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Television news: Pet your peeve in the Media area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Barney alert
By Andrew Leonard
Warning: This movie is dangerous
(04/09/98)

Radio omm
By David Futrelle
All Deepak, all the time: Positive Thinking Radio is here!
(04/08/98)

Bertelsmann's online blitzkrieg
By Geoff Shandler
The real reason the German giant bought Random is Web marketing -- and that's bad news for independent bookstores
(04/07/98)

"From Jesus to Christ"
By Jenn Shreve
A new Frontline series explores the historical reality of Jesus and his times
(04/06/98)

He knows what you've been reading
By Laura Miller
Novelist Nicholson Baker and booksellers attack Kenneth Starr as a "stalker"
(04/03/98)

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____________of party poopers, colo-rectal gerbils and other tales from darkest Tinseltown

HOLLYWOOD GOSSIP IS TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE -- AND IT USUALLY ISN'T.

Now the business about De Luca and the blow job is actually true, apparently -- and I salute Hollywood's hometown paper of record, the Los Angeles Times, for coming up with a rare must-read piece. But this famous poster girl of the '70s defecating in the bushes? I'm sorry, but that one smells like Hollywood urban legend to me.

At this point I've heard so many of these tales that I've become a party pooper of sorts myself. My standard response these days is a wet blankety "I don't believe it." For one thing, no one I know actually witnessed this famously erratic actress do what she supposedly did -- someone they knew saw it, and told someone they knew, etc. "My agent was there!" a screenwriter friend insisted. But when I made him press his agent for more details, my friend called back to say, rather sheepishly, "OK -- he can't vouch for exactly that, but she was shit-faced." Not exactly the same thing.

Still, this story's making the rounds -- in one form or another. "We heard she was just curled up in a fetal position in the closet," an Entertainment Weekly editor told me, relaxing after a busy week on the Mike De Luca blow job beat. In this week's Star, gossip maven Janet Charlton has a blind item about it. But her assistant thought the celebrity in question "did Number 1, not Number 2" on the lawn. Well, that's completely different, isn't it? I mean, if the lines to the bathroom are long, and the yard is large and shadowy and full of convenient shrubbery --

Uh -- not that I'd know anything about that, of course. In any case, Charlton herself called later to say that although she used the unspecific phrase "went to the bathroom," the act in question was indeed defecation. One of her regular reliable sources -- a flight attendant who heard a bunch of Hollywood bigwigs chatting about the party a few days later while en route -- had called to say so.

Still, Janet wasn't able to track down anyone who'd witnessed the scene firsthand -- thus the story's blind-item status in her column. "Maybe it's not quite true," she told me, with her usual good cheer, "but it certainly bears repeating!"

As with all urban legends, the really interesting thing about Hollywood folklore is its subtext. Once, for example, an agent told me a story about another agent: It seems a studio executive called an agency, wanting to know who represented a certain actor. "We do!" said the agent who answered the phone, promptly negotiating the fee skyward. The agent then called the actor, signed him and closed the deal.

It sounded like the perfect agent story, and it was -- too perfect, in fact. There was a reason my source was evasive when I asked him for specifics, and it wasn't just that someone could get in trouble. "Well, he was lying to the studio executive!" explained the taleteller. (Oh, like that's never been done.) As I found out later, this agent story had been around for years. It was a classic, but probably not true.

On the other hand, it illustrated certain perceptions about the truth (in this case, the sneakiness of agents) that are more powerful than mere fact. The dissonant, niggling details -- that the actor didn't have an agent, that the executive didn't know this -- weren't enough to get in the way of a good story.

I heard another one like this, relayed in hushed, outraged tones by a struggling actress and writer. It seems an award-winning woman screenwriter wasn't able to sell her action script until she took her name off and put a male pseudonym on. Then she sold the script for a lot of money. Well, who is she? "I can't tell you! The person who told me about it said she doesn't want anyone to know!"

But why not? If she'd sold it, what had she got to lose? In fact, presumably the first thing she'd want to do is embarrass the sexist slobs who rejected her in the first place. The real truth is the subtext about how women in Hollywood sometimes feel -- that they have a harder time here than men.

Charlton, who pays for usable tips, fends off regular calls about Eddie Murphy (sometimes it's Arsenio Hall, Montel Williams or another black male celebrity) in the elevator. Haven't heard that one? Well, it seems someone's friend's aunt got into a casino elevator with a bag of quarters for the slot machines the other day, when a bunch of black guys got on too. "Hit the floor!" announces one of them, causing the person with the quarters to drop to the floor, assuming she's being robbed. The punch line is that the guy only wanted someone to hit the button for the elevator floor, that he was not a robber but in fact Eddie Murphy, and that the other guys with him were not fellow robbers but his entourage.

Like all urban legends, this one lives on because of the enduring anxiety reflected in its message: Black guys in elevators are scary; celebrities are OK, but encounters with celebrities in mortal form are nerve-racking in their own way. The most resonant Hollywood urban legends, however, generally seem to have some sort of anal theme. Maybe there's a Freudian reason for this. Or maybe it just indicates an unconscious awareness of just what so much Hollywood product actually is.

The pooping at the party story reminded me that a few years ago it was hard to encounter someone who didn't have a sister/cousin/uncle's friend who worked at some hospital emergency room and had -- swear to God! -- seen the X-ray of a gerbil removed from Richard Gere's rectum. Folklorists found this story fascinating: Urban legend expert Jan Harold Brunvand described it as "The Tale of the Colo-Rectal Mouse" in his 1990 book "The Mexican Pet."

People became very heated if you questioned the truth of this tale. But gerbils, an exotic desert species that would wreak havoc on California agriculture if they were to get loose and breed, have always been illegal here -- a fact I remembered from my pet-obsessed childhood, when I checked out every animal book in the library. So where was Gere getting them?

As a Los Angeles SPCA supervisor told me at the time, weary from fielding hysterical calls from the public -- one woman had offered to fund a national gerbil protection society -- "I've been in over 150 pet stores, investigating other cases, and have never seen a gerbil." The supervisor added that he'd first heard the gerbil story some 25 years earlier, except then it involved Jim Nabors. Obviously, the rumor originated outside Hollywood -- gerbils are common pets in other states -- but reflects ideas about life in Hollywood, which, to cite the business with Mike De Luca and the blow job, do have a kernel of truth.

But why would a celebrity go to an emergency room with such an awkward problem instead of calling his private doctor? These stories reveal as much about the personal frames of reference of the taleteller as they do about anything else.

"In my favorite version he went to Kaiser," laughed folklorist Norine Dresser, who wrote an article called "The Case of the Missing Gerbil" for the academic journal Western Folklore. "And I just had to scream at the vision of him pulling out his Kaiser card."

Also, Walt Disney isn't really cryogenically frozen. But that's another story.
SALON | April 10, 1998

Catherine Seipp's Hollywoodland appears every other Friday in Media Circus.