, too. Amy Adams made it. But Matthew McConaughey and Kerry Washington were AWOL, as were Robert Redford, Miley Cyrus, and Benedict Cumberbatch, Robin Wright, and Oscar winning director Steve McQueen.

Also missing: President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Vladimir Putin, and Angela Merkel. They did manage to get New York senator Kristen Gillibrand and Senator Scott Walker of Wisconsin. Kim Jung Un sent his regrets.

Why keep giving this event if few show up? Publicity and promotion. But most of the guests who did attend were “New York fillers”: celebs who live here anyway, and look like they’ve been plucked from a movie premiere list. They aren’t on the TIME100. But they don’t need a hotel room. Seriously: Ronan Farrow? Rand Paul? Padma Lakshmi?

Nothing compares to TIME’s 75th anniversary bash at Radio City eons ago, May 1998. Joe DiMaggio, Muhammad Ali, Henry Kissinger, Dr. Kevorkian, Kurt Vonnegut, loads of movie stars like Sean Connery, Lauren Bacall, Mary Tyler Moore, Mel Brooks all in black tie. Those were the days, my friend. Those were the days.

At least Seth Meyers got to poke fun at the crowd:

Bob Hoskins, the great star of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” and “Mona Lisa,” died today at age 71 from pneumonia. Last year he announced he was suffering from Parkinson’s Disease. Hoskins was nominated for an Oscar in 1987 for “Mona Lisa.” He had two dozen other acting nominations. Sad, sad news. Here are some clips from his best performances:

EXCLUSIVE The Clippers story just gets more and more bizarre. Mac Nehoray, the lawyer for “V Stiviano”– not her real name by the way, as I reported a lot recently– has a crazy background. In 2003 he was suspended for two years by the American Bar Association from practicing law. Why? He ripped off a nun.

Not only that: the law school that gave him his degree opened in the year 1970 but didn’t gain accreditation until 2012. That’s four decades of lawyers who received basically useless degrees to practice law.

First the suspension. Here’s a summary from the State Bar of California, March 2004:

March 20, 2004

SIAMAK E. NEHORAY [#147168], 44, of Van Nuys was suspended for two years, stayed, placed on three years of probation with an actual 30-day suspension and was ordered to take the MPRE within one year. The order took effect March 20, 2004.

Nehoray stipulated to two counts of misconduct involving his client trust account.He substituted in to an auto accident case, but there was no written fee agreement. When the case settled, Nehoray received a $1,000 settlement check, but placed it in his client’s file rather than depositing it in his client trust account. More than two years later, he asked the insurer to reissue the check because it had expired. He deposited the new check in his trust account.After the client terminated Nehoray’s services and hired a new attorney, Nehoray took the settlement funds from his trust account and deposited it into his general account. The client disputed the way the money was distributed and in order to resolve the dispute, Nehoray withdrew $1,000 in personal funds, deposited the money in his trust account and wrote a check to the client. He stipulated that he commingled funds and failed to deposit client funds in his trust account.In mitigation, Nehoray has no prior record of discipline.

The accident case involved Sister Antoinette Pierre, of Massachusetts. She’s a nun, and he ripped her off for $1,000.

Nehoray is a graduate of the University of Laverne Law School in Ontario, California. It’s not Yale or Harvard, that’s for sure.

The school could not get accredited because its graduates had a history of not passing the Bar on their first try. You can read about it here: http://laverne.edu/campus-times/2012/05/law-school-aba-bid-begins-again/

I’ve emailed Nehoray and await a comment.

In the meantime: TMZ and everyone else continue to use “V Stiviano” as the name of Donald Sterling’s mistress. There is no one in the US who has that name. The mistress is named born María Vanessa Perez. She also goes by Monica Gallegos, Vanessa Perez, and Maria Valdez.

These two people brought down an NBA franchise and its multi- millionaire owner. These two people forced the commissioner of the NBA to make a public press conference, ban the owner from basketball forever, and instruct him to sell his team.

Wow.

Simon Cowell finally decided that Max Clifford didn’t have the X factor. Cowell today fired long time publicist Max Clifford. The 71 year old Brit was found guilty yesterday on eight counts of indecent assault on four girls. One of them was 15. He was exonerated of two other counts. Jurors couldn’t  reach a verdict on one additional count.

The Clifford scandal has gone on for quite a while in the UK. But Cowell decided to wait until now to break ties with him formally. Clifford had represented Cowell in England for over a decade.

Clifford is a celebrity himself in the UK, and maybe the most successful entertainment publicist ever. But now the Guardian newspaper is reporting that most of his celebrity clients are cutting ties.  Clifford’s website has been removed. Sentencing is on Friday.

Donald Sterling has been banned entirely from the NBA and ordered to sell the LA Clippers by Adam Silver, NBA Commissioner. He’s also being fined $2.5 million, the maximum amount allowed. The  money will be donated to charity. Sterling is banned from everything– attending, owning, thinking about the Clippers or the NBA.

In a press conference happening now, Silver expressed his outrage and disgust over the Sterling tapes. He said the NBA had determined it is Sterling on the tapes with his girlfriend. If Sterling doesn’t sell the Clippers, the NBA could force him to do it or kick the Clippers out of the NBA. Silver says an NBA committee will form and move forward immediately.

Sterling did admit to Silver that it was his voice on the tapes, but didn’t express any other sentiment– including remorse.

I agree 100% with Commissioner Silvers findings and the actions taken against Donald Sterling

— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) April 29, 2014

Commissioner Silver showed great leadership in banning LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling for life.

— Earvin Magic Johnson (@MagicJohnson) April 29, 2014

Director-actor Rob Reiner wasn’t quite sure why the Film Society of Lincoln Center gave him the Chaplin Award at their annual gala last night. He told a high school reporter on the red carpet: Maybe it’s a typo,” a punch line he riffed on later, on stage when accepting the award.

Martin Scorsese, Michael Douglas, James Caan, Michael McKean, Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan, and a few others came and paid their respects, introduced some clips, but were kind of stiff at a 90 minute presentation. Rob’s legendary dad, Carl Reiner, and Tom Cruise, who looked older than Carl Reiner, sent video messages.

Missing from the event were people who might have livened it up, like Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer. Whoever put the show together didn’t seem to get that “This is Spinal Tap” launched the world of mock-u-mentaries.

But making a rare public appearance, and looking happy but low key, were Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta Jones. Catherine looked lovely, and was very approachable. This is the celebrity couple everyone roots for.

Reiner has a spectacular list of films from 1982 to 1994– “This Spinal Tap,” “When Harry Met Sally,” “Stand by Me,” “The Princess Bride,” “A Few Good Men,” “Misery,” and “The American President” are movies all directors would give their eye teeth for on an imdb list.

But after the 1996 “Ghosts of Mississippi” went way off track, Reiner did, too. “North” had already shown the situation was tenuous. Then  “The Story of Us,” “Alex and Emma,” the grossly sentimental  “Bucket List”, something called “Flipped” and a Morgan Freeman movie no one knows, “Rumor Has It” and a documentary about Prop 8 constitute the last two decades.

A clip was shown from his upcoming “And So It Goes” with Michael Douglas and Diane Keaton that looks like a remake of “Something’s Gotta Give.” (Also, it’s the first time I can recall a Castle Rock film not distributed by Warner Bros. Something called Clarius Entertainment has it.)

Last night’s show was heavily scripted, but some of the speakers brought a little life to the room. Michael Douglas is always in good form. It was fun to see Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan together again after 25 years. “You wanted a sequel to “When Harry Met Sally”? he said. “This is it.” Cute.

Scorsese noted that Reiner was playing a send up of him as the documentary director in “Spinal Tap.” Apparently, the parody was of “The Last Waltz.” Even though I was around for all those movies, I’d forgotten that. It made for a funny bit.

Reiner riffed a little bit, and was sardonically amusing. But he had no real prepared speech. It’s interesting: his movies, with the exception of “Spinal Tap,” are not at all in the same realm of humor as his dad or Mel Brooks, his obvious idols. I wish he’d said something about what draws him to material, or what mattered most in the making of the seven or eight really really good films.

Reiner did joke about Scorsese casting him as Leonardo DiCaprio’s father in “Wolf of Wall Street.” He said, “I wondered which was more preposterous: Leonard DiCaprio being Jewish, or me looking like him. I thought, I must be better looking than I am!”

A dinner followed in the upstairs lobby of Avery Fisher Hall.