OH MY PAPA: South Philly native Eddie Fisher passed away yesterday, and it brings up a topic I've droned on about in the past -- what does it take to kill a career these days? For Fisher, of course, it was leaving his wife Debbie Reynolds -- where they were seen as America's sweethearts -- to shack up with that grieving hussy Elizabeth Taylor. The scandal wrecked his career as a crooner, though it obviously gave his daughter Carrie a lot of material going forward.
In 2003, as you may recall, Billy Crudup left his longterm girlfriend Mary-Louise Parker -- who was seven months pregnant at the time -- to take up with Claire Danes. Career consequences? None. And neither Brad Pitt nor Angelina Jolie seemed to have been hurt in the slightest, though Jennifer Aniston -- like Debbie Reynolds decades earlier -- seems to be doing fine centering her celebrity around her victimhood (see #3).
No, to have your career die in Hollywood for non-criminal reasons, it looks like anti-Semitism (Gibson) or flagrant overall weirdness (Cruise) are what you need -- but even in Cruise's case, neither Valkyrie nor Knight & Day were total bombs and both did well overseas. But infidelity? In Hollywood, it doesn't seem to be an issue, which I suppose begs the question of why over in the sports world Tiger Woods has generated so much genuine resentment and outrage. Is it the quantity/quality? The way we found out? Was America just bored? Why did Tiger take the hit which so many others did not?
