Tattle | It's the new order: Preggers Alba gets engaged

F

IRST COMES love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in a . . .

no, no, no, that's not how they do it in Hollywood.

Jessica Alba, who announced earlier this month that she's expecting, is now engaged to her boyfriend and the baby's father, producer Cash Warren. No wedding date's been set.

"I can confirm that they are engaged," Alba's publicist said in an e-mail yesterday. The couple is expecting their first child in late spring or early summer.

Alba, 26, stars in the thriller "Awake." She first gained attention as an action star on TV's "Dark Angel."

The ranks of badly behaving young Hollywood women are like shark's teeth: when one falls away, there's another positioned right behind it, ready to move up and into trouble.

Thus into the mug-shot spotlight comes actress Mischa Barton, who has much better taste in clothes than Britney Spears, Jamie Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton and the rest, but apparently shares their poor judgment.

She was arrested at about 2:45 a.m. Thursday for suspicion of driving under the influence of alcohol and for possession of marijuana, after sheriff's deputies saw her car straddling two lanes of traffic in West Hollywood.

Did we mention she doesn't have a driver's license?

Barton played Marissa Cooper on "The O.C." from 2003 to 2006, when her character died in a car crash.

In May, the actress was hospitalized for two hours after an antibiotic she was taking interacted badly with alcohol.

Asked to comment on the Spears family saga while talking with "Extra," Lindsay Lohan's father, Michael, dove deep into the gray matter between his ears and surfaced with this gem:

"People just don't realize what it's like to live under the whirlwind that families like mine and the Spears and other families out there are caught up in. It takes a lot to hold it together."

Let's see: Your child suddenly becomes a huge star, making so much money that everybody else in the family can quit his day job.

Presumably, as that child's parent you're already doing all you can to steer her on the right path and to love, support and guide her. And you're doing some of this by example, right? So now you have even more time to devote yourself to being a good parent, don't you?

Define "a lot," Mike.

It's good being first lady. But it's not too bad being an actress, either.

So why not do both, reasons LisaRaye McCoy-Misick, wife of Turks & Caicos Islands premier Michael Misick and star of the CW's "All of Us."

"There's definitely a difference between the celebrity LisaRaye and the first lady LisaRaye," she reveals in the latest edition of JET magazine, out Monday. "I don't have to stop acting. I call myself a 'New Millennium First Lady.' "

LisaRaye said she spends about "60 percent" of her time in Turks and the rest back in the States.

"I'm all over the place. As much as I love it [in Turks], I fiend for L.A. I go to events and I see my peers there, and it makes me get my swagger back to say, 'Yes, I've worked 12 years to build my name, my image, my brand. I'm not giving that up.' "

We love it when Jack Nicholson makes a movie, such as the upcoming Rob Reiner comedy, "The Bucket List," because then he gives interviews to papers like the Los Angeles Daily News, wherein he says stuff like this:

_ On the '70s golden age of filmmaking: "Well, we built 'em to last. . . . The time period you're talking about, we were very fortunate. They distributed all of the foreign films here. Every week, our age group expected to see a masterpiece from somebody, Bergman or Fellini or Antonioni or somebody. And we did, every week! But like a lot of good things, you think it'll be there forever. It doesn't exist now. I mean, my kids haven't seen most of my movies."

_ On director Francis Ford Coppola's recent quote that stars like Nicholson, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro were, essentially, only in it for the money these days: "When I talked to him I said, 'Look, if you've been in the newspapers, you know either you did say it or you didn't, and then you get in trouble with your girlfriend or your co-workers.' So I'm not about to jump on anybody for that. Plus, all he said was that I'm well-off. I can't fault him for that." *

Daily News wire services contributed to this report.