Golden Snow Globes

Touché, Suzanne Somers!

Last week in this space, I took the credit, I mean blame, for accidentally setting Malibu on fire by lighting a match after my Little Toot, which was a hit children’s song for The Andrews Sisters but a total disaster for me, which caused the inadvertent destruction of one of Suzanne Somers's houses, destroying dozens of unsold Thigh-Masters, and thus liberating a host of Butt-Slaves. (And who doesn't love a good Butt-Slave?) I apologized, but that apparently wasn’t enough for the vengeful Mrs. Hamil.

On Wednesday afternoon of this week, I woke up outside my magnificent movie star mansion, Morehead Heights, mounted firmly astride (Well, not really all that firmly anymore.) awe-inspiring Tumescent Tor, at the northwest end of Malibu, deep within my overwhelmingly complex hedge-labyrinth. This in and of itself isn’t really unusual. The list of weird places where I have woken up is longer than the extended DVD edition of The Lord of the Rings. It’s a relief when it’s someplace as close as my backyard, although finding one’s way out of my hedge-labyrinth can be quite a challenge. I go through Japanese hedge-trimmers faster than cases of vodka, which is frustrating, since I know they’re all still in there somewhere, probably setting up their own society, reverting to savagery to survive, like Morlocks, or the Bush Cabinet. And we’re still looking for Shelley Long, who wandered into the labyrinth seven years ago and hasn’t been seen since, although we are the only ones still looking.

What was unusual was that I was covered in snow! Now I have been accused of many, many things in my life. In fact there was an ugly trial back in 1947, which you can find thoroughly documented in my nearly-praised autobiography, My Lush Life (Chapter 22, My Kampf), as well as in Humphrey Brigand’s best-selling account When Justice Was Glad to Be Blind: The Trial of Tallulah Morehead, The Nearly-Living Legend, published in 1950, but still in print today. But the one thing I have never been accused of is being frigid. Only the high alcohol content of my blood kept me from freezing to death. Saved by booze, once again!

One of the primary reasons we live in Southern California is that it does not snow here, yet on Wednesday, January 17, 2007, it snowed in Malibu. I guess Dubya was right about Golden Global Warming. Barely over a week earlier, Malibu was on fire. There’s no question what was going on here: The Revenge of Suzanne Somers! I’ve had some freezing stares and cold shoulders from jealous women before, but Suzanne is in a class by herself. She clearly intended to freeze me solid. Well Suzanne, you are foiled again! My blood is the best anti-freeze on earth. Maybe you should try drinking to excess yourself. After all, nothing exceeds like excess.

There may have been a blizzard all day Tuesday for all I know. I was waking up from the Golden Globe Awards Monday Night. The Golden Globes, an award named after my chest, is the only award ceremony I routinely attend since, unlike the meaningless Oscars, you can drink all you want all through the show. How well I remember drinking Lucille Ball under the table at the Golden Globes every year, back in the 60s, no small feat in itself.

After the show, having been intrigued by Sasha Baron Cohen’s erotic description of the special charms of his Borat co-star Azamat’s formerly private parts (Well, just how private are parts that have been splayed across the mini-screens of America’s multiplexes?), I invited Azzie to join me for a vodka and a chaser of rancid air, and the next thing I know, I’m lying in my hedge-labyrinth, and my own legendary Golden Globes are now Golden Snow Globes.

I tried calling up the Hollywood Foreign Press (Which was exactly what Azzie had given me, a Hollywood Foreign Press) to find out what happened, only to learn that Warren Beatty was still making his Lifetime Achievement Award acceptance speech. Really Warren, the speech isn’t supposed to last a lifetime! Warren only got that award because Bob Denver died before he could receive it, and the Hollywood Foreign Press settled for third best. Bob of course, played Stanley Kowalski to my Blanch Dubois years ago on tour, and he was an actor of unique talents. Every astonished critic who saw our production agreed, his Stanley was like no other before or since. No one ever accused Bob of imitating Brando. Max Shulmann showed he understood where True Talent lay when he billed Warren Beatty below Bob in the Dobie Gillis credits each week.

I was puzzled by the multiple awards given to that British trollop Helen Mirrin. They gave her two different awards for playing the same old queen? She gets one award for playing Queen Elizabeth at the start of her reign, back in the 17th Century, and a second for playing her in the 20th Century, celebrating the death of Lady Di? I don’t get it. At least when I marry a queen, and I’ve married a bunch of them, it’s always a different queen each time. By the way, why was everyone so surprised at the death of Princess Di? I always thought her name was a dead giveaway.

I’m afraid it is customary for me to sleep in until mid-afternoon these days. Back when I was making movies, I was an early riser, but as I haven’t made a movie since 1969, I’ve developed the habit of sleeping in until my story comes on each afternoon.

But now, I may have no reason to get up any more at all. NBC has announced that they have canceled Passions, my favorite soap oprah, and The Most Realistic Show on Television. Life will not seem worth living without a daily screenfull of shirtless Lopez-Fitzgerald boys.

I particularly loved this show because it stars - no, starred - Juliet Mills. She is my heroine! Oh it’s not her acting. Get real. That whole Mills Family was vastly overrated as actors anyway. And why on earth did they insist on calling Juliet and Haley "The Mills Brothers"? That makes no sense to me at all, unless they were hiding a Distasteful Secret. Did Walt Disney unknowingly employ the world's youngest tranny?

No, the reason I worship Juliet Mills, former star of Mary Poppins, The Sit-Com, is because she has been married for decades to the gorgeous stud Maxwell Caulfield. There’s nothing I approve of more than elderly actresses being married to young, handsome hunks decades their junior, except drinking to excess of course. My own most-recent husband, at least as far as I can recall, Trevor Berman, was some 78 years younger than myself. And although that marriage failed, it did not fail because of our age difference. It failed because of his habit of having sex with men. The soles of his feet were more sunburned than mine.

Trevor also talked me into doing embarrassing product endorsements. Honestly, me endorsing milk? The last time I drank a glass of milk was back in the 19th Century. I was in my first of three (so far) infancies at the time, and I still spat that fetid fluid out. And then there was that mortifying slogan: "Drink Tallulah Morehead’s Milk, Fresh Sucked Daily." My poor, sagging Golden Globes haven’t dispensed that mucusie muck since my daughter Pattycakes stopped breast-feeding back in 1938. I was udderly humiliated. And my milk was 70-proof.

It was odd that I was able to breast-feed at all, since my daughter was adopted. I wasn’t even married at the time. It seems that my devotion to my poor daughter, who looked a lot like my revolting mother, to whom she was not related, and who grew to be more than six feet tall, and to have an enormous nose, not unlike the prominent proboscis of the over-six-foot tall character actor C. Aubrey Smith, with whom I co-starred in the classic romantic-fantasy-adventure HER! some nine months before someone other than me gave birth to Patty, caused me to experience the rare medical condition "Sympathetic Lactation", which made my breasts give what is called Irish Milk, until the doctor made me stop breast-feeding her, as it was damaging her developing infant liver, the big baby.

But I still hold out hope that I may yet find my dream hunk, and live happily ever after, just like Juliet Mills, and of course, Liza Minnelli.

Cheers Darlings.

Editor's Note: Art Buchwald died Wednesday. He was a giant in a world of ants, an inspiration to me, and he died when we need him more than ever. I would write something pithy and amusing about his passing, except that nothing I could write would be worthy of him, nor as funny as his own writings on his mortality. Art was an artist. He will be missed, but never replaced.

- Douglas McEwan