The NY Daily News' Ben "Gatecrasher" Widdcombe helps us kick off this Black Friday by directing us to the online auction of a letter that corpulent screen legend Marlon Brando dashed off to a young Charlie Sheen, expressing his regret over missing the younger actor's 26th "birthday bash." Brando's disarmingly poetic words of apology follow:
In a pre-taped interview set to air on Ellen DeGeneres' show today (TMZ has the video), Hollywood's highest paid TV comedy star, Charlie Sheen, appears to have found it in his heart to mend fences with ex-wife Denise Richards, despite still harboring some traces of bitterness over that time she announced to the world that he's an abusive, jailbait internet porn junkie and online hook-up addict. Sheen even goes so far as to reluctantly approve the new guy in her life, Richie Sambora:
A Defamer operative passing by the Two and a Half Men set sent over this photo of Charlie Sheen's trailer door, where the actor was taking a break from the crushing demands of a sitcom actor's schedule, marshaling his strength for a tour-de-force table read performance that would convincingly prove that he's worth every penny of the $350,000 per episode he's reportedly going to be paid this season. Sheen is obviously already taking his responsibilities more seriously now that he's going to be the best-remunerated comedy star on TV, as only a week ago the magnetic sign on his door frequently read "HOOKERS," a downtime activity that definitely didn't help to focus his professional energies.
When happily divorced Charlie Sheen isn't hotly anticipating being on the receiving end of one of his basket-tossed, pigtailed companions, he's hard at work raising American morale with his weekly antics on Two And A Half Men. Realizing that his role of Charlie Harper is one of TV's great, iconic comic creations—forged in the grand tradition of Ralph Kramden or Archie Bunker, just without any discernible character traits, idiosyncracies, or gifts for physical comedy—the show's producers are finally compensating Sheen for his creative contribution by making him the highest paid sitcom actor on television:
· It's nice to see that Charlie Sheen and Denise Richards could settle their divorce issues amicably, before any nastiness about drugs, gambling, and jailbait porn could disrupt their incredibly peaceful family life.
· Kate Hudson and Chris Robinson must be really serious about the end of their marriage—their rep isn't even bothering to lie about it.
· From the "actresses are crazy" file: Showrunners love nothing more than to pick up their morning paper and read about how a cast member thinks they know nothing about the character they created and are bent on removing all acting "choices" with some malicious editing.
· We imagine that Scary Hollywood Lawyers like Marty Singer are at their most terrifying when they're chasing after celebrity clients to pay their legal fees.
· We have no idea what ability our favorite local Chinese restaurant has to wage war, but some misguided hackers sure seem pissed off about it. [Note: The restaurant in question is Chi Dynasty in Los Feliz, but we removed the link to their website after a couple of readers said the site might be harboring a virus. We use Firefox, so we didn't see it.]
While it's safe to say Charlie Sheen is not having the greatest of years, his career seems to be the one area of his life that's carrying on nicely. Apparently, audiences of Two and a Half Men feel that the off-screen domestic foibles and cheerleader-chasing antics of its star do little to dilute its sitcomy hilarity. The LAT reports that Sheen is demanding to be compensated in an amount befitting his singular talents, elevating him to the rare, $1 million-an-episode circle previously occupied by such primetime royalty as David Schwimmer:
It's hard to pick out the most amazing thing about this Hasselhoff video: The Hoff's clinging to both his former Knight Rider and Baywatch glory, the incredibly bad production values, or the premise that he'd kick a hot piece of ass out of his car because she lives too far away would all make fine choices. But we'll have to go with the fact that KITT has been modified to European automobile standards so that Hasselhoff's German fans won't be jarred by the sight of the steering wheel on the left hand side of the vehicle.*
· Who are the hottest (by "hot," we're considering only their physical attibutes—who the hell cares if they can sell?) real estate brokers in LA? Curbed has the answer.
· Charlie Sheen must continue to stay 300 yards from Denise Richards, or the state of California will revoke his cheerleader-visitation privileges.
· Breaking! Kathy Griffin is a big c-word! Update: Kathy Griffin is not a big c-word because her publicist made nice with the angry internet man.
For the true warhorses of celebrity PR, there is no scandal so damaging (short perhaps of some video surfacing of their client dumping a duffel bag of hooker body parts over a steep embankment off Mulholland Drive) that its bad publicity can't be reversed. Charlie Sheen's reps, for example, seem to have been doing an impressive job of leaking favorable items to the press, but now it's time to move on to the more ambitious, second phase of their image rehabilitation plan. The Palm Beach Post's Page Two gossip column reports:
PrivacyWatch celebrity sightings are submitted by our readers. Send yours to tips[AT]defamer.com (please put "sighting" or "PrivacyWatch" in the subject line) and let everyone know about the time you saw Dylan McKay brooding in the Target toy department.
PrivacyWatch celebrity sightings are submitted by our readers. Send yours to tips[AT]defamer.com (please put "sighting" or "PrivacyWatch" in the subject line) and let everyone know about the time you saw Al Pacino and family skipping merrily along The Grove's trolley tracks.
While Hollywood myth has it that Charlie Sheen's insatiable appetite for cheerleaders had him regularly ordering up flatbed truckloads of pep-squad pyramids to his home at a time, Maxim magazine has finally established his rightful place in the he-whore pecking order by releasing a top ten list of "Living Sex Legends." The divorce scandal-embroiled Two and a Half Men star lands at the #2 spot, with 5000 spirited notches on his belt. The only more successful seed-spreader is #1 Umberto Billo, a porter at The Venetian hotel who supposedly earned his tip 8000 times over. Others to make the list are KISS' generously betongued bassist Gene Simmons (#3 with 3600), and beloved Oscars cut-to reaction shot subject, Jack Nicholson (#7 with 2000). The rest of the list is after the jump.
A helpful reader scanned this For Your Consideration cover ad from yesterday's Variety for us, demonstrating that CBS isn't backing down from supporting scandal-buffeted Charlie Sheen in its Emmy campaign for Two and a Half Men. While our spotlight might make it look like an unfortunate choice was made in selecting a pullquote for the ad, a savvy publicist actually made a wise decision by choosing the more ambiguous "perverse and timeless" description over the far less savory "cheerleader-devouring pom-pom fetishist" one from People's original text.
A little earlier today, a representative of Lifestyle Media, publisher of American Cheerleader, asked that we remove an image of that magazine's cover that we used to illustrate our post about the actor's latest spirit squad-related troubles, a request with which we happily complied. Of course, this distancing from Sheen during such a turbulent period of negative publicity, while admirably principled, will not be without its costs. We expect that this sudden abandonment will result in the immediate cancellation of Sheen's subscription, and depending on how personally he takes the news, the pulling of all advertising for The Mr. Jonze Talent Agency And Cheerleader Camp For Young Ladies Of Extraordinary Promise from the journal's pages, a revenue loss that could reach five figures.
Once again, the tabloid press has fallen for the clever tricks of the Charlie Sheen PR machine, which slyly seeks to reinforce the actor's alleged, All-American taste for the company of barely legal (legal being the operative word), spanky-panted pom-pom girls through the gossip column testimony of former enablers of his pigtail fetish .Says Page Six:
Charlie Sheen has finally caught a break from the onslaught of relentlessly negative publicity surrounding his ongoing divorce from estranged, Sambora-smooching wife Denise Richards, as a jailed pimp reminded Page Six of Sheen's All-American, straight-guy-with-too-much-money appetite for hookers dressed as cheerleaders:
• Assuming a net worth of $1.3 billion, and spotting him a generous five inches to start with, Mark Cuban's penis is fifteen inches long. [Page Six]
• Speaking of penises, Charlie Sheen may have been spending quality time with Las Vegas transvestite Kayle Coxx. The extra "x" is for how super creeped out we are by this story. [R&M]
• Staying on the topic of dicks, former NYT executive editor Howell Raines is living in Pennsylvania and working on a civil war novel in which Robert E. Lee explains how the war was everyone's fault but his own. [Lowdown]
• Suge Knight is down to his last eleven dollars. Apparently dangling Vanilla Ice out of a window doesn't produce as much loose change as it used to. [Daily Dish]
• If a stroke hadn't felled Jay Presson Allen, Liz Smith would have killed her with Vioxx. [Liz Smith]
The accusations of violence, drugs, gay porn, whoremongering, lying, bad mothering, and publicity-whoring in the Great Charlie Sheen/Denise Richards Divorce War (please assign the preceding transgressions to either party as you see fit) were already damaging enough. But if you doubted for even a second that Sheen and Richards were hurtling toward mutually assured tabloid destruction, consider the gossip Apocalypse that Team Richards is calling down from the heavens by invoking David Spade's love life. (Quick recap: Richards is angered that Spade—who is seeing Richards ex-bff Heather Locklear, we think—called the gay divorcée a backstabber for dating Richie Sambora, who is divorcing Locklear. Got it? Good. We're shooting ourselves in the gut with a nail gun for typing that out.) Says Page Six:
The ugly he-said-she's-a-lying-publicity-whore/ she-said-he's-a-violent- pill-abusing-whoremonger- with-a-taste-for-jailbait-porn fallout from the public disclosure of Denise Richard's divorce declaration last Friday continues to contaminate everything in its path, with estranged husband Charlie Sheen's manager expressing his outrage that the couple's messy split is being played out in nasty soundbites in the press by issuing a nasty soundbite to Page Six:
