2002-06-22 12:45 p.m.
With This Diaryring...
Round about the 15th diary entry, I figured, this "keeping an online diary" think would actually take. At that point I could settle down, join a couple of diaryrings, move into a new design that has room for a growing list. With the love of a good diary, be a bad girl no more. Tamed.
Kind of like Charlie Sheen.
Like many American toilets, mine has a gigantic pile of People magazines on the tank. I get them as hand-me-downs from my mom, who in turn gets them from her friend Mary. That way we all get our fix of celebrity cheese, while Mary's soul bears the scars for all of us for actually having purchased them. Mom and I, we're recycling, you see. Environmentally conscious. Almost as if we'd thrown ourselves in front of those chainsaws threatening the old-growth redwoods. Mary's a Minnesota-born Catholic and Marin County's pretty light on the suffering, so it works out well for everyone.
(For TheBoy, too, because it gives him an indisputable opportunity to feel intellectually superior. He can set aside whatever weighty war tome he's currently reading -- The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall of Poland or Romancing the Rhone or Pogroms for Dummies or Hitler! Hitler! Hitler! -- level a gaze at my latest haul and just sneer.)
That stack of Peoples is at its most entertaining when they write about the rich and famous and try to shoehorn their lives into a middle-class narrative. The actual facts are there in the stories, either explicitly or between the lines, but People's writers wrap them in so much cotton candy that it takes a careful reading to find them.
See, celebrities are just like you and me, only with more money. Marriage tames them, makes them grow up, and single men in particular need this. (Never mind that the kindest, most mature thing George Clooney could do is be honest and tell his girlfriends marriage is not for him.) Children ennoble them. (Even when the kids are raised by an army of nannies and the parents only trot them out for movie premieres and photo ops.) Raising kids as a single celebrity parent is hard. (Even with the same army of nannies, more money than God, and possibly a life partner back home in the closet who gets no credit at all.) Nicole Kidman feels your pain, America.
The latest story to get this treatment is Charlie Sheen's marriage to Denise Richards. The story was already written in the editors' minds before this couple even met: bad boy reformed by the love of a good woman. Every Netscape user who hasn't bothered to reset their home page sees "Bad Boy No More!" in big block letters. (And "Terrorism's Next Wave Could Be Just As Deadly" in much smaller letters to the right.) "Bad Boy Tamed!" blares Netscape's Celebrity page.
"After exchanging evening vows," People gushes, "the cherubic former Bond girl and the once-notorious bad boy -- now four years sober and distanced from his tabloid past -- enjoyed a prolonged kiss." But the fact that Sheen didn't even know Richards when he went into rehab and that they didn't start dating until last October is glossed over, as People hurtles along with its narrative.
"For her part, Richards, who grew up in Downers Grove, Ill., professes to be unbothered by Sheen's feisty old days, which included years of drug and alcohol abuse and trysts with Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss's call girls." So noble of her! The good, self-sacrificing Midwestern girl sets aside her doubts for the sake of her man. A gushing quote from Sheen's father about how Denise brings out the best in his son, followed by the following:
"In fact, Richards and Sheen rarely discuss that period in his life. 'I never wanted to ask him about it because it's none of my business,' says Richards, whose two-year relationship with actor Patrick Muldoon ended in the summer of 2000. 'We all have a past; unfortunately his was very public.' Her bottom line: 'I respect him for who he is. I admire him for where he's come from.'"
If there's anything to the rumor one Fametracker posted about Richards having been one of Heidi Fleiss' call girls, that puts a whole different spin on that quote. People has so strenuously defended Richards' virtue in this article that most readers would assume that a couple of live-in relationships and a little premarital sex is the end of it. It could well be, but the idea that a woman could have a past 1/10th as dissolute as Charlie Sheen's and still be a "good person" is unfathomable to much of People's target audience. After all, if the girl is bad too, who's going to head up the Bad Boy Reformation Project?
And don't even get me started on the "Julia Roberts Is Dying For Babies, So Why Doesn't She Get Married Already?" article. My brain's rotting enough as it is.