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Cinema falsité
By James Poniewozik
One of the great myths surrounding the videotape of Clinton's testimony is that it represented raw, unfiltered experience
(09/30/98)

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BROWSE THE
MEDIA CIRCUS
ARCHIVE

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Mighty Murdoch caught in love nest with leggy Chinese beauty!

BY SUSAN LEHMAN

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The British and Australian press have been having a fine old time with Rupert Murdoch's recent, how shall we say, change of address.

"Randy billionaire Rupert Murdoch has set up a New York love-nest with a Chinese TAKE-AWAY 36 years his junior," shrieked Edward Helmore and John Sweeney in London's Observer. "The super-rich sugar DADDY Sun King -- worth $5.6 billion, according to Fortune magazine -- is dating six-foot-tall 31-year-old Wendy Deng, having split from his wife earlier this year, and the love-struck twosome have SHACKED up in New York's trendiest hotel, the Mercer."

The Guardian dealt the magnate an even nastier blow. "Imagine Murdoch's scorn if a Democrat congressman had done this a couple of years ago. Imagine the way his tabloids would have brought up the deserted wife's story and generally heaped derision on his new choice of digs. The Village -- for Chrissake! Mixing with all those arsebandits and no-hope actors in cafes with 26 choices of decaf! The man's lost it -- he's pussy struck. It's pathetic," chortled Henry Porter.

The New York Daily News, the chief competitor and bitter rival of Murdoch's New York Post, planned to join the fun, scheduling an item on Murdoch's changed romantic status to run earlier this month. But the story was pulled after Daily News brass received a threatening phone call from representatives of the Post. Print the Murdoch/Deng story, threatened the Post, and we'll retaliate with dirt about Daily News publisher Mortimer B. Zuckerman and his private life.

The Post hasn't been shy about poking fun Zuckerman or his co-publisher, Fred Drasner. The paper's gossip columnists had a field day with an incident in which Drasner, frustrated after missing all his shots in a duck hunt, reportedly opened fire on ducks sitting in a pond. The Post gleefully mocked Drasner for buying a pair of camels for his Dutchess County farm and shelling out $75,000 for a pool table. But the tab has stayed away from Zuckerman and Drasner's personal lives.

"It's sort of an agreement between moguls," explained one person close to the affair. Publicists for the Post did not return calls seeking comment.

With the tabloid moguls in such cozy agreement, it was left to the New York Times to break the story. In a sober little item in the Business section on Oct. 4, the Times stated, "A big piece of the entertainment business just moved from the West Coast to the East Coast," and noted matter of factly that Murdoch had moved to the Mercer Hotel and was dating a 31-year-old Chinese-born, Yale-educated woman who had been in New York for the last few weeks. Now what sort of dirt do you suppose Murdoch has on Punch Sulzberger?

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Keith Olbermann fails to grasp Christopher Hitchens' physics lesson

Something funny happened on the Oct. 15 broadcast of MSNBC's "The Big Show": Keith Olbermann apologized. Minutes earlier acerbic left-wing British commentator (and sometime Salon contributor) Christopher Hitchens had engaged in such a rambunctious exchange with Democratic pollster and consultant Mark Mellman that the show's host felt compelled to apologize for the "tenor" of the segment. "We try to avoid what you saw. We do not always succeed," Olbermann told viewers.

The conversation began as a debate about the utility of political polls. Hitchens: "People don't take polls in order to find out what's going on. They take polls to influence what's going on." Mellman: "Well, I think what polling does is help us to understand public opinion." Hitchens: "I mean, the questions are designed to evoke idiotic responses, it seems to me." Mellman: "I don't think the responses are idiotic."

Things reached the boiling-over point when Hitchens raised the subject of Seymour Hersh's recent New Yorker piece about the bombing of Sudan. The piece, he said, made it plain that President Clinton ordered cruise missile strikes to save his own face and that Congress might well consider this an impeachable offense. Mellman's response: "Christopher is actually living in his own private universe somewhere there." After Mellman noted that "Mr. Hersh's pieces are not always accurate reflections of reality," he sardonically told Hitchens, "I couldn't possibly be as intelligent as you are." "No, that's a fact," replied Hitchens, who was cut short by a much discomfited Olbermann.

Somewhere around this point in the discussion, Hitchens said he received word through his MSNBC earpiece that he should "stop whaling on the guy."

In the last 90 seconds of the show, Hitchens savaged Mellman's response to a question about a New York Times article suggesting that "Americans are now divided on whether the country is moving in the right direction." "I couldn't bear the idea that there was any sort of division in the country or any lack of contentment," Hitchens sneered. "That would be frightful. And it would also, of course, be bad for our profession. No, no. Of course all Americans are fantastically content and happy." He continued in this vein for a few seconds, and then circled back for a final jab: "And now I have a rough idea of what it takes to become a Democratic consultant." Boom. Apology from Olbermann.

Neither Hitchens nor Mellman knew until they got home that Olbermann had made the unusual apology. When he found out about it, Hitchens said he thought about phoning someone at MSNBC to find out why they sell their show as a free and frank exchange of views. "Think of all the platitudinous nonsense people on these shows spout all the time," said Hitchens. "Now I rather doubt that anyone ever told any of those people they really ought to make an effort to say something interesting. It's always the other way around, the minute anything takes a real, unscripted turn, they can't wait to move away from it."

There is, Hitchens said, a sort of unspoken agreement between talk show producers and guests that conversation will be orderly, balanced and predominantly senseless: The minute discussion heats up in any way likely to produce illumination of any sort, everyone gets jittery and starts apologizing. "Light comes from heat," Hitchens said. "Where do you think light comes from? It's an iron law of physics: Light comes from heat, there isn't any other way."

Olbermann said through a spokesperson that the apology was intended for viewers who tuned in expecting "a milder discussion of the issues."

Mellman, who pronounced the evening less fun than surgery, said, "I don't think the exchange shed any light or any heat on anything." Maybe not, but it beat the usual talking-head fare.

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Nobody's a media critic

The New York Observer and the Village Voice are having trouble filling vacant media critic spots.

Since Warren St. John left the Observer to write longer pieces for Wired, Observer editor Peter Kaplan reportedly made one, possibly two offers, but was refused.

James Ledbetter, who wrote the media column for the Voice, recently left to join the Industry Standard, a weekly magazine about new media. Voice managing editor Doug Simmons says he's had a lot of interest from would-be media writers but would like to hire someone who has a sense of humor and a light touch and is having a tough time finding someone who measures up.

"So much media criticism is like Brill's Content, the first issue of which I admired and which I am really rooting for, but which now reads like homework," says Simmons, explaining that he wants to find someone who is a good reporter too. Andy Hsaio, who's been filling in since Ledbetter's departure, declined to take the job on a permanent basis.

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Only as young as you feel

This week's top Hollywood story: A 32-year-old woman named Riley Weston posed as a 19-year-old in order to get a three-year, $300,000 job writing for "Felicity," a TV show that deals with teenage subjects. Now that she's been found out, Weston may lose her job.

Why shouldn't writers lie about their ages? Lots of the brightest stars lie about their ages and no one seems to mind.

A quick read through some recent periodicals reveals major discrepancies in the ages Nicole Kidman, Julia Roberts, Calista Flockhart and others have, at various times, claimed to be.

Herewith a list. The number in parentheses represents the age the star would be today, based on her various statements:

Calista Flockhart

New York Times, Nov. 16, 1997: "The series represents the television debut of 28-year-old Ms. Flockhart" (29)

Back Stage, Feb. 14, 1997: "Flockhart, who will only admit to being in her late 20s" (late 20s)

People, May 11, 1998: "Calista Flockhart, 33, has emerged as a kind of gen-X Mary Tyler Moore" (33 or 34)

Star magazine, Oct. 27, 1998: "Co-workers confirm that the 34-year-old actress is making an effort to beef up" (34)

National Enquirer, Oct. 27, 1998: "The 34-year-old actress eats like a bird" (34)

Halle Berry

1986 Bergen Record, Nov. 9, 1986: "Miss USA Halle Berry created a big stir last week when she showed up at a luncheon for the Miss World contest in London wearing a star-spangled bikini. Berry, 20, of Cleveland." (32)

People, May 8, 1995: "Halle Berry, 26." "But as she looks to the future, her dedication to beauty doesn't include plastic surgery. 'I have to make my looks last as long as I can,' she says. 'When they're gone, they're gone'" (30)

People, May 11, 1998: "She knows it's an occupational hazard, but having no flaws, she says, means having no dates. 'It sickens some people to hear that,' concedes Halle Berry, 31, who went solo to the Oscars this year." (32)

Ebony, April 1993: "At 24, never before has she understood herself so deeply. Never before has she had greater mastery of her talents and her calling. 'You have to be real honest with yourself and that was a process that took me a long time: finding out who I was, what I wanted, why I'm here'" (30)

USA Today Feb. 18, 1993: "The 23-year-old actress says she spent a portion of her life 'wondering who I was and where I fit in.'" (29)

Kimberly Elise ("Beloved")

AP, Oct. 11, 1998: "'It's a book that has always been in the family library at home,' said the 30-year-old Elise" (30)

USA Today, Oct. 19, 1998: "But the 27-year-old actress takes no credit for her astonishingly raw portrayal of Denver, the daughter in Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel" (27)

Sandra Bullock

Cosmopolitan, November 1994: "At the age of 27, Bullock is more practical than many of her peers" (31)

Washingtonian, September 1994: "Bullock, 27, graduated from Arlington's Washington-Lee High School in 1982" [at 15?] (31)

USA Today, Oct. 11, 1993: "The 26-year-old daughter of an opera coach from Alabama and opera singer from Germany also gets to have sex, virtual reality style, with Sylvester Stallone" (31)

USA Today, May 7, 1990: "'The hard part is having to follow in her footsteps,' says Bullock, 25" (33 or 34)

People, Nov. 18, 1996: "Bullock, 32, shows no signs of kicking back" (34)

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The seven circles of Manhattan magazine hell

Revenge may be a meal best served cold, but recently fired Vanity Fair contributor Toby Young obviously regards it as a fast food. With the painful memories of his defenestration still freshly in mind, Young wrote a scabrous piece about his former boss, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, and other "Condie Nasties" at 350 Madison Ave. for this week's New York Press. Young, former co-editor of the British magazine the Modern Review, was clearly not Vanity Fair material -- as the short-lived editor of the VF Camera party pictures page, he stunned art empress Mary Boone by asking her whether her celebrated guest Ross Bleckner was a man or a woman. (A distraught Boone immediately rang Carter to complain about his clueless functionary.) Nonetheless, Carter kept Young on, apparently as a type of office mascot. "Toby, you're like a British person born in New Jersey," Carter once told him.

On another occasion, while interviewing Nathan Lane, Young innocently inquired whether the actor was Jewish and later if he was gay. End of interview, goodbye Nathan. An increasingly exasperated Carter informed Young, "You can't ask Hollywood celebrities whether they're Jewish or gay. Just assume they're both Jewish and gay, OK?"

Young writes that he was amused by the Vanity Fair office's "atmosphere of studious intensity [that was] completely at odds with the general tone of the magazine. I wanted to grab them by the lapels and say, 'Lighten up, for Christ's sake. It's an upscale supermarket tabloid.'"

In the end, Carter decided he had made a grave error in hiring Young. As he instructed his young apprentice, there are seven rooms in the glossy mansion that is Manhattan magazine publishing -- and Young was clearly destined to never get into the second one. "It was the nightclub theory of social advancement," muses Young. "I was the rube in Studio 54 who'd somehow managed to get past Steve Rubell at the door but was a long way from snorting coke off Margaret Trudeau's cleavage in the VIP room."

Young needn't despair -- he may get another shot at Trudeau in his current position as staff writer for Bob Guccione's aging young roué magazine, Gear.
SALON | Oct. 22, 1998