by Adam Carolla
I thought I’d include a section here where I break down all the celebrities I insulted or had some sort of run-in with while I was living in this house and doing Loveline.
PATRICK DEMPSEY: Before he was known to every woman in America as Dr. McDreamy, Patrick was known to me as a tool moocher. He lived a little below my new house and used to borrow my stuff. That’s the thing with actors and creative guys—they have no tangible skills. I used to go to his house and help him with home-improvement projects, but I’d have to hang out until it was done so that he wouldn’t fuck up my tools or kill himself with them. Eventually, I got sick of this arrangement and said to him, “I’m going to make a man out of you. We’re going to Home Depot, I’m going to fill your cart, and you’re going to buy everything in it.” So off we went to Home Depot, and we walked the aisles with me throwing all the essentials in his cart—a circular saw, cordless drill, framing square, all the essentials. A fellow shopper stopped us, saying, “Hey, you’re Adam from that MTV show.” I said I was, and then introduced my companion: “You remember Patrick from Meatballs III.”
MARILYN MANSON: He came on Loveline in 2003 and was bearing a gift. You can always tell alcoholics because they bring their own booze as a “gift.” Marilyn brought a bottle of absinthe from France and sat it down next to me. During the first commercial break he said, “Why don’t you give it a shot?” So I opened it—I didn’t want to be a bad host—but then he busted out two glasses. The next thing you know, he was on his fifth glass and had plowed through the “gift” he brought me.
CHRIS PENN: You may not know the late Chris Penn by name, but you’ve seen him in a dozen movies, most famously Footloose and Reservoir Dogs. He’s the only guest I ever hung out with after Loveline. The show ended at midnight, and that usually meant it was time to just head home, but in April of ’99 he asked if I wanted to go out for a beer and I obliged. He said there was a cop bar down the street from our studio in Culver City. Why cops need their own bar, I have no idea. Maybe so they can take turns busting each other for DUI and make their ticket quota.
I later became friends with his brother, the lanky musician Michael Penn. At that moment I realized there are no two brothers, in fact no two human beings, who are more different than Chris and Michael Penn. Chris was a big, hard-drinking guy who’d get in your face. He’d fill a room. Michael is a soft-spoken history buff. Sean is probably right down the middle. He’s smart and kinda reclusive like Michael, but if he feels like it he’ll tap into his inner Chris and punch you in the face. Chris was a good guy and is missed.
GWEN STEFANI: In November of 1995, No Doubt came on the broadcast. I had only been doing the show a couple of months; Riki Rachtman was still cohosting. They were sitting around and helping us roll through calls and a young woman from Vegas talked about how her parents were pissed that she was dating a black guy. Gwen said that she could relate because her family had a problem with her dating outside of her race. She clarified that it hadn’t been a black guy, it had been an Indian guy. She then went on to talk for a minute or two about the girl’s relationship with her parents and them being from a different generation. Being the hard-hitting journalist I am, I decided to jump in and probe a little deeper. I asked Gwen whether her former boyfriend was “American Indian or 7-Eleven Indian.” Gwen was stunned. I didn’t realize that the guy was in the room. She was dating the bass player from the band, who had been born in England but whose parents were Indian. Who pontificates about their ex and the trials and tribulations of their relationship without mentioning the person they’re talking about is sitting in the same room? He then very testily asked what my culture was. I explained I was from the Valley and was raised with no culture. He asked again and said, “I want to know what you are so I can insult you.” I explained I was “a Guinea, a wop, and a dago,” and moved on. No Doubt didn’t return to the show for five years.
ROB SCHNEIDER: There’s not too much of a story and I like Rob, but he did cancel a Loveline appearance because he had to finish a script and had writer’s block. This is a poor excuse under any circumstances, but the movie that was causing the writer’s block was Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo. Anyone who’s seen that movie can attest that the writing in that movie goes well beyond unfunny and becomes confusing. Watch it and you’ll find yourself asking, “Is that a joke?” For example, during the obligatory music montage in the middle of the movie (set, unsurprisingly, to the equally bad “She’s a Beauty” by The Tubes), Deuce helps grotesque women throughout Europe get their groove back. One is randomly covered in shit, twigs, and leaves for no reason whatsoever. He tosses her in a canal, gets out a bucket and brush, and begins scrubbing her. When she emerges from the water she is—are you sitting down?—beautiful. Even more jaw-droppingly, offensively bad is the scene in which Deuce is dating a woman who is forced to wear a veil because in place of where her nose should be she has a penis. That’s right. And not only did this poor girl have a schlong instead of a schnoz, she was also conveniently allergic to Deuce’s cologne. This causes his date to sneeze spooge all over the patrons of the fancy restaurant, including a perfectly timed and aimed spunk shot into a spoonful of consommé about to be ingested by an unsuspecting blueblood. You know what? I take it back. I’m glad Rob took that night off. Sounds like he really cleared that blockage. Just like a beautiful woman clearing jizz from her penis nose.
MARGARET CHO: Since we’re talking comedians, I also had some trouble with Margaret Cho. Margaret is a nice and funny but troubled woman. In 2000 she pulled me aside at a party at Kathy Griffin’s house and decided to practice the ninth of her twelve steps—making amends. This is always an awkward situation, but it’s especially bad when you’re plastered at Kathy Griffin’s house. A few years prior, when she was in the grips of her disease and was living down the street from me, she walked over to my house. She had a script and said there was a part in it for me. It involved the two of us at a party having sex on a pile of coats on a bed. Moreover, she thought we needed to get together and “rehearse” this scene. Years later at Kathy’s, she cornered me to apologize for this behavior. I told her I didn’t give a shit or need an apology. Eager to make her ninth step a success, she insisted. I let her finish and went back to the important work of getting shit-faced. That said, I now think I’m owed amends for the awkward making of amends.
HEATHER GRAHAM: One night in 1996, Heather came in to promote her latest project. I can’t even remember what it was, it was so bad, and looking at her IMDB page it had to have been either Nowhere, Two Girls and a Guy, or Kiss and Tell. Either way, you can see why it hasn’t stuck in my memory. So I asked her if she had anything else to plug. She started telling me about a movie she was working on. As she described it I thought, This is going straight to video, and even asked her, “Who’s your agent? You’ve got to get a new agent. You were in Swingers, you’re a beautiful woman, what are you doing in that piece of crap?” She had told me she was playing a roller-skating porn star named Rollergirl opposite Mark Wahlberg and Burt Reynolds. Obviously I didn’t know it was going to be my favorite movie of the year—Boogie Nights. But you have to understand the context of the time. Mark Wahlberg was still the washed-up rapper/underwear model Marky Mark, and the last thing Burt Reynolds had done was buy a new hairpiece: The last movie Burt starred in had been Cop and a Half (not counting a stellar performance in the Demi Moore movie—nay, film—Striptease). Throughout my five-minute rant about how she was shitting on her career and then lighting that turd on fire, Heather never stopped me or defended the movie. She never came on Loveline again, and Boogie Nights eventually went on to earn millions of dollars and multiple Oscar nominations.
DAVID ARQUETTE: The guests for Loveline on November 3, 1999, were Spike Jonze, Catherine Keener, and Orson Bean, who were promoting their new movie Being John Malkovich. It was the top of the show, and we were discussing John Malkovich and I was asking if he was truly as nuts as he seems. I was making the point that actors who play bizarre people are actually bizar
re in real life. But I was also pretty clear that I was impressed with actors who could be that nutty and yet still hold down the job of showing up on set and memorizing lines. The first example that popped into my head was David Arquette. He’d been on the show before and I thought he was a nice guy, but he’d always left me with a distinctly nutty aftertaste. I piled on a little bit, suggesting that it was impressive that he didn’t fold his script into a Napoleon hat and then eat it.
Drew told me to watch my step because if David was as much of a lunatic as I was saying, he could hunt me down. I laughed and told Drew he was too crazy to find the studio. But I moved on and we took a call.
We were still in the midst of this call five minutes later when David Arquette burst through the studio door. I was stunned, and the pathetic life you’ve been reading about flashed before my eyes. Everyone in the room was shocked. I remember saying over and over again, “This is the worst day of my life.” It was as if I had summoned a crazy genie from a lamp. Like if you say “Beetlejuice” three times. If you talk shit about David Arquette, he’ll pop up wherever you are.
Turns out David was driving home from the Lakers game, flipped on the show, and heard me making fun of him. Contrary to my belief that he was too crazy to find the studio, he remembered it from past appearances and walked right by the security guard and into the studio. He could have easily stabbed me, no problem. Remember, this is the same security guard who used to fall asleep on the sofa next to the studio while we were broadcasting. I inadvertently got him fired after the time I ran the mike-cord extension and broadcast him snoring just to prove a point.
Interesting tidbit: I’ve actually pulled off the Uncomfortable Arquette Trifecta. Alexis Arquette came by the radio show in early ’07 and got testy when I tried to talk about her testes. She stormed out of the studio. Then in ’09, when I was casting my CBS pilot, Rosanna Arquette came in to read for the role of my wife. After a flubbed line or two, she looked across the big oak table to me, my writing and producing partner, a couple of casting chicks, plus some useless executives and had a breakdown. She just stopped, cried, and said, “You know what I can do.” Then she looked at me and said, “Adam, nothing personal, but I just don’t feel like I need to do this.” I agreed with her, by the way. I still have no idea why she was auditioning to be my sitcom wife. Throughout her apology, she kept looking at me and saying my name. The whole time I was thinking, Why do you even know my name?
KELLY OSBOURNE: Speaking of famous families, I also got into it with Ozzy Osbourne’s daughter. Somewhere during the height of Osbourne MTV mania, she was our guest. During a rant, I made the proclamation that women didn’t know anything about war. Kelly declared that not only did her father live through the Blitz, but her favorite thing to do was watch World War II documentaries with him. I thought for a moment that maybe the snot-nosed teen with the fake British accent might be the exception to the rule and that I was going to look like an ass on national radio. But just like MacArthur returning to the Philippines (ladies, you can Google it), I stuck to my original point and stayed the course. I decided to do it Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? style by starting with the most basic questions first. “Kelly Osbourne, for $100, which countries fought in World War II?” She started stumbling through her answer, and it immediately became apparent that she didn’t even know who was on the Allied side and who was on the Axis side. And I don’t mean she didn’t know what team Hungary or Spain was on, I’m talking about the big four. I said, “Well, this proves my point.” She answered with, “That wasn’t a fair question.” I said, “Are you high? That’s like you saying you’re a speed reader but it took you a weekend to get through The Cat in the Hat.” I said, “Thank you for proving my point. Now if you could just admit that you don’t know anything about World War II, we could get on with the show.” She stuck to her guns and insisted she was an expert. At this point Drew jumped in, said this was uncomfortable, and asked, Could we move on?
I’ve gotten into hundreds of arguments with people on and off the air in which they’ve made some sort of proclamation, turned out to be wrong, and pulled the let’s-just-agree-to-disagree bullshit. I then end up coming off like a dick because I’m not willing to leave the subject until they admit that they were wrong. I don’t think this makes me an asshole; I think it makes me a champion of justice.
I said to Kelly Osbourne as soon as she admitted I was right about women knowing nothing about war, we could move on to lighter fare, like genital herpes and dry anal rape. She never did give in, and that night I got home and prayed that one day there would be a show called Dancing with the Stars and that she would be second runner-up.
Chicks pull that it-was-before-I-was-born shit all the time, especially when it comes to war. I think it’s out of convenience. If they saw all the footage of the kamikazes diving at the aircraft carriers and our grandfathers going up in a ball of flames, and if they knew about the hundreds of thousands of men who died in defense of this country, they wouldn’t be able to say no to a blow job or a Denver omelet for the next thousand years.
CELEBRITY BASEBALL: Since the fifties or sixties, the Dodgers would have the Hollywood Stars Night games with real celebrities like Burt Lancaster and Rock Hudson. Nowadays I’m out there with the guy who played the corpse from Weekend at Bernie’s and Mini-Me. Many years ago, during Loveline and before The Man Show, about ten minutes after I became a “celebrity,” Dr. Drew and I were invited to play.
I was very excited. Back then they played hardball, and I even thought that maybe if the wind was just right, I could jack one out of there. I’d taken some batting practice that day and had hit some to the track. I can swing a bat. Unfortunately, I noticed that not only was the roster deep, twenty-plus guys on each team, but that we only had about forty-five minutes to play. I looked up at the scoreboard clock and saw that the Dodgers were due on the field a little after six, and we were starting after five. So I said to the coach, whom I’d never met before, “Coach, I just want to let you know some of the guys, like Dr. Drew, aren’t that interested in playing. Other guys, such as myself, are. Also, I’ve got some game.” He snapped back, “Don’t tell me how to coach this team. Now sit down.” I hit the bench and said to Kevin Frazier, the black guy for Entertainment Tonight, “He’s gonna punish me.” Eventually he started weaving people into the game, and none of them were me. I looked up and saw that there were nine minutes left in the game and I wasn’t getting in. I was pissed because I went to the batting cages and oiled my mitt the night before, I got there two hours early, took batting practice, and yet I was stuck on the bench watching Elayne Boosler run to third from home plate. Eventually it was coming to the end of the game and the coach turned around looking for Stephen Baldwin, who had already been up several times. He was nowhere to be found. I realized this might be my only opportunity to get in the game, so I picked up a bat and I started heading for home plate. The coach grabbed me and said, “Where are you going?” I replied, “I’m going up to hit. Baldwin’s not around—” Before I could finish the sentence, he said, “Sit down.” I was done. I turned around to him and I said, “Fuck you, Pops. Fuck you. Kiss my ass.” Again, I thought he was just a Triple-A coach from the Toledo Mud Hens or something. Unbeknownst to me at the time, it was Jack Gilardi. He was a high-powered agent at ICM who basically ran show business. And he was pissed. This was a guy who hasn’t been told to fuck off in at least thirty years. So Esai Morales got up instead and dribbled one right to the pitcher, who barehanded it and tossed it to first for the third out. I shouted sarcastically, “Good call, coach. Way to get us out of the inning.” I’m the only guy on a baseball team who ever heckled his own coach from the bench. After that, he freaked out on me. He ran over and got in my face again, at which point I gave him the invitation to bring it on because I would kick his old ass. We had to be separated. I was sent over to the other team’s dugout and was banned from the celebrity game. It wasn’t until eight years later that I made my triumphant return.
&n
bsp; ALEC BALDWIN: Alec Baldwin is one of my few celebrity friends: He even blurbed my last book. Let me share with you why Alec likes me. Alec had a driver who would take him around town to his various gigs on movie sets and TV shows. And this guy was infatuated with Loveline. He used to tape the show on cassette and play them in the car while driving Alec around. Well, apparently one particular call, and more important my response to that call, stuck out in Alec’s mind. One day I got a call from him on my cell phone and he wanted to talk about the piece of wisdom I had handed out. In 2002 we had a caller named Troy who wanted to convince his old lady to have anal sex. He asked us if there was some medical reason he could use to convince her that it was good for her. Drew said there was “no medical benefit to that behavior.” Then I chimed in with my words of wisdom. Alec asked me if I remembered what I had told the gentleman. I said I had no idea. That’s the thing with Loveline calls, we did so many of them I can’t remember any in particular. So Alec, in his deep baritone, repeated back to me what I had said: “You told the guy to shit in a jelly jar, duct-tape a bagel to the top of it, toss it in the microwave for thirty seconds, and rape it.” Alec thought this was the greatest piece of advice ever handed down and declared me to be the funniest man on the planet. And yet he’s been asked to host the Oscars and I’m writing this crappy book.
PENNYWISE: Many bands came through Loveline in the nineties. Some of them were pretentious British assholes (Blur), and some of them were blowhard British assholes (Chumbawamba). But others were just good old-fashioned American alcoholics. I could rattle off a list of the bands that were drunk and belligerent, but they all paled in comparison to Pennywise. The guitarist from the band is a guy named Fletcher, and one night he pulled some shit that would make Keith Moon sit you down for an intervention. A little backstory to show you what kind of gentleman of the upper crust we were dealing with. Fletcher is six foot eight, four hundred pounds. Before I was on the show, in 1995 Fletcher came in drunk and vomited on Drew live on the air. When he returned in 1999 he presented Drew with a Stanley Cup–esque trophy filled with vomit he had generated from a trip earlier in the day to the Cheesecake Factory. He had put resin over the top so you could see the chunks of cherry cheesecake floating in it. Now, bear in mind this presentation happened within the first eight minutes of the show. This was before shit got weird.