Celebutards Read online

  Such was the case in 2003, when Dale Petroskey, president of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, and a former staffer of President Ronald Reagan, canceled an event scheduled to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the movie, Bull Durham, on which Robbins and Sarandon met. In the film, Sarandon starred as an aging minor-league baseball groupie and Robbins as a player. Petroskey feared the pair’s presence at Cooperstown during the difficult dawn of the war in Iraq represented “a danger,” and would not gibe with the sensibilities of audience members.

  The couple cried “Censorship!”

  Wait a minute. Celebutards have this annoying habit: A complete inability to understand basic concepts of law. Or rather, they willfully misrepresent the law, in order to paint themselves as victims. Which is amusing, when you consider how much free publicity the “censored” couple received in the following days.

  Robbins held the floor at the National Press Club. “Any instance of intimidation of free speech should be battled against. Any acquiescence to intimidation, at this point, will only lead to more intimidation. Millions are watching and waiting in mute fashion and [are] hoping for someone to defend the spirit and letter of our Constitution and to defy the intimidation that is visited upon us daily in the name of national security and warped notions of patriotism. We must honor and fight vigilantly for the things that unite us. Like freedom, the First Amendment, and, yes, baseball.”

  For someone complaining about being shut up, Sarandon sure made a lot of noise. She hijacked a CBS Early Show interview to talk about the baseball event.

  “It’s an interesting idea, you know, to say to people, ironic really, since we’re supposedly liberating the Iraqis for a democracy and then you’re telling people in this country where we have a democracy that you can’t have difference of opinion when the very basis for democracy is healthy discourse. I know the American people are not stupid. And I know they believe in democracy in the way I do. And they support their, you know, Bill of Rights.”

  It was a typical performance. Sarandon and Robbins misrepresented the laws that played into the flap. Let me give a primer on the Constitution 101, since the college-educated couple evidently napped that day in class. The First Amendment prohibits the government from curtailing free speech. There is nothing in the Constitution that guarantees obnoxious celebutards a stage on private property. Nothing.

  * * *

  There is nothing in the Constitution that guarantees obnoxious celebutards a stage on private property.

  * * *

  In a hilarious interview the following June in Los Angeles Citybeat, Sarandon gives some clues as to why being prohibited from speaking in Cooperstown represented no less than a danger to society: She knows more than you do.

  “I really see myself as someone who has access to information most people don’t get. I am tired of being afraid. I know so many people [at protest rallies] have been talking to me—I was just asking questions other people weren’t in the position to ask. I am not leading any movement. I’m just representing voiceless people who, a lot of times, aren’t getting the information they need in order to make their own decision.”

  She never explained from whom she gets the confidential information. Or what it is. Or why it is only available to Susan Sarandon. She did claim to be “right in the middle of it” on 9/11—actually, more than twenty blocks north of the carnage, in Union Square. But she took away from the attacks a message far different than anything gleaned by other witnesses to the atrocities, such as myself.

  “I had lost people on that day, and I was hoping that the event would shake us through our complacency and connect us to the world,” she told Citybeat. “Instead, the president and his honchos missed the opportunity to say, ‘We are going to be a stronger country now. We are going to be the best educated. We are going to feed our people. We’re going to get real about how we are perceived throughout the rest of the world. There’s going to be change in our foreign policy.’ [However] the lies, misinformation at best, continued to permeate the news.”

  Actually, as an American, a New Yorker, and a mom, I was more concerned with stopping the attacks than capitulating to the terrorists, an issue Sarandon did not address. And the attacks did stop. Sorry, Susan.

  I suppose no amount of celeb-driven hypocrisy should surprise me. But considering that Susan Sarandon is our nation’s self-appointed avatar of free expression, it struck me as bizarre that she summoned the chutzpah to urge sponsors to boycott a syndicated television show planned for radio shrink Dr. Laura Schlessinger. Of course, Dr. Laura once called homosexuals a “biological error.” That sort of free speech is not allowed.

  “I’m totally against wasting the airwaves, giving visibility to a person who is clearly in dire need of compassion, education, and a good shrink herself,” Sarandon said in a statement posted on Stop DrLaura.com.

  The TV show was canceled in 2001, killed by lack of sponsors, which might be Susan’s fault, and plummeting ratings, which was not.

  Sometimes, an event so well crystallizes a celebrity’s complete inability to see who he is—in this case, a buffoon—that it requires little comment. Such an episode took place in March 2003, after Lloyd Grove, then a gossip columnist for the Washington Post, conducted a brief telephone interview with Lenora Tomalin, the then seventy-nine-year-old mother of Susan Sarandon.

  “I am a conservative. I voted for George W. Bush and I simply agree with most everything he has said,” Mrs. Tomalin told him. “It’s not that I’m pro–war. It’s just that I think that I trust my government more than I would empathize with the government of Iraq.”

  She proceeded to talk about Sarandon’s views against the president. “That’s a given. That’s the way she thinks. That’s what Hollywood thinks. We don’t agree, but I respect her—more than she does me.” Pressed on whether her daughter supports Mom’s right to an opinion, she replied, “Wanna bet?

  “When I visit Susan, I tread on eggs. The most difficult time was during the election of 2000. I live in Florida, and I was a Republican poll-watcher in Polk County. Afterward, I was sitting at the breakfast table with Jack Henry, my then-thirteen-year-old grandson, and he looked over at me, with the sweetest little smile on his face, and said, ‘I hear you voted for Bush.’ I looked up at Susan, who’s standing at the sink, and she says, ‘All he wants to know is: How could you have voted for Bush?’ And I thought, ‘I’m not going to discuss my politics with a thirteen-year-old who has been brainwashed!’ But I just let it go—even though I have never been as rabid as I have been during the past few years.”

  Soon after, the writer showed up at the Vanity Fair post–Oscar party, which Robbins also attended. The confrontation between the scribe and the peacenik was as uproarious as it was ugly.

  “You’re the one who wrote about Susan’s mother?” Robbins demanded. “You wanted to be divisive and you caused trouble in my family. If you ever write about my family again, I will f*cking find you and I will f*cking hurt you!”

  One wonders if increasing the fiber in Robbins’s diet might improve his mood. If Tim Robbins does not want Grandma, an adult, blabbing to the press, particularly about his young son, it seems a subject best taken up with the woman, and not dealt with by threatening violence against a reporter who was, after all, just doing his job. Such valiant protection of those nearest and dearest did not prevent Robbins from soon exploiting another young family member.

  Less than three weeks after the Lenora flap, Robbins told the National Press Club, “A relative tells me that a history teacher tells his eleven-year-old son, my nephew, that Susan Sarandon is endangering the troops by her opposition to the war.” But the alarming tale ended on a note of Robbins-style triumph.

  He said his nephew, normally a quiet lad, stood up in class and declared, “That’s my aunt you’re talking about. Stop it.”

  For the Robbins/Sarandons, all stories end peacefully. If not, they’ll hurt you.

  6

  Chumps Like Us
r />   BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN

  Tramps like us, baby we were born to run.

  —Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run,” 1975

  Over the past six years we’ve had to add to the American picture: rendition, illegal wiretapping, voter suppression, no habeas corpus, the neglect of our great city New Orleans and its people, an attack on the Constitution. And the loss of our young best men and women in a tragic war. This is a song about things that shouldn’t happen here—happening here.

  —Springsteen on the Today show, September 2007

  I USED TO BELIEVE IN Bruce Springsteen. I also used to believe in the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and Hanukkah Harry. But growing into adulthood I learned, to my great dismay, that each is as illusory as Barry Bonds’ home run record.

  To legions of fans in his native New Jersey and around the world, Springsteen evoked a kind of stoic wisdom as a latter-day Joe Lunch Bucket, singing about the sounds, the sweat and the teen age angst above and below the boardwalk at Asbury Park on the New Jersey shore. What a surprise to learn that it’s all an act, and Springsteen is just another big-mouth celebrity twit eager to share whatever fashionable leftist political nonsense enters his none-too-swift brain.

  I grew up a Springsteen fan in simpler days, when the man known as The Boss sang directly to the disaffected youth of America, which was just about all of us, about getting high, getting laid and getting a job. That is, he directed his energies and considerable talents toward meditations on subjects about which he knew something.

  WHO CAN RESIST “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight),” recorded in 1973, an ode to raw sex and skipping school, featuring characters known as Sloppy Sue and Big Bones Billy.

  But twenty-seven years later, every police officer in the city of New York, Springsteen’s natural constituency, would feel as if they were stabbed in the back with the release of Springsteen’s angry song about the tragic, but completely unintentional, shooting of African immigrant Amadou Diallo, “American Skin (41 Shots)”: The song features a mother with a decidedly Hispanic name, who advises her son to obey police officers, always keeping his hands in sight. It was not meant as sound advice from one law-abiding citizen to another, but rather the song was a deep dig at cops. Springsteen, by now ensconced in a mansion, imagined that the police were bent on shooting innocent youth. He issued no similar song on behalf of police.

  THE SPRINGSTEEN I thought I knew would have identified with the police, understood they put their lives on the line, every day, to save his hide. But those days were over. With this song, in my opinion, and others to follow, he proved that his image of a struggling, all-American working guy—a pose that made him rich—was carefully honed in a publicist’s office, not a factory. The only sweat Springsteen ever expended was over the size of his royalties. He should have quit with Born in the USA.

  Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen was born September 23, 1949, in Long Branch, New Jersey. The name Springsteen is Dutch, his background Roman Catholic, though Adam Sandler (so far not a celebutard) poked fun at him in his second “Hanukkah Song” with the line, “Bruce Springsteen isn’t Jewish, but my mother thinks he is.”

  Like many creative types, Springsteen did not fit into school as a child, despising the cruelty he encountered in Catholic education, where he said a nun once stuffed him into a garbage can under the desk. Transferring to public school, he also failed to fit in, skipping his high school graduation ceremony. He attended Ocean County College briefly, before dropping out. So much for formal education.

  Legend has it that he bought his first guitar for $18.00 at age thirteen. In 1965, he started singing with a band called The Castiles, then in the early ’70s with a group that would later be called The E Street Band. He signed his first record contract in 1972, putting out the critically acclaimed, but initially not very well noticed, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle. He would not struggle long. It was clear his career was to take off like a bullet when this famous rave review by Jon Landau appeared in Boston’s The Real Paper in 1974: “I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen. On a night when I needed to feel young, he made me feel like I was hearing music for the very first time.”

  In 1975, Springsteen had his first commercial success with Born to Run. The week it was released, he appeared on the covers of both Time and Newsweek. A career was launched.

  Springsteen recorded perhaps his most famous album, Born in the U.S.A., in 1984, appearing on the record jacket in blue jeans with an American flag. The album railed against the ill treatment by some segments of society against Vietnam War veterans, Springsteen’s friends and band mates, but did not explicitly make a political statement on the war itself. During his Born in the U.S.A. tour he met Julianne Phillips, an actress and model, whom he wed in 1985. New Jersey went into shock.

  A virtual state of emergency was declared, so appalled were Springsteen’s ardent fans that Bruce had “gone Hollywood.” Why, his wife wasn’t even from the Garden State! She looked more comfortable tooling around in limousines than on the back of a motorcycle. Fans feared that Mrs. Springsteen might break a nail if she attempted to change a tire.

  But Springsteen filed for divorce from Phillips in 1988, and moved into a relationship with Patti Scialfa, a Jersey girl and back up singer with Springsteen’s E Street Band (Phillips was said to learn about the relationship by reading the tabloids.) Scialfa gave birth to the first of Springsteen’s three children in 1990, and married him the next year. New Jersey heaved a heavy sigh of relief. Time magazine encapsulated The Boss’s betrayal to his home state, and seeming return to the fold, thusly: “So after a failed marriage to model-actress Julianne Phillips, Springsteen moved into a $14 million mansion in Beverly Hills (the faithful jeered), wed Scialfa in 1991 (the faithful cheered) and sang about relationships, kids and his ennui (the faithful shrugged).”

  In hindsight, the criticism lavished on Phillips wasn’t fair. Bruce Springsteen was more than capable of going Hollywood with a Jersey girl at his side.

  Springsteen moved back to New Jersey with his family in the mid-1990s, taking up principal residence in an estate in Rumson, one of the poshest towns in the state. If his music at times had grown moody and introverted, it was about to become politically extroverted. This was not the Bruce we knew.

  In 1999 Amadou Diallo, a 23-year-old West African immigrant, was shot to death in the Bronx by four white police officers, all terrified for their lives. The police, who encountered Diallo in a dark doorway, thought he was pulling out a gun when, in reality, he pulled out a wallet. It turned out Diallo was unarmed.

  The officers fired at Diallo forty-one times, striking him with nineteen bullets. It was a tragedy. But it was a mistake. The officers were indicted on charges of second-degree murder and a trial was held upstate, in Albany, New York. I have long remembered this column written by New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert, an African-American liberal firebrand, because it reeks of common sense: “The killing of Amadou Diallo was cold-blooded, but it probably wasn’t murder. It appears that one or more of the officers genuinely believed Mr. Diallo had a gun and that all four officers, imagining danger when in fact there was none, panicked and began firing.

  “There is no doubt that the shooting was reckless and wrong. The forty-one shots from the frightened cops turned a terrible mistake into a hideous one. But even a hideous mistake by police officers who think their lives are in danger falls short of the threshold for second-degree murder.”

  Albany jurors agreed with Bob Herbert, and in 2000 found the four police officers not guilty of all charges. But noted police scholar Bruce Springsteen held a different view. He performed “American Skin (41 Shots),” a song with upsetting, hypnotic lyrics that build in intensity, and reach a climax with the assurance that a person can get slaughtered by police. Just for “living in your American skin.”

  The song brought heavy condemnation from New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Police Commissioner
Howard Safir. Hundreds of police held anti-Springsteen protests, and Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association President Patrick Lynch wrote to his membership: “I consider it an outrage that he would be trying to fatten his wallet by reopening the wounds of this tragic case at a time when police officers and community members are in a healing period.” He urged city cops to boycott Springsteen’s shows.

  The New York Times’ token conservative columnist at the time, John Tierney, wrote: “Mr. Springsteen is no longer the poor Jersey kid singing about his blue-collar neighbors. He is a millionaire who doesn’t have to hitchhike on Route 9 anymore. The singer who once defended Vietnam veterans and Middle American values has lately been focused on conventional liberal causes, like homelessness and AIDS.”

  In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Bruce found good use for his international platform. Initially, he hit the “pause” button on his political speeches, but only briefly. This gave him time to cash in on the worst attack in United States history. Yes, September 11 was good to Bruce.

  The Rising was released in 2002, a sad, moody album, not acutely political. It is true that no one owns 9/11, and many artists have profited from the carnage. But for Springsteen, who’d decided that police were killers and the war against terror was bloodthirsty and unjust, it angered me no end that he felt he had the right to exploit the attacks for personal and professional gain.

  In a TV interview promoting the album, I watched Springsteen field a seemingly innocuous question: Where did you spend that dreadful day? Springsteen paused for a split second, before replying that he hunkered down in his fancy mansion, and watched the attacks on TV.

  I spent the days after September 11 around the smoldering pile in lower Manhattan, trying to help a family search for their loved one, a young husband and father named Paul Ortiz. For days, his beautiful family prayed that somehow he survived. After days of searching, it was clear he had not. His young wife thanked me for my devotion. Such kindness was humbling. I had done nothing.