The Kid Stays In The Picture

Modesty. I've been trying to understand success. What it means to different people and how they achieve that... It's relationship to the elusive Happiness - the ultimate treasure chest that most people spend their lives searching for, but few actually find. Is happiness / success blowing late-night rails off a table at FortyDeuce with Ashlee Simpson or is it being the center of attention every time you recount the tale for the next eleven years? (Hopefully neither, but we'll call it the Shania Twain paradox). Eons before Huckabees, though, Married... With Children introduced us to a small town's only celebrity: The man who met Annndy Griffith. Spectacular enough to a small community that they could look past the fact that he was also a serial killer.

Success may not be the first thing that comes to mind when seeing a Burbank poseur dry fuck a still-young Ashly Blue on late-night norno (thats softcore porn for those who don't know), but considering she was last seen taking two San-Bernardino-biker cocks in her ass at the same time while squealing her catchphrase, "This is so fucking dirty! I love it," 3a.m. Cinemax may be her end of the rainbow.

Worse, maybe that underage extreme ass-fucking (though maybe less responsible for rectal prolapse) is the despicable, compulsive namefucking that feeds on every nuance of this city. There are some ringers in this sport - infotainment superstars, Melissa & Joan, Pat & Mary, even Jillian... but there are also some Muhammed Alis, some David Beckhams of desperate namedropping, and I think you know who they are!

• Robert Evans: considered a legend by the drones of people who buy into his bullshit, hoping to somehow live vicariously through his wagon which has been hitched to a few too many stars. This guy can't sneeze without spraying five oscar statues. He made blockbuster movie that was nothing but him listing the famous people he knew! Rediculous.
  
• Rodney Bingenheimer: one really lonely night i drove around the LAX arrivals terminal forty three times... it's just what I do... it was halloween weekend and that night I listened to Rodney's radio show for the first time - a halloween mix special. This was before indie 103.1 was on air, and it was the best radio I had ever heard. I learn that the man introduced America to most of the greatest music of the past twenty years... but also that he's a sad, hallow shell of a man... it's not rare that a being great comes at the expense of being horribly tortured, but something about his desperation - the way that he is always talking to someone, always seen with someone, but deliberately so. It was hard to watch Mayor of the Sunset Strip because it so clearly illustrated his psychosis... except maybe to him. In some ways he's the antithesis of Robert Evans, but in mostly they're the same... Kate Hudson's Penny Lane: always surrounded but always alone. ( Note: That's how Matt described me when we first met).
  
• Brett Ratner: This guy is just an asshole. A pathetic starfucking asshole, but an asshole none the less. Recently he released a book of polaroid strips taken in the photo booth in his home (Ingrid Bergman's former manse! Didn't you know?!). The book is more or less an illustrated name-drop. In an interview, i think for BlackBook magazine back in the day, Brett had to make it clear that, "The pictures were not staged or planned. I just had my friends - Michael Jackson, Heidi Klum, Paris Hilton [with Leo Di Caprio] - take pictures because they're always at my house anyway! Did you know it once belonged to Ingrid Bergman?!" And don't worry - Robert Evans not only sports a fancy spread (page 177), he also wrote the introduction to the book! It's like... i don't even know, but it's like something spectacular! Ratner may be the worst, because no matter how much you loathe him and know his life is a joke, you're afraid to talk shit about him because you know he's gonna name-drop you next time he's on Entertainment Tonight, and you know you were only at the Hilhaven afterparty because you were looking to score some blow but then he saw you and you had to tell him that you were between scripts right now but you'd definitely take a look at his... a sordid mess, yes?!
  

But these people are "successful." They're more-or-less wealthy, envied by many, and live the life that 50 million desperate housewives between Fontana and Prospect Heights wish for every week when they flip open their copy of The National Enquirer, STAR, In Touch, or when they turn on Pat O'Brien, Mary Hart, even Hal Sparks.

This was originally going to be about meeting Heidi Fleiss. After ten or fifteen minutes of casual conversation, her infamous past was completely eclipsed by her tragic fetishization of money and her pathological substitution of wealth for happiness (a condition that is intrinsically responsible for her degenerate lifestyle and eventual decline. Call it Tony Montana syndrome - to get precisely wha you've always wanted until it quickly and violently destroys you). I guess this makes me a starfucker. Whatevs. The face of a desperate woman.