Death of a dwarf
On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog, but everyone knows if you're a drunken, enraged midget.
By Patrizia DiLucchio
Sept. 10, 2001 | OK, he was no Aaliyah, but when I learned that Hank Nastiff -- a recurring character in the Howard Stern stable of dysfunctional radio personalities -- died last Tuesday, I felt a genuine pang.
In April 1998, Hank the Angry, Drunken Dwarf unwittingly hijacked the annual beauty poll run by People Magazine Online, beating out Leonardo DiCaprio, George Clooney and the usual gang of suspects, and crashing Time Inc.'s Pathfinder Web servers in the process.
For one brief moment, Hank became a bona fide Internet celebrity of sorts, an iconic manifestation of the hive mind at work and a pain in my ass. One minute Hank was throwing up on the sidewalks of Fall River, Mass., where he lived with his mother; the next, he was voted the most beautiful person in the world. That's how fame's 15 minutes of high beams work sometime. Get used to it.
To the netizens mounting the grass-roots campaign on his behalf, a vote for Hank could have been a sly protest against the celebrity culture upon which People magazine had built its readership. Or it could have been just another interactive goof. To those of us at People Online, where I worked as an entertainment editor, the votes for Hank were a crisis in the making -- like the year before when Princess Diana chose the Labor Day holiday weekend to remind the world that no car can sustain a really massive front-end collision and protect lovers in the back seat unless they're wearing their seat belts. For Hank himself, the votes meant a limo with a full bar on future excursions to Howard Stern Central. Previously, Hank confided in one of our late-night calls, he'd been bussing down to the city once a month on the day his SSI check arrived in the mail. But all that was about to change. He hoped.
One of People magazine's most popular issues has always been its annual spring pick of the Fifty Most Beautiful. (No one has ever quite been able to explain why there are 50 beautiful people in the world every year but only 25 intriguing people -- it's like trying to explain how Harry Hamlin could ever have been chosen the Sexiest Man Alive.) It's a tough job but somebody's got to do it, and the beauty buck had stopped that year at the office of Susan Toepfer, the executive editor in charge of special issues. Toepfer started in January with a list of between 300 and 400, culled from nominations made by People staffers in bureaus around the world. The specials staff of about 20 then pared the list down to the magic number. "Hot" and "current" were the criteria. Toepfer's choice for cover boy was Leonardo DiCaprio, fresh off the decks of "Titanic." Readers were presumed to be voting with their wallets at the checkout stand of their local supermarket.
The difficulty in mirroring old media to new media is that the editorial processes can seldom be coordinated. The Internet -- at least in those more innocent days -- was a democratic medium. That meant that readers got an active voice. For three years, People Online had been running its own beauty poll, separate and not at all equal to the magazine's beauty parade. The Net survey had nothing to do with People's cover.
Next page: "What color are your eyes?" "Bloodshot."
