We need something up here that has nothing to do with anybody dying today. So here's one of the funniest guys I know, Pete Barbutti, from an old Tonight Show appearance...
For the last half-hour, Michael Jackson has been alive or not, depending on what channel you were watching. He managed to simultaneously be alive on Fox News, in a coma on CNN and dead on MSNBC. At one point on CNN, Wolf Blitzer was saying he was alive but in a coma while the crawl at the bottom of the screen said, "Michael Jackson dead." Eventually, they all got in sync.
There's something oddly appropriate about it. No one was ever too sure what was what with Michael, up to and sometimes even including his gender or race.
I worked with him in the late eighties on a proposed Michael Jackson cartoon show for CBS. He didn't want to do it but had been persuaded by associates that he had to okay the project for business reasons. So I found myself in the odd position of trying to come up with something he'd like...and all the time, he was saying, "I'm a rock star...I don't want to be a cartoon character." Eventually, I moonwalked off the project and the cartoon series idea evaporated. Michael got his way.
As long as his albums were making zillions, Michael always got his way. Like Howard Hughes squirreled away like a hermit in a Vegas penthouse, there was always someone to cater to his every whim...and no one to tell him he was crazy. I met with him several times at an estate he had on Hayvenhurst in the Valley, just south of Ventura Boulevard. The way the conversations went, I got the idea that if Michael one day decided he wanted Ventura flooded with chocolate pudding, that would have happened by the time I drove home.
Based on my admittedly-limited contact with the man, I naturally assumed that his later problems were an outgrowth of what I witnessed. When he thought the public would understand that he could sleep with children and that no one would assume anything sexual, there was no one who could tell him, "Uh, Michael, I don't think that will get the reaction you assume." That became my theory but maybe that's not it. Maybe by then, people were telling him that and he refused to believe it...or care how it all went down. When I knew him, he thought it would harm his image to be seen as someone who primarily appealed to kids. Ten years later, he failed to stop the world from thinking he was molesting them.
Others can and will write volumes about his appeal, his electricity on a stage, his musical innovations...and the darker, money-challenged events of his last decade or so. I remember a certain lovable, impishness about the guy that occasionally peeked out between statements of total self-obsession. At one point, he was showing me around the estate and introducing me to his pets, and we had an exchange I will never forget.
I had been hired to create and develop the proposed cartoon show because, among other reasons, Michael had expressed some affection for the Richie Rich cartoon show, which I'd story-edited. On the grounds of his mansion, after showing me his llama and some small amusement park rides, he turned to me and said, "I love Richie Rich."
I said the same thing you'd say to the guy. I said, "Michael, you are Richie Rich."
He had an odd look on his face. There was always, by then, an odd look at his face but this particular one looked like it came from his brain and not from a surgeon. Then he grinned and said, "Thank you." That's the Michael Jackson I'd like to remember. I wish it could have stopped there.
The only time I ever met Farrah Fawcett, she wasn't Farrah Fawcett yet. It was pre-Charlie's Angels, pre-poster, pre-phenomenon. She was one of umpteen clients for a p.r. and management firm that had me writing some of its press releases, and I think I rewrote her official bio, which didn't take long. She hadn't done much of anything and there was no reason to suspect she would. She seemed nice enough but had the attention span of one of those insects with a two-hour life span.
She had just been signed as regular on one of my favorite TV shows, Harry O with David Janssen. I don't recall if she'd filmed her first episode yet but I do remember that she'd never seen the show. Nor was she all that interested in it. It was just a matter of what the exposure might do for her career. I gather that at some point later in her life, she decided to pay some attention to the acting part of her profession...and she wasn't bad at it.
I never quite understood why, apart from the old right time/right place luck, she became so famous. Beautiful she was....but so were thousands of others who never got those breaks. My sense was always that she was the answer...and the question, pondered by some powerful folks in Hollywood, was "Can we create a superstar?"
Apparently, they could. But the sad part of that is that it usually doesn't last long...these days, about as long the aforementioned insect's life-span.
Amidst all the expected damnation being laid upon Governor Mark Sanford for admitting his affair, some people are praising him for not trotting out "The Betrayed Spouse" to stand beside him and show forgiveness and support. Of course, that presumes that "The Betrayed Spouse" is willing to even be in the same room with the guy, and that she doesn't want to prune his crotch with a hedge trimmer. But he did speak respectfully of her and the "Other Woman" and that showed a certain amount of class.
There's an extent to which these things trigger a little alarm in me that says, "None of our business." What happened in the Sanford marriage oughta stay in the Sanford marriage, such as it is. Unfortunately, too much of this lapses into the area that is the public's business: Did he use government funds to go call on his friend in Argentina? Did he leave his state leaderless because of it? How do we feel about our elected officials lying about anything, even topics outside their job descriptions? The John Ensign scandal reportedly involved a certain amount of salary increases to the mistress and maybe payoffs to her hubby, and that of course moves that one somewhat out of the realm of a family in-house matter.
An e-mail from a friend (who admits she enjoys these revelations more than she should) tells me it's all relevant because we have an interest in knowing the "true character" of our elected officials and hearing how he cheated on his wife tells us oodles about Governor Sanford's "true character." I tend to think we know less about our leaders in that sense than we think we know; that they all erect carefully-managed public images and that even the occasional cracks in the veneer, like getting caught in an affair, only give us a brief, arbitrary glimpse inside. Whatever is now true of Sanford's personal integrity was just as true two weeks ago. We just didn't know about it then.
Where I have trouble in this area is in the sudden Changing of the Rules. When Bill Clinton got caught in his little marital infidelity, no one who thought they could score some political yardage on the play was shy about exploiting every corner of it. You ever take a real look at Ken Starr's report? It went way beyond cataloging the history relevant to the specific charges and tossed in every explicit detail they thought might embarrass Clinton into resigning. At the very least, they thought descriptions of the presidential genitalia would drive his approval ratings down to around what we would now call Cheney Numbers.
And guys like Mark Sanford were fine with that. During that period, he said of Clinton, "I think it would be much better for the country and for him personally [to resign]. I come from the business side, If you had a chairman or president in the business world facing these allegations, he'd be gone. I think what he did in this matter was reprehensible." In fact, I don't recall a single politician who thought he could advance himself or his agenda by condemning Bill Clinton even saying, "You know, I'm not comfy with digging into folks' sex lives like this..." Sanford may wind up having to resign as governor of South Carolina but it won't be because he decides it's better for the state and for him personally.
So here's what I'm wondering about...
Politicians of all parties get caught this way. If it's been a few weeks since a Democrat was nailed, don't worry — it'll all average out. But leaving Clinton aside — they really ganged up on him — it seems to go a little worse on Republicans. That's because they all seem to have these sanctimonious, Bible-laden quotes in their past in which they condemn anyone who strays even slightly over anything sexual. So that leaves them open to greater charges of hypocrisy, and I guess their supporters are a little less forgiving about such transgressions. (Would that some of them could generate a spark of outrage at breaches of financial ethics.)
Might part of the problem be that these guys, for career reasons, are afraid not to appear to be in storybook marriages with multiple children? Politicians do get divorced, of course. Reagan, McCain and Gingrich all did...but not when they were facing contentious elections. Enough time had to pass where they could pretend their prior wives were in the distant past.
Mark Sanford's wife separated from him two weeks ago. It's none of our business in the specific...but in a generic situation, imagining a politician in a similar position, might the candidate's future be a key factor in whether or not to divorce? Sanford obviously has/had presidential ambitions for 2012 and might well have been McCain's running mate last time. I suspect there's pressure on a political marriage to stay together because of what it does to the candidate's prospects. even when a separation might be better for All Concerned.
If we all were more tolerant of that kind of thing — as tolerant as we are of the plumber or your butcher leaving his wife — maybe we wouldn't have a new affair in the news every two weeks. Maybe some of these guys would have the common decency to properly end one union before launching into another. Then again, it would stil be rough on Republicans. It's tough to campaign for the Defense of Marriage Act while you're filing papers to get out of your own.
June 26, 2009
