No Life for Old Lushes.

This is OUTRAGEOUS! I'm a helpless, wealthy old lady movie star. Will no one protect me from predatory scam artists like "author" Richard Price?

I was skimming over the New York Times Best Seller List the other day by accident, and my heart skipped a beat (Which is down from it's usual practice these days of skipping two or three beats, or even just taking an hour or two completely off, for some rest) when I saw that my award-eligible autobiography My Lush Life was listed as NUMBER TWO! Now admittedly, many, many readers and critics have been calling my book Number Two for years now, [Editor's note: Actually, all professional, published reviews of My Lush Life were very positive, laudatory reviews. She received no pans, other than from a couple of disgruntled Amazon.com reader reviewers, i.e. folks whose opinions can't get published any other way.] but this is the first time I've seen it listed officially designated in that position. I quickly consulted another few publications's Best Seller lists, and found My Lush Life on each one, usually at Number 2. Good Heavens, after a brief slow down in sales that began a month or two, all right, one, after publication 6 years ago, the long-predicted (by me) bounce-back had arrived.

I was not really bothered by the fact that all of these lists omitted the word "My" from my title, as they were clearly trying to save space and ink. I was, however, a little surprised that all of these often-prestigious publications had misspelled "Douglas McEwan" (Little Dougie, my amanuensis) as "Richard Price". That was very odd.

So imagine my horror and disgust to learn that it was not a misspelling, nor was the missing "My" an inadvertent omission. It turns out that the Lush Life currently on best seller lists is some novel written by this Richard Price person. The cheek! Obviously, this Price person (If that is his name. I suspect he's just trying to fool Vincent Price disciples into thinking he's a relative of the divine Vinnie. He's NOT!) is trying to trick unsuspecting readers into buying his fraudulent book in the false belief that they are buying my beloved obscure book! Little J.K. Rowling is going through the exact same thing, suing some rude person for doing an encyclopedia on her books, not to mention her frivolous lawsuit against me for my book Hairy Pothead and the Secret Chamber Pot.

Further, according to some outrageous law, titles can not be copyrighted, so this Price villain is free to trick people into buying his book, thinking it mine. What's worse, his book is about the murder of a BARTENDER, The Worst Crime on Earth! Imagine, nice innocent people buying my book, looking for fun, laughs, and the history of my amazing life, and instead they have the greatest horror imaginable, the killing of a BARTENDER, shoved into their unprepared faces. The death of a bartender, God's Greatest Servants, is not casual entertainment. The horror. The horror.

Fans, don't buy this Price person's book. Buy the one, the only, the true and utterly non-fictional, the critically declaimed, Greatest Book of The 21st Century, My Lush Life by ME. (Although it has Little Dougie's name on the cover as the "Author." Next time I'm having my lawyer read the contract before I sign it.) Accept no substitutes. And, I might add, this Price person is doing a book tour. If he comes to your city, go to his reading, spit on him, and say "These bodily fluids are from Tallulah!"







As if this literary fraud isn't bad enough, on the news today, after we got past Britney's latest catastrophe (Crashing into people on the freeway this time. That walking car wreck is now a literal car wreck.), Hilary's latest attempt to drive people into voting for O'Bama by appearing to be an ever more strident and horrific harridan (What no one else but me has figured out is that she's actually supporting Barry O'Bama - he's Irish you know, at least according to political sage and hardcore unemployable James Diederich. It's the only possible explanation for her otherwise insane form of campaigning. I mean look at how she appears in public. Is she trying to nag America into voting for her? Is she running for First Fishwife? No, she's trying to get O'Bama the nomination. No other explanation makes any sense.), and John McCain so out of it that he spent several days campaigning in France, all we got is endless coverage of Dubya rolling out a red carpet to a visiting Nazi, namely Pope Eggs Benedict!

It was amusing that they made The Lame Dodo drive out and pick up The Nazi Pope at the airport himself, but someone had to do it, and Dick Cheney, our lycanthropic VP, is busy losing the war in Iraq. Besides, for some unfathomable reason, they didn't want to risk the Vice President shooting the Pope in the face, although it's one time when Cheney's psychosis might have done some good. However, they're treating the unimportant visit of this Nazi head of an international cult of sexual predators (Something I know a little about) and child molesters that was outdated 500 years ago like it was a state visit. It's not. The only place Eggsy should be treated as a VIP is Argentina, where his surviving old cronies all reside.

And they kept saying on the news that Dubya and Eggsy were visiting "The National Cathedral". THERE IS NO SUCH THING! This is a secular country. We don't have any "National" churches, not even of any kind. The whole concept is a violation of the Separation of Church and State. and if anything is Truly Sacred, it's the Separation of Church and State. They don't look too separate however, when you have Dubya out there with his tongue up Eggsy's butt.

To be fair to the Evil Old Nazi, they always treat Pope visits as though they were important. Hello news media? 75% of the populace doesn't give a rat's ass about the visit of any Pope. However, I did think putting Eggsy's picture on Souvenir Pope Condoms was appropriate, as well as probably giving him his first ever visit to a bodily orifice over 12 years old.

Too bad Cheston died before Eggsy's visit. After all, what's the point of religion (Really. What?) without Cheston, The Voice of God Himself? Once upon a time, darling, sexy Lon Chaney (No relation to our psychotic Vice President) made a silent movie titled The Unholy Three. As it happened, Little Dougie's maternal grandfather worked on that film. Lon later remade it as his only talkie. Had Cheston survived to join his BFF Dubya with Eggsy today, we would really have had The Unholy Three.



Speaking of Cheston, I've had a number of positive reactions to my posting last week on Cheston's demise, and of my revelation of our working together. My long time friend, TV writer and actress Jayne Hamil said: "I howled reading about his hairpiece that has survived him (and learned to act from him.) I encountered that hairpiece close-up when I was a waiter for the On Golden Pond premiere party. My job was to stand behind a tray of beef stroganoff and spoon it onto attendees plates. Down the row came 'Cheston', and leaned over my steam tray to gaze at the stroganoff. Up close that bathmat revealed its thatched underpinnings. I was amazed that such a big star would have such a cheap and ratty-looking rug. But there it was, right in my face. However, he was very charming as he acquiesced to have me pile some stroganoff on his plate."

Now admittedly, my hearing isn't what it used to be a century ago, so I misheard Jayne the first time. It had sounded to me like she said, "My job was to stand behind a tray of beef, stroking-off, and spoon it onto attendees plates." Just what the hell kind of party was this, and why wasn't I invited? And then: "Cheston ... leaned over my steam tray to gaze at the stroking-off." And as if that wasn't kinky enough, this amazing revelation followed: "He acquiesced to have me pile some stroking-off on his plate." Was this party for On Golden Pond or On Golden Shower? Who catered this event? The Farrelly Brothers? Who was spooning out the Soylent Green?

Heston's fan remembers well Upchuck's famous line in Planet of the Apes: "Take your filthy paws off of me, you damned dirty ape!" Screenwriter Rod Serling, the man who put me into My Zone, is usually credited with writing the line, but actually it was Cheston himself who came up with it, 14 years earlier, when working in my immediate vacinity on The Nude Bush. He actually ad-libbed it to me when we were rehearsing a love scene, while I had him innocently padlocked in my undressing room. Later, he remembered his flash of rudeness and suggested using it in his silly monkey movie.


By the way, the working title of our jungle epic was The Bushmaster, but it was changed when we learned that, with Cheston, well "Master" wasn't the accurate word. and The Bushfumbler just didn't have the right ring. Poor Lydia The Tattooed Heston. No wonder they only had two kids despite being married for 60 years.

Oh, and I was wrong about them prying his gun from his cold dead hand. It was decided to leave it. Better it should be buried with him, where it couldn't fall into the wrong hands, like Dick Cheney's for instance, or Pope Eggs Benedict.

Hmmm. Eggs Benedict. That sounds like it would be good right now. I Gotta run. Or is it: I've got the runs?

Cheers darlings.