Are we talking the Connie Willis incident at 2006 WorldCon or something else?
Security.
I’ve also heard that Bob Denver was a great guy. There’s the story about how when the show was originally made, the title sequence didn’t include Russell Johnson and Dawn Wells. Denver didn’t feel it was fair to exclude them so he talked to the executives about refilming the title sequence. The executives balked at the expense.
But Denver invoked a clause in his contract about his placement in the title. The clause was supposed to guarantee that his name was included but the way it was worded gave Denver the power to have his name removed from the title sequence is he said so. Denver said he would invoke the contract and force the studio to reshoot the title sequence anyway so they might as well reshoot it with everyone. The studio gave in and reshot the title with Johnson and Wells added.
Here’s the thing; Denver never told anyone what he had done. Johnson and Wells thought the studio had decided on its own to reshoot the title sequence. They didn’t find out until decades later, from a third party source, that it had been Denver standing up for them.
Seal was really big but his last hit song was in 2007. He was on the masked singer recently.
Bob Dylan was on Pawn Stars . They pretended Chumlee ran into him to get a signed album. Turns out Bob is a big fan of the show so he agreed in advance to do the bit.
This is technically true. But according to the Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs, it was a little more complicated than that.
Jobs did not bribe anyone to move to the front of the line. However, he took advantage of the fact that he had a private jet which he was able to keep fueled, staffed, and ready to take off at a moment’s notice to pick up a liver anywhere in the U.S. as soon as it became available. This was what put him on waiting lists all over the country. And obviously, this was only possible because of his great wealth.
But (acc. to Isaacson) no rules were broken.
And to the OP, Isaacson admits that even Jobs’ friends thought he was a jerk…
James Brown was an asshole to his band mates, which has been documented in biography and biopic.
And of course there’s the infamous Leona Helmsley, the hotelier, who became famous for her nasty behavior towards employees and for stiffing contractors. Basically, a female Donald Trump.
I don’t have the names places or dates, but at a sf convention, someone on stage said something unflattering about another sf writer who had passed away. Harlan Ellison said, “[He] isn’t here to defend himself,” and got up on stage and hit the guy who’d said it.
I don’t have a source; to the best of my memory this was reported in an issue of SF Chronicle.
If I have suckered to an UL, I’ll apologize and retract, of course. (SF Chronicle has suckered me before, misquoting Isaac Asimov’s last words. Hey, it’s better than the National Enquirer…)
Allegedly, Ellison hit Charles Platt after Platt said that Ellison’s tribute to the late Larry Shaw was in poor taste (I wasn’t there - there are conflicting accounts).
One I can testify to from personal experience: Jerry Pournelle could really be a jerk and a half at times. Rude, aggressive, offensive, derisive, bigoted, and really, really loud about it. But he was a Jekyll and Hyde, because most of the time he was pleasant, thoughtful, witty, funny, and intelligent. And really, really loud about it.
(And, like Ellison, one hell of a writer!)
Brown would never have considered anyone in his band a “band mate.” They were employees, pure and simple, extremely disposable ones at that. He drove them to excellence but in the process exploited them, bullied them relentlessly, fined them constantly and fired them at a whim. He was ungodly talented, incredibly charismatic and an unmitigated asshole to all but one or two mentors throughout his life. He may never have had a single genuine friend in his life, he certainly didn’t have one he regarded as an equal in any human way.
Having met The Colonel at many LASFAS meetings and being a member of the 42nd (or so i was told by Sarge) I never remember him as anything like " jerk and a half at times. Rude, aggressive, offensive, derisive, bigoted, and really, really loud about it. " Mind you, LASFS was mostly liberal, Jerry was conservative and in a private conversation would argue- which is fine.
I used to wear a safari jacket, kinda like Jerry’s, and was tapped on the back once by someone who thought I was he (for the record, i dont really look anything like Pournelle). So when Jerry was going to speak one time at a meeting, we had like a dozen of us in safari jackets, with pipes (mostly not lit) in the audience . When Jerry looked up into the audience , he lost track of where he was for a minute, then continued on.
Regarding Harlan Ellison, I have a first-hand story that shows him in a rather jerkish light (though there may be an epilogue I am unaware of).
He spoke at MIT decades ago, when I was a student at Wellesley. He was enthralling and I loved every minute of his presentation.
Alas, he spoke quite late, and the final bus home to Wellesley left at something like 10pm. Missing that bus would be a disaster, as you’d be a broke college student stuck in the city overnight, in cold weather, with no place to go. So with enormous regret, I got up to leave at the last possible second so I could make a dash for the bus stop. There were probably 10 or 20 other Wellesley students, maybe more, who did the same thing.
Ellison verbally abused us as we walked out, assuming we were just being rude and telling us so with all of his sarcastic verbal skills. I felt terrible, as I’m sure everyone else did, but there was no choice.
I hope he later learned why we left, but you would think that he’d have the sense to realize that when a bunch of people scattered randomly through the auditorium all get up at more or less the same time, and kind of late at night at that, there was probably a reason.
I can only hope that someone later informed him why the exodus occurred and that he felt bad about being nasty. But I’ll never know.
I heard one of his crew in a documentary talk about how absolutely self-obsessed Brown was(like Trump level of attention-craving). He said when they would talk, Brown would always clearly look like he needed the conversation to come back to himself and praise towards him.
Yeah, I heard about that, but it was my understanding that the conviction was for exposing his penis on stage - a charge he denied, hence the pending appeal at the time of his death - which would be indecent exposure and these days could have gotten his name on the sex offender list. That’s a little different that an “audible obscenity”.
There are mentally ill people who can, and have been, both “a great guy, friendly and funny” AND “did so many horrific things to so many people”. There are also mean sons of bitches with the acting skill to do the same.
Lewis Black might well get most of his anger and crankiness out on stage. Sort of like how people I know who work in demolition all day smashing stuff up are some of the calmest, most laid-back people you’ll ever meet after their work day is done. I’ve heard Don Rickles and Rodney Dangerfield were both good guys off stage.
Just about every celebrity has “one time stories” about that one day they were having a bad day and it got plastered across the media. I don’t think those are the folks this thread is about, because we all have a bad day now and then. The objects of this thread are the celebrities whose “one time stories” are about the one day they weren’t assholes.
Well put.
And there are “mean drunks” who become raging jerks under the influence of alcohol.
Seems like it’s pretty common for comedians to be quite different as human beings from their professional personas.
Jack Benny was apparently the most generous fellow you could meet - in real life. In his self-portrayals, of course, he was the stingiest man alive.
Yes, he was one of the examples I had in mind.
I knew Jerry pretty well from online interactions and debated directly with him on many subjects. He always argued fairly but would make strong points that were not easy to refute. Our biggest difference was on membership rules for SFWA. He wanted to restrict it and require requalifications; I favored Heinlein’s more expansive qualifications – three pro short story sales or one novel and that was it. We argued a lot, but it was always a fair debate with no name calling. We disagreed on a lot of things, but we both respected each other.
He had his quirks – every few month he’d leave “forever” and then come back a week later.
Never met him in person, but he was definitely loud – because he was hard of hearing and didn’t realize how loud he actually was.
Jerry Lewis: My dad was in a club that raised a butt-load of money for his cause. They were supposed to be on the show to hand over the check. Lewis, backstage, snatched the check out of their hands and basically told them to fuck off.