Did anybody else catch this on CNN last night? Anderson Cooper was guest hosting Larry King (while Larry was at home contemplating on how Miami started to look so much like LA, who these damned little kids in his house calling him daddy are, and which wife he’s married to at the moment). The guest was Nancy Grace. In addition to a self promoting incestuous menage for CNN Nancy proved that she is either the greatest performance artist in history (trumping Andy Kaufman, Ann Coulter, GG Allin, and pretty much all other claimants to the crown) or else the single most vapid human being ever to get a multimillion dollar media gig. I honestly believe that if she ever successfully mated with Glenn Beck that they and their resulting offspring would be to IDIOCRACY what Cornelius and Zira and Milo/Caesar were to THE PLANET OF THE APES (minus time travel and Ricardo Montalban).
I should add in here that I hate Nancy Grace not just as an individual (though my hatred there is to the point of the neurotic) but as an archetype. She is incarnate every smug, condescending, rude, enyclopedically ignorant, mercilessly vapid, comically classless, aggressively stupid, intellectually incurious and yet unrelentingly opinionated middle class Southern she-WASP who have ever convinced herself that she is equal to Stephen Hawking in brilliance, Rosalind Russell in class, Ava Gardner in sex appeal, Cher in talent, Thomas Jefferson in knowledge, Gore Vidal in pithy wit, Eleanor Roosevelt in people skills, Oprah in their influence on others and Sophia Loren in ageless beauty when in fact in all these things she’s really closer to Rob Schneider (but with the ego and humility of Jerry Lewis). This is a larger subset of the population than you might think, incidentally- and a disproportionate number of them seem to end up majoring in psychology and or managing cubicle farms or working in public education and or social work for some reason.
Her voice could curdle the milk of a mother whale 2 miles beneath the surface of the water. Her mouthbreathing “I know you are but what am I” gape makes me want to play a game of chess with her but only after silently placing bets on which piece will be the first to wind up in her mouth. She’s a proven liar (the real story of her fiance’s murder versus her account are alike in that both assert he is dead but that’s where it stops), her record as a lawyer includes formal disciplinary measures and multiple accusations of gross incompetence, her gut instincts are on par with Custer at Little Bighorn and her cognitive processes are on par with those of a trout. You absolutely know that she honestly believes Jane Fonda personally waterboarded American soldiers in Vietnam, that Oprah once bodily evicted Tommy Hilfiger from her show for saying racial slurs and giving the Nazi salute, and she probably actually remembers the day she outsmarted that science professor who said if God existed then his chalk wouldn’t hit the ground, and when she is absolutely proven to be wrong in terms so plain even she can almost understand them she believes that changing the subject is the best way to deal with it because everyone else will forget long before you’ve edited your memories to have always been right. She’s like a country club cousin of Peggy Hill who makes Peggy Hill look like Peggy Hill’s assessment of Peggy Hill, or perhaps a better analogy would be she’s Pinky’s intellect fused to Brain’s personality and ego.
But please don’t get me wrong: I hate Nancy Grace.
But she’s also the aching tooth I have to push my tongue against sometimes. And last night she was being interviewed by Anderson Cooper, so I was curious what that was about.
Cooper made his journalistic bones with Katrina and he’ll always have that, but he’s no Edward R. Murrow or even Walter Cronkite. He’s basically a cute (in an inbred ‘could bleed to death from a shaving injury’ Romanov sort of way) newsreader rather than a Bob Woodward, BUT the charming thing about him is he obviously knows this, and he really is well informed and intelligent and capable of decent reporting when he’s not slumming. He’s up against Nancy who has no Katrina and no integrity but atones for it by having 20 times the ego. And now she’s written a novel, which she’s pimping it with the self importance of Al Gore with An Inconvenient Truth and the self restraint of The Engineer with MISS SAIGON.
Some highlights from the transcript:
What’d I tell ya?
The wikion her skill with this.
As opposed to novel writing where… uh… you aren’t able to conjecture what happens next… (Darling, that’s the point of writing novels- anything you want to happen can happen; that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily going to be believable or good, but then you’re Nancy Grace, you’ll be convinced it’s brilliant regardless.
Try this: “She sat on the wet sand, feeling the breeze and looking at the moon”. Tah dah! I don’t think most people really need that much commentary; if they haven’t felt a breeze or looked at the moon in their lifetime, they’re probably not going to be reading your novel anyway because they’re probably dependent on a nurse for their most basic needs, and while perhaps fewer people have sat in wet sand, a) they probably aren’t that much fewer and b) I’m pretty sure they understand wet and they understand sand and can put the two together and conjecture. But of course it’s clear that she is now qualified to advise Marcel Proust.
I have absolutely no doubt that you did. Without having read it I am going to guess this is more convincing than most of the dialogue in your novel, and if it’s not I am going to guest you have a ghostwriter. (Nancy is the type who if she did have a ghostwriter would not only NEVER let it be known but would completely convince herself that all he or she did was add in a couple of periods and apostrophes.)
The day before Nancy gave birth to her twins she could not have been as pregnant as Anderson’s ‘Ah’. How many times have I said that and probably thought the same thoughts he was having. It’s the type of thing you say to “Did you know that every cell in the human body actually has DNA and can tell you the memories of your great-great grandparents?” or “Numerology, which is a proven science, says that the world is going to get colder, not warmer!” or “Well you know that English is based on the French language and that’s why so many of our words are the same” or “I happen to have studied workplace efficiency in junior college and I can tell you without need of researching it or asking opinions that customers don’t like having a cash register up in front of the store, they want it in a back room that they have to go look for cause then they feel more like family and not like just a customer!” when you know from experience that there is absolutely no purpose in arguing with them.
So enough of her novel. (Anderson Cooper, the son of a critically acclaimed writer/editor father, a mother who is a bestselling memoirist, and a bestselling author in his own right, never brings up these facts, nor does Grace, who I seriously doubt is aware of any of these facts and if she is doesn’t mention it for fear he’ll beg her for advice.) Anderson asks (whether due to contractual obligation or morbid curiosity I’m not sure) her opinion of current events.
My God but she’s on top of the coverage. Who knew that Squeaky Fromme was nuts? I can’t believe that one slipped by Anderson.
I’d love to have played Sookie Stackhouse and heard Anderson’s internal monologue while she was braying. I’m guessing he was weighing a $50 million contract versus the demerits of saying 12 words you can’t say on primetime television.
Well, read the transcript or watch the video for one of the greatest displays of the intermingling of narcissism and stupidity ever to have an annoying drawl. Even I had to turn away after Fromme as it got too painful listening to her opine. I turned back about the time she trotted out her not quite 2 year old twins and sent them to Anderson, who looked into the camera and somehow managed to convey to the camera “I wonder if I performed Lawanda Page’s ‘I need a big black d__k!’ routine right now on air holding this child if CNN would release me from my contract…”, but ultimately everybody left.
Absolutely nothing of any great importance, but then this is Café Society. And if I haven’t mentioned it, I hate Nancy Grace.