LIVE BLOOPERS FOR LUNCH:
CELEBRITY F***UPS vs. PUBLIC ACCEPTANCE
Wont as I am towards blind hero worship (Saint Stevie! Queen Mariah! Lord Reznor!), I long ago came to the conclusion that even the most noble of "famous people" -- be they scientists, politicos, or just plain show-biz folk -- have as much clay in their feet as you or I, and are capable of doing outrageously stupid things in public. Main difference, of course, is that their behavioral brain-farts get splashed over Entertainment Tonight, three or more supermarket tabloids, and CyberSleaze, and they have the better part of the global village to explain/apologize to. (You or I merely get in deep doo-doo with The Significant Other.) Said train of thought being inspired by two fairly recent celebrity boo-boos. To wit:
First, Eddie Murphy gets pulled over for giving a ride to a transsexual hooker with an outstanding arrest warrant. The Murph, no doubt mindful of (a) his wife, (b) his kids, and (c) his recently-revived-from-the-dead film career, quickly issued a statement to the effect of "I was just being a Good Samaritan & helping someone who needed help." Meanwhile, the TS in question -- as well as several others who have since surfaced, via the usual sleazy media outlets -- are insisting "Naw, Eddie's been into this stuff for years!" Now, I've been wildly ambivalent about Murphy at least since his ill-advised singing career (although I hope, for the sake of general decency, that he is telling the truth), but this little imbroglio reminds me of two past incidents:
Jessica Hahn, post-Jim Bakker sex-scandal, throwing in her lot with Playboy magazine - and cross-town rival Penthouse running the equivalent of a smear campaign in retaliation ("I WAS JESSICA HAHN'S MADAM!")
the Hugh Grant/Divine Brown coitus interruptus. (Hugh, of course, had it even worse than Eddie, but at least he did the manly thing, stammering out his mea maxima culpa's on Larry King's show and getting on with his life. What I could never figure out is -- why? Most men I know would give one of each redundant organ to breath the same air as Liz Hurley.)
A different -- albeit no less mortifying -- incident occurred last week when Lucy Lawless, a/k/a TV's favorite butt-kicking Amazon "Xena," achieved a reported life-long dream and sang the National Anthem before a major-league hockey match. (I won't even go into the logic of an Aussie singing "The Star-Spangled Banner;" it would be akin to, say, Da Flatline belting out the "Marsellaises" at the Moulin Rouge prior to the can-can girls coming out.) Anyway, Loo's skimpy "Uncle Sam" costume proved to be a bit too skimpy on the final verse, when she raised her arm and...
Um, how can I put this delicately? Let's just say the port pontoon of the S.S. Xena momentarily broke the surface.
(A less delicate description might be [switch to Paul-Hogan-as-Crocodile-Dundee voice] "G'day, mate. Throw another tit on the bahbie!")
Never having given a rat's ass about televised sports in general, I didn't find out about the blessed event until CyberSleaze wrote it up a coupla days after the fact. The article included a link to a Xena fan site where the photographic evidence had been originally posted. But by the time I got there, the webmaster had removed the pix in deference to his favorite actress. His original rationale for posting the photos in the first place may have been "all in the spirit of good clean celebrity bloopers," but when thousands of dirty-minded Web-surfers stormed his gates, he decided that he respected Ms. Lawless too much as a person to further contribute to her public humiliation. Or sentiments to that effect. In other words, the guy got an attack of the galloping guilts (including, no doubt, the universal unspoken dream "Oh my God, what if the object of my desire actually visits my site?") and, in his eyes, Did The Right Thing.
It certainly gives an unexpected resonance to last month's issue of Yahoo! Internet Life, where breast-plated covergirl Guess Who? was quoted as saying "I always seem to get into trouble online..."
(And yes, the Web being what it is, The Evidence Is Still Out There. And no, I ain't a-gonna tell you where, either -- do the legwork yourself! [You might want to ask my Uncle Scoopy, though...])
«switch to Tommy-Lee-Jones-as-TwoFace voice» "What's yer point, big boy?"
Damned if I know. I guess my point, if any, is that Eddie and Lucy -- and all other famous faces that wind up with egg on them -- should be thankful we're living in a day and age where the general public won't ride you out of town on a rail for being an asshole in public. ("Your mantra, should you choose to accept it, is: 'This, too, shall pass.'") One can almost imagine silent-film starlet Mary Miles Minter (whose career self-destructed when a pair of her undies were discovered as a "nookie souvenir" in the home of slain director William Desmond Taylor) looking down from Heaven and fuming "Sh*t! I knew I was born fifty years too early!"
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