Enter tree lover Peter L. Malkin, a real-estate heavyweight perhaps best known for his lengthy battle with Leona Helmsley over control of the Empire State Building.

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Peter L. Stern of Boston had a couple of attention-snatching, jacketed examples of This Side of Paradise (1920) and Flappers and Philosophers (1922), extravagantly inscribed by Fitzgerald, the latter presented to comic actor Edward Everett Horton.

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When the singer Luther Vandross was charged with manslaughter after his best friend died in a car accident with Vandross driving, L. Peter Parcher, "lawyer to the stars, " devised a slick defense: An olive tree had dropped its slippery nuggets precisely where the crash occurred on Hollywood's Laurel Canyon Boulevard.

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On television, Petherbridge is best known for playing the snooty sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey in the Dorothy L Sayers Mysteries.

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That news was first reported in Today's L.A. Times by Peter Spiegel, who's here now.

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In contrast, many others adorn their spaces with reminders of home and family, from the bobble-heads that fill the office of Peter Gruber, the co-owner of the L.A. Dodgers to the mementos of alma mater Oklahoma State University cherished by BP Capital Management Chairman and billionaire T.

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Dorothy L. Sayers's fat, black-bound Lord Peter Wimsey mystery, "Busman's Honeymoon" was one of the first I remember being given.

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