I was practically catatonic. I wanted to burst into tears and run out of there sobbing, but I couldn’t move. My dad has a nickname, Tony the Tiger, because anytime anyone asks him, “Hey, Tom, how you doing?” even if he’s feeling shitty, he says, “I’m gr-r-reat!” I remember him telling me once, when I asked if he was really always great, “Nobody really wants to know if you’re having a bad day.” He always put up a positive front no matter what, and that has stuck with me in trying times.
“Gr-r-reat!” I must have told the publicist. I think. I’m not all that sure what the fuck came out of my mouth, but I apparently agreed to finish the other rooms. Thanks for nothing, Dad! Somehow, I did three more interviews with Bruce’s costars, even though I’d just been kicked in the gut with steel-toed boots and could barely breathe. I do not remember a single one of them, or the ride home, for that matter. I just kept replaying that one sentence in my mind over and over again.
Me: So you get lei’d a lot?
Bruce: (Blank stare.)
Me: So you get lei’d a lot?
Bruce: (Look of death.)
Me: So you get lei’d a lot?
(My head explodes as he smiles at the scattered pieces dripping down the wall.)
I think it’s safe to say I wasn’t singing “Side by Side” out the car window on the way home.
I may have come away with all my limbs attached, but I was a thoroughly broken person after that day. I couldn’t get past the humiliation of my complete misfire or the fact that I had somehow misjudged a moment so badly that it resulted in insulting my hero. Until that day I had prided myself on knowing how to read a room. And to top it off, the universe didn’t show me any sympathy. I had to continue like it was business as usual, booking four or five junkets a week, as if nothing had happened. I had to walk into what now felt like a volatile situation and face the biggest celebrities in the world, knowing what I know now. That I suck!
If you watched the interviews I did right after Bruce, like Chris Rock in Head of State or Adam Sandler for Anger Management, I appeared fine on the outside, but inside I was a total mess. I would go into an interview paralyzed with fear. Like a baseball player who gets beaned in the head by a pitch and doesn’t want to step foot in the batter’s box again. My insecurity and self-doubt were causing me to turn in on myself. I’d walk into the office every day and be bombarded on all sides by me. The person I blamed for putting me in this shitty place. The person I hated for not being good enough. All the edit bays had my face on them. Ugh! All I could hear was my voice over and over, echoing throughout the building. SHUT HER UP! I couldn’t get away from myself.
My brief encounter with Bruce Willis had completely shattered my confidence.
The Japanese say you have three faces. The first face, you show to the world. The second face, you show to your close friends and your family. The third face, you never show anyone. It is the truest reflection of who you are.
In the celebrity world, it’s slightly different. The first face is the one that matters the most to them. It’s the face they show to the world. The second face is reserved only for people who can help them get ahead in business and their family members. But by far the most interesting and disturbing is who gets to see their third face, the face that even psychotic serial killers elect to hide. That face is actually their day-to-day working face. The face everyone they work with or interact with professionally gets to see. I know: it’s nucking futs!! Now, you may ask why a celebrity would choose to display the face most people in the world elect to hide? Well, the simple answer is, because they can. Everyone around them either works for them or needs something from them, and therefore will tolerate pretty much any kind of behavior. The sky’s the limit. You’ve all heard the stories. Some are legendary. Most are true.
It’s easy to lose yourself in an environment where morality is regarded as more of a mild suggestion than a requirement. There are some who are able to keep it together and maintain their sense of decency, but unfortunately, there are many who can’t. They ultimately lose all connection with faces one and two, becoming entirely absorbed by face three. We’ve all seen it. Stars we love and admire who turn out to be intolerable douchebag divas. I’ve always felt that to survive celebrity intact, you can’t keep your faces separated and be so calculated. You never know if you might wake up one morning and find yourself in a career-ending, couch-jumping spiral or in a J. Lo music video with your third face on display by accident. I think you need to bring all three of your faces together and take the best and worst of you and find a middle ground and try to be that person to everyone as best you can. You may find this shocking, but I believe the key to that is developing a sense of humor and humility by coming to terms with the profane side of yourself.
I believe profanity is paramount, profanity is important, profanity is truth, and profanity is reality. It is, in many ways, that which defines us all. I’m not talking about your run-of-the-mill cursing here. That’s just one kind and it happens to be my favorite. No, I’m talking about the vulgarity, the blasphemy, and the sacrilege that fills all of our lives and completes the picture of who we really are and not who we pretend to be. I think it’s critical to be in touch with the profane side of oneself and to acknowledge that every day our greatest challenge is to maintain inner balance. After all, the measure of who we are is built from the good and the bad, the yin and the yang. You’ve got to let the light and the dark mix; otherwise your life is a lie. That’s why I never trust anyone who says they don’t swear. I call bullshit!
Celebrity is intangible from its inception yet profound in its impact. The lucky few who are given the gift of harnessing its power have two roads they can take. They can use it to inspire new generations of people, demand social justice, create political change, or simply put a smile on the faces of their fans by making them feel special and appreciated when they run into them. Or they can piss in the face of humility, degrade the professionals they rely on for their careers, take a shit on the hearts and souls of their fans, and make sure that their riders are filled with insecure, self-aggrandizing horseshit like all-white rooms, no eye contact, and rose petals refilling the toilet after every bowel movement. All this so that some poor bastard making minimum wage might get fired because the rose petals weren’t Brazilian long stems. Unfortunately, road number two has had a massive traffic jam for decades.
Whether any of us admit it or not, we are all heavily influenced by our perception of the famous even though we rarely get to actually know anything real about them. I know I am. In some ways, they are our society’s living gods. There’s a level of worship and accolade given to them that is rarely justified, and for the most part, with much help from reality TV, fame tends to shine its whitewashing spotlight on the very worst of humanity. Ultimately, we are primarily left with their life’s work to help fill in all the blanks for a more accurate picture of who they really were. Problem is, defining a person’s character based solely on the gravity or artistic value of their body of work tends to eliminate their profane side. We are then left with only a shadow of who they were as opposed to a portrait of who they are. Which is a shame because, sometimes, it’s okay to learn the truth about our famous figures. We’re all human, after all. We make mistakes and we grow. In some ways it would make them more relatable. But sometimes, no matter how great their contribution, some people deserve to be forgotten.
The good news is times have changed. The Internet and social media have made it virtually impossible to hide the truth. Generation Now is hungry for information, short on sentimentality, and couldn’t give a fuck about your legacy. It’s not enough to be a great actor and director if you’re an anti-Semite, racist, and a bigot. It’s not enough to be a racial barrier–breaking trailblazer and one of the greatest comedians of all time if you’re a serial rapist. It’s not enough to be one of the most recognized television personalities of the last forty years if you’re a pedophile. You can fill in the blanks. Don’t get me wrong, things are nowhere n
ear perfect and there are plenty of idiots who still use their fame to evade justice, but as Fox Mulder would say on The X-Files, “The truth is out there,” and it’s just a Google search away.
Here’s what I didn’t know about Bruce before he walked into the room. It might not have helped that just weeks before I interviewed him, Demi was rumored to be dating cocksure new action hero Colin Farrell. Basically, the new (much younger) Bruce Willis. With a full head of luscious brown locks.
Also, Bruce’s own director on Tears of the Sun, Antoine Fuqua, had publicly called him “a pain in the ass” to work with. Nobody ever snitches on each other in showbiz; the business is too small and nobody wants to burn a bridge. Unless the person is an absolute monster, and even then it’s tempered. “Pain in the ass” was likely an understatement. That’s why we rarely know what a star’s real personality is like. Though sometimes it rears its ugly head organically. Take Christian Bale and that now-infamous audio leak. In my mind, Christian is unquestionably one of the best actors of our time and absolutely one of my favorites. I mean, if you weren’t mesmerized by his disturbingly sexy performance as serial killer Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, then I think we’ve now identified the huge void in your life that makes you feel like you’re always the dull one in the room. Fix it!
The first time I ever interviewed Christian was for a small film nobody’s ever heard of. On a half-assed, makeshift red carpet on which three of the six journalists covering were photographers.
I innocently asked him, “What made you want to be in a small indie film like this?”
To which he sneeringly responded, “First of all, I don’t appreciate you calling it a small indie film!”
All righty then! (In my best Ace Ventura.) I instantly knew I had had enough. Every time I interviewed Christian after that, he always came across as surly and took himself way too seriously. Of course, nobody ever made issue of what an unpleasant interview he was because we all just hid it under the all-encompassing veil of “method acting.” So when someone on the set of Terminator Salvation leaked an embarrassing, expletive-laden audiotape of him going ballistic on a crew member, I couldn’t help but smile. I guess we all have lessons to learn. By the time The Fighter came out, it was clear to me that a brilliant and smart publicist who wasn’t afraid to speak her mind must have told him, “If you want an Oscar, you need to play nice.” And surely enough, at that junket, everyone walked out of the room going, “Who the fuck is that guy?” Christian was friendly, smiling, and sweet, and gave all of us press everything we wanted. And guess what? He won the Oscar. Funny how that works, isn’t it? And he’s remained cool ever since. He’s actually fun to talk to now. Whether it’s an act or real, it doesn’t matter because it shows respect and appreciation, and that’s more than enough. His profane/dark side is what makes him good at what he does, and I am down with that. But his ability to control it is what makes him someone worth rooting for again.
Some people in this business just take themselves too seriously and lose sight of the fact that it’s called entertainment because that’s what it’s supposed to be. Bitching about it makes about as much sense as dedicating your entire life to working in the underground Brazilian fart porn industry only to complain every single day about all the excessive flatulence you’re being exposed to. What part of Brazilian fart porn did you not understand?
But most of the time, nobody knows when an actor or actress is a turd sandwich in real life because of this veil of secrecy. Let’s face it, the Mafia’s got nothing on showbiz when it comes to keeping secrets. I’ll give you two blind examples (call me a coward or someone who isn’t quite ready to throw in the towel on their career): this award-winning actor, considered by many to be one of the most beloved actors of our time, is super saccharine on camera but an absolute monster behind the scenes who berates and humiliates those around him as soon as the cameras stop rolling. Another huge female star of beloved romantic comedies has a reputation for hating women with a vengeance. No, it’s not Katherine Heigl. She’s always been sweet to me. In fact, here’s a side of Katherine Heigl you may have never seen before in a press interview. Boisterous, bawdy, and beaming with joy, she’ll flip the switch and make a believer out of you. I was excited about her hilariously dirty film The Ugly Truth and had some important questions. Lucky for me, she had all the answers:
Katherine: I know that was fun; we get to say COCK! They kind of forgot how far we went.
Me: Blowjobs always first?
Katherine: Blowjobs trump everything else!
Me: As they kind of should … I mean really.
Katherine: I guess.
Me: Quick and dirty. (slapping hands.)
Katherine: I know. Right!! (With a huge smile on her face, about to laugh.) Oh, god … starting to blush a little.
Me: Anal sex is jah … you know, I don’t know, I think I’m gonna put that last. I’m gonna keep that one … cause lingerie …
Katherine: I think you can have your delusions, if you want them. But you’re gonna have to go out there and take one for the team. (Laughing out loud.) Find out! Find out the truth!
Me: It’ll be a pain in the ass. (After which I flash a big smile.)
Katherine: (Just leans forward and starts laughing hysterically.) NICE!! NICE!!
Me: I feel like I can help. (Laughing.)
Katherine: (Really enjoying this moment.) That’s really fuckin’ clever!
Then I just had to ask about the over-the-top orgasm scene. I mean come on … if not me, then who? If not now, then when?
Me: Tell me about um … you know … sort of getting off in this film … on this film. You did … quite well. (Katherine starts to chuckle.) I was very impressed.
Katherine: It was a long day. Let me tell you. They were fake, but even if they were real, you wouldn’t wanna orgasm that many times in one day. You may think it would be awesome; I don’t think so.
Fuckin’ see this movie … that’s fuckin’ not fuck but you know, you get it!
I’ve never understood “historically” douchey actors and actresses. The ones who act like the press and fans are a nuisance and claim all they care about is “the work.” Uh, excuse me, but without fans and the press, there is no work. And if you don’t want any of the hoopla that comes along with being on TV or in movies, I’m pretty sure there are some community theater companies and public-access TV stations, all around the country, who would love to have you perform on their stages. Hell, you could even get involved with the bake sale after the show!
I have an idea. Since you’ve made it this far into the book, I think it’s safe to assume that we’re now friends. So, just between us, I’m going to tell you a little secret. I’m going to reveal two ways that you, sitting at home, can tell exactly who the divas are while you’re watching your favorite talk show. First, look for what is commonly referred to as the “one-reply bitches.” For the unfamiliar, ORBs those are celebrities that answer questions with one or two words or a short useless sound bite. I bet you already have a list in your head of potential candidates. Second, look for those who appear to be suffering from what is universally known as”post-fartum depression.” This is, essentially, the projection of an overall sense of disappointment or anger that the world is not recognizing your fart with the level of enthusiasm you feel it deserved. PFD is very easy to spot and tends to reveal itself in either a facial expression, body language, or both. Please feel free to speculate, and tweet or Instagram me using the hashtags #OneReplyBitches and #PostFartumDepression. It’ll be our little inside joke.
Anyway, it truly is ridiculous how lucky those of us who actually get to work in this business are. Especially considering what other people have to do to make a living in this country. I couldn’t fathom the idea of walking around treating people like I’m trying to win a game of Asshole Bingo. It’s too much work. I had heard about prima donnas ruining interviews, but I always thought that my carefree approach would cut right through that shit.
Nope!
Douchebag trumps friendly almost every time.
I don’t mean to burst any bubbles here, but there are more than a few celebrities that try to shove their false sense of entitlement and abject misery down the throats of relatively harmless junketeers. Because why be satisfied with having your ass kissed all day in four-minute increments when you can have these powerless people wear it as a hat, too? One guy I have no problem calling out is Tommy Lee Jones. Alas, this is not much of a revelation. He’s done such a masterful job of alienating so many people that there have been many articles written about what an insufferable bore he is. He used to get off on scaring people (he’s done it to me twice). I heard he’s flipped over tables and refused to be interviewed based on what a journalist was wearing. I’ve seen so many people run out of his interview room in tears, and yet in the public eye, he’s respected and revered as a serious ac-TOR. Where he gets the energy and why he ever felt the need to do this is beyond me.
I mean for fuck’s sake! It’s just a movie we’re there to promote, right? Not the reemergence of the black plague! We, the press, all show up to celebrate these films. Whether they are great or horrendous, we extend you the courtesy of pretending that each one is a celluloid miracle. Then we enthusiastically come to you like eager little children desperate to be acknowledged. We then graciously listen to you pontificate about the backbreaking and laborious nature of acting in a movie. We wholeheartedly empathize with your poetically Shakespearean reflections on the emotional razor’s edge that your artistry demands of you to walk on, in every performance. Never once bringing up the fact that all this pseudo-philosophical rhetoric seems pretty heavy-handed for a Steven Seagal film. We let it go. That’s right, Tommy—we even let THAT go. So, perhaps, the very least you can do is to chill the fuck out and display a modicum of human decency, a breath of humility, or even an ass-hair of graciousness! And I’m not just talking to Tommy. You all know who you are, A-listers Gone Wild. Swallow your pride occasionally; I’ve heard it’s not fattening.
Everybody Curses, I Swear! Page 31
