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TERRY LAWSON: Celebs can't get a break

October 29, 2006

Since this will come out anyway, I might as well confess. I wrote this with a smear of pine tar on my bald spot, because I just can't get a grip on all this:

Arnold Schwarzenegger is the sanest high-profile politician in the United States.

Michael J. Fox is dumped on by prescription drug abuser Rush Limbaugh for taking legally prescribed medicine.

Paul McCartney may have to give a sizable part of his fortune to a woman whose own court filings paint a picture of her as a classic narcissist nag, because he truly believed that all you needed was love.

Madonna is forced to go on "Oprah" to defend herself for adopting an African child.

Schwarzenegger, with boundless ego and self-confidence but no particular credentials, gets himself elected governor of California as a Republican, and has proceeded to disappoint his conservative backers. How? By acknowledging the common sense and science of global warming, supporting legislation that would require higher fuel efficiency and lower emissions for automobiles, and asking the president to intercede with an emergency plan that would reduce heating oil prices for Californians who need the help. What a turncoat.

As for Fox, he had the audacity to make a TV commercial supporting a Missouri initiative to allow certain types of stem cell research and endorse the Democratic candidate in that state's Senate race who backs it. (The Republican incumbent doesn't.)

He is then attacked by Limbaugh, who suggests that the actor, who has Parkinson's disease, went off his meds so his body would shake more violently. In fact, anyone who knows anything about the degenerative disease knows that the shaking is a side effect of the medicine; when you don't take it, you can seem catatonic.

McCartney's mistake was forgoing a pre-nup in his marriage to Heather Mills, much to the chagrin of his children, because he believed her love for him was real. Her side in the divorce battle leaks court papers intended to make the public believe he was not only insensitive but a wife abuser, and the gossip pages and TV duly report this. The actual court papers, on the other hand, make her look like nothing more than a conniving egotist.

Madonna, of course, has spent a good deal of her career doing and saying things to get attention, so now we are expected to believe that her adoption of an African baby, as trendy as it might be, is not only a publicity stunt, but a cultural crime.

I have spent way too much of my career talking to celebrities. Some are transparent phonies. Some of them are simply not that bright. Many more of them have perfected the acting art of seeming sincere. And some, it is obvious to me, clearly care about both the quality of the work they do and the causes to which they attach their names and their signatures on checks.

They don't need my support. What they need is the same thing the rest of us deserve: the benefit of the doubt.

Contact TERRY LAWSON at tlawson@freepress.com.