Quote of the Day (Christopher Buckley, on the Start of the Summer When All Mel Broke Loose)

“MEL IS CONDEMNED BY THE PRESS. Mel is pulled over by a centurion for driving his chariot at great speed, and accused of having a blood-alcohol level exceeding that mandated by Tiberius. ‘Arrest me not,’ he telleth the centurion, ‘for I owneth Malibu. And thou lookest a bit Jewish unto me.’ Sayeth the centurion, ‘Tell it to the procurator.’”—American comic writer Christopher Buckley, “Shouts and Murmurs: Stations of the Mel," The New Yorker, Aug. 21, 2006

At this time 15 years ago, the film industry was still reeling from the fallout over Mel Gibson’s arrest for drunk driving in Malibu the prior month. (That's his mug shot in the accompanying photo.) 

The initial report by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department—that the actor-director had been detained “without incident”—turned out to be incorrect, with the tape leaked to celebrity Web site TMZ.com showing that Gibson tried to run away, then went into an anti-Semitic rant against the arresting officer.

Two years before, Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ had provoked accusations of reviving the ancient “blood libel” of Jewish responsibility for the death of Jesus. His outburst during his arrest seemed to confirm all that his critics had been saying about this ambiguous, even problematic box office hit.

In the above paragraph, Christopher Buckley demonstrated his usual comic genius with his parody of the stations of the cross. If he had held his fire, he would have found even more material in the next few years, when audiotapes surfaced of Gibson telling his much younger girlfriend, Oksana Grigoriev, that she “deserved” to be beaten and that he’d “bury” her.

Four years ago, there was talk about Gibson’s “comeback,” given the Best Director Oscar nomination he received for Hacksaw Ridge, his first effort behind the camera since the disastrous 2006 film Apocalypto (which, Buckley waggishly suggested in his satire, Gibson had offered to rename Fiddler on the Roof II).

Fifteen years after his Malibu melee and PR mess, though, Gibson is unable to fully emerge from the shadow cast by his past anti-Semitic, racist, and homophobic comments, not to mention his drunken, violent behavior—a history not just viewed in a different light because of the #MeToo movement, but also by actress Winona Ryder’s claim (denied heatedly by Gibson) that he referred to her in the 1990s as an “oven-dodger” (a reference to the Holocaust).

Bonus Quote of the Day (Horace, Anticipating Charlie Sheen by Two Millennia)

Ne, quicunque Deus, quicunque adhibebitur heros,
Regali conspectus in auro nuper et ostro,
Migret in Obscuras humili sermone tabernas:
Aut, dum vitat humum, nubes et inania captet.

(Translation:

“But then they did not wrong themselves so much,
To make a god, a hero, or a king,
(Stript of his golden crown, and purple robe)
Descend to a mechanic dialect;
Nor (to avoid such meanness) soaring high,
With empty sound, and airy notions fly.”—Horace, Ars Poetica, translated by Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon

I don’t know about you, Faithful Reader, but I’ve given up tracking the daily pronouncements and news surrounding Charlie Sheen. He’s not only put out of business the crew of his own show, but also late-night comics, prime-time entertainment journalists and bloggers such as myself who hoped to say something definitive that would not be superseded by each successive news cycle involving the (now former) star of Two and a Half Men.

Heck, he’s even trying to sideline the editors of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations: the number of catchphrases he’s minting with each Tweet and TV appearance (“tiger blood,” “bi-winning,” etc.) has grown so ridiculously immense that he now requires not just a few pages, but an entire CD unto himself.

When did Sheen transform from a bratty, limited-talent son of a Hollywood star into the highest-paid actor on TV, hellbent on taking down his long-running show? In other words, when did this example of garden-variety Tinseltown megalomania become a tale of not-so-ordinary madness?

Sheen likens himself to “a total freakin’ rock star from Mars.” Indeed, in our current culture, it takes only a nanosecond to morph from a rock star to a rock god. (And doesn’t a god deserve “goddesses,” like the twentysomething women from the adult-entertainment industry in his pad?)

You have to go back a long way to find people who thought they had so many divine powers—the Roman emperors, to be exact. My guess is that Sheen knows only one phrase from the centuries of Roman domination of the world: Horace’s Nunc est bibendum (“Now we must drink”).

But the great poet of the Augustan Age, in Ars Poetica, has some things to say apropos of the descent of gods into the common muck.


Fundamentally, Sheen has to watch out. It’s not just because the world outside his hermetically sealed, “bi-winning” environment shows signs of tuning him out (even the witches of Salem became so offended by his use of “Vatican assassin warlock” that they performed a “magical intervention”).

It’s also because that same public is emitting increasing signs that, though it is willing to forgive the worst—and repeated excesses—of stars, it expects repentance. Mental illness only goes so far to excuse someone who endangers his life and his family members, then goes on a 24/7, seven-days-a-week, ad hoc reality show, then sues the creative powers that tried to use tough love to save his life. The crowd, as Horace shrewdly observed, scorns performers prancing around “With empty sound, and airy notions fly.”

Far more talented actors than Sheen have come a cropper, especially for excesses eerily reminiscent of his. Had he opened his paper or turned on his TV this week, he might have seen someone in his corner, Oscar winner and past box-office star Mel Gibson, pleading guilty to a misdemeanor assault charge for battering the mother of his child, with a career grounded for the last five years after a drunk-driving incident that included an anti-Semitic rant as out-of-left-field as Sheen's own. (See last month’s Vanity Fair article on the roots of Gibson’s decline.)

But, if Sheen really wants a glimpse of his frightening future, he would do well to rent or catch on TCM the 1933 golden oldie, Dinner at Eight—and, in particular, concentrate on John Barrymore, in a role based on his persona and in a performance as emotionally naked and terrifying as any Sheen can ever hope to see.

“The Great Profile” was just a little more than a decade removed from his electrifying Broadway turn as Hamlet, but he was already headed straight for his sorry career finale—an inebriated has-been whose failing memory--and consequent need to improvise anything on the spot--led to the pathetic spectacle of audiences laughing at his expense.

In Dinner at Eight, the situation faced by Barrymore’s character Larry Renault should strike a chord of recognition in Sheen: a star in the grip of substance abuse, abandoned at last by a press agent exhausted from covering for his endless excesses Before his lonely end, Renault/Barrymore looks in the mirror and finds only exhaustion and emptiness. Like Sheen, he finds himself, in Horace’s words, “Stript of his golden crown, and purple robe”—and the discovery shatters him.

Massachusetts Travel Journal (Day Four—Boston)

With the temperatures moderating somewhat, climbing all the way to 60 degrees, I decided it was a good day to experience Boston by boat.

I really have this thing for boat tours. Years ago, having dinner with other members of a writing group, we shared the first memories of our childhood we had used in our writing. All involved bodies of water—a harbor, a river, or, in my case, a creek near my house.

Something of the same yearning for the origins of a life probably underlie my fascination with rivers. I relate to the great closing line of the film and movie A River Runs Through It: “I am haunted by waters.”

My host at my bed and breakfast had suggested the prior day that I try the Boston Duck Tours. The name sounded a bit odd at first, but the more I thought about it, the more intrigued I was. I wasn’t disappointed.

I bought a ticket for the one-hour, twenty-minute tour--$29, with tax—at the Prudential Center. The boat was the “Beantown Betty,” and our guide—or, as he cheerfully put it, “guru”—was a genial fellow named Fred. (That’s him with the duck on the walking stick, in the photo I took that accompanies this post.)

As the tour continued, I was delighted not only to learn about history but also to ride on a vehicle that participated in it. The “Ducks,” you see, were converted WWII amphibious vessels. The term is, in effect, a serviceman’s mongrelization of the military acronymn DUKW (D stands for designated, U for utility amphibious cargo carrying vehicle, K for front wheel drive, and W for double rear axle drive).

The Beantown Betty was one of 21,000 similar vehicles built between 1942 and 1945, being used most notably at D-Day. Our boat still had notations reminiscent of the period, including three cartoons with the once-ubiquitous inscription, “Kilroy Was Here,” and another inscription from a British Army commando at D-Day who had ridden on the vehicle years later.

That vet wasn’t the only person from the British Isles to join our intrepid little crew. In fact, the boat seemed full of them. I thought it was mighty nice of them to prop up the American economy, especially considering those unpleasant little matters we had with them from 1775 to 1783 and again from 1812 to 1815.

In any case, Fred kept up a running commentary as we went around the city, through such areas as Back Bay, Copley Square, Boston Common, the Boston Public Library, Beacon Hill, Government Center, the Longfellow Bridge, Bunker Hill, the North End, Faneuil Hall, the “Cheers” bar, and Newbury Street. He gave this film fan a particular thrill by pointing out the location filming, on Beacon Hill, of the upcoming Mel Gibson movie, The Edge of Darkness.

(Incidentally, this is the second time I’ve witnessed location filming of a major motion picture on Halloween. The first was nine years ago, when, unlike this time—when I did not get a glimpse of Mr. Gibson—I saw, in Savannah, Robert Redford, Matt Damon, Will Smith, and Charlize Theron on the set of The Legend of Bagger Vance. I just hope Gibson’s project is less of a disappointment than Redford’s.)

When this fun and informative tour concluded, I ate a fast lunch in the food court at Prudential Center, then took the T train to the Government stop, walked several blocks to the North End, and visited the Old North Church and the Paul Revere House. Both Revolutionary War sites are worth talking about at greater length, which I’ll do in future posts.

For now, it’s worth mentioning another point about Longfellow’s immortal poem about Revere. In prior posts, I mentioned some issues that made this ride not quite the stuff of legend (e.g., the famous lantern signal was not devised for Revere’s benefit but for others, and he never made it out to Concord because he was apprehended by the British).

Well, there’s another legitimate bone to pick with Longfellow. The poem mentions “a friend” of Revere that hung the lantern. That “friend” bit marginalizes not one, but two people who took risks as significant as Revere’s: Captain John Pulling and Robert Newman, sexton of the Old North Church, who hung the two lanterns for up to a minute in the steeple window. (The church was then the highest structure in Boston).

The problem was this: If the patriots could see the lanterns, so could the redcoats, and they immediately began wondering why they were being put up at that hour of the night. By the time Newman came down the stairs, they were waiting for him. To evade capture, he came down the center aisle of the church, then jumped through the window to the right of the altar—now called “Newman’s Window” in his honor.

Newman could not escape arrest for long—General Gage figured out pretty easily who did and didn’t have access to the steeple at that hour—but eventually had to release him for lack of evidence—the same thing that kept them from holding onto Revere himself indefinitely.