Movie Quote of the Day (‘Love at First Bite,’ With Dracula’s Big Come-On Uncharacteristically Rebuffed)

(Count Dracula, having been seized by love at first sight for flaky blond supermodel Cindy Sondheim—whom he believes is the current reincarnation of Mina Harker—sits down at her table to make his best case.)

Count Dracula [played by George Hamilton]: “I love you, and can give you eternal life.”

Cindy Sondheim [played by Susan Saint James]: “Shit! I knew it! An insurance salesman. I’ve already got Prudential.”

Dracula [haughtily]: “I am Count Dracula. I don’t sell life insurance!”

Cindy: “Well, don’t get so hostile! You walk over here and start to tell me you love me. How can you possibly love me? You don’t even know me. Maybe the only thing you know is that I don’t want to get married.”— Love at First Bite (1979), screenplay by Robert Kaufman, directed by Stan Dragoti

Dragoti knew about blond supermodels all too well: he was married, in the Seventies, to perhaps the biggest one of the time: Cheryl Tiegs.

Quote of the Day (Jennifer Sky, on Wolves Who Chase Models)

“We’d be invited to a fashionable club, and GiGi would be introduced to a guy twice her age who would soon disappear. The guy who dumped her this time didn’t even have the decency to call. This man was known to date only models. In the years to come, I would watch ‘modelizers’ become part of the pop culture canon—Mr. Big, in an early episode of Sex and the City, was even suggested to be a modelizer. They were sold as capricious fellows, just doing what fellows do. They were promoted as heroes and conquerors for bedding those elusive creatures called models. But that day, I was only a teenager comforting another teen with a broken heart.” —Jennifer Sky, “On The Prowl: Models and The Men We Dated,” The New York Observer, February 24, 2014

The “modelizers” featured prominently in this article are Leonardo DiCaprio and Hugh Grant. Among others, past and present, according to this Huffington Post article from last summer: Mick Jagger, Adam Levine, Johnny Depp, Richard Gere, Rod Stewart, George Clooney, Seal, and Eric Clapton.

Photo of the Day: Party Animals and Supermodels

A few days ago, across the street from my office building at Rockefeller Center, the sounds of Caribbean music reached my ears as I made my way into work in the morning. I knew that the Today Show has, for some time now over the last several years, at least, featured mini-concerts. Perhaps Fox News was doing the same thing with its morning show, I speculated—a thought probably planted a few days before, when I saw a bandstand set up with some musicians onstage.

This time, as I drew closer, I noticed the little scene in this photo. It was a veritable cabana party going on. What could be the occasion?

Good ratings? Or something that must be music to the ears of Roger Ailes—a potential megascandal for the Obama administration? The music and the relaxed attire were so festive that I half-expected to see Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and God knows how many other house conservatives come out to do the Limbo Rock. (They might be slightly premature in their expectations: Fifteen years ago, as the Monica Lewinsky situation hit the fan and dreams of impeaching Clinton danced in their heads, they were ready to do the Bimbo Rock. We all know how that turned out.)

Just around the time I was taking in this scene, another one greeted me: a mad hive of people pressing toward the door of the Fox News Building, madly snapping photos of someone hidden by the crowd until that person had slipped behind the door. The last time I had seen such a swarm of shutterbugs snapping away was during a book (???!!!!) appearance by Cindy Crawford at a Barnes and Noble store on Fifth Avenue one Christmas season nearly 20 years ago.

“Who were they shooting?” I asked a couple of bystanders.

Each offered the same initial response: “Oh, some supermodel.”

Some supermodel. It says something about contemporary American culture, I think, that this answer could be so blasé. The term “supermodel,” after all, was originally coined to designate an individually far removed from the normal pack of models in terms of money and level of fame. Over the years, it applied to the likes of Cheryl, Christie, Cindy, Elle, Kathy, Tyra, and Katie. It usually combined several of the following: 1) a Sports Illustrated cover, or multiple ones; 2) appearances in Victoria’s Secret; 3) at least one divorce; 4) extending 15 minutes of fame into a fashion line, talk show, or reality show; or 5) eye-candy appearances on film, with no pretensions toward lasting thespian careers.

We have come quite a distance from those days. “Some supermodel” implies that we’re making so many of these that we simply can’t keep up anymore. America, it seems, has become better at inventing supermodels than at inventing gadgets.

The second of the two onlookers I spoke to offered a name for this supermodel: Miranda. At this, I drew a near-total blank. I could think of only three reasonably well-known figures named Miranda: Miranda Hobbes, the red-headed lawyer friend of Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City (a fictional character, be it noted); Miranda Richardson, with a well-deserved reputation as an actress but never, to my knowledge, as any form of model; and Miranda Lambert, who has made her mark on country-music stages rather than catwalks.

I could just imagine the intense disappointment of a friend of mine (and he knows who he is!!!!!) On a prior occasion, he had chastised me, a lifelong Yankee fan, for not knowing that: a) Derek Jeter was dating Jordana Brewster, and b) Ms. Brewster was easy on the eyes. What would he think now, when I not only had failed to come up with a picture of “some supermodel” but couldn’t even summon the last name of the one in question?

This is the story of my life, I’d have to tell him: a minute late and a dollar short.

The next day, idly perusing one of the tabloids without which life in New York is sadly incomplete, I was, at least, able to supply the name of “some supermodel.” I learned that Miranda Kerr was an Australian supermodel and that she had dropped in on “Fox and Friends” the prior day. Evidently, she was promoting her own skincare line.

I still don’t have a clue about anything else this woman has done (although, I suppose, a supermodel is not expected to do anything except recline on a beach somewhere, being snapped away)—but I’m sure my friend will enlighten me some (after scolding me for being too late to snap a picture of the Aussie lassie).

Photo of the Day: Where Was Heidi?

You really never know what—or who—is going to turn up in Duffy Square in midtown Manhattan these days. On my way home from work late this afternoon, I noticed that crowd staring at a stage set up for the TV show, Project Runway.

I began to rummage foggily through memories of past issues of Entertainment Weekly. Was this the show with Tyra Banks or Heidi Klum? I couldn’t remember. I did hope it was Heidi’s show rather than Tyra’s. (The one time I happened to be channel-surfing and caught Tyra passing judgment on young ladies, she appeared so severe, so cold to the losing contestants as to instantaneously, all by herself, plunge the world into a new ice age. It must be Heidi’s show they were promoting here, I decided.)

When I got home and looked up the show’s Web site, I saw that I was indeed correct, though the site referred to Lincoln Center rather than Duffy Square. While still in Duffy Square, I caught no glimpse of the blond former supermodel, nor any sign of any designers (not that I would know what a designer looked like). Not only that, but there was no trace of any aspiring model ready to strut and pout her hour upon the stage and then being heard no more.

The one person seemingly begging for attention in the vicinity of the square was a somewhat squat woman in shorts, with a guitar that she did not strum well at all, along with a cascade of hair that strategically concealed, Lady Godiva-like, portions of her torso. This must be The Naked Cowgirl, who, capitalizing on the blaze of publicity for The Naked Cowboy, had dared to appear at the Crossroads of the World.

Whatever the woman’s entertainment aspirations, she did not appear remotely ready for Project Runway, let alone any form of prime time.

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.”

Quote of the Day (Rod Stewart, on Wedding Rachel Hunter)

“I’ve been tamed. I've put my last banana in the fruit bowl."—Rod Stewart, following his marriage to model Rachel Hunter on December 15, 1990, quoted in John Walsh, “The Saturday Profile: Rod Stewart, Rock Star: Do Ya Still Think I’m Sexy?” The Guardian, December 5, 1998

Do I even need to write that the couple separated in 1999? I guess you can say that for Rod Stewart, this relationship devolved from “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” to (given his recent gravitation toward what a friend of mine once termed “Grandma’s Music”) “Yes, We Have No Bananas.”

None of us should be surprised that the relationships of entertainers last about as long as summer fireflies. Compared with the eight-day marriage of Dennis Hopper and Michelle Phillips (see my post from the other day), the union of Stewart and New Zealand supermodel Rachel Hunter amounted to an entirety.

(Before we go any further, a question: what does a young woman have to do to graduate from being just a model to being a “supermodel”? A Sports Illustrated appearance? Million-dollar contracts? What, exactly?)

What continually gets me, though, is how silly entertainers sound when they profess eternal fealty in public. It’s like what someone told me when I asked him why so many CEOs spout optimism about their firms when financial results tell a far different story: “They’re caught up in the moment—they can’t help themselves.”

Among the people who haven’t been able to “help themselves,” for instance, is Brad Pitt, who praised his beaming honey in the audience at one awards show as “my angel.” Who was this seraphim? Angelina Jolie? Jennifer Aniston? No, try Gwyneth Paltrow, about 14 years ago, right after their Seven came out.

On another such occasion, Jim Carrey spotted his beloved (no, not Renee Zellwegger or Jenny McCarthy—perhaps it was Lauren Holly?) down the aisle, then pronounced, before millions worldwide watching on TV, “I would slay dragons for you.”

An easy promise to make—no dragons have been around since St. George, to my knowledge—but when it comes to something harder, like sticking with the person he loved after their 10th fight over mirror time, Carrey had no desire to go the distance. As all my married relatives and friends (nearly all of whom are married longer than Stewart, Pitt or Carrey) have told me, marriage requires inordinate patience, even hard work.

But you have to ask yourself, why was Stewart so confident that his relationship would last? His own prior history with Britt Ekland, Kelly Emberg, Alana Hamilton, and God knows who else didn’t exactly inspire optimism about his connubial endurance.

Neither did the age difference between him and his toothsome blond bride. Once, in a live version of the immortal song about his youthful love for what would now be termed a “cougar,” “Maggie May,” he joked that his wife was still in diapers at the time it was recorded. Put another way: she was 21 and he was 45 when they wed.

At some point, Ms. Hunter was bound to look at the man who still thought of himself as a bantam rooster and conclude that he was getting long in the tooth. Though marketers are fond of telling us that today’s youth are not as loyal to brands as earlier generations, I’m afraid the same holds true for how long they stay with older partners. That meant Ms. Hunter would, at some point or other, join Cheryl Tiegs, Christie Brinkley, Cindy Crawford, and others among the legion of MCSs (Maritally Challenged Supermodels).

TV Exchange of the Day (“Scoundrels,” on Photographers and Supermodels)

Heather West (played by Leven Rambin): “Mom, Rene is a brilliant artist. See? Totally legitimate. He shot Gisele Bundchen when she was 14. You know what she made last year?”'

Cheryl West (played by Virginia Madsen, pictured here): “Some dirty old man very happy?”—“And Jill Came Tumbling After,” Premiere Episode of Scoundrels, teleplay by Lynnie Gray and Richard Levine, directed by Julie Anne Robinson, original air date June 20, 2010