My Bête Noire Bites the Dust

blatantly capitalizing on celebrity mortality

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Image: the author and his bête noire blanche

Well, another celebrity has up and died, but this time it’s personal. I’ve worked with a few celebrities on stage, video, in academia, and in film, but Donald Sutherland was the biggest. “The biggest what?” you might query. Well, I’m glad you asked.

The glowing memorials are coming in, but of course they are. Even when Chevy Chase or Mel Gibson die, the glowing memorials will come in. Even Leni Riefenstahl got glowing memorials. Mostly from Nazis, of course, but that’s the point. There’s always someone to say something nice about you when you die. Unless you’re a universally reviled tyrant, like drummer Buddy Rich. Although I think there was even a nice piece about him in the Times by Idi Amin. Maybe Pol Pot.

Anyway, back to Donald Sutherland. Even Elliot Gould released a glowing memorial. Although it also served as a glowing nostalgic partial recapitulation of his own career, so, two birds with one stone. I mean, Elliot has his image to think of. What vague image people may have of me is already of a negative hue.

I’ve come not to praise him, nor bury him, but some ambiguous hybrid of the two. He was always a dick to me, but a charming dick. For decades, movie stars were the closest things to royalty we could worship here in the USA until the re-ascendance of the robber barons in their current Guru-esque incarnation. And man oh man was Donald Sutherland a movie star, albeit Canadian. His legend will continue glowing, like that pile of prehistoric giant sloth scat in that *cave in South America that went on burning long after they went extinct.

That he agreed to be in our little musical comedy set in India and filmed on location says something commendable about him. But, lots of people agreed to be in our little movie, so, y’know, it’s not like he would be the only one getting a glowing memorial out of it. All I’m saying is, it knocks the value down a bit, all the other amazing people who contributed to our movie. I mean the director, who wrote the screenplay with me, and his wife, the main hands-on producer, are extremely likable people. Some might say they have a subliminal way of hypnotizing you into wanting to be around them. And they routinely initiate projects that you want to be part of. So, like me and hundreds of others, Donald was just another sucker.

Donald Sutherland was so intuitive about people that, somewhere in his heart of hearts – if his hearts had a heart – he had to assume I would write something unflattering about him upon his dropping dead. And I think he would find it hilarious. He certainly found it hilarious when he treated me like trash. Come to think of it, so did others. But what were they supposed to do, tell this seven-foot preening yeti, “Donald, please don’t pick on the writer, you might be hurting his feelings.” That would have been like having your mommy beat up your bully for you. Perhaps they mentioned something in private, but, no, there were much more important things going on. And, I mean, I never told anyone my feelings were hurt, and even I found his childish, bullying antics funny, mostly because of their juxtaposition with the sophisticated, worldly image he had of himself, but partly because I knew I would one day write about it in memoriam flagrante.

There was no way that glorified inveterate butt hustler, whose Brobdingnagian flesh had obviously seen better days, was going to outlast me, regardless of my dissolute lifestyle and my penchant for suicidal ideation. In fact, I credit Donald Sutherland with keeping me going all these years. Don’t worry. I’ve been collecting names of other dicks to outlive. Two of them are running for president this year. And there’s always Chevy.

Some of the nicest things about Donald were his foibles. For example, he was a flailing neural web of insecurities. Hey, game recognize game, fam. He was just as likely to declare he’d been a major star long enough that he’d earned the right to be an a-hole as he was to fear almost cripplingly that he might have become too much of an a-hole. And he wore that mess on his sleeve. Both sleeves. And they were long sleeves. Covered with all that.

It really was almost adorable. He was dedicated, professional, knew the script backwards and forwards (except for his song), knew how to give the director what he wanted, was always first on the set and often last to leave. Those aspects were much appreciated. But the most charming of all were his ego, its constantly cracking and blistering façade, and the funny, patinaed chunks of it that would flake or fall or sluff off from time to time throughout any given day.

Warts and all. This is not an elegy, it’s a smellegy. Well, what do you expect from a down-at-heel operation called Not The Media? Lies? No, we are the single unique outlet of honest-to-a-fault revelations. MAD Magazine and Conan O’Brien try to make it their schtick, but we’re the real thing. Yes, I do have my own twisted ego and speak from my own erroneous zones, as Doctor Wayne Dyer would have it. Oo, there’s another one I’m going to outlive. Oh, damn, he’s dead already. Well, mission accomplished, I guess.

I haven’t even given you any examples of Donald’s sophomoric hazing. And I’m not going to. I’m saving that stuff for a really juicy bidding war from the tabloids – I mean, the internet ‘bloids or whatever. Maybe I’ll do a tell-all on This Is Hell’s Patreon.

I of course love almost all his work. Of course I was a huge fan, or it wouldn’t have been as emotionally exhausting to be hazed by him. But trust me, I’m not the only one he rubbed the wrong way. I won’t name names, except maybe to entertain Patreon subscribers to This Is Hell. I might be the most understanding of all the myriad survivors of his abuse. Then again, it’s possible each of us deludes ourselves that we and only we had a special relationship with our great white bête noire, the bête noire blanche of the Great White North. Aw, he would’ve spiraled into such a melodramatic mini-depression if he could hear me say that.

*the cave is not in S. America and the fire was not a natural occurrence, sorry —jd