It's been a while since most of us have seen Star Jones, and there was an audible gasp in the room when Court TV flashed a picture of their newest talk-show host on the two large screens that flank the Beverly Hilton's International Ballroom this morning.

And another when she actually walked on stage, looking svelte -- and toned -- her hair in a sleek bob, and wearing a pair of fashionable-looking glasses.

So apparently they didn't just pop Star's head on someone else's skinny body, after all.

There aren't even clips available for Jones' live show, which is scheduled to launch Aug. 20 and which she promises won't just be actors talking about what their movies are about (stop me if you've heard this before). She didn't want to say nasty stuff about "The View," from which she was so famously fired (though she thinks they need a permanent host who's a woman of color).

So talk quickly turned to her new look, with one reporter suggesting, gently, that she might need to reintroduce herself to the audience, she looks so different.

Star, though, didn't want to talk about it. At least not with the likes of us.

"I know that people are curious," she acknowledged. "I changed completely from the way I looked when I first started on television...In the coming months, I think I will have answered every question" about it.

Just not to a roomful of reporters who've flown in from all over the country, charged with scooping up a few facts from the pile of promotional drivel that the networks think it's their job to force-feed us.

"It's taken a long time for me to talk about it...and this is not the format to do it," she said.

"I recognize very clearly that my viewing audience is interested," Jones said, adding that if she talked to us, "there's one reporter who would be very annoyed with me."

Would that reporter be her former "View" boss, Barbara Walters?

"She didn't ask."

Larry King?

"Absolutely not."

The sparring continued for some time, until one reporter finally informed Jones -- who, by the way, told us she's still Star Reynolds when she's cooking her husband's dinner -- that she was in the process of triggering a public-relations disaster.

At which point, she grudgingly gave a few details about her coming revelations: "I actually wrote about my experience in the past four years. It's not a book, it's a magazine" article.

We then threatened to pull out her fingernails one by one (only kidding) at which point she gave up the name of the magazine.

Glamour.

Which, come to think of it, is exactly the place where I'd expect to find a story about the weight-loss success of a woman who in the past has been perhaps less than forthcoming about how exactly that weight loss was achieved. And may, for all I know, continue to be.

But since I've now gone down this sorry road, I should point out that no one during yesterday's "Weeds" session asked the waifish Mary-Kate Olsen a single question about her somewhat alarming appearance, much less how she achieved it.

Some things we just might not want to know.