TIME OF THE LEMMINGS

It's already old news that the lemmings have spoken. But now that they've elected Arnold Schwarzenegger as governator of Culifornia, what's next? Running Clint Eastwood for president? Re-animating Sylvester Stallone and running him for senator? That's too obvious. How about doing something really subtle. Let's join Sen. Orrin Hatch's campaign to amend the constitution so Arnold can run for president.

When the world's most famous bodybuilder-turned-action-hero first ingratiated himself with the Republican Party -- "Hello," he said. "I'm Conan the Republican" -- people thought he was tongue-in-cheek clever. When he married Maria Shriver, they thought he was a helluva lot cleverer. By feeding the lemmings what they wanted yesterday -- a "not-Gray-Davis" android with a household name -- he's proved yet again how clever he is, finally transforming himself into what another writer once presciently called "a large Austrian male Statue of Liberty." Nothing could be more oxymoronic, unless it's a compassionate conservative.

Postscript: The virtual Frank Sinatra has a cold. His 40-foot-high, three-dimensional image has run into technical problems. Producers of "Sinatra: His Voice. His World. His Way." -- a special-effects extravaganza designed to re-animate the crooner -- have postponed tonight's debut at Radio City Music Hall in New York. But the show will go on, beginning Tuesday. Following the engagement, Sinatra may run for mayor.

October 8, 2003 10:31 AM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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