Photo of the Day: They Might (or Might Not) Be Giants

When I first snapped this shot of a Times Square billboard nearly two weeks ago, I was thinking of titling it “The Biggest Losers.” It feels eons ago now, but at the time the New York Knicks’ lineup looked stripped-down, they were terrified at the prospect of injuries to stars Carmelo Anthony and Amar’e Stoudemire, and coach Mike D’Antoni was uneasily laughing off inquiries about his employment prospects. The team seeemed to have no chance of making the playoffs--and, worse still, Isaiah Thomas was still circling around in owner Jim Dolan’s orbit, maybe unable to coach the team but casting a baleful shadow once again.

You’ll notice, I’m sure, one face missing from this billboard, the one who has rescued the Knicks from the dead and put a genuine smile back on D’Antoni’s face. Tonight against Sacramento, Jeremy Lin led the team to its seventh straight win.

How long can he keep this up? Will Carmelo and/or Amar’e demand the ball and disrupt the web of Jeremy’s game? Will opponents figure out his faults and stop him cold? Will injuries restrict his future?

Who cares? Right now, the Knicks are playing the most joyful basketball in years. If he’s not putting the ball in the basket himself, Lin is making a terrific pass to someone who is. (Tonight against Sacramento, 13 assists!)

So the Knicks, I’m sure, are now trying to figure out how to put together another billboard that will capitalize on the unexpected Linsanity phenomenon. In the meantime, however, may I suggest that they please resolve the dispute between MSG and Time Warner Cable, my local provider, that is keeping me from watching Knick games on anything other than post-game news highlights?

Quote of the Day (John Barrymore, on How Movie Lenses Treat Faces)

“If you stay in front of the movie camera long enough, it will show you not only what you had for breakfast but who your ancestors were.”—Stage and screen actor John Barrymore, quoted in Peter Hay, Movie Anecdotes (1990)

The last couple of days, like much of America, I absorbed the nonstop coverage of Whitney Houston’s death. Aside from the changes in the once-glorious voice before her passing, I pondered her altered looks in the last decade, including a TV appearance late last year on Access Hollywood. Her face--once thin, then downright gaunt--had grown heavier. Did her more-mature hairdo set off the face differently? Did she appear fleshier because she was (temporarily) healthier? Or, as was rumored at the time, had she undergone Botox treatments or more radical plastic surgery to camouflage the cumulative effects of aging, alcohol and cocaine abuse, and violence at the hands of ex-husband Bobby Brown?

We don’t know, and even with the saturation coverage of all things medically related to her now, I’m not sure we ever will. But something had happened to the once-radiant face that burst on the music scene in videos for “Saving All My Love for You” and “How Will I Know?” It signified the abuse of a talent as much as the snuffing-out of joy.

With John Barrymore, born on this date in 1882, there was no need to speculate. The stage and screen idol knew just what he was talking about in the quote above. He might have been one of the consummate substance abusers of all time, but he was also as skilled at every aspect of his craft as they came. (Laurence Olivier, who went an Oscar for his own interpretation of Hamlet in 1948, recalled decades later the electrifying effect of seeing Barrymore in the role of the melancholy Dane onstage in the 1920s.)

Barrymore never felt the need to resort to Houston's pitiful evasions and denials of substance abuse. It would have been pointless to do so. After all, in the decade before his alcohol-hastened death in 1942, the camera had been recording the deterioration in the austere good looks that had once earned him the nickname “The Great Profile—and the art of plastic surgery, still in its relative infancy, could not camouflage, let alone reverse, the relentless damage.

In his silent films, Barrymore’s face is still unlined. By the 1930s, however, he was seguing into character roles by necessity. His eyes often pop--no surprise, perhaps, as he was consulting cue cards more frequently because of his failing memory. By the time he played Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet (1936), the face looks puffy and tired, and he appears by far the senior even in a cast notoriously older than their characters.  By Midnight (1939), the lines crowd around the eyes.

Two films made earlier in the decade forecast where matters were headed for The Great Profile. In A Bill of Divorcement (1932), his eyes fill with anxiety as he describes the madness he dreads. The actor might have been channeling his own worst terrors: his father’s insanity had resulted from venereal disease, and Barrymore worried that his alcoholism would produce the same result.

Dinner at Eight (pictured here), made only a year later, was, then and even now, one of the most nakedly terrifying self-portraits an actor ever put on screen. The original George S. Kaufman-Edna Ferber play modeled the character of alcoholic matinee idol “Larry Renault” on Barrymore. (The script even refers to the actor’s nickname.)

It’s impossible to resist the conclusion in his final scene, after Lee Tracy’s cynical publicist has scolded him as "a corpse," that Barrymore is peering into his own abyss. His features slackening, the actor pulls on his face, as if to disprove Tracy’s contention that he is “sagging like an old woman.”

But terrible self-knowledge has overcome Renault/Barrymore, and there’s nothing for him to do, once he’s turned his gas-jets up, than to arrange himself so that when his body is found, “the Great Profile” will manage to look, once again, to its best advantage.

Photo of the Day: The Glow of a Heart

“Love isn't something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn't a feeling, it is a practice.”—Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (1956)

Starting this past weekend, Times Square has run a promotion by architectural firm Bjarke Ingels Group: If you hold your hand over a large button, a fluorescent “heart” within a 10-ft. crystalline cube begins to glow. When several people put their hands over the button, the heart really glows.  I took this shot on Friday, as clumps of passersby began to gawk and/or line up for photo opportunities.

Oh, yes: Happy Valentine's Day!

Quote of the Day (John Forsythe, With Welcome, If Un-Thespian, Modesty)

“I figure there are a few actors like Marlon Brando, George C. Scott and Laurence Olivier who have been touched by the hand of God. I’m in the next bunch.”—John Forsythe quoted in Anita Gates, “John Forsythe, ‘Dynasty’ Actor, Is Dead at 92,” The New York Times, April 4, 2010

This Day in Rock History (Jagger, Richards Set Up in Drug Bust)

February 12, 1967—When he answered the door at his Sussex, England estate that evening, Keith Richards, somewhat the worse for wear after using LSD at his party, disregarded the urging of Marianne Faithfull, girlfriend of Rolling Stones bandmate Mick Jagger, that if he ignored the visitors outside, they would just go away.

What could possibly be wrong? the rock-‘n’-roll guitarist thought. There was simply a “little old lady” out there, along with more than a dozen uniformed dwarves.

Despite the highly improbable appearance of so many diminutive creatures in matching clothing together at one time, Richards greeted the unknown visitors with open arms. They promptly presented him with a warrant to “search the premises and the persons in them, under the Dangerous Drugs Act 1965.” The law found what it expected to find and arrested those inside.

Well, some of those inside. While Richards, Jagger, and art dealer Robert Fraser were hauled off to the pokey, the drug dealer who had supplied most of the mind-altering substances that night, David Schneiderman—a.k.a. “The Acid King” —was not only left mysteriously untouched by the police, but was not pursued in connection with the case when he almost immediately disappeared.

It took four more decades to confirm, but the suspicions of The Rolling Stones and the rest of the counterculture—that the partiers at Richards’ Redlands home had been set up by police and press acting together—turned out to be true. The ensuing case not only proved a major legal battle of the British Establishment vs. the rising youth culture, but also an early indicator of what has been much in the news recently: that the News of the World was collaborating with police to violate the privacy of celebrities.

The Stones’ manager-producer, Andrew Loog Oldham, promoted them as the nasty, surly, evil counterpart to the Beatles’ nice boys. This was largely hype (it was Jagger who attended the London School of Economics, and Lennon who beat early bandmate and friend Stu Sutcliffe to such a pulp that he believed he had caused the latter’s early death). For all the wonders it might have created for the group’s sales, it also sparked a backlash among people who believed them tools of the devil.

One incident after a Stones gig, when the musicians, refused a much-needed bathroom break at a gas station, relieved themselves nonetheless, made some of the newly-suspicious anxious to induce some humility in them. Among this circle were the brass at The News of the World (NOTW).

Given a seeming scoop—i.e, that one of the group was using narcotics—News of the World reported that the one in question was Mick Jagger. The Stones’ lead singer sued and won because—perhaps on the theory that all druggy rock ‘n’ rollers look alike, anyway—the scandal rag guessed wrong as to the identity of the drugged-out musician: It was Brian Jones.

Now the Fleet Street rag was doubly anxious to get Jagger because he had made them all look like fools. Soon, they found themselves in cahoots with the police.

NOTW had first attempted to work through Scotland Yard, but that agency had thrown cold water on the idea, noting that any arrest would just make martyrs of Jagger and Richards. The Chichester police were more open to the publication’s advances.

The police didn’t have much time to plan this operation, but they didn’t need much. In a preview of the black ops that have gotten Rupert Murdoch’s enterprise in trouble since then, the phones at Richards’ estate were being bugged. A motley crew of law-enforcement officials were gathered together on the spur of the moment.

What happened after Richards opened the door to them has now passed into legend. Blasting from the speakers was Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35”—you know, the one that goes, “Everybody must get stoned.” The 21-year-old Faithfull, grabbing a fur rug to cover herself, was so surprised at what she called “the coppers” making free with the house that she dropped her impromptu covering.

(Perhaps the police avenged themselves for their sexual frustration at this moment by spreading a cruel—and, Faithfull insists, false—rumor involving Jagger, his woman and a Mars bar.)

Jagger and Richards received the support you might expect from other members of the British Invasion--notably, The Beatles and The Who--but unanticipated aid from an influential member of the British Establishment helped to turn public opinion in favor.

William Rees-Mogg, in an editorial titled "Who Breaks a Butterfly Upon a Wheel?” for the paper he edited, the London Times, blasted their unduly harsh sentences after they were found guilty at the subsequent trial. (Jagger was sentenced to three months in prison for possession of four amphetamine pills, and Richards to 12 months for allowing his home to be used for smoking cannabis.)

The musicians were being made examples because of their fame, Rees-Mogg contended. (Jagger, for instance, was a first offender who was caught with a French seasickness pill in his pocket. The medication was sold over the counter in France but required a prescription in England.)

There was a real question whether the slight Jagger would have survived a lengthy prison spell. The Times editor, however, changed the climate of opinion enough that the public did not squawk when the two Stones’ sentences were drastically reduced (to less than two days) on appeal.

When I saw the NOTW connection to the case, I immediately wondered about any involvement of Rupert Murdoch. As it happens, the Australian press baron didn’t take over this paper for another year. This particular incident demonstrates that the wiretapping of celebrities had been going on even before his arrival (though, to be sure, he could have changed the environment of the newspapers he bought, if he had been so inclined).

As for The Acid King and his disappearance: According to a 2010 article in London’s Daily Mail, David Schneiderman changed his name to David Jove, then moved to Hollywood, where he became a small-time producer and filmmaker. Eighteen years after the incident, a female friend introduced him to dinner companion, Marianne Faithfull.

The bust had had a deleterious impact on the former sweet-voiced singer, who, tired of her bad-girl image, decided to embrace it. A decade of drug abuse had followed.

In this 1980s dinner, Faithfull abruptly announced to her friend that the male to which he’d been introduced was none other than the Acid King, and he should be avoided like the plague. Her friend took her advice. (Later, Schneiderman admitted to his daughter--herself a rock musician--that he had helped set everything up at the behest of federal officials in the U.S. and U.K. who wanted to discredit the band and cause them legal problems.)

Schneiderman died in 2004, shunned by Hollywood for drug use so rampant that even it couldn't abide it.

Quote of the Day (Cardinal Bernardin, on a ‘Consistent Ethic of Life’)

“The primary intention of the consistent ethic of life…is to raise consciousness about the sanctity and reverence of all human life from conception to natural death. The more one embraces this concept, the more sensitive one becomes to the value of human life itself at all stages…. This consistent ethic points out the inconsistency of defending life in one area while dismissing it in another. Each specific issue requires its own moral analysis and each may call for varied, specific responses. Moreover different issues may engage the energies of different people or of the same people at different times. But there is a linkage among all the life issues which cannot be ignored….

“There are those who support abortion on demand who do not grasp or will not discuss the intrinsic value of human life and the precedence it should take in decision making. The issue—the only issue—they insist, is the question of who decides, the individual or the government.

“Who decides is not the issue. We all decide, but we make our free decisions within limits. In exercising our freedom, we must not make ourselves the center of the world. Other individuals born and unborn are as much a part of the human family as we are.”—Joseph Cardinal Bernardin (1928-1996), “Deciding for Life” (Message for "Respect Life Sunday"), October 1, 1989

Gisele Jinx?

I’m not sure of the provenance of the image attached to this post, but it sure conveys a Churchillian sense of triumph—a premature feeling that might have turned into rancid disappointment and anger inside the very famous young woman flashing this sign.

For the faithful in New England, the New York Giants’ come-from-behind win in the Super Bowl must have felt like (with apologies to Yogi Berra) Deja Blue All Over Again.

But the outburst by losing quarterback Tom Brady’s celebrity wife, Gisele Bundchen, rubbed salt in the wound. Fox Sports’ Bill Reiter went so far as to suggest that it might spell the end of “The Patriots’ Way.” That, for those of us previously unfamiliar with the term, is the code of omerta imposed by coach Bill Belichick that had succeeded, for much of the past decade, in keeping within the family the inevitable tensions occurring when testosterone-turbocharged young men, striving past every ache and pain and Monday-Morning-Quarterbacking session by fans, fall short in the quest for perfection on any given Sunday.

And wouldn’t you know it, no sooner had Mrs. Brady unleashed The Rant Heard Round the World against a taunting male Giant fan, when the Pats’ Ron Gronkowski—he of the most-talked-about bad ankle in New England since Curt Schilling’s much-hyped bloody sock—was videotaped at an aftergame party, moving as if his throbbing body part had miraculously recovered.

The Patriots' Yoko Ono?
It was a massive breach of the latter-day athletic Spartan code: instead of coming home with his shield (or helmet, in this case) or on it, the record-setting tight end was ready to dance on his, surely making a few fans wonder if he could have moved just as fast to catch Brady’s last-second Hail Mary heave into the end zone. It was a Patriot re-enactment of The Fall: first the sin, then the end of the innocence, all following a woman leading a man astray.

The whole sequence had many Patriot fans speculating if it all might have been part of a “Gisele Jinx.” Boston Globe’s Dan Shaughnessy succinctly summarized the developing consensus: “The notion of Gisele Bundchen as Yoko Ono will gather steam now that Brady’s wife has inserted herself into his professional business.”

What a fascinating turn of events—particularly for a woman who has, from all appearances, led a charmed life as the Uber-Supermodel.

The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women
A friend related, not so long ago, that he had developed a small, unexpected, but fascinating subset of his very busy legal practice: representing models. The practice of discovering and marketing beautiful young women, it appears, can be singularly ugly, with some agents ready to take gross financial advantage of these naïve youngsters.

My friend is far too modest to draw the inevitable conclusion, but there is obviously, in this environment, a burning need for an honest, competent, all-around good guy such as himself to act as legal eagle. (I can’t imagine that my friend, if he had junior male attorneys at his firm, would have a terribly difficult time convincing them to perform for such clients work that would normally be considered the worst kind of drudgery.)

I gather that my friend’s practice includes at least a couple of young women who prance down the catwalk, but I don’t know if any of them have yet ascended to the rarefied level of The Supermodel: the Christies, Cindys, Naomis, Elles, Tyras, and Heidis of the world, the ones who can say: “Go ahead, hate me because I’m beautiful! I’m crying all the way to the bank!” Such women have long convinced me that the term “pouting supermodel” is redundant.

Now comes Gisele. Perhaps her profane outburst that her hubby couldn’t be expected to throw and catch at the same time was simply, as Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Gay contends, a matter of a loving wife standing up for her man in an understandable, if inappropriate, way.

But who could doubt that this was a blow to the Patriots’ esprit de corps, an incident so grievous that it made the appearance of a previously unknown “New Belichick” (one given to smiling, if you can believe it) as evanescent as “The New Newt” in the GOP primaries.

Another one of my friends (and he knows who he is!) has sometimes expressed delight that Brady’s wife has a twin out there, presumably unattached. But outbursts such as Ms. Bundchen’s post-Super Bowl rant make one question the desirability of possessing such eye candy, for reasons going beyond what Jack Nicholson memorably told Michelle Pfeiffer in Wolf : “The problem is, aside from all that beauty, you're not very interesting.“

I’m not talking simply about the fact that, even after she stops walking down the runway and consumes her first Twinkie in two decades, there’s a good chance that Gisele will be netting more money than Tom. (On one side: income from apparel lines, diet/exercise books, reality shows in which she could deliver tough love to aspiring Pouty Supermodels; on his side, a pension which will be lucky to exceed his mounting medical expenses. Do the math.)

I don’t even have just in mind the elemental fight every morning for Mirror Time. From Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe to David Justice and Halle Berry, the longevity of unions between professional athletes and their glamorous spouses does not seem terribly long.

The Difficult Mixture of Football and Supermodels
There is also the issue of why a supermodel would even want to follow closely a game such as football. Football involving tackling is not, after all, unlike soccer, volleyball, softball (a cousin of baseball), or basketball, an activity in which a female is likely to participate at a young age. If you’re a supermodel with a loved one in the game, watching him chased (and, sometimes, upended) by 300-pound mastodons at unbelievable speeds is likely to seem like a Sunday horror show. As for all that complicated play-calling—well, what could be interesting about that?

Even after hours of hanging out with, say, Hannah Storm or Erin Andrews—both of whom might be able to translate the game into fairly understandable terms—professional football is simply not likely to be fully understood or liked by Gisele.

And that lack of understanding might go to the heart of why she missed some fairly elementary things, such as:

* If her husband’s receivers were so bad, then how come they caught a Super Bowl record 16 consecutive passes of his at one point?
* Why had her husband put the Patriots in such a vulnerable position with his safety on the Pats' first possession, as well as with his subpar fourth quarter (6 of 15, 64 yards, an interception)?

* She couldn’t have had Wes Welker in mind with her tirade, could she? Because if so, her husband was at least halfway at fault by throwing so poorly on the play.

* Instead of taking umbrage against the Giants heckler who claimed that Eli Manning owned her husband, why couldn’t she point out, with perfect reason, that her husband faced the Giants’ defense, not its offense—then ask, with equally perfect reason, how her heckler might have fared if he had Justin Tuck chasing him all day?

* Instead of questioning her own team’s wide receivers, she might inquired about the wisdom of Belichick’s plan in guarding against the Giants’ wide receivers—specifically, whether the odds of Mario Manningham staying in-bounds on a crucial play would begin to work in the latter’s favor.

Instead, Brady’s Mrs. has made matters unnecessarily awkward for herself and her husband. No matter how much the two of them might offer abashed apologies, from now on, there’s going to be quite a contingent of Patriot wives who, instead of helping Gisele flip the burgers at the next summer Brady barbeque, would much rather flip her the bird.

No, the sense that Gisele is Yoko, or Delilah depriving her husband of his powers at critical moments, can’t be entirely sustained. There are equally, perhaps even more, plausible explanations for why the Patriots dynasty has, as the Giants’ Brandon Jacobs stated with relish, been “decapitated.”

First, perhaps this is all divine punishment for Spygate—a use of videotaping against an opponent so egregious that the NFL imposed a heavy fine.The Patriots have not only not won a Super Bowl since then, but lost in the most agonizing fashion: first, when they were minutes away from concluding a perfect season, and second, when they were on the brink of avenging themselves for that earlier loss. Somehow, the term “genius,” once tossed around regularly about Belichick, sticks a bit more in the throat these days.

The Curse of Bridget Moynahan?
Second, might this be less Gisele’s Jinx than the Curse of Bridget Moynahan? The star of Blue Bloods, Sex and the City and Coyote Ugly has declined to criticize her ex-boyfriend, even after a) he dumped her, taking up with Gisele shortly afterward, and b) he left her pregnant, and even, for a short time before the birth of his first child, seemed distinctly unhappy about impending fatherhood.
But Moynahan's ex-beau, more than anyone, should know better than to read a public silence as ready acceptance of reality. After all, Brady, as someone of Irish descent, should understand that Moynahan can summon all sorts of forces beyond the ken of mortal man. She can pray to the saint for whom she is named, for instance, asking her to take her ex-boyfriend down a peg.

Or she can look in a far less benign direction. Something in the ancient Irish way of life lends itself to impenetrable mists, or calls on the supernatural. (With their groundbreaking tales of vampires, Sheridan LeFanu and Bram Stoker didn’t write from a vacuum, you know.)

If I were the Patriots, I would deeply worry about this curse of a woman scorned. Consider Kate Hudson, who last went out with Alex Rodriguez during the 2009 World Series, and split with him shortly afterward, supposedly over his incurable narcissism. The Yankees not only haven’t come close to winning since, but Kate's Curse seems to be a metastizing force. (How else to explain Brian Cashman's current case of lunacy?)

As he considers what Gisele Hath Wrought, Brady has experienced firsthand the meaning of these lyrics from Peter Allen’s “Don’t Wish Too Hard”:

“How I wished for you and now you’re here
Now I wish that I could disappear and go away.”