Celebutards (4 page)

Here’s a complete list of the meticulous one’s misspellings:

Irag. Curruption. Dictatoriship. Crediblity. Adminstration (three times). Warrented. Desperatly. Preceedings. Ouside. Subpoening. Responsibilty.

Take some responsibility, Babs! A short time after the posting, Streisand’s spokesmouth, Dick Guttman, blamed the errors on the star’s Web hosting company.

There was no disputing the identity of the woman at the microphone in New York’s Madison Square Garden in October 2006. That’s when Streisand, appearing for the first time since a 2000 farewell concert (she always says goodbye, but never leaves) got irritated by a heckler who didn’t like her skit involving an impersonator of George W. Bush. Frankly, most of the audience, which included a good number of Bush-bashers grew a tad impatient with the tedious politicization of the concert. One fan yelled out something that sounded like, “Communist!” That’s when Streisand blew her stack.

“Shut the f*ck up, would you?” she shouted, slowly and clearly enunciating the third word. “Shut up if you can’t take a joke!”

She shrieked, “Give him his money back! Go get your money back!” The man left. I hope she returned every penny.

Barbra later apologized, but defended her shrewish outburst insanely. “The artist’s role is to disturb.”

There is only one thing disturbing about Barbra Streisand. It’s that anyone, anywhere, continues to listen to a word that comes out of this gold-throated dolt’s mouth.

H
E’S THE BIGGEST STAR
to grace the heavens, envied by men, adored by women. Heck, adored by men and slobbered over by women. He’s also a major political iconoclast, who cut his $20 million
Ocean’s Eleven
salary to $1 to star in, co-write, direct and produce the socially conscious, historically illiterate propaganda picture set in the McCarthy era,
Good Night and Good Luck
.

Probably more than any adult man alive, George Clooney appears on “celebrity lists” popularized by the HBO series
Entourage
. This is when otherwise monogamous couples draw up lists of famous people who the couple agrees that, should the opportunity arise, the woman would be permitted to sleep with, no penalties to the relationship. On
Entourage
, star Adrian Grenier discovers to his dismay that the woman with whom he’d spent the night was about to get married, but had put him on her list—so sex was OK, but just that one time. Of course, if you want to trap Clooney for more than a few hours, you’d better be exceptionally selfless, politically liberal, uncommonly stunning and most of all, patient, because George has a chronic inability to settle down. This tendency was joked upon in New York’s Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, where a sculpture in Clooney’s likeness sits at a table offering a faux diamond ring to whoever sits opposite. How many tourists have had their pictures snapped in the fantasy pose of getting engaged to George Clooney?

H
IS CHRONIC SINGLEDOM
has also led Clooney to battle persistent rumors that he is swinging for the boys’ team.
Esquire
magazine asked him in April 2008 about a Web site that asserts “George Clooney is gay, gay, gay.”

“No, I’m gay, gay,” George cheerfully said. “The third gay, that was pushing it.”

But movie tough guy Clooney went soft when addressing a 2007 shoving match in a Los Angeles restaurant with cover model and “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” pitch man Fabio. Clooney had asked a member of Fabio’s party to refrain from taking his picture. But Fabio insisted he was merely hosting a charity event when a drunken Clooney flipped the bird and insulted Fabio’s female guests.

“He has no class,” Fabio huffed to
OK
magazine. “You have to be a low-class scumbag to start calling a woman a name. If you’re a man, you should never. You should be a gentleman. These women were with me and as a man I defend them. He was lucky he ran out of the restaurant. He’s not even half a man.”

Clooney agreed the Italian-born model and romance novelist could beat him up.

“Yeah, that’s probably true,” said Clooney. “He’s a big guy.”

Before his TV success, Clooney was married from 1989 to 1993 to actress Talia Balsam. More recently he’s developed a reputation as a consummate bachelor. Nicole Kidman and Michelle Pfeiffer once bet him $10,000 that he’d have kids by age forty. But when he hit forty-one and still had failed to reproduce, Clooney confessed, Kidman sent him a big check. But the star sent it back, betting double or nothing he’d be childless by age fifty.

And why not? At a glitzy 2007 Hollywood AIDS benefit, Sharon Stone put Clooney on the auction block along with his
Ocean’s Thirteen
co-stars Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Andy Garcia and Ellen Barkin, with the high bidder winning a kiss from the bachelor of his or her choice. Sorry, Matt, Andy, Don and Ellen, there never was any contest. Some bazillionaire bid $350,000 to watch Clooney kiss his girlfriend on the mouth, proving that the “celebrity list” is alive and well. When you’re the sexiest mammal alive, kisses don’t come cheap or private.

He has held on tightly to his confirmed bachelorhood. Standing next to girlfriend Sarah Larson in New York in 2007, he said, “I’m never at home and every woman gets sick of it. If I was them, I wouldn’t put up with me for too long.”

B
UT IT WAS
C
LOONEY
who didn’t put up with Larson for long. After a year of togetherness, he dumped the former cocktail waitress in May 2008, leaving his Los Angeles mansion for a time so Larson, twenty-nine, could gather her stuff. “George is relieved to be single again,” a friend of Clooney’s reportedly said. “He thinks Sarah is sweet [yee-ouch!] and that is why it is so hard to break up with her.” Larson was said to be completely devastated. Clooney had just celebrated his forty-seventh birthday with her. She was his Oscars date. She thought he was about to propose marriage. Instead, those pesky gay rumors returned, full-force.

Twice voted
People
magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive,” Clooney is a former TV heartthrob (he catapulted to stardom playing hunky Dr. Doug Ross in
ER
) who clawed his way to the top of the celebrity acting game with his deadpan delivery, full head of hair and air of inaccessibility. But somewhere along the line, Clooney translated his public adulation into an annoying willingness to express whatever offensive or inane liberal patter crosses his graying head.

“I’m going to keep saying ‘liberal’ as loud as I can and as often as I can,” Clooney told
Newsweek
magazine. Somehow, he was talking about his film
Good Night, and Good Luck.

Clooney does a pretty good impersonation of a guy who doesn’t care about dough (he earned a paltry $350,000 and a best-supporting actor Oscar for
Syriana
). But then he rakes in $10 million, $15 million, even $20 million for a mainstream flick that pays for his money-losing political diatribes. As he’s risen in prominence, and, unbelievably, influence—some folks have urged him to run for office in his native Kentucky—Clooney has come down with an acute case of Clooney’s Disease, a disorder that occurs when actors begin to believe their own hype.

The afflicted are deluded into thinking fame makes them smarter and their opinions more important than those of ordinary mortals. In 2003, as Clooney received a special filmmaking achievement award from the National Board of Reviews, he joked, cruelly, “Charleston Heston announced again today that he is suffering from Alzheimer’s.” Turns out Clooney is active in gun control, but what that has to do with a filmmaking award exists only in his frazzled head. Clooney defended his remark to columnist Liz Smith. “I don’t care. Charlton Heston is the head of the National Rifle Association. He deserves what anyone says about him.”

Replied Heston, “It just goes to show that sometimes class does skip a generation,” referring to Clooney’s elegant late aunt, Rosemary Clooney.

Perhaps Clooney thought he was too cute to be an idiot, a theme that crops up repeatedly in his life and work. But George Clooney proved something unintentional with the Heston remark: Good-looking people, even more than Alzheimer’s patients, have an inverse ability to be stupendously dumb.

George Timothy Clooney was born May 6, 1961, in Lexington, Kentucky, to Nick Clooney, a journalist, TV anchorman, game show host, host of TV’s
American Movie Classics
, and failed Democratic congressional candidate, and Nina Bruce, a former beauty pageant queen. His cousins include actor Miguel Ferrer, the son of Rosemary and Jose Ferrer.

“I spent the first part of my life being referred to as Rosemary Clooney’s brother, and now I am spending the last part of my life being referred to as George Clooney’s dad,” his father famously said, with a touch of bitterness.

Clooney attended Northern Kentucky University and briefly the University of Cincinnati, but did not graduate. I sense a trend—why do those with the silliest, loudest mouths tend to be the least educated? He turned to acting only after he failed a tryout with the Cincinnati Reds.

While still appearing on
ER
, Clooney began starring in feature films. These included 1997’s
Batman and Robin,
in which he played the conflicted bat, a role he said he hated. He told Barbara Walters that, in his rubber suit and pert nipples, he also played Batman gay.

It seems Clooney quickly forgot that, as a struggling, young actor living under Aunt Rosemary’s roof, he couldn’t get arrested to get his picture taken by that breed of photographer known as paparazzi. Or “stalkerazzi,” as he called some of the most aggressive shutterbugs. Once a star in 1996, he organized a boycott by fellow celebs of
Entertainment Tonight
because its parent company owned
Hard Copy
, which he considered the worst invader of celebrity privacy.

Clooney objected to photographers (A) yelling comments such as “Who’s the fat chick?” about a woman he was with to get his reaction, and (B) shooting over the top of his stall in a men’s room, which happened in Australia. In that incident, Clooney grabbed the peeping shooter’s film from his camera, which prompted police to begin an investigation into Clooney’s alleged photographic assault. But the probe was dropped once cops saw the pictures, which Clooney then destroyed. The episode leaves me wondering what Clooney found so objectionable about the sight of his presumably naked body in the loo.

A year later, Princess Diana was killed, and Clooney, loudly and unfairly, blamed the photographers who chased her into a Paris tunnel. His criticism grew so shrill that those who make their living bringing Clooney fame and fortune had enough of his whining. At the New York premiere of his film,
The Peacemaker
, photographers stood quietly together, put down their cameras, and refused to shoot.

After Diana’s death, Steve Coz, editor of the
National Enquirer
, called for all tabloids to boycott “motorcycle paparazzi”—the breed that chases its prey from the backs of bikes. Oddly, despite the unprecedented self-censorship, Clooney singled out Coz for condemnation. “The Princess of Wales is dead, and you [Coz] have gone on television, and you have washed your hands, and you have deflected responsibility, and yet I wonder how you sleep at night. You should be ashamed.” Perhaps Clooney failed to actually
read
the loathed tabloids.

But in 2005, Clooney suddenly came out against anti-celebrity stalking laws championed by fellow thespians such as Reese Witherspoon.

“These guys can be real jerks, these paparazzi, they’re not trying to catch me doing something stupid, which I’ll have to take hits for—they’re trying to create you doing something stupid. They walk through the airport and go, ‘Who’s that fat chick you’re with?’

“I’ll take all of those hits in lieu of trying to restrict it, because the dangers of restricting it, or getting into those dangers, [is] like burning the first book. I get that they do some rotten things…It’s a drag for me…[But] as a guy who believes in the free press, I think that some of these hits we have to take in order to not mess with freedom of speech.”

After Clooney and Sarah Larson were injured in a 2007 motorcycle accident in New Jersey, more than two-dozen hospital staffers were suspended for peeking at his medical records. But Clooney, undergoing a change of heart over invasions of privacy, said they should not be punished.

Mr. Free Speech must have been terribly disappointed when DNA evidence was presented in the case of Diana’s death. It was final proof that Diana was killed not by the hated shutterbugs, but by her alcohol and pill-popping driver, Henri Paul.

Clooney quickly switched his political blathering from photographers to liberal politics. As was evident with his Charlton Heston comments, he simply did not care, or did not recognize, how offensive, or even hurtful, his words can sound.

“What did Bush do on 9/11? He ran away and hid,” he told Britain’s left-leaning
Guardian
newspaper. “Even Reagan knew more about leadership than that, and he was as bad a symbol of America as I can think of, off-hand. But at least he’s been in enough cowboy movies to know he had to come out and stand on top of the rubble and be seen shaking his fist or something.”

He went on, “They tell us we’re going to war and no one’s saying ‘Bullsh*t’ loud enough. And the language! Listen to the language! ‘Evil.’ ‘Evil’? ‘Nexus of evil’?,” Clooney said, mangling the phrase, “axis of evil.”

“‘Evil-doer’? That’s my favorite, ‘evil-doer’! What’s wrong with their vocabulary: couldn’t they come up with ‘schmuck’?” railed Clooney.

Clooney told
GQ
magazine that he keeps a photo of his fellow celebutard, ex-President Jimmy Carter, visiting the
ER
set on display in his bathroom. He also thinks Mario Cuomo should be president, and compared Newt Gingrich to a dinosaur. “The man has no arms,” he laughed.

“The problem is we elected a manager, and we need a leader,” Clooney told the magazine. “Let’s face it: Bush is just dim.”

Pot, kettle? One who demonstrates his own dimness so promiscuously probably should avoid such terms. But I’d never sleep if I allowed myself to take regular offense at the ravings of celebutards. And yet, it’s hard to gloss over this classic Clooneyism, which he spilled to German TV: “You can’t beat your enemy anymore through wars; instead you create an entire generation of people revenge-seeking. These days, it only matters who’s in charge. Right now that’s us—for a while at least. Our opponents are going to resort to car bombs and suicide attacks because they have no other way to win.”

Did I read that right? Is Clooney suggesting that we and our allies simply stop defending ourselves, so as not to encourage “revenge-seeking”? With these words, Clooney mindlessly excuses the dastardly work of suicide bombers and terrorists, while making us into the bad guys. He grandly espouses what’s known as a “rape mentality”—a way of thinking that says, “If you attack me, it’s my fault!”

Clooney has brought his lack of intellectual seriousness into such labors of love as
Good Night and Good Luck
, which received generally glowing reviews and bagged six Oscar nominations, including one for best picture and best director, but won nothing on Oscar night. His story that lionizes TV journalist Edward R. Murrow as the guy who took down Commie hunting Senator Joseph McCarthy is historically flawed. In fact, Murrow was decidedly late to the dump-McCarthy party. See how Jack Shafer of
Slate
eviscerated Clooney’s movie: “If Jesus Christ no longer satisfies your desire to worship a man as God, I suggest you buy a ticket for
Good Night and Good Luck,
the new movie about legendary CBS News broadcaster Edward R. Murrow…. Of course, Murrow was no god. Point of fact, he shouldn’t be regarded as the patron saint of broadcast news his fans, among them
Good Night and Good Luck
director George Clooney, make him out to be.”