Celebrity Follies

Two items of celebrity news actually affected me recently, and that’s odd for me.

Usually I could give a flying frack about celebrity lives, deaths, hook-ups, break-ups, and train wrecks.

If a celebrity, and this usually means movie/TV star, dies it’s either, 1) the case of an actor whose work I enjoyed who died after a rich full life with no regrets. In this category I remember: Jimmy Stewart, Robert Mitchum, Gregory Peck, Michael Landon, more recently Patrick Swayze… I could go on.

Or 2) it’s a sad, totally unsurprising case like Michael Jackson. Enough said, de moriturus nihil nisi bonum est.

The last celebrity death that really affected me was Brandon Lee. What potential he had! He was just at the position where he could make the kind of martial arts flicks with class his father wanted to.

Celebrity break-ups are boring and/or incomprehensible. Ethan Hawke, you had the choice of waking up every morning next to Uma Thurman (not to mention your kids) and you…? Never mind, I don’t understand it either.

That said, I have to say, Sandra Bullock’s shame and pain bothers me.

Sandra seemed, from her movies and from interviews, to be a genuinely nice person. You know, one of the eight percent of the people in Hollywood Dean Koontz assures us are neither stupid nor evil. And it really seemed like she’d married a real mensch – not one of these modern Hollywood pansies.

And he didn’t slip up, or even have an affair with someone who had comparable beauty and class, he – you know what he did. It’s all over the front pages of the magazines by the checkout counter.

I could feel the same way about Tiger Woods’ wife Elin, but she’s led a more reclusive life and we don’t know her as well. She has my sympathy just the same.

It’s not just the fact these guys stepped out on beautiful and to all appearances very nice ladies – it’s who they stepped out with. Porn stars, groupies, star-fracking tatooed perverts, all of whom turned out to be attention sluts eager to sell their stories to the tabloids.

Jesus guys, I understand wanting to get a little strange – every married man does. (And probably every woman, though I can’t speak for them, I haven’t got the equipment.) As a the well-known source Anon said, “Show me the most beautiful woman in the world, and I’ll show you a man who’s tired of fracking her.”

But as a bud of mine who damn near lost his family for the same kind of behavior told me, after realizing he might have lost his kids, “A man who don’t take care of his kids ain’t a man at all.”

And the ladies might heed the words of Dear Abby (the original,) “A woman who gets a man who’s cheating on his wife, gets a man who cheats on his wife.”

Of course, if the man is a gazillionaire who’ll pay plenty to be shut of you after he gets tired of you, that may not matter.

And I recently read the most surprising thing that I really hope is true about a celebrity.

Megan Fox, is a stone fox for sure. One of my biggest guilty pleasures of late was seeing her play the naughty-girl-with-a-heart-of-gold in the Transformers movies.

Jesus she was every nerds fantasy, and for this former nerd… well I thought she played the part of the woman I did in fact eventually marry rather well. In the Transformer flicks she’s clever, resourceful, loyal and brave, as well as dynamite in cutoffs and a tank top.

“I won’t leave Bumblebee!” she says about a comrade-in-arms she only recently thought was a car.

And when she takes the wheel of the tow truck and tells Bumblebee, “I’ll drive, you shoot,” yeah!

It was almost heartbreaking to think of her public personna as a slutty, bull-busting, bi-rhymes-with-witch.

And then she went and told the press, on the occasion of her engagement (is it official?) that she’s only slept with two men in her life, her first boyfriend and her fiancee, and couldn’t think of sleeping with someone she didn’t love.

Wow, is that true? Could it be that the screen Megan is the real one and the press-release party girl the fake?

I’d like to think so.

But the question that this prompts in my mind is, we used to have female Hollywood stars who projected purity in public to protect their careers, and had sometimes perverse, self-destructive, or just plain scarily weird lives in private. Now we apparently have the case of a pretty good person pretending to be all that, for career advancement.

What the heck does that say about our culture now?