Mr. Irresponsible's Bad Advice

Mr. Irresponsible Meets Mr. Cruise

I'm not sure how or why, but my assistant Debbie managed to land me an interview with this Tom Cruise guy. I thought it went well, all things considered. For some reason, though, his "people" weren't pleased with it. And man, have they been steamed -- calling, emailing, threatening legal action. Which is really kind of funny, considering that threats of legal action are pretty much the air we breathe around here at Mr. Irresponsible World HQ.

Anyway, see the results here and judge for yourself. And then, if you want to strike a blow against the deadly hegemony of crybaby movie stars and their PR handlers, send the URL to your friends. There's a link right below. See? It's fun! It's easy! Best of all, the First Amendment will thank you, metaphorically speaking. And so will Mr. Irresponsible.

 

"I'm so, so sad... Hey! Get out of my key light or I'll have you killed! KILLED! So sad... "

People change, lives go in different directions, and sometimes it's inevitable that partners split. If you're in this predicament, you could do worse than follow the six-part example of actress Hilary Swank, who's splitting from husband Chad Lowe and handling it in the dignified way actors handle these painful, private things -- by spilling her guts to Vanity Fair.

1) Marginalize him. Getting, say, an Oscar? Thank everybody from your manager to your gardener, and "forget" to mention the man you've been involved with since you were 18.

2) Twist the knife. Getting, say, another Oscar? Ostentatiously remember to acknowledge your husband, turning it (and him) into an awkward punch line. Then sit back and enjoy as the cameras find him squirming in his seat!

3) Out him. If your spouse is, let's say, struggling to maintain sobriety after a difficult period of substance abuse, by all means feel free to disclose that fact in a major magazine cover story. The timing of this step is crucial: Let just enough time elapse that readers of the tabs will have forgotten your initial statement that you "continue to be friends." A month should do it.

4) Undermine, undermine, undermine: "(Drug addiction is) an enormous obstacle to overcome, and he's doing it," Swank tells Vanity Fair. "He's living a sober life. I know how difficult it is... "  And I would be the first one to feel terrible, Swank could have but probably didn't add, if the shock of public betrayal were to send him hurrying back to the dope. But ultimately that would be his problem, although I would continue to be proud of him for struggling to overcome it. Again.

5) Remember: Other people's problems are all about you, and your only defense is your own acuity. "I knew something was happening, but I didn't know what. When I found out, it was such a shock because I never thought he'd keep something from me. And yet, on another level, it was a confirmation of something I was feeling that was keeping us from being completely solid." So, you know: Phew. That worked out pretty well for her.

And finally, 6) Assume responsibility. A leeeeeetle bit of responsibility. "It takes two to make something work or not work," Swank tells Vanity Fair, proving that in some cases actors can do math in their heads. But, she adds in the last delicious little soupcon of malice: "Would I say that his substance-abuse problem helped us? Absolutely not." Bonus points here for answering the ridiculous rhetorical question that even Vanity Fair wasn't craven enough to pose.

Hey, here's an idea: When Vanity Fair hits the newsstands later this month, what do you say we all just kinda... go spend our money on something else?

Also, Rocket Scientists Pronounced "Brainy"

Is there anything more beautiful than the love between a celebrity and a major news organization -- or, in this case, Reuters? The wire service goes all shy and dewy this morning describing Julia Roberts' trip to the Tony Awards. To refresh your memory, Roberts is currently starring in "Three Days of Rain" on Broadway, and has drawn reviews ranging from the faintly positive ("I think she may have stunk a little less in Act Two") to the downright dismissive ("A lifetime of pain crammed into two and a half excruciating hours. I watch this performance and every unpleasant thought I've ever had coalesces into a vast, buzzing nimbus of misery. Imagine the worst toothache you ever had. Now multiply it by a million billion trillion. Now imagine having that pain and being seasick at the same time, and all the while a legion of demons are stabbing you in the eyeballs with poison-tipped pitchforks and screaming the awful, unnameable Song of the Damned. This performance is just a little bit worse than that").* With this as background, Reuters implies, Roberts' appearance at last night's Tonys constituted an act of classy selflessness rivalling Lou Gehrig's farewell at Yankee Stadium, not one more desperate attempt by a megalomaniacal publicity hog to shoehorn her mug into the public eye:

Hollywood's most highly paid actress, Julia Roberts, was panned by critics in her Broadway debut this year, but she may have won a few friends in New York at Sunday night's Tony Awards by eating humble pie...

Well, not so fast there, Reuters. A close examination of Roberts' remarks -- or for that matter, a quick scan over coffee and Danish -- reveals the self-congratulatory narcissism of the Movie Star lurking just below the skin of the Working Actor:

Roberts won a warm round of applause for acknowledging her lack of stage credentials: "I just want to take this opportunity to say that you people are insanely talented," the Oscar-winning actress told the audience full of Broadway stars.

This must have come as a tremendous relief to the Yale Drama graduates marooned in the highest balconies, or, more likely, unable to attend because they were waiting tables at Joe Allen. Good news, kids! Julia Roberts thinks we're talented! Now we can soldier on with our miserable hand-to-mouth lives for one more lousy year! Hey, that's MY Caesar Salad!

And what to make of the fact that Roberts' encomium drew applause, rather than the puzzled collective "Wha?" it so richly deserved? Only this: Celebrities can say any obliviously insulting thing to any damn body they please, and the only response it's likely to draw is "Thank you, Sir, may I have another?" Which is why it's so wonderful to be a celebrity. But you don't need me to tell you that. You people are insanely smart.

 

*Not actual reviews.

In The Name of God, Don't Watch This

Gosh, we've seen so many different O.J. Simpsons over the years. He's been a Protean figure -- a Heisman-winning running back, a record-shattering pro, an actor, a murderer *... Now we learn we've hardly known O.J. at all. The real O.J., it turns out, is none of these things. He's a practical joker! A nutty prankster!  Taping a pay-per-view TV special/DVD to be called "Juiced," Simpson portrays an Elvis impersonator, a curbside orange peddler, and an elderly man leading a Bingo game. Oh yeah, also: In a hidden-camera segment, Simpson tries to get a used-car dealer to buy his White Bronco, claiming that "It was good for me, it helped me get away."

Get it?

The Simpson camp has had a little trouble getting its story straight on this. The producer of the special told the AP that Simpson "was not paid for the program," implying that he did at least knowingly participate, and wasn't loopy on Ambien or under the influence of a hypnotist or some other person holding one of those twirly hypno-wheels at the time the cameras rolled. Simpson's attorney, cutting the salami a little thinner, told the New York Daily News that Simpson isn't involved with the current project (proving that the only party who scuttles away from a sinking ship faster than a pay-per-view TV producer is a lawyer) and the footage probably came from a failed TV pilot Simpson shot three years ago. Oh, okay. Because three years ago the bit wasn't repugnant or anything. Why, three years ago it was a whole different world! Three years ago George Bush was in the White House and we were stuck in the intractable quandary of an unwinnable ground war in Iraq!

But I digress. The real question is: Seriously now, how much more loathsome can this guy get? Either he's doing it for the dough, which he'll use for greens fees and dinners at Joe's Stone Crab instead of paying down the $33 million civil judgment still hanging over his head, or he's doing it for attention. And wouldn't you think he's had enough of that? Hasn't he been in the papers quite enough for one lifetime? It seems a little tone-deaf, no? Why, a person who's that nakedly sociopathic could be capable of... anything. If I were advising Simpson, for which there isn't a Brink's truck big enough to back up to my door, my advice would be short and sweet: Hey, Juice? Publicity, good or bad, is not your friend. Keep your head down. Stay out of the papers. Stay off morning drive radio. And if some sleazy hack with a Digicam tries to get you to prank somebody for profit, get in the Bronco and drive away. It isn't like you don't know how.

*Redacted on advice of counsel

I can't believe that awful thing you printed about me. What did you say your circulation is?

Gosh, what would advice columnists do without pop stars and flavor-of-the-week starlets? Left to our own devices, we'd have to come up with purely theoretical examples of bad behavior.  And those always pale next to the gossamer glowiness of a case study like Lindsay Lohan, who is reported by AP to be "appalled" at a Vanity Fair cover story in which she admits to a bout with bulimia.

The Vanity Fair cover story has become a sort of pseudo-confessional in which people like Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie pretend to exorcise their personal demons, or at least those personal demons that pass the scrutiny of high-priced flacks and handlers. It is to print what the day-after stint on Jay Leno's couch is to television -- fake catharsis and real publicity in one grand, symbiotic sweep of cynical self-interest. So it seems a tad squirrelly of Lohan to claim now that the magazine misrepresented her words. (For the record, VF "stands by its story," a formulation that in other times was used to shore up journalism like Woodstein's reporting on Watergate and the New York Times' publication of the Pentagon Papers. Times, it seems worth noting, have changed.) More than that, though, it seems like a violation of the seamy deal that underlies these stories, the implicit contract that trades a tightly-controlled simulacrum of emotional nakedness for a free ride on the nation's newsstands and morning TV shows. Put simply: You can't have it both ways, honey. You can't pimp your problems to the glossies and then claim to be shocked, shocked when they put them on the street. And so to today's manners lesson: When you make your deal with the Devil, own it. It's unattractive to turn up at the Devil's doorstep a few days later claiming that you didn't know he was the Dark Ruler of, like, the whole underworld.

Still, Lohan and her team may not have completely lost their minds. When they decided to disavow the bulimia part of the story, they at least did it in a way that's consistent with the cash economy of Hollywood fame. They issued a statement to that well-known bulwark of truth and rigor, Teen People. The beat goes on.

I Invite You To Bow Down Before Me

Say, here's a tip we can all use to make our dealings with retail establishments more satisfying and productive.  If you and a group of friends find yourselves in the vestibule of a high-priced boutique at, say, one minute to six in the evening, just as the underpaid employees are wearily preparing to close the store and return to their drab little apartments after spending eight hours on their feet catering to the whims of over-entitled crybabies such as yourself, and the employees take a moment to discuss the relative merits of allowing a large entourage to enter the store within seconds of its posted closing time -- make an international stink. Cry, bitch, moan and caterwaul. Use your nationally-syndicated talk show to rake the company over the coals. And just when the thing seems about to die down, "invite" the outfit's president onto said show to crawl sixteen feet across the brightly-lit studio floor and kiss the toes of your Jimmy Choo shoes. (Note: The "invitation" to beg for mercy in this fashion is analogous to the "invitation" convicted killers are extended to walk the Green Mile.) Remember to insist that it is you and you alone who is being singled out for unfair treatment. Use locutions that would be identified as insane in a person less famous, powerful and feared, like: "That's what was embarrassing... I know the difference between a store being closed and a store being closed to me." See? It's simple! And if all else fails, buy your audience's love with bread machines and baskets of soaps, for which the manufacturers have, in the great American tradition, received promotional consideration.

Demi-Terrible

I know, I know. It'd be shooting fish in a barrel to tee off on today's AP story slugged "Report: Are Demi, Ashton Trying For Baby?" The trouble is, sometimes the fish are so plump and delicious that you just can't resist. And so... avanti!

According to Demi Moore via AP's cheap, hacky retread timely summary of a Harper's Bazaar story, Moore, 56, and Kutcher, 11, met "not through Sean Combs, as everyone said, but through a mutual friend, Sara Foster, an actress who's known Ashton from the day he arrived in Los Angeles." Why, I remember it as if it were yesterday, the day everyone was saying Sean Combs introduced Demi Moore (then 63) and six-and-a-half-year-old Ashton Kutcher. All I wanted to do was walk down to the newsstand and get the papers, but there were huge clots of people on every corner talking animatedly about how Sean Combs had just introduced Demi Moore (at the time a youthful 74) and a still-in-Underoos Ashton Kutcher, and you just couldn't get anywhere. I swear, it was like VJ Day and the World's Fair rolled into one. Oh, by the way: "...a mutual friend, Sara Foster, an actress who's known Ashton since the day he arrived in Los Angeles"? Am I wrong, or does this awkward, overbuilt sentence fragment bear the stamp of someone who has either learned it phonetically or is having it fed to her through a tiny earpiece by Peggy Siegal? No matter: That's good eating! Moore continues, apropos of marriage:  "I feel that we are and that we don't need something formal, so to do so isn't a big deal one way or another." (Translation: The lawyers are still fine-tuning the pre-nup.) And say, how do Moore, who is amazingly vigorous for a woman nearing her centenary, and Kutcher, whose posterior fontanelle is almost completely closed, like to spend an evening? Oh, you know, just like you and me: "Sharing a bath with one another and watching Court TV," Moore confides, and then adds the extra little fillip that helps the anecdote turn the corner from stiffly unbelievable to creepily specific: "Snuggling up naked." Okay then!

There's more -- isn't there always? But honestly, you have things to do today and so do I. From 11 AM to noon, for example, I'll be rubbing my eyes raw in an attempt to expunge the image of these two nitwits curled up naked in a bathtub watching "Forensic Files," while Moore's half-grown children play with matches and live ammo in the next room and pine for the days when their positive male role model was Bruce Willis. Then lunch. Then I plan to spend the afternoon thinking nostalgically of a time before every dope with a steel will and a couple of lines in IMDB got to impose her every thought on the American populace, and before the American populace had nothing better to do than listen.

Jen to Brad: My Publicist Isn't Angry, She's Just Very Disappointed (In Your Publicist)

Mr. Irresponsible took a few days off last week, if by "off" you mean "holed up with my lawyers plotting revenge on my enemies," while Debbie held the fort here at Irresponsible World HQ. (If by "held the fort" you mean "put her Chuck Taylor high tops up on my desk and ate donuts, and don't try to deny it because there are crumbs in my paper clip tray.") And when I got back and checked the Web, what did I find? One more example of how media and celebrities collude in an awful conspiracy to expunge the remaining traces of decorum from our public life.

Here's a CBS.com story about Jennifer Aniston "breaking her silence on her break-up with Brad Pitt." But wait, before we get into the dish let's pause a second to admire its provenance. In a dazzling example of the echo-chamber effect so often seen in stories like this, the silence-breaking doesn't actually originate with CBS.com, because CBS.com exists largely to repurpose content from the broadcast network, and man, would Mr. Irresponsible like five minutes in a quiet alley with the guy who came up with the word "repurpose." So the Aniston interview took place on CBS's air, right? No, of course not; what are you, new in town? Aniston talked to Vanity Fair, CBS's "The Early Show" did a segment on the article, and a precis of that is what ended up on the web site. And if that isn't a triple-play from Hell, then I don't know baseball.

Okay, now we get to look at what Aniston actually said. "She said she still loves Brad very much," according to VF via "The Early Show" by way of CBS.com, as parsed by People editor and "Early Show" contributor Jess Cagle. (Still with me?) Cagle goes on to opine that "I don't think [Aniston's remarks are] a plea for sympathy." No, of course not, because that would be cheap and showy; this is a good honest plea for publicity, which is totally different. Aniston also thinks Pitt is "missing a sensitivity chip" for appearing in a photo spread that showed him playing house with Angelina Jolie. (This just in: Fading TV star confirms celebs actually robots!) The story continues:

In addition to those photos, Aniston expressed shock over the ones that appeared in tabloid magazines of Pitt and Jolie, and her adopted son Maddox in Africa. Why the surprise, considering all the rumors about the affair? As in so many marriages where this happens, there is an element of denial, Cagle says....

Cagle apparently had time to slip out and get a degree in psychology between segments. So he's got that going for him, which is nice.

It goes on like this for quite a while, but honestly, after a paragraph or two I started to get that bees-living-in-my-head feeling and had to take a break and do something mindless, like vacuuming the donut crumbs from my paper clip tray. And when my vision had cleared I thought: Here we see the unfair balance of power that exists between celebrities and normal people. If you or I go through a divorce we handle the aftermath in the traditional way -- we whisper spiteful half-truths about our exes to friends in the checkout line. There's an appropriateness to that. It's one-to-one. Celebrities, however, have a metaphorical bullhorn in the willing shills and lackeys of the press. (Hmmm. Note to self: Get a bullhorn.) Not only will somebody from Vanity Fair come to Aniston's house and collect her grievances as if they were the precious droppings of a rare and exotic bird, he will then bear them away to be published and broadcast and Web-enabled literally all over the world in a dizzying cycle of endlessly-reciprocating vituperation.

Is there no more proportionality in the world? Does everybody in this seedy little ménage à trois absolutely have to get a spread in Vanity Fair out of it? When my own divorce was finalized some sixteen years ago I didn't take to the public prints to deliver artful little knife-blows to my ex; I did what a man does, which is to say I drank a volume of Captain Morgan's equal to the displacement of my own body every 12 hours for two weeks. Then I got up and went back to work, pausing only to pick an extremely ill-advised bar fight with a guy who turned out to be one of the early practitioners of what would now be called "Ultimate Fighting." Do you see what I'm saying? Where is that kind of dignity today?

London Calling

American singer Omarion, who is in London but was uninjured in today's terrorist attacks, has issued a press release asking for prayers that he remain uninjured. I wouldn't have believed it either, but here it is, via PR Newswire. The release is short and sweet, untroubled as it is by any mention of the three dozen people known so far to have been killed, or the several hundred who were hurt.

Mr. Irresponsible doesn't have a comment on this, because some breaches of manners -- or, for that matter, of humanity -- speak for themselves. I did want to alert you, though, that if you hear something that sounds like grumbling under your feet tonight, it's Satan trying to figure out how to clear a little room in Hell for one more jackass pop star and his toadying PR reps.

UPDATE, July 8: In fairness, because Mr. Irresponsible is all about the fairness, Omarion is claiming that he never sanctioned yesterday's press release, and that he has no connection with the PR firm Reuters identified as its source. This doesn't exactly square with information on the firm's web site about an Omarion record release party held in May. So it seems fair to assume that the firm did at one point work for the singer, and that as of yesterday at least one person there was under the impression they still did. Semi-mysteriously, however, the firm's site seems to have been taken down since I looked at it yesterday, and its URL (do I have that right -- "URL"?) now points to Yahoo. But Google -- do I have that right? "Google"? -- does have a cached version of the site's front page, containing the item about the Omarion party.  So you be the judge. Or don't. What do I care? This much I do know: There is in all likelihood one very-recently-fired junior PR drone wandering around Los Angeles today, wondering in a shell-shocked fashion if it's too late to apply to law school. 

What I Learned From Michael Jackson (Besides The Moonwalk)

Mr. Irresponsible has, for more than 20 years now, plumbed the very depths of human dysfunction.  (And believe me, the depths of human dysfunction need some plumbing.) So Mr. Irresponsible isn't easily stunned. Mr. Irresponsible knows the score, he's been around the block, he's seen some things. But Mr. Irresponsible has never, ever seen anything like the statement Michael Jackson's put up on his web site.

It isn't that you expect quiet good taste from the man who built Neverland. That would be unrealistic. Wouldn't you think, though, that after a protracted trial in which, acquittal or no, his reputation was dinged seemingly beyond repair, a guy would think, Okay, well, time to putter quietly in the garden for awhile and regroup. Or Maybe I'll finally get around to painting the garage. Or Man, those New Yorkers have really been piling up around here -- time to stack 'em up by the old easy chair and have a nice read! But that guy wouldn't be Michael Jackson... and darn it, we just wouldn't want him to be, would we? No, the Michael we want is the one who constantly redefines the term Big Crazy, the one who exuberantly dashes our dwindling hopes that maybe this traveling circus of celebrity and jurisprudence and journalism will just quietly pull up stakes and slip out of town.  And that's the Michael we get on his website, in full, eye-gouging, bandwidth-hogging Flash animation.

The introductory fanfare, which makes the music they play at the opening of the Olympics sound like a kazoo solo, is only the beginning. Then -- wait for it -- yes! It's the montage of "Great Moments in The History of Mankind Which Previously Did Not, But Now Do, Include The Acquittal of Michael Jackson"! You'll stare in horror as Jackson compares his acquittal to the birth of Martin Luther King, Jr.! You'll gasp in frank disbelief as Jackson compares his acquittal to the fall of the Berlin Wall! You'll reach for something heavy as Jackson compares his acquittal to Nelson Mandela's release from jail!  (Lemme see, what was Mandela in jail for again?... I can't remember, exactly, because right at the moment I'm being pummeled into insensibility by the quick cutting and relentless pacing of this Flash thing I'm seemingly unable to stop watching. But whatever it was, I'm sure it wasn't a bigger injustice than what The Man did to poor Michael Jackson... What? No, I'm afraid I've lost the ability to remember anything that happened to me before the beginning of this animation, which is now actually seeping into my brain and wiping out my childhood.)

Fortunately, there's a lesson here. It's in the form of a simple "DO and DON'T" formula, and it applies to even those among us who don't live on vast Central Coast ranches with private zoos and amusement rides and a secret underground lair stuffed with death rays and ex-Staasi hitmen and a crack cadre of the deadliest female Ninjas the world has ever known. (I'm just assuming.)  The lesson is this:

Life is capricious, and frequently unjust. So if you should be fortunate enough to hit the karmic Lotto, in whatever way, shape or form it applies to you...

DO grab your hat, button up your overcoat and head out to enjoy the second chance the cosmos have dealt you. You may even, if you so choose, issue a cheery "So long, suckers!" as you glide on out the door.

DON'T hang around buttonholing strangers in the street and haranguing them about about how unfairly you were almost treated.  The life of the average citizen is as studded with real unfairness and random misfortune as a tasty cinnamon bun is with delicious raisins. All that post-game yammering about the historic scale of the injustice that really, no fooling, came this close to happening to you...? It's simply unattractive. So take the great big bus pass the Fates have given you and use it to go away and quit bothering people.