THE BELL CURVE:

Every once in a while, a seemingly innocuous story in the back pages of a local newspaper can make the day for hungry columnists seeking a morsel and suddenly offered a feast. Last week two such seedlings landed in our laps, and I hasten to plant and water them herewith.

The first appeared in the Los Angeles Times and concerned the pending homeless state of a 21-foot, six-ton bronze sculpture of John Wayne — forever known as The Duke — atop a horse.

The second was a front-page story in the Pilot about a new cable TV reality show called — honestly — “Top This Party: Orange County.� Both fit rather precisely into the vision of Orange County, Calif., in every corner of the U.S. north of San Francisco and east of Las Vegas, nurtured for the past four years by an adolescent soap opera called “The O.C.�

For a period in the 1960s and ’70s, Duke shilled for Great Western Savings and Loan, and five years after he died, the bank commissioned the sculpture for display at a Wilshire Boulevard plaza in Los Angeles, outside a 10-story building that housed one of the bank’s branch offices.

Ten years later, the bank (by then Washington Mutual) sold the building to Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler magazine. The bank didn’t, however, sell the Duke to the nation’s leading purveyor of porn. Only the building.

So for the past 13 years, Duke and his trusty horse have stood guard on the home of Hustler, which should have given both parties some uneasy feelings.

Especially since the base of the statue shows a cowboy being trampled by stampeding cattle and then being buried, scarcely Duke’s prevailing movie image.

Since he isn’t around to express himself, we can only imagine what Duke must be feeling from wherever he hangs out today. Since I did a half-dozen magazine profiles of him over the years, I have some basis for speculating that he would find all of this very funny.

The guy who rode a tank onto the Harvard campus to accept a dare from the Harvard Lampoon to “appear in the most radical, the most intellectual, in short, the most hostile territory on Earth� to defend his political and philosophical views would scarcely be daunted by Larry Flynt.

The Hustler publisher, in turn, told a Times reporter that a statue of comparable size celebrating male anatomy would, in his view, better serve the cultural bent of the building housing Hustler magazine. Thus, said Flynt, he would not feel badly if Duke took up residence elsewhere.

All this takes us to Newport Beach where efforts are underway to accomplish just that. A spokesman for Washington Mutual said the bank has been contacted by city officials and the John Wayne Foundation about bringing Duke home, hopefully in a setting more appropriate than either the Hustler building or the airport named for him.

Newport Beach City Manager Homer Bludau acknowledged that the city was involved in preliminary conversations, labeling its acquisition as a “possibility� and preferring not to get into “details� at this point.

If we do acquire the statue, however, it might be wise to skip the years of debate and angst and — in keeping with current local views about effective governing — just go directly to the ballot box to decide where his new location should be.

If the Duke does come home, that might well constitute a theme for a party to compete for attention in the new cable Lifetime reality show where Newport Beach and Las Vegas are — according to a recent Pilot story — alternating sites for parties intended to eclipse the ancient Roman orgies. If the remains of “Top This Party� are ever excavated a few centuries hence, they should help explain why our civilization collapsed.

All this is the brainchild of a local party planner named Brian Dobbin who started out doing kids’ birthday parties and has graduated 20 years later to guest lists that include Bengal tigers, flown in for a jungle-themed party he planned. He called being in the presence of the tigers “terrifying and humbling at the same time,� which might be one of the great all-time understatements.

The way this works is that very rich people get Dobbin’s services and TV exposure for their party by picking up all the bills.

Dobbin told Pilot reporter Brianna Bailey that one of his first projects, for example, was filming a James Bond-themed singles bash at a 20,000-square-foot mansion featuring a live jazz band and a corps of models dressed in gold. The hostess, heiress and businesswoman Caren Lancona said she’s already thinking of ways to top the $150,000 party.

The final word goes to Dobbin’s executive producer Mechelle Collins who said: “You definitely have a lot of eccentric people in Newport Beach a lot of excess.�

Yeah. Understatement again.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.