Quote of the Day (Catherine Zeta-Jones, on Her Male Admirers)

“I’ve had a few marriage proposals from the crowd, but I think to myself, ‘Gosh, they must be living on Mars to think that I’m not married.’”—Catherine Zeta-Jones, the dream of countless photographers and tabloid editors, on the male admirers she’s charmingly shooed away while appearing on Broadway in the musical A Little Night Music, quoted in Tanner Stransky, “Checking in With…Catherine Zeta-Jones,” Entertainment Weekly, February 5, 2010

Well, Ms. Z-J, the short, flip answer to your concern might be put this way: Men are from Mars, women are from Venus. (Or, at least, the individuals you’re evidently thinking of must see you as something like the ancient goddess of love and beauty.)

But we don’t do “short” and “flip” here (well, “short,” anyway). So, for those extraterrestrial males who, you conjecture, might not be aware of it, I’ll perform a public service and state now that you’re Mrs. Michael Douglas.

But I think something else is involved with these importuning swains besides a dearth of information.

A friend of mine (and he knows who he is!) is the self-appointed head of the Phi Zeta Beta Society. Until I read Ms. Z-J’s comment, however, I had no idea that this ad-hoc (no membership fees!) organization had a contingent of stage-door Johnnies lining up in such force to see her in Stephen Sondheim’s classic.

Based on that sample, it seems a safe wager that my friend’s group might outnumber the combined, unduplicated membership rolls of AAA, AARP, and god-knows-what-else alphabet-soup association. Heck, it might even be bigger than the Pentagon and CIA combined.

(I’m sure its members enjoy their principal activity—ogling Ms. Z-J—far more than America’s military and intelligence establishments do theirs.)

Several logical explanations exist for the cascade of decent and (depending on the paucity of the monetary inducement) indecent proposals that the actress has received:

* Temporary insanity. One possible side-effect of Ms. Z-J opening up her kimono to a fellow cast member onstage in character as Sondheim’s middle-aged actress Desiree, is acute myocardial infarction among male audience members. (Opinions differ as to whether, on at least one occasion, an unplanned wardrobe malfunction occurred or, as those associated with the show insist, the wish was father to the thought among men in attendance that performance.) A second side-effect is acute, though short-term, derangement resulting in the belief that they stand a chance with the Oscar-winning actress.

* Mr. Douglas is losing his life force. Michael Douglas has now joined father Kirk among the rolls of Social Security beneficiaries. Ms. Z-J’s father is younger than her husband. A good quarter-century younger than Michael, she is not that much older than his son Cameron from his first marriage. Her oblivious male suitors evidently have a vision in mind of the couple—either now or in the not-so-dim future—akin to that between superannuated general Sid Caesar and Ann-Margret, as the appropriately named Jezebel Desire, in Neil Simon’s Sam Spade parody, Cheap Detective (a spoof with the kind of obvious and—well, cheap—laughs that bloggers of low taste enjoy).

In other words, the second that Mr. Douglas kicks off—or even begins to slide off—these admirers want to be around his grieving—and suddenly richer--widow.

* Mr. Douglas isn’t losing his life force. In an AARP Magazine profile earlier this year, the actor-producer spoke of “some wonderful enhancements [that] have happened in the last few years—Viagra, Cialis—that make us all feel younger.” It was all he could do not to start roaming through Cupid’s grove right on the spot.

But Douglas has to be careful just how much of his old self these virility wonder drugs preserve. Let’s put it this way about Mr. Douglas in his prior marriage: If Tiger Woods needed good references for the best sex-addiction clinics around, he could have done far worse than consult with the star of Fatal Attraction.

Old dogs sometimes find it difficult not to bound off the porch and go for a good run. A Viagra- or Cialis-enhanced Mr. Douglas needs to resist that urge if his wife is off appearing in a movie or show.

Cat’s prenup, you see, supposedly awards her, in the event that their marriage goes kaput, $2.8 million for every year they’re married and an additional $5 million if he's caught tomcatting. (Not surprisingly, Ms. Z-J regards prenup agreements as “brilliant.”)

In about another year, in other words, if such a sad eventuality should come to pass, Ms. Z-J’s current admirers want to be around the vengeful—and about-to-be-much-richer, by-more-than-$30-million—ex of Mr. Douglas the second that she becomes a free woman.

The second and third scenarios I've just outlined boil down, in a way, to the same principle: Nothing ventured, nothing gained. It's the same one that governors and senators of little name recognition and/or experience have employed for years when they look in the mirror each mirror, see a potential President, and decide that obstacles be damned--they're throwing their hat into the ring.

And so, as she approaches her big moment in A Little Night Music and urges, “Quick, send in the clowns,” Ms. Z-J can imagine the gentlemen lining up outside her stage door and, very truthfully, warble: “Don’t bother, they’re here.”

Movie Quote of the Day (Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, on Why a Marriage Is Ending, in “The War of the Roses”)

Oliver Rose (played by Michael Douglas): “I think you owe me a solid reason. I worked my ass off for you and the kids to have a nice life and you owe me a reason that makes sense. I want to hear it.”

Barbara Rose (played by Kathleen Turner): “Because. When I watch you eat. When I see you asleep. When I look at you lately...I just want to smash your face in.”—The War of the Roses (1989), written by Michael Leeson, adapted from the novel by Warren Adler, directed by Danny DeVito.

Certain TV series and movies epitomize the Reagan Era, I think, either in specific details or their sense of the time.

The primetime soap Dynasty was an example of the former. Creator Esther Shapiro sold her show as a kind of modern retelling of I, Claudius, but in time many saw her characters as stand-ins for the Reagans.

There was the same powerful paterfamilias; the same loving second wife; the same first wife rather lost without him; the same rebellious daughter; the same son either gay or, like Ron Reagan Jr. in those years (courtesy of his brief ballet career), rumored to be so. Its length almost exactly stretched across the Reagan administration, premiering nine days before the Gipper’s inauguration and ending five months after he left the White House.

In showing liberalism at bay, Family Ties represented the second trend. Michael Gross and Meredith Baxter Birney were the stars when the show premiered in 1982, but viewer interest swung irresistibly toward Michael J. Fox, who made conservative son Alex Keaton a charmer you rooted for even though you knew you shouldn’t.

Parents Steven and Elyse Keaton, Sixties hippies who’d morphed into, respectively, a public-TV exec and an architect, looked old and stodgy, just as liberalism did in that era compared with laissez-faire economics (nowadays, we know, in politics as in life on TV, that father knows best).

But the black comedy The War of the Roses touched a particular national nerve, taking the number-one box-office spot in the U.S. on this date 20 years ago. Oliver and Barbara Rose tortured each other so much that they brought to mind Samuel Butler’s acidic summary of Victorian historian Thomas Carlyle and his wife Jane: “Yes it was good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four.”

Except, of course, that Butler was not counting children as collateral damage. The two Rose kids become casualties in the couple’s ferocious divorce after 17 years of marriage, just as the children of Christie Brinkley and Peter Cook did and as those of Tiger Woods and Elin Nordegren will in the event (increasingly likely) that the golfer and his wife part ways.

Warren Adler’s novel was published in 1981, just as a new mood was sweeping the country. The film came out eight years later, when that initial headiness had long since worn off, courtesy of a stock-market correction (sound familiar?). Many in the nation began to take stock of their own lives, if only for a brief period.

The battles between Oliver and Barbara Rose struck such a chord because of this (admittedly short-lived) reassessment. Their relationship began with material goods—a typical romantic- comedy, meet-cute encounter at an auction—so it was only natural that when it all soured—when Barbara decided to have the things that Oliver, as he claims, “worked his ass off for”—it would also involve money and everything it could buy.

Their opulent home forms their battleground, and their take-no-prisoners engagements escalate to take in Barbara’s catered dinner (which Oliver ruins by urinating into it), Oliver’s sports car, and the expensive chandelier from which they dangle at the film’s denouement.

Following Romancing the Stone and its sequel, The Jewel of the Nile, The War of the Roses represented the third (and, so far, last) teaming of Douglas and Turner (who enjoyed a furtive, quickly ended offscreen affair during the making of Stone). These two actors were unafraid to follow their selfish yuppie characters to their logical conclusion. (Douglas gets off one of my favorite lines from the film: "You have sunk below the deepest layer of prehistoric frog shit at the bottom of a New Jersey scum swamp.")

The ascension to power of Barack Obama, like the earlier Presidency of Bill Clinton, persuaded many that a new Age of Aquarius, filled with love and understanding at last, was about to ensue. I’m afraid it’s not going to happen, for reasons having nothing to do with whatever mix of talents and frailties these Presidents and their appointees brought to Washington. It has everything to do with an instinct in the American people far more basic than the kind present in Douglas’ notorious 1990s thriller.

The hunger for material goods has only been checked by the recent recession, just as the “Decade of Greed” did not end when Reagan left for California. That hunger shrivels everything, including marriage.

With so much materially at stake these days, divorce only promises to become nastier. The weapons in the Divorce Wars have only multiplied since the Roses jousted.

In the old days, photographic evidence of liaisons would be enough to compel a wronged spouse to scream bloody murder. Think of the classic early episode of L.A. Law when Arnie Becker warns a client that she does not want to see the pictures of her errant hubby. When she persists and he shows them reluctantly, the inevitable explosion—and resulting legal complication—follows.

But now text messages, reports The New York Times, represent a new “Digital Lipstick on the Collar.” According to the piece, divorce attorneys are seeing an increase in cases where spouses are offering text messages as evidence of adultery.

The War of the Roses missed out on the telecommunications boom that produced the explicit text message, but in so many other ways it anticipated how our age is producing thousands of increasingly toxic divisions of the spoils.

Happy 40th Birthday, Catherine Zeta-Jones!

One of my friends—and he knows who he is!—is the self-appointed president of the Phi Zeta Beta Society, an organization devoted totally to worshipping what he calls one of his “dark-haired British beauties.”

The goddess in question was born 40 years ago on this date in Swansea, West Glamorgan, Wales. But one suspects that she is still putting spring into the steps of hubby Michael Douglas as he enters those golden years. (He shares the same birthday--just that his occurred 25 years before hers.)

It’s sometimes forgotten, but Catherine Zeta-Jones can act (see her performance as a drug lord’s wife in Traffic), even sing and dance up a storm (see her mesmerizing, highly deserved Oscar-winning turn as Velma Kelly in the movie musical Chicago).

Now, it appears that she’ll have the opportunity to do all of this again, as she’ll appear on Broadway with veteran trouper Angela Lansbury in Stephen Sondheim’s musical, A Little Night Music.

The brief AP notice on this didn’t indicate what role she’ll play, but how can it be anything other than the glamorous actress-of-a-certain-age Desiree? Which means we’ll have the chance to hear her sing Sondheim’s most popular song, “Send in the Clowns.” (Somehow, though, I doubt that Ms. Jones will be “losing my timing this late in my career.”)

Looks like the show at the Walter Kerr Theatre—opening Dec. 13—will be one of the harder tickets to obtain this season. Oh, well…