By Wes Pedersen
The PR sheen is off Charlie Sheen for now. The idiot rubbed it off all by himself. But can he ever get it back?
Probably.
His show is hotter than ever now that he's exposed himself as a ranting bag of conceit, pomposity and aging wrinkles that Botox and crevasse- concealing Hollywood makeup cannot conceal.
Charlie the whacko has been on every TV talk show extant for several weeks. He's given so many “exclusive” interviews to hosts boasting of catching the big one that he has become a Charlie the Tuna, going bad by overexposure to the sun.
He's scoring big via Twitter, bringing a Guinness-record million followers to his ravings in one day.
He's doing his PR by himself. His PR director, Stan Rosenfield, dumped him rather than let the idiot ruin his professional PR reputation. His daddy, Martin Sheen, and his brother, Emilio Estevez, have given up trying to talk sense to him.
Charlie has told his story before, and before, and before. He admits now to being addicted to porn “stars.” We knew that. Old news. He was a headline maker in the last century with his admission of being a devout follower of the ministrations of the young things in Heidi Fleiss's Hollywood bordello. Now we see two of his catches, young, simpering girls with no particular attractiveness. Any young woman off the streets would serve him as well. No class, no looks, just availability and a willingness to tell Charlie he's the best they ever had. They, with Charlie, give threesome a bad name. They certainly are not Charlie's Angels
The image of Charlie is becoming that of a somewhat younger Hugh Hefner, who never met a Viagra he wouldn't down.
If Charlie keeps on at this rate, he should, by all standards of logic, be persona non grata in every family values home around the world.
It's not going to work that way. Look at Tiger Woods, who held the bad-boy title for a short while last year. Look at the politician, Newt Gingrich who presented divorce papers to his wife as she lay suffering from cancer. Now Newt says he'll be filing papers soon to run as the Republican savior of the land.
When Tiger got caught breaking his marriage vows and his sparkling clean image, the crisis control “experts” presented all manner of ways for him to cope. I wrote here that he needed to come clean with a public confession, find God (he did in the Dalai Lama for a bit), and wait until he could venture back onto a golf course as a returning ex-sinner cum hero.
He ignored a heap of garbage advice offered to him by many to sanctify his commitment to Golf, and came back with no real ado a year later.
Sheen is Tiger Woods magnified by more than a million headlines and a trainload of same-old, same-old interviews. Now he's playing the aggrieved father determined to win back the kids snatched from him by a deceitful wife, said wife and at least one New York bimbo testifying to the penchant for senseless violence allegedly demonstrated on terrifying occasions.
Producers of Three and a Half Men are searching for some hunk who can play grab
ass with the same aplomb as Charlie. Charlie thinks it's impossible for anyone to fit the bill as well as he. He wants 2 million for each performance now.
Charlie may return because he is probably worth that for the rest of the year. People tend to still think of him as a lovable scamp, but he is his own worst enemy when it comes to image control and PR. And reruns are plentiful.
Any PR agency or agent who would try to show Charlie Sheen the error of his ways would be buying trouble. Still, there are enough grab-the-money-and-pray publicists who would sell their souls, and whatever is left of Charlie's, for a chance to rep a star of his rank.
Right now, Charlie is hot … hot enough to repeatedly take precedence in the news over the conflicts spreading throughout the Middle East and Africa. That's ridiculous. Charlie is ridiculous. The media are ridiculous; they have lost all journalistic sense of proportion. The public is ridiculous for putting up with this trash.
Be good, Charlie, or be gone. You're in a mess of your own making. Man up and shut up.
You've made a pile. Wallow in it now, because residuals are going to be your only source of income as soon the public discovers you really are a jerk.
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Wes Pedersen is a retired Foreign Service Officer and principal at Wes Pedersen Communications and Public Relations Washington, D.C. |