Wasn’t Anita Bryant a Miss America? Or was she just a contestant? She became a rather vocal anti-homosexual activist (“Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” was her line, IIRC), but no career-ending scandals, unfortunately.
PsstLamia, Twicks Lee Meriweather???
Haven’t heard much about her lately… I don’t think Barnaby Jones was exactly a scandal
Although *Batman * probably was… 
My current favorite is the sad story of Jack Ryan, the ex-Republican candidate for
the US Senate in Illinois, whose carreer ended after it was revealed that he propositioned his own wife! :eek:
To be fair, if what was written in the divorce papers is true, he was a completely insensitive prick to her (he took her to some strip clubs and at one point asked her to blow him while some other people watched). And has been noted in other threads, the real problem was that he lied to GOP state bosses about what was in the divorce papers. If he’d been honest they probably wouldn’t have dropped him like a hot potato.
That whole Ford’s Theater incident seemed to hurt the acting career of John Wilkes Booth…
Gretchen Elizabeth Carlson, co-host of CBS’ The Early Show, won the Miss America scholarship “pageant” competition in 1989. Her talent was classical violin-ing.
Anita Bryant was a contestant, Miss Oklahoma, but didn’t get the crown. Her hate campaign itself was more or less a scandal, as it eventually became clear she was less interested in “defending good christian, patriotic morals” and more interested in scapegoating a whole segment of society. Her ship set sail officially when she did a television interview in Des Moines, Iowa and was smacked in the face with a cream pie! Gays all over the country (and a surprising number of indifferent heteros who were just damn sick of her) rejoiced.
I think, years after her anti-gay campaign, it came out that she’d had a number of extramarital affairs. But by then, she was already a has-been.
More recently, there is “Dr.” Laura Schlessinger who rather abruptly launched a screechy anti-gay campaign as a publicity stunt for her then-upcoming tv talk show. In a similar situation, gay activists railed in fury at her hate speech, but what really did her in was that the hetero-majority of Americans saw her for what she was - a shrill, hectoring nag who was full of herself.
Comedienne Brett Butler comes to mind. She had a successful show with Grace Under Fire, which she derailed with drug addiction, creating huge problems on the set and ultimately causing the show to first decline in the ratings and then be canceled.
The actor Marcus Chong, who played Tank in the first Matrix movie, is an interesting study. I remember the article in Salon, but I have to register now to find it. Something about him representing himself, and demanding more money from the Wachowski brothers, then writing a rather odd letter to them and essentially destroying his career with strange countersuits where he claims they called him a “terrorist.”
OK, I found some info about the Marcus Chong thing here.
Krokodil, in post #36, recounted Al Capp’s fall from grace. Reading about Goldie Hawn recent visit to Seattle as a motivational speaker (http://www.thestranger.com/2004-09-02/last_days.html), reminded me of her involvement.
Like a lot of Depression-era liberals who drew the line at Communism, Capp had a lot of disgust with the New Left of the 60’s. Perversely, he enjoyed going on the college lecture circuit and engaging in shouting matches with them.
Unfortunately, he brough along his sex drive. Unfortunate because, like a lot of big shots, his success had allowed him to dispense with the usual preliminaries such as dinner, dancing, foreplay, or even a complete spoken sentence. Other examplars of this lack of technique were Napoleon III, who had women ushered into the presence with the instructions that they could kiss the imperial person anywhere except the face, and Bill Clinton, who abandoned his famous charm and simply exposed his penis to Paula Jones with the opening line of “kiss it.”
If you guys try this method, you might notice that women really hate being treated like this! Paid escorts accept it as part of the transaction. Women in show business (like my grandmother in the 1940’s) found it onerous but inevitable. Goldie Hawn, who was a young dancer in “Lil Abner” on Broadway when Capp propositioned her thusly, was young enough to be shocked by it and immediatley left his room (although she kept quiet about it until seven years after Capp died). But when Capp tried it on a college woman at the University of Wisconsin, it really blew up in his face.
When I was an art major in college, it was pretty much accepted that the visiting celebrities who came through for lectures and exhibits would be snapping up sex partners from among the undergrads. But Capp was a hostile visitor, so it was pretty stupid of him to boorishly proposition a young woman from among an audience that had just been yelling and booing at him, and not expect a trap (the U-Wisconsin mascot badger should have been a clue). At that time, oral sex was illegal in Wisconsin, under the ugly catchall “sodomy.” Soon the assistants who did the actuall drawing for Capp’s strip had to find other employment.
A slight hijack here, but my employers sent me to one of those motivational seminars with Goldie Hawn (she appeared on tape at ours, though) and it was nauseatingly awful. Imagine if the Nuremburg Rallies were sponsored by militant Mary Kay representatives. I’ve never had less respect for Goldie Hawn, and I’ve seen Housesitter.
Stephen Glass was a hot young journalist at The New Republic until it was discovered that he had fabricated a lot of his sources, quotes, and even entire stories. There was a movie made about it with Hayden Christiansen. That pretty much ended his career, obviously.
Anne Heche seems to have fallen off the radar, at least on big screen, after breaking up with Ellen, running around acting like a madwoman, then recanting her lesbianism.
While I don’t consider it a scandal, that whole “is she or isn’t she” didn’t do Ellen Degeneres’s career no favors. But it seems she’s recovered, in a rather big way. And I’m glad - she’s really funny and deserves her success.
Roman Polanksi. It didn’t really end his career, but it didn’t help him out too much either.
Political strategist Roger Stone (who’s worked for presidential candidates as far back as Nixon) was outed in 1996 as having visited swing clubs with his wife and placing ads soliciting swing partners. (He denied the claims, even threatening to sue one of the accusers). Although Stone had to resign from his unpaid position in the Dole campaign, the long-term result was definitely not ‘career-killing.’