I always heard he was a complete gentleman. Doesn’t surprise me. (not from personal experience)
A very nice man. I got a chance to chat with him before he spoke at my school a few years back and, while he was intelligently difficult with the students whose questions (but not whose shit) he was there to take, he was a very humble, pleasant, intelligent man while he was waiting to go on-stage.
My sister has a beach condo in the same building as his in Alabama (though I think he sold his [even after two hit series and a movie career he managed to go broke and recently filed bankruptcy]) and I have literally never heard a nice thing about him from those who’ve encountered him on his stays down there. One waitress at the place said he asked her to show her “tits” and come to his place (she was about 20 and didn’t even know who he was as she hadn’t watched his shows, so she just knew that a sleazy older guy was trying to hit her up) and then he tipped her something like $2 on a $100 tab when she spurned him.
Eartha Kitt stayed in a hotel where I worked and I’m convinced she heard voices. She would wander along talking to herself very animatedly.
Reba McIntyre (before she was at her zenith even) was a complete bitch- very sarcastic, wearing shades in a dimly lit lobby, dismissive to the staff, etc…
Hijack, but one of my favorite stories about a celebrity encounter is from a hotel I worked but occurred many years before I went to work there- I heard it from the housemaid and I have no doubts she was telling the truth. Elvis Presley stayed in the Madison Hotel in Montgomery AL ca. 1975 and even though this was the “old fat Elvis” it was treated like a visit from the Pope combined with a Beatles Reunion. Teenage girls and their mothers and their grandmothers screaming in the lobby, offering bribes and peeks at boobs to any desk clerk or security guard who would get them his pillowcase, etc… There were armed guards at the elevator and in the stairwell of course, and when it was announced that “Elvis has left the building” for the theater the crowd dispersed a little. It was also not until after his departure (through a service elevator and still mobbed outside) that the housekeeper went into his room to do turndown.
She opened his door, knowing Elvis had left for the auditorium, and saw Elvis sitting with some of his entourage. She started screaming (very heavyset black lady, probably in her late 30s or so at the time, and still screaming almost 20 years later when she tells this story to me). The departure had been a decoy.
One of his roadies was very rude. “Ma’am, calm down! He’s just a person! How would you like it if somebody screamed in your face! Shit lady!”
But Elvis just grinned, got up, walked over and put his arms around her, asked her name and said “Brenda baby, could you leave some extra mints and some extra glasses and… tell you what, just leave some extra everything, baby” and gave her a $50 bill that almost 20 years later she still had even though she’d always lived hand to mouth. When his roadie started to complain again about her hysteria (she wasn’t screaming by this point but she was crying) and how she was going to let everybody down below the atrium know Elvis was still here, Elvis shushed him with a “this is just another day in your life, man, to her it’s the day she met Elvis”. As she was telling me this story all those years later she commented “It’s almost like something Jesus would have told Judas or Peter. He was a fine man.”
Incidentally, the suite in which he stayed was commemorated by a brass plaque on the door that proudly read THE ROY CLARK SUITE.
I rode about ten floors in an elevator with David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar once.
One of them was kind of smelly. I couldn’t tell which one.
You won the contest twice!? I listen to that every single morning and always try to get the nerve to call in and try myself, but I usually think “eh, I won’t get through, so why bother?” But that’s totally awesome. How well did you do to their Championship of champions, of whatever clever name they call it? Did you get to meet Kelly or Frank as well? Were they nice?
Hmmm, I haven’t met many celebrities, but the ones I have met were all very nice. James Marsters is the sweetest man on the planet when dealing with his insane fans.
Had dinner, along with five other people, with George Takei from Star Trek. A very nice man to us fans who’d won the dinner. Talke with each one of us, laughed a lot. He’d told the con organizer that “I’d sit naked on a silver platter, with parsley, and an apple in my mouth, to help publicity for the con.” A joke of course but she had a waiter bring a silver dish to the table that had apple and parsley on it. Takei picked up the apple, bit into it, and layed his chin on the dish. I begged him to hold the pose until I fumbled my camera out of my purse. The picture is my favorite con souvenir ever. I also have a photo of all of us at the table, taken by Anthony (God I can’t remember his name) who was inside the C3PO suit.
But as for an unpleasant encounter, at a later con I won a dinner again, along with another fan and the con organizer. It was with James Doohan. He hardly talked to us fans, only the con organizer. And all his conversation was about himself, with a little trash on the other Trek actors thrown in for spice.
My wife hates Jack Nicholson. Back in the mid 80’s he and Timothy Hutton were in the northeast Kansas area filming a movie that I don’t believe was ever released (“The Last Cattle Drive”). My wife was working at the bookstore at the University of Kansas at the time and one day while Tim and Jack were filming in the area, they showed up at the store to stock up on KU goodies. Timothy Hutton was pretty quiet and kept to himself, but Jack was about as obnoxious as you would expect him to be, loudly proclaiming “No autographs!” as he walked in the door and just generally causing a scene while at the same time acting like he didn’t want any undue attention. Even though my wife was trying to avoid him, she somehow wound up becoming his “personal valet” during his shopping trip, and had to follow him around the store while he piled sweatshirts and things into her arms.
Speaking of Don Johnson and his fondness for the word “tits,” there’s also the fondling in a Sushi Bar incident. The whole affair is quite a read.
I sat next to Rob Schneider on a 3-hour plane ride once. I was fourteen years old, and he was drunk. He told me all about his career, and kept offering to buy me rum and cokes.
Sleaze.
In his defense, I don’t think he realized how young I was, but still. . . ew!
Embarassingly enough, I was the first to get knocked out of the Tournament of Champions. My response time just wasn’t aggressive enough to be competitive. Plus, I can never play “I Want a Crack at That” again. They made that rule when I asked for the DVD. :o
But Frank and Kelly (AND Preva, AND Tito – he was still there, running the syndication board) were very nice to us, and everyone was appreciative of the muffins, even the Way and the Light themselves. And they DID give Black Beauty away several months later to a late-answering caller on We’ve Got Your Answer Hangin’.
Daniels, IIRC.
Totally not typical! Uber-Geeky, definitely- even perhaps Geek-Messiah! 
Sampiro! I wanna hear your Gallagher story, 'cuz I have one about him too - not terribly interesting, though. He was the headliner for a New Year’s Eve show locally, but I had gone to the show to see Danny Bonaduce (long story, but he’s a pretty fun guy). Anyhow. After Danny, Dennis Miller was on and was slightly off moodwise, but then, his show had just been cancelled by HBO, so we let it slide. Then Gallagher came on. Very unfriendly, but the audience assumed this was a new “wrinkle” in his act. Someone in the front row yelled out “SLEDGE-O-MATIC!” and Gallagher went nuts, yelling for security to “get this asshole out of here!” When security actually started to escort the guy to the door, the crowd boo’d. Gallagher screamed at the whole place: “Oh, yeah, you laugh when it’s fucking DANNY PARTRIDGE, you assholes!” The rest of his show was pretty much delivered in a mumbling monotone. After the show, he went out in the hallway for his scheduled “meet & greet” - and every person in the place walked past him without a word. So - is your story kinda like that one?
One other unpleasant encounter with stardom: Tom Baker was the guest of honor at a Dr. Who convention I attended (before I shed my geekdom to become the glorious, er… not-a-geek you see before you now.) He may have an alcohol problem, or at least he had had entirely too much to drink that night. His handlers or escorts or whatever sort of shoved him into an elevator with me and two of my friends at the hotel, and they had to hold him upright. He spent the trip upstairs weaving in place, leering and flirting with us. Just as the elevator door opened and my friends and I exited, Baker pitched forward onto the floor and vomited all over the place.
Though I’m a huge fan of his films, **Spike Lee ** is an enormous fucking asshole. When I was the director of my college radio station, he came to our campus as a guest speaker, and I arranged for him to come up to our studio and tape an interview that we would later run on the station.
I had about 30 mins worth of great interview questions - well plotted, though-out questions from a long-time fan - nothing too provocative, but not the typical brainless interview fodder either.
He was dismissive and condescending, stonewalling me or giving one or two-word answers to intelligent, multi-part questions. When I tried to get him to talk about jazz, he refused, muttering a comment about how “that’s our music.” (I’m white, and probably know enough about Jazz to spin circles around Spike). He basically intentionally botched the interview, leaving me with unusable non-answers.
I hate to play the race card, but at the actual speaking engagement later, he blew off all questions by white audience members with one or two-word answers, but spoke for 10+ minutes in response to generic, obviously assigned questions like “uhh…what do you think some themes in your movies are?” as long as they were asked by black audience members.
As a contrast to these stories I have to say that Penn and Teller are two of the best guys towards their fans that you can image. During intermission at the show I went to, Penn was in the lobby having a glass of wine and talking to fans (Teller had been killed right before intermission). At the end of the show both of them were in the lobby and stayed talking to fans until everyone had an autograph. Yes Teller spoke. And yes they were wearing togas and were covered in fake blood.
being from the decidedly star-empty state of indiana, the only famous person i ever met was chirs rock when i visited new york in college. this was at the absolute height of his career, maybe 7 years ago or something. anyway, i was just walking down the street with friends, and i heard a voice. sounded familiar, so i turned around and saw chris rock walking out of a store, talking to the owner or something. so as soon as he hit the sidewalk he’s right in front of us, so i ask him for a picture, in all my hick glory. he politely accepts, i put my arm around him, take the picture, and my and my friends are sort of starstruck for a moment. then chris disappears. we look around, he’s nowhere.
so chris rock is pretty cool, but don’t expect him to hang around and chat. i’d never pull that shit again, though. i had only been to chicago maybe twice before, so new york really brought out the idiot in me. and i was young. i’m suprosed chris rock accomodated us, especially with me PUTTING MY ARM AROUND HIM. if some asshole hillbilly did that to me, i’d probably flip out.
I’ve had no brush with celebrities myself, but hubby, in his years as a PI/bodyguard, had a few. For one thing, a dozen or so years ago (you’ll excuse me, but my grasp of time has always been rather tenuous), he worked security on the opening of Planet Hollywood, he got to meet a lot of celebrities. The ones he came home complaining about were: Roseanne, Bruce Willis and Corbin (L.A. Law) Bernsen. Said they were all asses. Another time, working security at Dulles Airport in D.C., he saw Alex Trebek, acting like an obnoxious jerk, demanding special treatment just because he’s Alex Trebek. Didn’t surprise me much.
I’ll second that. I worked security at one Penn and Teller show - two of the nicest, most personable guys you ever want to meet.
I’ll second that Penn and Teller are very cool guys.
I grew up in West L.A. and live in Santa Barbara so I have seen tons of celebrities in my time. The list would be too long to post.
Celebrities love to come to Santa Barbara because they’re generally left alone here and can wander around without people running up to them and annoying them. The downside it that they’re usually treated like normal people and some of them are incredulous when things happen like they don’t get seated at restaurants that are full and they don’t have a reservation. I saw the curly haired guy from That 70’s Show try to get a table at one of the nicest restaurants in town a few years ago. It was Valentine’s Day and the place had been booked for weeks. The look of disbelief on his face when he was turned away was priceless. I can’t say that he was an asshole about it though.
I have one recent asshole story for you. There’s a sushi bar in Montecito that I love. Christopher Lloyd is a regular there. He always sits at the end of the sushi bar and they always leave an empty seat next to him. I was in there one night and the only empty seats in the place were the two seats at the bar next to Christopher. The hostess said it would be a fifteen minute wait and I asked about the two empty seats. She kind of stammered a bit and finally said that I could sit there.
When Christopher saw us sit down there he gave me a look of disgust. Then he turned on his stool to the side so that he wasn’t facing the bar anymore and his back was towards me. He ate the rest of his meal facing sideways. Fuck, I can see him doing that if I kept trying to talk to him or something but I had no intention of saying a word to the guy. One good TV series and one good movie over twenty years ago and he thinks that he’s a megastar. I felt like tapping him on the shoulder and asking him to do a Reverand Jim impression for me. Jerk off.
Haj
I can picture this being a classic Martin moment…IF said with his characteristic mild smile and faux-polite tone.
But somehow, from the way you tell the story, I think he meant it.