Touched by a Tabloid
Maybe it's a touch of premillennial fever or all
that post-Columbine soul-searching, but for whatever reason, the tabloids turn
their collective eyes toward heaven this month and find God. Even when the Big
Guy himself is not explicitly mentioned--and he's mentioned plenty--the current
crop of tabloid offerings brims with so many transcendent crises
(life-threatening illnesses, brushes with sudden death, ruminations on
mortality, profligate lives steered straight and narrow) that it feels like one
long episode of Touched by an Angel .
The Globe , for starters, details not one but
two exorcisms underway this month: one performed on Burke Ramsey, the brother
of murdered child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey, to "rid [him] of any remaining
memories" from the murder; and one on Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee. Lee's
exorcism has supposedly unearthed the "sweet little boy" inside him, spurring
ex-wife Pamela Anderson to run back into his tattooed arms--and, apparently,
into his bed. Pregnancy rumors abound, but only the Globe has a damning
photo of Anderson's abdomen, highlighted with a red circle to point out its
eyebrow-raising convexity.
Talk show host Rosie
O'Donnell has also had spiritual matters on her mind of late. After 25 years as
a lapsed Catholic, the Enquirer reports, O'Donnell recently "took God
back into her heart." And, according to the Star , she is so terrified of
dying young that she has entered into a pact with perhaps the world's most
famous lapsed Catholic, Madonna, to make sure her children will be cared for.
Hoping to keep the Grim Reaper at bay, O'Donnell is also said to be assiduously
dieting and exercising.
We heartily recommend that she do whatever it takes to stay
in the here and now, if only to avoid being included in the Enquirer 's
"Scandals of the Century" double issue, which devotes an entire section ("The
Quick and the Dead") to celebs cut down too soon. Unlike O'Donnell, actor River
Phoenix was apparently quite keen on the idea of checking out early. "I don't
want to die from old age in a nursing home," he reportedly told a friend. "I'll
be the best-looking guy in the morgue." It was surely in the interest of
proving the accuracy of this prediction, therefore, that the Enquirer
chose to run a post-mortem photo of the actor. And while Keeping Tabs finds it
inappropriate to quibble over the attractiveness of corpses, we will bestow
upon Phoenix our special nod for clarity in the face of eternity; it was he who
reportedly shouted, "I'm gonna die, dude!" on his way out.
On the brighter side,
celebrities have saved--or tried to save--so many lives this month that we
wonder if anyone's getting any real work done in Hollywood. They've
revived an ailing dog ( ER 's Anthony Edwards), spent $700 nursing a
rabbit back to health (actress Gretchen Mol), spearheaded efforts to free an
inhumanely caged gorilla (Doris Day), and aided African elephants that suffer
from "Floppy Trunk Syndrome," a malady that keeps the poor beasts from eating
properly (Alicia Silverstone).
Business has been no less brisk for human rescues. The
Enquirer details lifesaving efforts by Meryl Streep, Sylvester Stallone,
and Tom Cruise, among others. The re-Christianized Rosie O'Donnell is reported
to have made two daring rescues aboard her Jet Ski, says the Globe .
Meanwhile, Sen. Ted Kennedy's ex-wife, Joan, reportedly saved her own life by
calling a taxi in the middle of a mild heart attack. The Enquirer
suggests that "lonely" Joan was forced to make the call because she's been
"abandoned" by her ex-husband. The Globe , on the other hand, has the
good senator "rush[ing] right over" to be with his ex and thanking--you guessed
it--God that she was all right.
One Globe
photographer's prayers must have been answered when he followed Brooke Shields
and new boyfriend Chris Henchy on what was supposed to be a simple exercise
outing. The "lensman was expecting to snap some fun photos of the couple
enjoying the spring day," the Globe explains breezily, as if the
photographer had actually been invited along for the trip. But Shields is on
emotional thin ice, having recently filed for divorce from her husband and
having lost a fellow Suddenly Susan cast member to suicide; and the
photographer was "stunned" when she suddenly began "sobbing uncontrollably."
Luckily for Globe readers, the quick-thinking paparazzo was not
so stunned that he couldn't get off several frames of the disconsolate actress.
Shields quickly pulled herself together, however, and she and Henchy headed for
a "trendy health-food store" to buy organic fruits and vegetables.
While the Globe 's photographer failed to capture the
pair choosing hydroponic tomatoes, we feel fairly confident that they did not
buy any apples. The Star suggests that Shields' breakdown may be in part
attributable to the fact that the "stressed-out" actress is battling a
"crippling disease": temporal mandibular joint syndrome, or TMJ, which sounds a
bit like the aforementioned floppy trunk syndrome. With all due respect to TMJ
sufferers, Keeping Tabs can't help but note that Shields' symptoms, while no
doubt troublesome, seem to fall just a bit short of "crippling." "It got to the
point where I just couldn't open my mouth wide enough to eat an apple," Shields
is quoted as saying. "I had to get someone to 'start' my apples for me." Fear
not, apple eaters; the Star very thoughtfully reprints the address of
the TMJ Association's Web site.
And finally, the tabloids try to account for the end
of soap star Susan Lucci's 18-time losing streak at the daytime Emmys. (The
Star asserts that she'll now quit All My Children for her own
talk show. But there's no word on whether she'll consider the path taken by
soap-stars-turned-preachers Susan and Bill Hayes, who according to the
Star have "traded in steamy scenes between the sheets" to "devote their
lives to the Lord.") The Enquirer offers this rather down-to-earth
explanation of Lucci's win, straight from an Emmy judge: She snagged the trophy
because she finally stopped submitting tapes with "overly dramatic"
performances and went with something subtler instead. (Less, apparently, is
more, even for a soap opera character who's been married to virtually everyone
on the show and once impersonated a nun.) The Globe , however, looks to
the Fates to explain her win, calling in two numerologists to mull over Lucci's
birth date, the cosmic significance of the year 1999, and the importance of the
number 19 in her life. Should we even feign surprise that she was 19 when she
"survived a devastating car accident"? Or that it was 19 years ago that Lucci's
son Andreas made it through a "touch-and-go" health scare? As far as the
numerologists are concerned, the other nominees shouldn't even have bothered to
show up on Emmy night. Numbers, shnumbers. Keeping Tabs is certain that Lucci's
win was, quite simply, the will of God.
