Hollywood, Interrupted: Insanity Chic in Babylon -- The Case Against Celebrity
416
Hollywood, Interrupted: Insanity Chic in Babylon -- The Case Against Celebrity
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Overview
Charting celebrities from rehab to retox, to jails, cults, institutions, near-death experiences and the Democratic Party, Hollywood, Interrupted takes readers on a surreal field trip into the amoral belly of the entertainment industry. Each chapter — covering topics including warped Hollywood child-rearing, bad medicine, hypocritical political maneuvering and the complicit media — delivers a meticulously researched, interview-infused, attitude heavy dispatch which analyzes and deconstructs the myths created by the celebrities themselves.
Celebrities somehow believe that it's their god-given right to inflict their pathology on the rest of us. Hollywood, Interrupted illustrates how these dysfunctional dilettantes are mad as hell... And we're not going to take it any more.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780471706243 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wiley |
| Publication date: | 03/10/2005 |
| Pages: | 416 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.73(w) x 8.76(h) x 1.12(d) |
About the Author
MARK EBNER is an award-winning investigative journalist who has covered all aspects of celebrity culture for Spy, Rolling Stone, Details, Los Angeles magazine, Premiere, Salon, Spin, and New Times, among others. He has produced for and/or appeared as a journalist-commentator on NBC, FOX, MSNBC, A&E, FX, Court TV, and E! Entertainment Television. Ebner is currently serving as staff reporter for American Media, Inc.
Read an Excerpt
Hollywood, Interrupted
Insanity Chic in Babylon - The Case Against CelebrityBy Andrew Breitbart Mark Ebner
John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0-471-45051-0Chapter One
HOLLYWOOD FAMILY VALUES
A New Weird Order
Leggo My Ego!
Why do Hollywood stars, the most attractive, admired, and highly compensated citizens of the world, have families more screwed up than even the notoriety-driven mongrels loitering around the green room at the Jerry Springer show?
The short answer is ego. Insatiable ego. Constantly massaged ego. 24-hour-a-day concierge ego. 400-thread-count linen at the five-star luxury dog kennel ego. Trading in your prefame spouse for a world-class model ego.
Ego. Ego. Ego.
For every celebrity, by design and necessity, is a narcissist. The desire to become a star requires an incredible appetite for attention and approval. To achieve fame and its accoutrements takes laser-like focus, and a nearly commendable ability to stay self-centered in the service of the dream. Maintaining celebrity is a 24-hour-a-day process requiring a full-time staff to solidify the star's place at the top of the social pecking order. An impenetrable ring of "yes" creatures-including assistants, publicists, managers, agents, hair and make-up artists, stylists, lifestyle consultants, Pilates instructors, cooks, drivers, nannies, schedulers, and other assorted caretakers-work round-the-clock to feed the star's absurd sense of entitlement. Celebritiesfocus on the minutiae of self all the time-and they make sure that no distractions like airplane reservation snafus or colicky babies interrupt this singular focus. This often extremely lucrative self-obsession invariably becomes downright pathological.
That is why Los Angeles is a veritable triage center for psychiatry, and why the industry responds so well to Woody Allen's neurosis-driven films when the public at large barely registers his openings. It is also why psychiatry's arch-nemesis, Scientology, has made Hollywood central to its base of operations (more about the "church" of L. Ron Hubbard and its hold on Hollywood later!). The competition for the dollars of damaged celebrity souls is stiff-may the best man win, Freud or Hubbard.
Massive ego and narcissism may be the primary ingredients for achieving and maintaining Hollywood success, but they are also the number one cause of the grandiose foibles in their storied, disastrous personal lives. The full-time job of parenting requires absolute selflessness. In contrast, the full-time job of celebrity requires absolute selfishness. The two by definition do not naturally coexist. Yet, because of their fame, money, and social power, stars somehow think they can defy the odds and maintain a high level of professional success, and still raise healthy families in the process.
No wonder so much rotten fruit is hanging from the dysfunctional celebrity family tree.
Celebrity Bumfights
The exotic personal exploits of celebrities are fascinating to read about, and presumably to live through, but by all accounts Hollywood is not the proper environment to raise children. Divorce notwithstanding, Bruce Willis and Demi Moore (1987-2000) seemed to have their priorities straight when they moved to Hailey, Idaho, to raise their children. Sissy Spacek raised her kids in Virginia and has all but kissed the LA life goodbye. Sam Shepard and his life roommate Jessica Lange also opted for a simpler life for their family in Minnesota. Likewise, Michael J. Fox and actress wife Tracey Pollan share time at homes in rural Connecticut and Vermont.
"If we're [in L.A.] all the time, our life is about me. Our life is about my job or the way people react to me. Everywhere we go, businesses this, dinners that, lunches that. I don't want my family to be about me. I want it to be about us, and I can do that better here," Fox told USA Today Weekend in 1997. "I know what it's like to eat with the Queen of England. And it doesn't mean as much as sitting on the floor today with my kids."
These examples represent a small but hopeful trend toward celebrities pursuing a sense of normality for their kids-despite the odds against their parents being able to weather the storm away from the logical epicenter of their egos' home, Hollywood.
Sadly, a cottage industry has thrived in which the flotsam and jetsam of celebrity misbehavior, usually the offspring, air the family's dirty laundry in the pursuit of achieving something they never had growing up-a sense of self-worth-because their parents larger-than-life accomplishments and minute-to-minute needs too often eclipsed their own.
Books like Christina Crawford's Mommy, Dearest and the late Gary Crosby's Going My Own Way offered sensational, firsthand accounts into the family lives of Joan Crawford and Bing Crosby, proving that even in the industry's Golden Age, Hollywood idols did not make top-notch parents. Nor most likely do their own children, comfortable performing literary blindsides on their star parents in the pursuit of their own 15 minutes of fame. It's a vicious cycle. These stories took time to come out, usually not until after Mommy or Daddy entered the ranks of the dearly departed, and as postmortem tell-alls did not allow their famous parents much opportunity to wage a defense.
In the current Hollywood scene, it's not just the kids but also the parents publicly airing the secret family tittle-tattle, often in real time and for large sums of money. Celebrity reality television in the form of "The Osbournes" has expedited and streamlined the process by which celebrities share their innermost secrets and lay out their personal family turmoil. Waiting until the end of rehab to tell Stone Phillips about the road to hell and back is simply too late now.
While actor Jake Busey ("Shasta McNasty") is trying to make a name for himself in his father's erratic shadow, he must compete with dad's on-screen reality antics in "I'm with Busey." To sell the show, Comedy Central posits the born-again rehab alumnus as more unpredictable than Ozzy Osbourne. In an interview with Maxim magazine Gary Busey promotes the show by sharing his drugged-out low point: "I came home one day, took off my windbreaker and three bundles of cocaine fell to the floor. Well, my dog Chili, who has short hair, came in and lay on her back with her legs in the air and she rubbed all the cocaine on her back and side. So I got a straw and I started brushing back her hair and snorting where I saw the cocaine. Back, butt, side-not a spot was left. It took me 25 minutes to snort all the cocaine the dog had on her coat."
So transparent is the network suits' desire to chronicle the domestic meltdowns of the rich and famous, VH1 slated princess of the damned Liza Minnelli, daughter of Hollywood's most glamorous suicide, Judy Garland, along with her short-term wax show husband David Gest (2002-2003) to star in their own televised journey to hell. When Minnelli attempted to hijack "The Liza and David Show" and make it into an extended "Larry King Live Weekend," replete with old timers like Steve and Edie belting out standards around the bizarre couple's home piano, VH1 immediately dropped the idea. Dueling lawsuits between the parties ensued with personal details coming from both sides reminiscent of a divorce proceeding. If Minnelli couldn't realize that her path to career rebirth was exposing herself and her bizarre husband of the moment to raw exploitation, that was her problem. Not Viacom's.
The saddest aspect of E! Channel's ratings bonanza "The Anna Nicole Show" is reluctant costar, Daniel, Anna Nicole Smith's Nirvana T-shirt-wearing adolescent son. "He doesn't like the cameras," the plus-sized head case told "Good Morning America." "He's doing it for mama."
As if it isn't hard enough going through the awkward teen years as the offspring of a demented single mother, Daniel is forced to withstand the public viewing of what mom calls her "rollercoaster" of a life.
"Hold on," Smith warns viewers, Daniel be damned.
Alt.Family.Hollywood
Is it too late for Hollywood families who have already flamed out to tap into the burgeoning market for celebrity-driven reality TV? Stars can't live off the proceeds of "E! True Hollywood Stories," you know.
Some past vignettes of the familial eruptions of the down and out and famous would surely whet the appetite of parasitic network suits today if they could only rewind time, and get a guarantee in writing that the stars have no intentions of pursuing their dignity anytime soon.
Marlon Brando heads a family so damaged its story line wouldn't make the cut on a Brazilian soap opera. Over the years he has helped to create a series of nine children with four different women. In 1990, son Christian killed Dag Drollet, the Tahitian lover of his half-sister Cheyenne, who later committed suicide by hanging herself in French Polynesia, where her father sent her to recover from chronic depression. "I have come to despise my father for the way he ignored me when I was a child," Cheyenne once publicly stated.
After a few years in the brig, Christian then got involved in a paternity squabble with Bonny Lee Bakley, the future wife (and future murder victim, allegedly) of actor Robert Blake, who proved to be the father in question. We all know what happened next.
Marlon Brando ballooned while holed up in his Hollywood Hills home, and local food deliverymen acclimated to the clandestine rituals of getting the icon his daily caloric bounty-including throwing McDonald's hamburgers over the gate. In a rare public appearance on "Larry King Live" in 1994, filmed at his home, Brando babbled incoherently and declared "Hollywood is run by Jews." To top it off, Brando planted a slobbering on-screen kiss on King.
"This is a false world," Brando once opined. "It's been a struggle to try to preserve my sanity and sense of reality taken away by success. I have to fight hard to preserve that sense of reality so as to bring up my children."
We're thinking that Marlon lost this particular fight.
Oscar-nominated Ryan O'Neal (Love Story) and his Oscar-winning daughter Tatum (Paper Moon) have both flourished in the trade, yet both-along with Ryan's doomed son Griffin (Attack of the Killer Bimbos)-have withstood so many self-inflicted life traumas it's no small wonder they are still alive. Ryan's battles with the bulge and cancer, along with his stealing of Farrah Fawcett from his best pal Lee Majors, make for a compelling script, perhaps better than any the three O'Neal burnouts have read in the last two decades.
Tatum's career tanked as she couldn't stay off heroin long enough to keep custody of her kids spawned by temperamental tennis icon John McEnroe. Tatum repeated the cycle of her mother, Joanna Moore, who, according to Tatum, was more interested in getting high than caring for her own children.
Brother Griffin has said that the O'Neal children were "traded like dogs" between Ryan and his estranged wives, contributing to his inevitable drug and anger management problems. Griffin was tried for manslaughter in the death of Francis Ford Coppola's son, Gian-Carlo, who was decapitated in a drunken speed boating accident. He was found guilty of a lesser charge and admitted to drinking at the time of the accident. Subsequently, an ex-girlfriend took Griffin to court alleging he said he'd kill her for breaking up with him and proved he had attempted to do so when he rammed his Ford Bronco into her parked car as she sat inside fearing for her life. He was en route to her home when police later arrested him. Griffin pleaded no contest and was sentenced to one year in a drug and alcohol treatment program.
Kids of Hollywood royalty seem much more susceptible to tragic downfalls than their peers in the general population:
Paul Newman's son Scott died of a Valium and alcohol overdose in 1978.
Mary Tyler Moore's 24-year-old son Richie accidentally shot and killed himself in 1980-the same year his mother starred in the wrenching Ordinary People.
Carroll O'Connor's son Hugh killed himself in 1995 after a 16-year battle with drug addiction.
Barbara Eden's son, Matthew Ansara, died of a heroin overdose in 2001.
How many people do you know whose children have died of substance abuse or suicide? Add to the Hollywood death count the names of the Hollywood kids, like the O'Neal clan, who narrowly averted tragic endings after struggles with drugs, alcohol, and celebrity parents, including Charlie Sheen, actress Mackenzie Phillips ("One Day at a Time"), and Carol Burnett's late daughter Carrie Hamilton (who struggled with drugs and later died of cancer in 2002). We'd list even more, but you get the point.
The female progeny of the Beach Boys' cosmically disturbed Brian Wilson hooked up with the daughter of infamous hedonist John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas to create Wilson Phillips. "I know that there is pain, but you hold on for one more day and break free the chains," the saccharine pop trio sang in the 1990s single Hold On, from their eponymous debut album that garnered four Grammy nominations.
The biggest casualty of the musical union was Carnie Wilson, a big-hearted soul with a magnificent voice. The group's career took off, but Carnie was surrounded by people obsessed with her Rubenesque figure, especially in contrast to her thin sister Wendy and super slender Chynna Phillips. The all-important music videos that pushed the band's success all but ignored her visage. It didn't help that hovering above her was the spirit of Mama Cass Elliott, who died in 1974 at the age of 32 from a massive heart attack brought upon by her excessive weight.
In an interview with Wilson, conducted by her "lifestyle consultant" and her psychologist before her stomach reduction and broadcast live on the Internet, she brought up the psychological factors that led to her morbid obesity, including bonding with her father over large bowls of Raisin Bran and half-and-half gobbled up in the middle of the night. "It was so damn good, it was so good."
Dad's all-encompassing, mostly LSD-induced insanity caused him to hand over "total therapeutic authority" to Dr. Eugene Landy, a controversial psychologist, who famously exerted total control over every aspect of his patient's life for years. Well, not total. Dr. Landy didn't take over as Carnie or Wendy's father.
Chynna's half-sister, Mackenzie Phillips, tells how dad, "Papa" John Phillips, instructed her in the art of joint rolling at 10 and injected her with liquid cocaine at 17. "To any normal, decent person reading this, that probably sounds horrific," Phillips said. "But dad didn't know any better. To him it was all part of being cool, being a 1960s dude. I paid the price for that. For years I felt bitter, but I forgave him on his deathbed."
Continues...
Excerpted from Hollywood, Interrupted by Andrew Breitbart Mark Ebner Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments.Introduction.
PART I: IT’S A FAMILY AFFAIR.
1. Hollywood Family Values: A New Weird Order. Hollywood families exposed for not only not upholding family values but pissing all over middle-class mores. Rethinking the life and death of River Phoenix. Familial implosions exposed. It’s gotten so bad we argue for sterilization of the celebrity class.
2. In Loco Parentis: Hollywood Nannies. Hollywood nannies speak out and tell all—“There is no laughter in this house.” Nannies so stressed they’ve formed a Beverly Hills support group. A nanny gets blacklisted.
3. Hollyweird High. Inside Crossroads School for the Arts & Sciences, where Hollywood elite send their children, and we find, like any other school in the Western world, sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll. Unlike other high schools, we also discover Crossdressing Day, Ménage à Prom, death, and a mandatory pseudo-therapeutic program called “Mysteries.”
PART II: FEAR AND LOATHING IN LOS ANGELES.
4. Screwball Tragedy. Hollywood’s strange history with insanity, drugs, and therapy.
5. Doctor Feelgoods. Not feeling so hot? Call the doctor. Top Gun producer overdoses. Winona’s Dr. Feelgood loses his license. Oliver Stone signs a medic. Lily-livered Hollywood “heppers,” including Stripperella, try anything.
6. From Rehab to Retox. Rehab centers to the stars get visits from Matthew Perry, Robert Downey Jr., Ben Affleck, among others. Celeb rehab spas offer a panoply of treatment programs from equine therapy to brain wave analysis. Not on the menu—sex in the bathroom.
PART III: THE BELIEVERS.
7. Karma Chameleons. Madonna and friends converge on Kabbalah. Hollywood cults run amok. Established religion is evil.
8. Shilling for Scientology: I Want Your Body—Thetans. Scientology rocks!
PART IV: CALIFORNICATION.
9. Sex in This City. The pornification of America. There’s a whorehouse in Beverly Hills. Swing Kids club hop. Hugh Hefner is a porn baron. The Heidi Tapes.
10. “Sexual Perversity” in Los Angeles. Eddie Murphy plays good Samaritan to a Samoan transvestite hooker. Hollywood attorneys employ shady PIs to bend laws. Peter Pan picks a porn producer.
INTERMISSION.
Heroine. Love Means Never Having to Say You’re Courtney.
PART V: THE LEFT WING.
11. Reds. Celebs embrace hate speech. Everyone’s “Friend” Jennifer Aniston calls Bush names and taunts daughter Jenna. Robert Altman and Alex Baldwin threaten to leave the country. We love dictators! Hollywood warmly embraces Castro.
12. Blue Country Haze. Hollywood ground zero for the culture war. Rosie, the lesbian, swoons over the heterosexual Tom Cruise. Oprah dictates politics. The war of the ribbons (can you support PETA and be for AIDS research?). Flacks make celebs pick a cause.
13. The Death of Comedy. Hollywood kills Andrew “Dice” Clay and Sam Kinison. Can’t get no comic relief. “South Park” rails against Rob Reiner.
PART VI: LIES, MORE LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE.
14. Hollywood Pan Men. Hollywood A-Team of B-list celebs goes on the road to sell pans of lies for fast cash and cheap thrills.
15. The Lying Game. Fictionalized documentaries. Scripts are stolen. Friends cover up. We expose Hollywood’s own Jayson Blair.
PART VII: AMERIKA ONLINE.
16. Hollywood Online. Where the stars go and what they do when they virtually get there.
17. www.americahateshollywood.com. Media Berlin Wall falls. Newfound freedoms expressed in cyberspace. The gigabyte is up. America talks back.
Epilogue.
Notes.
Index.
What People are Saying About This
“In Hollywood, Interrupted Breitbart and Ebner dig deeply into the very heart of our greatest export—pop culture—as produced by Hollywood, the movie industry and the people who affect and infect America. You cannot take a more fascinating or terrifying trip. There are tales of the fabulously famous here you would never know if not for their work. Hollywood, Interrupted is a book you have to put down frequently in order to catch your breath. Absolutely riveting.”
—(Lucianne Goldberg, Publisher, Lucianne.com,News Forum and Talk Radio Network host)
Richard Gooding, Investigative Reporter
“Reading Hollywood, Interrupted is like sitting on a stakeout and having a telescopic view into the darkest reaches of the corruption and perversity of today’s celebrity culture.
From the very first page to the last, Breitbart and Ebner’s probing reporting spells out in graphic detail how Hollywood lives by a set of norms the rest of America finds appropriately appalling—and endlessly fascinating. The authors have the unusual courage to take on Scientology. They provide revelations about Michael Jackson’s sickness that go beyond even today’s headlines. They rip the phony veneer off the political correctness of Rosie O’Donnell and Barbra Streisand.
They give readers a behind-the-scenes understanding of how snooping private eyes and ruthless information brokers feed scoops to the tabloids. And, in one riveting chapter, they document how a young woman in the AOL backroom unmasked the bizarre fetishes of some of Tinseltown’s top names. Hollywood, Interrupted is no ‘E’ channel fluff.
It’s disturbing stuff. But it’s all too real and it’s utterly riveting.”
Orson Bean, Actor
“This book blew me away. It’s more than I wanted to know, but I couldn’t stop reading it.”
Jill Stewart, “Capitol Punishment” syndicated columnist, radio and television political commentator
“Hollywood hypocrites are going to simmer with fury at the painful barbs, backed up by plenty of facts, that these two sleuthing authors toss at some of the i ndustry’s most beloved stars and wags. If you love Larry King and Oprah, you’d better get ready to defend their honor, because this book deftly melts the shine off their armor.”