The Noxema Girl and Mr. Steamy Get High, Get Naked, and Get…..No Coverage?
Eric Dane, aka ‘McSteamy,’ and Rebecca Gayhart, aka The Noxema Girl
If a scandal falls in the middle of Hollywood, and very few people read about it, did it happen at all? Or does it indicate that the stars involved don’t even merit the attention? OR does it mean that the subject matter is just too dirty and ugly to think about?
This is relatively old news, and it’s also ‘sad smut,’ as Lainey would put it — gossip on matters that are serious and dangerous. But I’m particularly struck by the way it’s been relegated to the back pages of the gossip rags — or not covered at all.
The story, in brief: Rebecca Gayheart, whose face is forever immortalized for my generation as ‘The Noxema Girl’ (and/or Dylan’s ill-fated wife in Beverly Hills 90210), is married to Eric Dane, aka ‘McSteamy,’ from minivan majority fav Grey’s Anatomy. Last Spring, Lainey published a blind item with the following clues:
Smack No Kids
Smack No Kids:
They’ve been married a while now, he’s still desperately in love with her, and has been patiently waiting to have children…only she hasn’t been healthy enough to get pregnant. Because she loves heroin. Last summer it was a last chance, he took her on extended holiday, cleaned her up, a new positive attitude, kept her busy working on a new project through the fall, away from her regular enablers, and it totally worked out. She was in a good creative space. She was able to fight the temptation.But as an actor, the work ends eventually and if there’s nothing new to do, there’s really nothing else to do. Bored and idle, the old demons have come back. One day last month he came home from a long overnight and couldn’t find her. The dealer called a few hours later telling him to pick her up, she was so out of it even he had to cut her off and she had started harassing his other clients. All the emotional wear and tear, it’s beginning to show on him physically too. But he’s working more than she is and can’t get away for several weeks so he’s hired a babysitter to watch her night and day. Babysitter. She resents him for it of course so the fights are getting worse … and the one benefitting from all of this is a slag bitch colleague who’s been waiting for her chance for a long, long time.
Last week, Lainey somewhat uncharacteristically acknowledged that the blind item did indeed describe Gayheart and Dane, perhaps because a very illicit and very scandalous video of the pair had recently surfaced. The video, which depicts the couple and another woman (former Miss Teen USA Kari Ann Peniche, recently of Celebrity Rehab) in various states of undress and intoxication, includes Gayheart’s admission that ‘I’m so high!’ For more, see the extensive Gawker post, including edited video, here.
Us Weekly ran a two page spread — very brief reportage — concluding with an inside source who claims “this is another cloud over Grey’s, and they don’t need any more negative publicity.” The couple’s lawyer has been riding the crazy rhetoric train, claiming:
“This is simply a private, consensual moment involving a married couple, shot several years ago, which was never intended to be seen by the public. Although the participants are nude, the tape is not a ‘sex tape.’ It is a private tape made for only my clients’ personal use, and nobody has the right to exploit it. If anyone exploits the tape, they will be violating my clients’ rights and will be exposed to significant liability.”
In other words, there’s no way to spin this. Gayheart was convicted in 2001 of vehicular manslaughter hitting and killing a 9-year-old with her car. She was also photographed in 2003 naked, in a bathtub, with a crack pipe.
Now you might be thinking: Gawker coverd it! So did Lainey! It was in Us Weekly! It was totally covered! On the contrary: it was on the 56th page of Us Weekly, and didn’t even merit a cover mention. This, from the magazine that repeatedly featured an affair between Lee Ann Rimes and the star of a Nora Ephron made-for-tv movie. And as much as I like Gawker, it has a fraction of the audience of either of the big mags. TMZ covered it, but not with its usual updates and panache — most likely because Gawker got the scoop. Crucially, the language used to describe the tape isn’t ‘scandalous’ or ‘shocking’ — but embarrassing, a word with a far softer connotation than those usually associated with sex tapes and hard drug use.
So what’s going on here? Why doesn’t this merit a cover? We’re talking HARD DRUGS here. Is it too sad of smut? Is it the fact that Eric Dane — the real object of the minvan’s affection — is not directly linked to the drug use, and is trying to ‘save’ his addicted wife? Is it that the romance at the heart — the marriage of Dane and Gayheart — doesn’t seem to be in peril? And only a truly nasty sexual scandal, such as the various exploits of both Jon and Kate, will sustain curiosity, outrage, and readership? Or is that too little is known about the ‘real’ Gayheat and Dane…and their personal lives, despite any matter of coke and sex, simply aren’t established enough to merit a disconnect between established persona and action?
I will say that from what I remember from Grey’s halcyon days, McSteamy was a bit of a sex-driven cad, so a sex-tape wouldn’t absolutely undercut his ‘picture personality.’ But then again, knowing Grey’s, I’m sure he’s reformed and had serious relationships with half of the hospital. But the guy’s nickname is MCSTEAMY.
And maybe that’s what gets to the heart of the issue: as Lainey points out, Dane has repeatedly announced that they want to start a family. And if they have, and continue, to reframe this scandal and recovery in terms of love, unconditional marital devotion and the possibility of a big-cheeked Noxema girl baby, they may do no wrong. Rimes, on the other hand, is getting a divorce, and Jon keeps dating the daughter of Kate’s plastic surgeon. You might assume hard drug use would out-scandal those actions. But as the last few weeks have proven, you’d be wrong.
Post Script: Apatow, Rogen, Heigl Throwdown!
The shitstorm continues. Heigl’s The Ugly Truth opened relatively strong with $27 million domestic (although not strong enough to beat current summer rom-com champ, The Proposal).
And this weekend, it goes up against the Rogen/Apatow/Sandler collaboration Funny People. Rogen and Apatow have been doing the press rounds for the film, and have obviously heard wind of Heigl’s comments — both concerning her “torturous” schedule at Grey’s Anatomy and her previous complaints about her own collaboration with Apatow and Rogen, Knocked Up. (For the record, Heigl told Vanity Fair that Knocked Up “paints the women as shrews,” while the men look “lovable.” She added, “It was hard for me to love the movie.”)
On Howard’s Stern’s XM Radio show, Rogen and Apatow offered the following (via US Weekly):
“That [movie] looks like it really puts women on a pedestal in a beautiful way,” he quipped on Howard Stern‘s SIRIUS XM radio show on Thursday.
Added Apatow, “I hear there’s a scene where she’s wearing … Underwear …
with a vibrator in it, so I’d have to see if that was uplifting for women.”
Apatow figured Heigl was “probably was doing six hours of interviews and kissing everyone’s a**, and then just got tired and slipped a little bit” when she made the remarks to Vanity Fair.
Regardless, Rogen said, “I didn’t slip and I was doing f****** interviews all day too … I didn’t say s***!”
Even more baffling, said Apatow, “We never had a ‘fight’” with Heigl while filming. “Seth always says, it doesn’t make any sense [because] she improvised half her s***,” Apatow said, adding that she “could not have been cooler.”
Apatow said he hasn’t spoken to Heigl since her remarks. He doesn’t know if he’d make a big deal about it, either.
“It all depends on how much coffee I have had that day,” he said. “If I was fighting … with someone else about something I may handle it wrong, and if I’m in like total Buddha mood, I’d be like ‘I feel sad that she hasn’t learned the lesson of her journey yet,’” he said.
After the remark, “[You think] at some point I’ll get a call saying ‘Sorry, I was tired…’ and then the call never comes,’” he said.
Rogen said he doesn’t feel bad since Heigl seems to run her mouth and most people, including Grey’s Anatomy staff.
“I gotta say it’s not like we’re the only people she said some bat **** crazy things about,” he said. “That’s kind of her bag now.”
Now, this has been framed as Rogen and Apatow attempting to divert attention away from her movie and onto theirs, but I think the choice of forum — Howard Stern, who tends to encourage more, well, frank discussion — helps to at least frame their discourse as the expression of their ‘authentic’ feelings about Heigl.
Ultimately, Rogen and Apatow undermine any and all discourse that asserts that Heigl has become a scapegoat, or that her words are taken out of context (see the Newsweek article). If even the people she WORKS WITH say she’s this sort of person, she must be.
Again, I want to emphasize that it doesn’t really matter whether or not she really is a shrew — what matters is that all aspects of her image (and the media) seem to be collaborating to portray her as such. It also doesn’t help that she was the executive producer of The Ugly Truth — further highlighting what has been constructed as ‘movie-role’ hypocracy: criticizing her character in one film and playing one that seems to embody the selfsame traits in another.
That’s about all I have to say — other than the fact that everywhere, even The Onion A.V. Club, seems to be circulating this line of discourse. Heigl’s got to turn this around quick — either by mocking herself (a Funny or Die video or SNL skit might do, but I don’t know how funny she really is) or by doing something significant enough to drape over this now acutely felt component of her star image.
Katherine Heigl: The New Shrew
Katherine Heigl: The New Shrew?
A number of trusty tipsters have pointed me towards a bevy of articles (one on NPR here; another, more lengthy one you can find here from Newsweek) that, in light of Heigl’s recent visibility in promoting The Ugly Truth, attempt to grapple with the question of her stardom — and the backlash against it. Is she a shrew? Do people really hate her? And why?
The NPR Piece points to Heigl’s recent appearance on Late Night with David Letterman, which has been repurposed and used as ammo against her. In the clip, she complains about working an 18-hour day, but somewhat jokingly. Here’s what NPR reported:
When Katherine Heigl was on The Late Show With David Letterman in support of The Ugly Truth this week, he asked her about her return to Grey’s Anatomy, and she told him (it’s at about the 1:25 mark in this clip) that her very first day back was a seventeen-hour day. “Which I think is cruel and mean,” she said with exaggerated somberness, before moving on to talk about how it was great to be back, she misses former co-star T.R. Knight, and so forth. If it were anyone else, mentioning that she thought seventeen hours was a rather long first day, it would have gotten no attention whatsoever.
But she is not anyone else. She is Katherine Heigl.
Every time Heigl opens her mouth, the majority of the outlets that cover this sort of news gleefully write another story about what a horrible complainer and diva she is. (Two of those articles claim that she was on a “rant” and that she “railed at” producers. I challenge you to get “rant” or “rail” from that clip.)
The article then points out the following concerning her ploy against her own show last year:
People will tell you she got herself into this mess by insulting the Grey’s Anatomy writers by pulling her name from Emmy consideration last year and blaming the quality of the material she was given. That move was, indeed, not diplomatic in the slightest, despite the fact that she was absolutely correct about both the writing in general and the writing for her particular character. (What was she supposed to do? Submit the episode where she saved the deer?) There is a certain “you don’t trash your co-workers out loud” ethic that it would have been both wiser and kinder to embrace. (Although, of course, plenty of show “sources” haven’t hesitated to dish equally about her, except that they do it anonymously and avoid the consequences.)
…before going on to show examples of how her quotes have been taken out of context and used against here (including one in particular about smoking, which outlets used to complain that she swore she wasn’t addicted to smoking (even though she smokes regularly). Anyway. Point is, the press — especially the blogs — are out for her.
Newsweek offers a bit more of a meta-analysis:
How did Katherine Heigl fall so far and so fast in esteem? Part of it is pure sexism. Every decade has a Most Annoying Actress (not that long ago, Jennifer Love Hewitt was the object of tabloid disaffection), never an actor, and it’s a distinction doled out via a caveman’s principles. Heigl violates every archaic, unspoken rule of being America’s box-office sweetheart. A lot of actors smoke, curse, drink, and mouth off, but she gets the most grief for it. Last summer, when she was caught flicking a finished cigarette onto the sidewalk, Star magazine quickly tarred her as an environmentally unfriendly “litterbug” who inappropriately goaded a nearby police officer into letting her off without a ticket.
But then it goes on to do exactly what the NPR piece was highlighting —
- “more than simply daring to challenge chauvinistic mores, Heigl has shot herself in the foot with her delivery”
- “This week, she carped to David Letterman that she’d had a “seventeen- (dramatic pause) hour (dramatic pause)” workday on set, and that she was “going to keep saying this because I hope it embarrasses them [the Grey's Anatomy show runners].” Embarrass them for what? Keeping her employed? To a country nearing 10 percent unemployment, the remark was tone-deaf”
- And this doozy at the end: “Just like real life, in which Heigl seems unable to see the acreage between oversharing and keeping her mouth shut. Heigl might be an actress, but she could work on her act.”
So what is it? In a debate on my Facebook wall, two of my friends offered the following:
KL: while i think that gender plays a significant role in the Heigl backlash, i also think that she needs to step up her game. i mean how can she complain about Knocked Up and then star in The Ugly Truth? am i missing something here? they look about the same in terms of gender politics - except one doesn’t involve a baby, at least as far as the trailer acknowledges.
KW: heigl is a punching bag but that in my opinion it is fully deserved…i think what you said about the politics of her films (and tv shows) is true: she’s done nothing to merit being so damn sanctimonious about things. of course she’s right about knocked up but why … say that after you’ve cashed your check and become a “bonafide movie star”. as far as grey’s goes and last year’s incident, regardless of the writing, if she could actually ACT then that’s what would have counted. meryl streep could read the phone book and get an oscar nomination. what’s her excuse? heigl just infuriates me.
See the vitriol there? And I feel the SAME WAY. I don’t know exactly why: most likely a confluence of reading about what we have collectively taken as her ‘ungratefulness,’ her outspokenness, and her general complaining about the situation in which she’s found herself.
But this anger/annoyance bespeaks a greater sentiment and attitude towards stars, something I’ve been continually reading about in recent weeks. Part of our reason for being okay with stars and celebrities — who are paid enormous salaries, enjoy lavish lifestyles, have everything better than us — is our fundamental belief that they are there for two reasons:
1.) They have talent. And that talent merits their elevation — they are magical, beautiful, superlative. Angelina Jolie or Meryl Streep. They DESERVE our adulation.
2.) WE have chosen them. They become superstars because we, as a discerning audience, have ‘voted’ for them each time we attend a movie, watch a TV show, are interested in their lives. In this way, stars are strongly linked to feelings of democracy — we believe that those in power (and those that are elevated) are there because we, the people, have selected them to be so. They aren’t monarchy, they aren’t put in power by force — it’s US who have selected them to be our representatives. Even if they are completely and totally manufactured and put before us as the “new star” — see the Disney star factory — there’s still an illusion that they are of our choosing.
This is complicated somewhat by the rise of people like Paris Hilton (note, however, what a backlash there is against her — for her lack of talent, specifically) and reality stars. In my opinion, however, reality stars are the embodiment of the second quality: in American Idol, the country literally votes for who they want to be the newest celebrity. But a full discussion of this phenomenon merits a separate post.
For now, assume that we consider our stars as if elected officials. Now, what do we expect of an elected official?
1.) They will ‘serve’ us.
For stars, they serve us by entertaining us. When they do bad movies, or offer a bad performance, they are ‘failing’ us.
2.) They will make good on campaign promises.
A star must ‘make good’ on the promise of his/her first elevation into stardom. Katherine Heigl must “make good” on the promise of her performance in Grey’s Anatomy and Knocked Up.
3.) They will not begrudge the responsibilities of the office.
It was the star, after all, who wanted to be ‘elected’ — so he should not be angry when the paparazzi follows him, stars want autographs, or he has to work long hours. This was his idea, right?
4.) They will be grateful for our support.
For Heigl, this is key. She is ungrateful, she begrudges her work (see above), she lambasts the films/shows that made her a star (see her comments on Knocked Up and Grey’s.
5.) You must acknowledge (and play by) the rules of the game.
Politicians know they must participate in the publicity game — you spin negative things to look okay, you make sure you don’t put your foot in your mouth, you never say anything too outspoken — see the backlash against President Obama’s comment on the “stupid” decision to arrest Gates this week. You exhibit grace under pressure. You’re not too loud, too brash, too out there.
And Heigl is ALL of these things — and she has no compunction about it. Her transgression is of course embolded by the fact that she’s a woman — as one of my professors has pointed out, a woman who speaks (and especially speaks boldly) is always labelled as shrill, because women aren’t supposed to be speaking in the first place. But she’s also demonstrated a general unsavvyness, for lack of a better word, when it comes to negotiating her image, sustaining her fan base, and generally INVITING the press to take jabs at her.
Now, the feminist in me might want to look at this as a general critique on outspoken women. And Hollywood certainly has a long history of banishing those who don’t play by the rules: Heigl hails from a long line of “outspoken shrews” that include Katharine Hepburn, Jane Fonda, and Roseanne Barr. The first two bore the brunt of media criticism and fan backlash (Hepburn was “box-office poison; Fonda was the reason we “lost the war at home”) before returns in tour-de-force actings; as for Barr, well, I think we do different things (and force different fates) on women who aren’t considered ‘beautiful.’
So what does Heigl need to do? I don’t think she needs to “shut-up and sit down.” But her stardom is contingent upon a certain “contract” between fan and star — and to me, she just seems uncognizant of what is expected of her. As KW points out, this may be due to the fact that her MOTHER IS HER MANAGER. (See the example of Tom Cruise. Sigh.)
I’m not saying that women shouldn’t be able to speak their minds. Female stars speak their minds all the time — they just do so in a more calculated, less press-release-to-lambast-writers-on-my-own-show sort of way. I am saying that any star — regardless of gender — needs to be aware of the way that the game is played — especially when your words, whether in the form of an official statement or a couch-jumping tirade on Oprah — can be morphed, digitalized, and spread far into the corners of the internet. With so many opportunities for distortion — so many media outlets, so many voices that get to “speak” the star — it’s reckless, at least from a purely financial, star-maintenance point of view, to give them the opportunity to do so.
