Celebutards

by Andrea Peyser

  Yet her ugly feud with token View conservative Elisabeth Hasselback proved to be the last gasp. It started May 17, when Rosie asked, stupidly, on air, “655,000 Iraqi civilians dead. Who are the terrorists? If you were in Iraq and another country, the United States, the richest in the world, invaded your country and killed 655,000 of your citizens, what would you call us?” What do you think Rosie meant?

  The following Wednesday, Rosie complained her words had been “twisted.” Rosie asked Elisabeth if she believed American soldiers were terrorists. Elisabeth hesitated. Then she sensibly asked Rosie to explain what she meant when she ranted about the troops. But Rosie ignored her.

  A couple of days later, Rosie again shot her mouth at Elisabeth: “Because here’s how it gets spun in the media,” she said. “Rosie, big, fat, lesbian, loud Rosie, attacks innocent, pure Christian Elisabeth.”

  It was unfair. Elisabeth said, “I just don’t understand why it’s my fault if people spin words that you put out there or phrases that suggest things. And I gave you an opportunity two days ago to clarify the statement that got you in trouble on all those things.”

  “That got me in trouble?” Rosie asked sarcastically. “As a friend, you gave me the opportunity. That was very sweet of you. I was asking if you, who actually knows me, do you believe I think our troops are terrorists, Elisabeth? Do you believe that, yes or no?”

  Elisabeth put her finger in the air. “Excuse me. Let me speak.”

  “You’re going to doublespeak,” said Rosie. “It’s just a yes or a no.”

  It went on like this for ten grueling minutes, an eternity for television, as the show switched to a split screen, with each woman in a separate box.

  “Every day since September I have told you that I support the troops,” Rosie spat. “I asked you if you believed what the Republican pundits were saying. You said nothing, and that’s cowardly.”

  “No, no, no!” Elisabeth shot back. “You will not call me a coward, because No. 1, I sit here every single day, open my heart and tell people exactly what I believe.”

  “So do I!”

  “Do not call me a coward, Rosie.”

  “It was cowardly.”

  The next day, Rosie took a planned day off to celebrate Kelli’s birthday. On Friday, March 25, she was gone from the show.

  Barbara Walters wished her well.

  And looked mighty relieved.

  17

  Curb Your Ignorance

  LAURIE DAVID

  Sure, I have a big house, but I use it to gather hundreds of people for eco-salons. That’s not to justify the size of it, but it does create opportunities to spread knowledge and raise money for the greater environmental good. Sure, I could always cut down on clothes and dry-cleaning, but the point is not necessarily what more you could do—we could all do more—the point is that we do our part. And even with the house and clothes, I think I can do, and am doing, my part.

  —Laurie David, to environmental website Grist.org, June 2004

  LAURIE DAVID STANDS APART from the celebutards featured in this volume because she is not an entertainer, politician, minister or prison inmate. She is a wife. Or rather, she was the wife of a fabulously rich and famous person, Seinfeld co-creator Larry David, an achievement that has opened doors to her pet projects and opened wallets in support of her obsession of choice—the urgent, imminent crisis of global warming. But those disciples inclined to enlist in Laurie’s army should be cautioned to do as Ms. David says, not as she does. For while the erstwhile star wife is known to flip the bird at those who drive gas-guzzling Hummers in Los Angeles from behind the wheel of her Prius hybrid, she is then likely to fly, via Gulfstream jet, between her gargantuan, fuel-drinking California mansion and a second, humongous abode in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. For this transgression, she is wholly unapologetic. It is in this hypocritical manner that Laurie David has grown into the living, breathing, dry-cleaning, embodiment of celebrity environmentalism.

  She was born Laurie Ellen Lennard on March 22, 1958, in Long Island, New York. Her first brush with fame came when she started a career in New York City booking comedians for David Letterman. There, she met her future husband, Larry, an unknown who wanted five minutes of airtime. He was turned down. Only later would Larry David find fame, fortune and a “busty, shallow” wife—his words—through his wild success with Seinfeld, and for starring as a misanthropic comic with a fictionally tolerant spouse on HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. The Davids have produced two daughters.

  Laurie’s interest in global warming began as a hobby, then turned into an obsession, a religion and finally into a form of performance art in which the ability to spin seemingly contradictory ideas—SUVs bad, Gulfstream jets good—is paramount. She told the environmental website Grist.org that her environmental mania began at a breakfast with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., son of the slain politician and an environmentalist himself.

  “I sat down to breakfast with Bobby Kennedy and I got up from that table and I have not been the same since,” she said. She was asked what Kennedy actually told her, but she couldn’t remember a thing. “Nothing specific that I can remember. It was like ten years ago. I’m sure we talked about global warming and rivers and oceans and pollution and pesticides and toxins. The gist was that everybody should have the right to clean air and water the way they should have the right to affordable health care and racial equality. What’s more basic than the right to health? One in four black kids in Harlem has asthma because of pollution—now that’s a civil rights issue. It’s an environmental-justice issue. A human issue.”

  Something happened in November 2004. Sorry, Laurie, but George W. Bush was re-elected president, soundly beating Democrat John Kerry. Laurie David described taking to her bed and crying for three days. If she neglected her two young daughters. I suppose she might justify the crying jag as serving the greater good. Because by the time she got out of bed, Laurie was more than an environmentalist. She was a crusader. A full-blown, fire-breathing celebutard.

  Laurie set out to influence every man, woman, plant and child alive. She converted actors, starlets and studio heads in her circle at the salons she held in her monstrous, Tudor-style mansion in Los Angeles. It’s a house she defends, despite its grotesque energy inefficiency, every bit as fiercely as she defends the planet.

  “My philosophy about this stuff is, it’s not all or nothing,” she justified. “A lot of people have that attitude: ‘So you drive a fuel-efficient car, what about your giant house? What about this, what about that?’ I just got asked that on Paula Zahn and I was like, ‘I’m not looking for perfection in any of this.’ We’re an imperfect people. But I really feel strongly that if everyone did one thing, we would be well on our way to a better planet. And I try to do more than one thing in my personal life.

  “Of course, I’m obsessed with telling my kids, no long showers and don’t run the water too much when you brush your teeth. I always use both sides of the paper for printing and faxing. I recycle obsessively.”

  Then came my absolutely favorite part of her rant: “And since I get a lot of clothes dry cleaned, I take a garment bag to the dry cleaner so that I don’t waste the disposable plastic covers.”

  This prompted some perfectly logical questions—if dry cleaning is more harmful to the earth than plastic bags, why not dry clean fewer clothes? And why not live in a smaller house? She did not budge.

  “Everybody has to strike their own balance between how they want to live and how they can reduce their impact. If the environmental movement wants to be mainstream, it has to lose its purer-than-thou, all-or-nothing attitude. It has to be pragmatic enough to bring everyone on board. If perfection is the measure, we will fail to appeal to anyone but the fringe.” That is, the green tent should be big enough to hold every hypocritical Hollywood piglet. Even Laurie David.

  She revealed to Britain’s Guardian newspaper in 2006 that she forced Larry to use hard, recycled toilet paper—though she suspected he secretly filched some of
the soft stuff from his daughter’s bathroom that she brought home from friends’ houses. She also admitted to banning Larry’s golf shoes inside the house, because they might bear traces of pesticides. Finally, she limited Larry’s showers to a minute and a half. Good thing Larry David is mostly bald, because that leaves no time for the application of conditioner.

  * * *

  Finally, she limited Larry’s showers to a minute and a half. Good thing Larry David is mostly bald, because that leaves no time for the application of conditioner.

  * * *

  But Laurie also copped to being part of the problem, confessing that she’s a member in good standing of the Lear jet liberal crowd.

  “Yes, I take a private plane on holiday a couple of times a year, and I feel horribly guilty about it. I probably shouldn’t do it. But the truth is, I’m not perfect. This is not about perfection. I don’t expect anybody else to be perfect either. That’s what hurts the environmental movement—holding people to a standard they cannot meet.”

  Um, I always thought burning excess fossil fuel is supposed to hurt the environment. But what do I know?

  Finding detractors on the right is easy. Bernard Goldberg ranked her No. 82 in his 2005 book, 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America. But Laurie David’s jet-set life-style has brought condemnation even from her pals on the left. Ultra-liberal Nation columnist Eric Alterman, a friend, wrote in the Atlantic, “Laurie David, who dedicates herself to fighting for improved fuel-economy standards and reviles the owners of SUVs as terrorist enablers, gives herself a pass when it comes to chartering one of the most wasteful uses of fossil-based fuels imaginable: a private plane. (She’s not just a limousine liberal; she’s a Gulfstream liberal.)” Ouch.

  New Republic writer Gregg Easterbrook estimated that “one cross-country flight in a Gulfstream is the same, in terms of Persian-Gulf dependence and greenhouse-gas emission, as if she drove a Hummer for an entire year.” But remember—Laurie David screams at drivers of Hummers. Well, I guess eschewing that vehicle is like a fat person who pigs out on Twinkies, then tries to make amends for her gluttony by drinking Diet Coke.

  For a long time, Larry David was forced to adapt. He stuck it out and provided financial support as she authored two books, produced a star-studded comedy special, Earth to America! for TBS, and an HBO documentary, Too Hot Not to Handle, as well as co-producing the Academy Award-winning, An Inconvenient Truth starring Laurie’s fellow celebutard Al Gore.

  He found the enthusiasm to speak these words at a fund-raiser for his wife’s pet charity, the National Resources Defense Council, and reproduced them in his wife’s 2006 book, Stop Global Warming: The Solution is You!: “Thirteen years ago I met a materialistic, narcissistic, superficial, bosomy woman from Long Island. She was the girl of my dreams. She read People magazine, watched hours of mindless television and shopped like there was no tomorrow. Finally I’d met someone as shallow as me. I was hopelessly in love. But then after a few, short months I began to sense that something had changed. She started peppering her conversation with words like ‘ozone layer,’ ‘sustainable forestry’ and ‘toxic runoff.’” But what was not all too painfully obvious was that Larry David, the shallowest man in the world, had married an environmentalist.”

  The marriage came to an end in July 2007, when Laurie David filed for divorce after fourteen years of marriage, citing “irreconcilable differences.” The differences reportedly may have had something to do with Martha’s Vineyard resident Bart Thorpe, five years Laurie’s junior. And a Republican. He was helping build a massive property for the Davids, and was frequently spotted in Laurie’s company. His wife filed for divorce as well.

  Thorpe was helping build for Laurie a new 25,000-square-foot house, bigger even than Al Gore’s Tennessee spread, which was estimated to use twenty times as much energy as the average home in this country.

  Laurie David has not addressed this hypocrisy. Except, when pressed, she told ABC that she’d try to fly commercial. Ick.

  Asked by reporters for a reaction to his wife’s abandonment, Larry passive-aggressively quipped, “I went home and turned all the lights on.”

  She’s not done yet. In the fall of 2007, Laurie and co-author Cambria Gordon published The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming. It’s a children’s book.

  * * *

  Asked by reporters for a reaction to his wife’s abandonment, Larry passive-aggressively quipped, “I went home and turned all the lights on.”

  * * *

  “Kids are the most optimistic human beings—they only see the future ahead of them and it’s bright,” David told Publisher’s Weekly. “Kids also are the number one influence on their parents, so if you want to reach the parents, go to the kids.”

  There you have it. In her long-range plan to indoctrinate the public, Laurie David makes no apologies for scaring the stuffing out of children. It’s all for the greater good!

  Pass me a dry cleaning bag, Laurie. I fear I may be sick.

  18

  Live from Celebutard Row

  MUMIA ABU-JAMAL

  Out of the many here assembled, it is the heart of he or she that I seek who looks at a life of vapid materialism, of capitalist excess, and finds it simply intolerable. It may be one hundred of you, or fifty, or even ten, or even one of you who makes that choice. I am here to honor and applaud that choice and to warn you that, though the suffering may indeed be great, it is nothing to the joy of doing the right thing.

  —From convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal’s taped commencement address played at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, June 11, 1999

  Once again, this is an outrage and we have another marginal piece of allegedly higher education, which proves once again that you can get a better education in a public restroom than you can at one of these colleges.

  —Rich Costello of the Fraternal Order of Police, on plans for Jamal to address Antioch College

  MUMIA ABU-JAMAL—or Mumia, as his disciples affectionately refer to him—has the distinction of being the only celebutard in this volume convicted of first-degree murder. Others have done time, notably Paris Hilton (twenty-two days) and Lindsay Lohan (eighty-four minutes). But none except Mumia has been sentenced to death. If you don’t mind, I’ll just call him Abu-Jamal.

  The Black Panther, radio reporter, and cab driver was ordered to die in 1982 for gunning down a Philadelphia police officer, Daniel Faulkner, a newlywed who was 12 days shy of his twenty-sixth birthday when he breathed his last. Abu-Jamal’s death sentence was overturned in 2001, and transformed to a life prison term that he is currently serving in Pennsylvania, where he enjoys elite status as the prisoner with an energetic, star-studded fan club. He is routinely invited to address college commencements and municipal and civic organizations, for which he provides taped addresses. In 2003, he was named an honorary citizen of Paris, France—though I doubt he could get a table in a restaurant in downtown Philly. But to a specific swath of celebrity-worshiping America, Mumia Abu-Jamal has been anointed a rock star.

  * * *

  It seems every Hollywood blowhard worth his bloated bank account has developed a thing for Abu-Jamal, from Susan Sarandon to Paul Newman, Whoopi Goldberg, Jason Alexander, and Oliver Stone.

  * * *

  To understand Abu-Jamal’s allure, realize that some inmates draw fan clubs of lonely women and confused men who are convinced the imprisoned are wrongly convicted. But Abu-Jamal has developed not just fans, but total fanatics who believe in him as fervently as they believe in building tremendous houses on California sand. It seems every Hollywood blowhard worth his bloated bank account has developed a thing for Abu-Jamal, from Susan Sarandon to Paul Newman, Whoopi Goldberg, Jason Alexander, and Oliver Stone. Tim Robbins and Mike Farrell took out a full-page ad in The New York Times advocating for a new trial, and the Beastie Boys played a concert to raise money for Abu-Jamal’s defense fund. Even former South African President and Nobel Peace prize laureate Nelson Mandela, who served twenty-seven years in h
is country’s Robben Island prison, has jumped on the Free Mumia bandwagon, evidently making the common mistake of confusing the convicted celebutard with a persecuted individual.

  If his fans had their way, Mumia Abu-Jamal would be free to roam the streets tomorrow. I recommend he take up residence in Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins’ guest room.

  The crime for which Jamal received the maximum penalty is fairly straightforward: At around 3:51 A.M. on December 9, 1981, police officer Daniel Faulkner routinely stopped a car driven by Abu-Jamal’s brother, William Cook, on a Philadelphia street. As he handcuffed Cook and awaited backup, Mumia Abu-Jamal emerged from a taxi parked across the street. According to testimony at his trial, confirmed by his conviction and upheld by no less an authority than the United States Supreme Court, it all ended after Jamal pulled out a .38-caliber revolver and shot Faulkner in the back. The officer got off a shot that hit Abu-Jamal in the chest. But the wounded assailant—and Abu-Jamal’s fans strenuously contend it could have been someone else—came back and emptied his gun in Faulkner’s head. Despite his injuries, Abu-Jamal lived; Faulkner did not.

  Those interested in truth and justice might call this an open-and-shut case. For one thing, a .38 that Abu-Jamal had owned since 1979 was found nearby, with five spent cartridges in the cylinder. But legions of the Hollywood upper crust, as well as enthusiastic supporters regularly churned out by mainly West Coast universities, have flocked to Jamal’s aid. To the Free Mumia brigade, his conviction and sentence are a grave miscarriage of justice. To Faulkner’s widow, Maureen, it has been more than a quarter century of uninterrupted hell. Because those who want Abu-Jamal to walk are not terribly interested in who killed Daniel Faulkner. Mumiamites contend that a black man in America cannot find justice under any circumstances. In other words, even if Abu-Jamal did the crime, he should be let go.