Today out of the starting gateway have a living legend - Faye Dunaway. You might remember her from such important work as Bonnie & Clyde, not to mention Network. Faye has been on the edges of the radar for w awhile what with her being over 60 and a woman in Hollywood. Hollywood Beauty has a very short half life, ! Anyway Faye got herself back onto the radar recently when some past antics, circa early 90's, resurfaced by way of Page 6!When I say that Faye had some airline related trouble I don't mean that she brought down the plane or anything. I mean that she got on the wrong side of some airline attendants. You know how sensitive they can be - Steven Slater; and you can probably guess how demanded over the hill & irrelevant actresses can be. Making constant demands is how they reassure themselves that they're still worth it. Reassure herself was what Dunaway did with a number of mid flight tantrums. It got so bad that attendants started calling her "The Bitch" behind her back - I guess they must have seen her films!
Little Britain
This whole thing took place on a trip to Heathrow - which is in Britain. So perhaps the Brits don't get the whole celebrity entitlement thing the way we do over here. Maybe they weren't prepared for Faye's quick change into her alter ego - the one who wears a great big B on her chest! Either way they decided that they were not going to stand for Dunaway's bitchfest antics. This in spite of the fact that Dunaway was insisting on an upgrade while demanding loudly "Don't you know who I am?" (at least she didn't ask them if they knew who they were fucking with - cause that line would be corn even in a film). Anyway here's the tale as told by one of the flight attendants:
high altitude attitude
Before she boarded one early-'90s flight to London's Heathrow, the stewardess claims that airline management contacted flight attendants and ground staff and told them that under no circumstances should they upgrade Dunaway. "This was the only time this ever happened in my career," she said. Sure enough, Dunaway turned up at JFK with a coach ticket to London and demanded an upgrade.
The stewardess told us, "She was a total bitch, screaming at everyone and saying, 'Don't you know who I am?' But we refused and sat her at the front of coach, where she could see there were seats free in business and first class, which made her even more furious. When we brought out the meal service, she snapped, 'I am not eating,' as if we would care."
But the attendant added that the flight crew -- taking a cue from "Mommy Dearest," in which Dunaway played a monstrous Joan Crawford who railed, "No wire hangers, ever!" -- got their revenge. "When she fell asleep, one steward said, 'I'm going to get that bitch' and grabbed a bunch of wire hangers and put them on the seat next to her. All the other passengers were snickering. When she woke up as the plane landed, she was wide-eyed with fury, and looked around [for] whom to blame but had no idea who did it. Then she got up and did yoga in the aisle to calm herself down."
I especially like the part about her getting up and doing yoga in the aisle to calm herself down. Of course a few drinks might have worked even better. Then again a drunk and irate Dunaway might have been more than any flight crew and their attendants could have handled. Their only option might have been to jettison Dunaway at high altitude, mid flight - like so much excess volatile fuel! Put in that perspective, coat hangers seems a more gentle way of handling things. of the story is that if you're an aging Hollywood beauty and still want people to pay attention, you'll still have your bad behaviour and nasty attitude to fall back on, long after your sex appeal has deserted you!
This is probably why really successful celebrities, like John Travolta & Angelina Jolie, invest in their own private planes. When you have your own plane you're not surrendering control of yourself over to a flight crew & attendants. Plus you sky time gives you some well needed peace & quiet, by giving you a chance to relax in the privacy you can only get at 30 000 ft. Plus you can never be too sure when your attitude is gonna fail and people are gonna have some tales to tell about what sort of a nasty shit person you really are when you can't hold it in anymore! So at very least bring along a parachute for that next high altitude ego trip.
When it comes to out of control diva behavior somethings never change, they only get worse. They happen in a more compressed time line too. Where as in the old days getting yourself royal fucked up might have taken a lifetime of boozing, bad romance, and other forms of poor judgment; by the Age of Marylin Munroe an ambitious actress could achieve that in her mid 30's.
As TV shortened the American attention span the need arose to shorten the train wreck from life story to media byte proportions. That meant repeated waves of high impact incidents like rehab, arrest, court, etc; instead of the old fashioned slow comfortable screw up. From baseball to football in other words! So we have had the Britney's, Christina's etc - with the high combustion rapid burn out personal disaster stories. This form of entertainment is so intense that few young women can keep it up for long (poor Mischa Barton is looking busted lately!). Among those wild young women only a very few have stood the test of time: Paris Hilton - by going into semi retirement, Jessica Simpson - by getting fat and desperate (who saw that coming?), and of course Lindsay Lohan - by refusing to take a fall.
Lindsay has certainly had her ups and downs. So much so that her mother Dina - she's the lesser of two evils in Lindsay's parental situation - has felt the need to explain her daughter once again and this time to the good people @ ABC News 20/20. 20/20 are the ones who got right on that ticklish Tom vs Oprah story after Cruise flipped out on Winfrey's couch. So they kind of bridge the gray zone between tabloid news and entertainment gossip; the way Bill Maher and Jon Stewart bridge the gap between commentary and opinion (news is getting increasingly squeezed out - and you have to go to Stephen Colbert for any possibility of Bigfoot coverage!). I especially like their astounding medical breakthrough stories! Who knew that Epsom Salts could cure depression? Any how if you want to see Dina explaining away her daughter's trouble then hit the link over to Mocksure, where you can watch the entire interview!
