What goes up must come down. And that includes the sun. Our flight from Los Angeles arrived in the Land of the Rising Sun at 5:28 pm, just in time for sundown.
Tokyo, Japan: Sundown in the Land of the Rising Sun
Angaston, South Australia: Why didn’t my dad think of this?
A few years ago I wrote this blog item about my dad selling cow shit by the truckload and his near monopolistic control of San Bernardino’s manure business. He was a very, very smart man but as you are about to learn, he overlooked a few very interesting product extension possibilities.
Like this one.
I’ve had some girlfriends who’ve accused me of giving them shitty gifts on Valentine’s Day, but the people behind this company clearly believe there’s a market for shitty gifts.
In addition to cow shit, they offer several far more exotic options for sending fecal matter to that special someone in your life. Such as elephant crap and gorilla poop.
What a sweet premise this could be for a romcom.
I have always been a compulsive business-thinker-upper. It’s probably part of the obsessive-compulsive disorder that controls every other aspect of my life. One of those business ideas was to be called ”Endangered Feces.”
Get it? Endangered Feces. It sounds like endangered species.
The concept was that I would purchase the turds of endangered species from the Los Angeles Zoo, embed them in clear plastic cubes, and sell them as paperweights. A portion of every purchase would have been donated to the World Wildlife Fund. So, for example, if you had a particular interest in saving the gorillas you could contribute by purchasing a gorilla turd embedded in a plastic cube. Same with tigers and pandas and snow leopards. Your purchase would not only help save your favorite endangered species, but become a terrific conversation starter in your office.
(Elephant poop, I thought, would be problematic. It would require a very large hunk of plastic and you might need a couple burly friends or a small crane to help hoist it onto your desk.)
Of course, like most of my business ideas, I never got around to doing anything with it. But I still think it would be a great idea. If you have the time and money and inclination to pursue the idea, I hereby grant you permission to run with it.
But let’s get back to my dad for a moment. Think how much more profitable his manure business could have been if he had thought of selling individual cow pies for $17.95 each instead of selling a dump truck load for just $6. His profits would have risen exponentially.
Endangered Feces.
You missed a huge opportunity, dad.
Angaston, South Australia: Shipping your dog Down Under is dog gone expensive
I’ve always been a cat man. I used to rescue and adopt every stray kitty that wandered up to my house. After he started hanging around my back door, I once spent months taming a really mean, really ugly feral cat. As soon as we lopped his nuts off Bob turned out to be the sweetest house cat ever.
I never wanted a dog. I didn’t even particularly like dogs. I still wouldn’t have one if Jamie hadn’t demanded that we get one.
Now I realize and admit to the error of my ways.
When Jamie saw little Tinker’s photo on a dog rescue website she said, “Look at that face. There’s something special about this one. She looks spunky.”
I know you love your dog and think it is special. But no matter what you may think, he or she does not compare to our little Tinker. Tinker’s never met a person she doesn’t love. Instead of barking at our mailman, she takes him a toy every day when he arrives at our front door. She’s never bitten anyone. Never dug a hole in the yard. Never chewed on anything she wasn’t supposed to chew. Never peed in the house. Never growled at anyone. In fact, she doesn’t even know how to growl and it’s kind of funny on those very rare occasions when she tries. She even tries to groom our cat.
Despite this lengthy list of attributes, and despite our love for little Tinker, she will not be accompanying us to Australia.
Why?
Well, how much do you think it might cost to ship a 9-pound dog to Australia? Let’s pretend this is The Price Is Right. Closest guess without going over the actual price wins. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go wash the dishes while you think it over. Ready? Begin cogitating.
(PAUSE)
OK, I’m back. The dishes have all been washed and dried and put away and you’ve had plenty of time to think about the question I asked.
What was your guess?
A thousand dollars?
Two thousand?
Five thousand?
Because we thought it would be fun to take her with us, I contacted two companies that specialize in shipping dogs overseas.
We didn’t have a clue as to the actual cost and we initially guessed that it might cost a couple thousand dollars. Although that seemed expensive, it was a cost we were willing to bear just for the pleasure of having little Tinker with us.
Oh, how wrong we were.
The company that had received the highest recommendations sent me a detailed estimate for one-way shipping. (One way because they ship pets only to Australia. We would then need to find an Aussie company to ship her back to Texas.)
Are you sitting down? If not, please do because the cost I’m about to give you is so outrageously high that it caused blood to rush from my head, nearly causing me to faint. Please take reasonable precautions prior to reading the next paragraph.
The cost to ship little 9-pound Tinker was $9,500. One way.
The detailed cost breakdown included items such as “Take dog out of shipping cage to pee at LAX. $175.” Putting her back in her cage after she peed was another $75 line item.
But $9,500 was not the final cost. The fine print in the contract specified that it did not include a number of additional required items.
I’m going to to take a wild-assed guess that the total cost of shipping her from Dallas to Sydney would probably end up somewhere around $12,000. And as I said, that’s a one-way cost. Although the return trip is far simpler, an Aussie company estimated that the return trip would cost an additional $5,000. And I’m pretty damn sure that was merely the base price and that a number of those pesky unspecified extras would eventually be added to the bill.
Do the math: $12,000 plus $5,000 plus a list of unspecified additional costs equals somewhere in the neighborhood of $20,000.
In case I have not made myself clear, we love little Tinker. She is the sweetest, most lovable dog in the world.
But we don’t love her $20,000 worth.
So Tinker will be spending the next six months with Bob and Jan, good friends who live a couple blocks down the street from us. They are the nicest people in the world and he’s a retired veterinarian, so we know she’ll be in very good hands.
Bon voyage, little Tinker. We’ll miss you.
Angaston, South Australia: What’s that? You haven’t been reading JimandJamie.com for the last two years? Here’s what you missed.
Most JimandJamie.com readers stopped reading the blog when we finally returned to Texas after covid stranded us in Australia for a couple extra months. They reasonably concluded that a travel blog would end when our travels ended. But unlike most years, I continued writing. Some were advertising stories, some were family stories, some even covered our travels within Texas and the other United States.
If you’d like to go back and read some of the stories you missed, you can click on the story summaries or just keep scrolling down the page and click on “Next Page” at the bottom of the page to keep going.
Here are some of my personal favorites from the last two years:
Tokyo, Japan: I think I’m turning Japanese, I think I’m turning Japanese, I really think so
My apologies to the Vapors, whose 1980 hit “I Think I’m Turning Japanese” was the number one song in Australia, but only climbed as high as number thirty-nine in the United States. I swear this will all start to make sense a few paragraphs from now.
But let’s set this up wth a trip back to Irvine, California, circa 1994.
As I’ve mentioned a number of times, I’ve had several Japanese girlfriends in the past. That’s how I happened to add a few very basic Japanese words to my vocabulary.
I knew that “hai” meant “yes.”
That “konnichiwa” meant “hello.”
That “domo arigato gozaimasu” is the formal way of saying “thank you.” But one of the Japanese girlfriends taught me that it often gets shortened to just plain “domo” in everyday conversation.
And that “sukoshi” means “a little” (it’s the root of the American word “skosh” as in “I’d like a skosh more.”)
That’s it. I knew four words in Japanese.
In those days, our ad agency had a very prominent Japanese client. He was a very cool guy who had been born in Japan, but had grown up in America. I was in the lobby one day bullshitting with our receptionist when he finished a meeting in our conference room. He passed through the lobby and as he opened the door to leave he paused, turned to me and said, “You guys are doing great work for us.”
“Domo,” I responded.
He was shocked. Absolutely shocked. His eyes widened in surprise and his mouth dropped open. “How do you know to say, ‘Domo?’ he asked. “Do you speak Japanese?”
“Skoshi,” I replied.
He was very impressed and mistakenly assumed I knew far more than I was admitting to.
If I’m being absolutely honest, the secret to success in advertising is the opposite of the secret to success in any other business. Other businesses require someone to have a deep understanding of a specific subject, but in advertising the secret to success is knowing just enough about any particular subject to fake it. You need to learn a little bit about a lot of subjects, but you don’t need to become an expert in any of them. Your knowledge level about any client’s product is like Mark Twain’s description of the Mississippi River: It’s a mile wide and an inch deep. If you’re handling a dozen different clients in a dozen different industries, it’s impossible to become deeply knowledgeable about all of them. You might be writing an ad about fishing equipment one day, guitars the next day, and semiconductors the day after that. You learn just enough to get by.
And that brings us to yesterday’s Japan Airlines flight from Tokyo to Sydney. The service was incredible. The Japan Airlines flight attendants were truly unbelievable. They wanted nothing more than to take care of us and to do everything within their powers to please us. They made it one of the best flights we’ve ever taken. They doted on us. They bowed constantly. One of the flight attendants came to us just before we landed. She stood beside us, gave us a polite bow, and told us how much she had enjoyed serving us.
“Domo,” I responded.
Her reaction was identical to the reaction of my Japanese client thirty years earlier.
She was shocked. Absolutely shocked. Her eyes widened in surprise and her mouth dropped open. “How do you know to say, ‘Domo?’ she asked. “Do you speak Japanese?”
“Skoshi,” I replied.
“Yes, you speak Japanese,” she said enthusiastically. “You speak Japanese.” She could not have been more pleased.
So consider this an expert travel tip. Fake it. Learn a few basic words in a foreign language and you can convince a native speaker that you are fluent in their language. Or at least to convince them that you put in enough effort to learn the basics. And that will make them very, very happy.
And as a special bonus, you will be well on your way to success as an advertising copywriter.
Angaston, South Australia: Why didn’t my dad think of this?
A few years ago I wrote this blog item about my dad selling cow shit by the truckload and his near monopolistic control of San Bernardino’s manure business. He was a very, very smart man but as you are about to learn, he overlooked a few very interesting product extension possibilities.
Like this one.
I’ve had some girlfriends who’ve accused me of sending them shitty gifts on Valentine’s Day, but the people behind this company clearly believe there’s a market for shitty gifts.
In addition to cow shit, they offer several far more exotic options for sending fecal matter to that special someone in your life. Such as elephant crap and gorilla poop.
What a sweet premise this could be for a romcom.
I have always been a compulsive business-thinker-upper. It’s probably part of the obsessive-compulsive disorder that controls every other aspect of my life. One of those business ideas was to be called ”Endangered Feces.”
Get it? Endangered Feces. It sounds like endangered species.
The concept was that I would purchase the turds of endangered species from the Los Angeles Zoo, embed them in clear plastic cubes, and sell them as paperweights. A portion of every purchase would have been donated to the World Wildlife Fund. So, for example, if you had a particular interest in saving the gorillas you could contribute by purchasing a gorilla turd embedded in a plastic cube. Same with tigers and pandas and snow leopards. Your purchase would not only help save your favorite endangered species, but become a terrific conversation starter in your office.
(Elephant poop, I thought, would be problematic. It would require a very large hunk of plastic and you might need a couple burly friends or a small crane to help hoist it onto your desk.)
Of course, like most of my business ideas, I never got around to doing anything with it. But I still think it would be a great idea. If you have the time and money and inclination to pursue the idea, I hereby grant you permission to run with it.
But let’s get back to my dad for a moment. Think how much more profitable his manure business could have been if he had thought of selling individual cow pies for $17.95 each instead of selling a dump truck load for just $6. His profits would have risen exponentially.
Endangered Feces.
You missed a huge opportunity, dad.
Somewhere over the Pacific: Did I neglect to mention that we’re leaving for Australia today?
Shame on me. This is supposed to be a travel blog, but I somehow neglected to mention that today we’re beginning our first long trip, our first international trip in more than two years. We’re leaving Texas this morning and flying to Sydney, Australia.
Here’s our route map.
Not quite as simple as it sounded, is it?
Why, you may ask, are we stopping in Tokyo instead of flying direct to Sydney? And on the return trip, why are we stopping in Jakarta and Tokyo instead of flying direct to Dallas?
Here’s the answer.
I’ve made a career out of accumulating frequent flier points. Jamie and I pay for everything with our airline credit cards. And I mean everything. At one extreme, we paid for her car with that credit card. At the other extreme, I often use the same credit card to buy items so inexpensive that I could easily have paid for them with the spare change in my pocket. If the credit card company offers a special bonus for certain activity, I immediately sign up and do whatever is necessary to accumulate those bonus points. And I once had a client who paid me in frequent flier points. As a result of these machinations, we have stacked up somewhere north of 2,500,000 points.
Enough, we thought, to last us the rest of our lives.
In the past we have flown business class to Australia and back for as little as 105,000 points. Then they raised it to 200,000 points. That, we thought, was a bit greedy of the airline, but we had plenty of points and thought, “That’s expensive, but we still have enough points to last us the rest of our lives.”
And then along came Covid, the Flu Manchu, the Asian Contagion, the Moo Goo Gai Pan Health Plan, the Chinfluenza, the Commie Cough, General Tso’s Revenge.
Want to fly business class to Australia? In an effort to separate tourists from their hard-earned frequent flier points, the airlines have jacked up the price of tickets to and from Australia. What once cost 105,000 points, and what cost just 200,000 points as recently as three years ago, now costs 750,000 points. Per person. Seriously. Seven hundred and fifty thousand points each. The 2,500,000 points we’ve accumulated, the points we thought would last for the rest of our lives, are no longer enough to buy us three business class round trips to Australia.
If you choose to pay cash instead of points, be prepared to get screwed on that deal, too. I just looked up what Dallas-to-Sydney would cost if we were paying cash. Are you sitting down? Are you prepared to be dumbfounded?
What used to cost $7500 (sometimes much less) now costs $23,000. Each. Seriously. Twenty-three thousand dollars per person. Yes, you read that correctly. Twenty-three thousand smackeroos. Twenty-three thousand greenbacks. Twenty-three thousand clams. Twenty-three thousand simoleons. Twenty-three thousand…well, you probably get the idea. It’s outrageously freakin’ expensive.
As a result of this out-and-out airline avarice, I got on the phone and spoke to a very helpful airline representative who was a frequent flier point specialist. She helped me find a far more affordable, but far more inconvenient route (Dallas-Los Angeles-Tokyo-Sydney-Adelaide) for just 200,000 frequent flier points each. The return route is even crazier (Adelaide-Sydney-Jakarta-Tokyo-DFW).
Between flight times and layovers, what should have been a 15-hour experience has turned into a 33-hour ordeal.
But what the hell. I’m a glass half full kind of guy so I look at our three hour layover in Tokyo as a chance to visit a country we’ve never before visited.
And since this is supposed to be a travel blog, that’s probably a good thing.
Hollywood, circa 1983: The biggest star I ever worked with
It cannot be denied that Dom DeLuise was a huge star, an immense talent. He not only filled the doorway, he filled the hallway. Holy moly, he was roly-poly. He was a bulky, bulging, bovine butterball. His mirth was surpassed only by his girth. He made Michael Moore look like Twiggy. Get out your thesaurus. He was corpulent. Elephantine. Fleshy. Porcine. Portly. He was the Lord of the Onion Rings, Jabba the Gut. He looked like a vanilla whale. A dump truck with ears. A fire hydrant with hair. A blimp with feet. Oh, the humanity.
I promise you that this is a story worth waiting for. And wait you must because I feel compelled to give a brief Advertising 101 lecture in order to set the story up property.
The subject of today’s lecture is ”Advertising Celebrity Spokespeople.”
I have a simple theory about using celebrities in TV commercials. There should be a logical tie-in between the company (or product or service) and the celebrity who is endorsing it. And there are a number of different ways to make a celebrity spokesperson work effectively:
First, the celebrity’s personality must fit perfectly with the client/product/service. For example, John Wayne was an absolutely brilliant choice as spokesman for Great Western Savings. You look at this commercial and it’s impossible to imagine anyone else doing it.
Second, even if there’s no real life tie-in, a commercial can be written with a celebrity in mind. In a commercial for U.S. Savings and Loan Association, retired actor John Carradine said something like, ”I’ve made a lot of money over the years, but I’ve also spent a lot of money. I wish I’d put more of it aside in a safe place like U.S. Life Savings and Loan. Even though I’m an actor I’m not acting right now. I’m glad U.S. Life Savings hired me for this commercial. I need the money.” Brilliant. There’s zero logical link between Carradine and U.S. Life Savings, but the commercial works because it was written specifically for Carradine. I suppose any older actor might have worked, but Carradine was perfect casting and his delivery made him perfectly believable. It’s one of my all-time favorite commercials.
Third, a celebrity spokesperson could also be tied to a product as a result of a role for which they are well known. For example, Dolly Parton and Lily Tomlin played beleaguered secretaries in the movie ”9 to 5.” It would have been perfect if they had recreated those characters in commercials for someone like Office Depot.
And then there is a completely different category — celebrities who were hired just because they are celebrities and who were then shoehorned into commercials that were not written around their well-known personalities nor for any of the roles for which they were famous.
And that brings us to the subject of the biggest celebrity I ever worked with.
%$#@&!
NCR, National Cash Register, had been the world’s leading manufacturer of cash registers for one hundred years when they decided to expand their product line and get into the personal computer business. Our little southern California ad agency had been doing great work for a small division of the company, so along with a number of huge Madison Avenue ad agencies, we were invited to pitch the PC account.
Against all odds and all logic, we were awarded the business. It was larger than the rest of our agency put together.
Unfortunately, just a matter of weeks after we landed the account, NCR hired a big name New York marketing executive who was horrified when he learned that he was being saddled with a small California ad agency he had never heard of. “Why,” he asked, ”do we have a little ad agency in California handling the most important piece of business in this corporation’s history?”
What he meant was, ”Lunches at Tavern on the Green will look very suspicious on my expense account if I don’t have a New York ad agency.”
The fact that we had bested half a dozen big name Madison Avenue agencies to win the account mattered not to this guy. Without any discussion with us and with no reason to think it would somehow work with the campaign that had already been approved, this genius decided to hire a celebrity corporate spokesperson. He agreed to pay overweight, over-the-hill comedian Dom DeLuise $1,000,000 per year to appear in NCR’s ads and commercials. And that was back when $1,000,000 was a lot of money.
Unfortunately, DeLuise fell into that final category of celebrity spokespeople — the ones who were hired just because they are celebrities and who were then stuck in commercials that were not written around their well-known personalities nor any roles for which they were famous.
Unlike John Wayne and Great Western Savings, DeLuise had no logical connection to NCR or to personal computers. Unlike Dolly Parton or Lily Tomlin, he’d never played a role that connected him to business or computers. Unlike John Carradine, there were no scripts written with him in mind.
Maybe we could have made it work if we’d been given the option of going back and creating a campaign that told the story of a fat, lovable schlub who didn’t understand computers yet they had somehow helped him solve all his problems. Maybe. But that was not an option. We were simply ordered to shoehorn DeLuise into an existing campaign aimed at small business people.
Now let’s get back to that $1,000,000 contract. If you paid me $1,000,000 a year I would do anything you asked. I would wash your car. I would trim your toenails. I would jump through flaming hoops. I would perform whatever bizarre sexual favors you might request, no matter how personally offensive I might find them.
But that big, round number was just the beginning of DeLuise’s fat contract. I couldn’t swear to this in court, but as I recall, he was only required to work twelve days a year to earn his money. Twelve days. That’s $83,333.33 per day. On top of that NCR also agreed to provide him with a limosine and chauffeur to deliver him to and from any TV shoots or recording sessions scheduled on those twelve days.
We tried to make the best of a bad situation. We scheduled a recording session in Hollywood to produce a series of radio commercials. We showed up with scripts in hand, ready to go.
Much to our surprise, two more well-known comedians were waiting at the studio when we arrived — David Steinberg, a stand-up comic and frequent guest on late night TV talk shows, and Pat Harrington, Jr, a regular on the One Day at a Time sitcom. We had no idea why they were there. Perhaps just to cheer on their corpulent compadre.
Then the doors burst open and The Big Star entered the studio. He was wearing a cape. I think it was the only time in my life I’ve ever seen anyone other than Superman clad in a cape.
After a few minutes of forced joviality, with us nervously watching precious minutes tick off the clock, DeLuise demonstrated that he was not only morbidly obese, but morbidly obtuse. He announced that he had decided not to record the scripts that had been approved by the marketing director who hired him.
Instead, he decreed, he and his two friends would ad lib commercials. We’re talking improv, baby. Because they were, of course, Professional Comedians. To give DeLuise the benefit of the doubt, he may have realized that he had been force fit into the scripts and that it really made no sense. Perhaps he thought that ad libbing was the only way out.
I think it would be fair to say that the three Professional Comedians approached the client-approved scripts as nothing more than a starting point. They were quickly discarded as the three laugh meisters began ad libbing their own concept of what the commercials should be. They went off on flights of fancy that had absolutely nothing to do with small business and nothing to do with personal computers. They laughed hysterically at their own clever ad libs. They squealed with delight at their spontaneous bon mots. They roared in approval of their own wittiness.
We, on the other hand, sat horrified in the control room. It was like watching a slow motion car wreck. They thought they were mining gold, but we thought they were creating self-congratulatory bullshit. The commercials were painfully unfunny. And even worse, they did nothing to sell the client’s products.
But it was what it was. The big time marketing director had foisted DeLuise upon us and he was getting exactly what he deserved.
This is where the story really goes off the rails.
Because Dom’s time was a limited commodity and the clock was ticking on his twelve days, we did something very unusual. We scheduled a photo session right there in the studio immediately after the recording session. While we had him, we thought, let’s kill two birds with one stone, recording radio commercials and also shooting photography for some print ads.
We had to cater to DeLuise by catering the production. Craft services, the people who usually cater TV productions, were on hand to provide food for this radio production and photo session. I’d never seen craft services at any previous radio production nor at any print ad shoot. So, yeah, this was probably another big, fat freebie written into DeLuise’s contract.
DeLuise was drawn to food like Jeffrey Epstein to underage girls. He stuffed as much sugary, starchy sustenance as possible into his gaping craw. Cookies, brownies, cake, candy, you name it. The higher the caloric content, the higher the likelihood that he would consume it.
While DeLuise was busy stuffing his face, others were busy getting ready for the photo shoot.
“Dom, I need you over here for lighting,” the photographer said.
Our star, caught in mid-munch, had no interest in helping out with something as mundane as getting the lighting right. He looked around the room, spotted my business partner Dan, and said, ”Dan. We’re about the same size. Can you stand in for me while I finish eating?”
DeLuise was about 5’ 10” and probably weighed 325 pounds. Dan, a fitness fanatic, was 6’ 1” and may have tipped the scales at 170. They were the same size like Laurel & Hardy were the same size.
Dan was amazed and amused, but did as DeLuise requested. DeLuise, meanwhile, continued sucking sugar down his craw.
Sometime later, photo shoot completed, craft services began cleaning up, putting away the left overs when Dom rushed over and said, ”Do you mind if I take a little something home to my wife?”
“No problem,” the craft services manager answered. ”What would you like.”
”Do you have any baggies?”
The craft services manager probably assumed the same thing we did — that DeLuise was going to take home a couple cookies.
“We have some around here somewhere,” he continued. ”Let me find them.” He returned moments later with a box of plastic sandwich bags.
DeLuise began stuffing leftovers into the plastic bags and then stuffed the stuffed bags into his pockets. Not just a cookie here and a brownie there. No, DeLuise stuffed each bag full as he could. Cookies, brownies, sandwiches, candy bars. He would have stripped the table bare had his pockets been bigger. It was so awkward that onlookers had to divert their eyes.
Plastic bags and pockets finally filled, DeLuise once again donned his cape, waddled out to parking lot, climbed into the awaiting limousine, and returned home with his bountiful booty. Well, in all honesty, I doubt there was much booty left by the time he got home.
It was probably the single most embarrassing thing I ever witnessed in my advertising career.
Los Angeles, California: Vin Scully, 1927-2022
Vin Scully, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ announcer for an amazing 67 years, died the other day. All of Los Angeles, all of California, all sports fans, really, are mourning. Here’s a great obituary that really captures what the man was all about and why he stood out from every other sportscaster:
And here are a couple JimandJamie.com stories that revolve around Vinny (JUST CLICK ON THE HEADLINES):
Angaston, South Australia: Australian diamonds
This one tells the tale of an American baseball player in Australia and of the time I met Vin Scully.
Angaston, South Australia: Another TV game show, Part I
And this one explains how Vinny got me on a TV game show.
RIP, Vinny.
McKinney, Texas: One degree of separation from the King of Pop, Part Two
What are the odds against some goofball who lives 70 miles south of Hollywood and has no connection to show business having not one, but two separate one-degree-of-separation-from-Michael-Jackson interactions? And just to make it even stranger, both stories involve different doctors who cared for the King of Pop.
Those odds are pretty damn steep, I’d say. Which is what makes this story so damn unusual.
I had a good buddy who was a contractor. He was in the middle of building a home for me. One day I told him last week’s story about Michael Jackson and our receptionist.
“That’s crazy” he replied. ”In addition to your house, I’m also building a beachfront house for one of Michael Jackson’s doctors.”
That doctor was Arnie Klein, Michael Jackson’s long-time dermatologist. He was building a fabulous weekend beachfront estate in Laguna Beach, just a couple miles up the road from my far more humble new abode in Dana Point. (Although Laguna and Dana Point are only a couple miles apart geographically, they are worlds apart demographically. Laguna sits in one of the nation’s highest income zip codes, but Dana Point definitely doesn’t.)
How close were Arnie and Michael? Well, Arnie’s office manager was introduced to the world as Michael’s wife just about the time the first stories about Michael and little boys started to percolate. And rumors have always floated around that Arnie actually fathered Michael’s children via artificial insemination.
As the months passed and as both of our houses progressed, my buddy continued to tell me how incredible Arnie’s beachfront estate was turning out. ”You need to see it,” he kept saying, “And you need to meet Arnie.”
So he set up a tour. Arnie walked us through his stunning beachfront home. I’m pretty sure it’s only time I’ll ever seen a Rembrandt sketch hanging in a bathroom. He was a funny, charming, flamboyant guy so we all agreed to go to dinner at a great little Laguna Beach restaurant the following week.
“Make sure we’re seated next to each other,” I told my buddy.
There were probably ten people at the dinner. The contractor and his wife, Arnie and his significant other, me, and a handful of other people I have completely forgotten.
It was a great dinner. We all laughed. We chattered like we were longtime friends. He was quite the raconteur and told great stories about his experiences with well-known Hollywood celebrities. He was known as the Dermatologist of the Stars and the Father of Botox. Everyone who was anyone in Hollywood was one of Dr Klien’s patients. Elizabeth Taylor, Dolly Parton, Goldie Hawn, David Geffen, Dustin Hoffman, Linda Evans, Sharon Stone, Penny Marshall, and Carrie Fisher were among his devotees.
The conversation finally turned to Michael Jackson. Arnie told us that he’d once received a frantic phone call from Michael while he was on tour in Brazil.
“I’m having a skin emergency,” Michael wailed. ”I’ve already chartered a jet. You need to drop everything and fly to Rio de Janeiro to take care of me.”
”Did you go?” I asked.
”Of course, I went,” Arnie laughed. ”Do you know how much he pays me every year?”
I thought the ice had been broken and that Arnie had loosened up enough, so as dessert was being served I leaned over and said, “So, Arnie, I have a question about Michael Jackson.”
“What’s the question?”
“You’re his dermatologist. Are you the one bleaching his skin?”
”I can’t answer that,” he laughed. “Doctor-patient confidentiality.”
We’d enjoyed ourselves at dinner. We’d laughed. Everyone had had a couple glasses of wine and was in a good mood, so I continued asking him to answer the question all of American wanted answered.
“C’mon, Arnie, my lips are sealed. I swear I won’t tell anyone.”
“Can’t do it,” he replied.
“Arnie, buddy, pal. This is just between you and me. Are you the one bleaching Michael Jackson’’s skin?”
I kept this up for an hour. Arnie was amused by my persistence, but absolutely refused to answer the question. So I guess he racks up a few ethics points.
All that being said, he was clearly a very disturbed man. Vanity Fair described his descent into drugs, sex addiction, gay chubby chasing, money woes, the drug-aided death of Michael Jackson, a bitter feud with one of Jackson’s other doctors, an attempt by the California State Medical Board to revoke his license to practice medicine, and plenty of additional bizarre behavior.
Had I read this article prior to our dinner, I wouldn’t have bothered asking Arnie trivial questions about bleaching Michael Jackson’s skin. No, I would have asked questions that pulled on the loose threads of our societal fabric. I would have burrowed into the psyche and mores of the man and extrapolated their significance onto the canvas of 21st century America. Instead of asking the question America wanted answered, I would have asked the question America needed answered:
“Chubby chasing, Arnie? What’s that all about?”