Of course it's true! A celebrity said it

I remember when Nick and Jessica were doing great. I remember when Angelina and Brad were just friends.  I even remember when Mary-Kate Olsen ate like a lumberjack and baby Suri wasn’t a hastily constructed infant-bot purchased on the Samoan black market.

Yes, those were simpler days.  A time when denials flew fast and loose, and good-hearted fans like me chose to believe. I remember racing home for my pre-primetime entertainment show fix, eager to hear soothing words like, “Robert Downey Jr. denies the charges.”  Oh, Mary Hart,  please tell me again that Kate Moss is high on life and life alone. Make me believe.

But now I’m fed up. I’m disillusioned by divorces, sick of plastic surgery denials that contradict the laws of physics. My patience has been strained by claims of “It’s just Red Bull!” and 24-year-old actresses who inexplicably drop 40 pounds of “baby fat.”  I’m hungry for real answers. Where is Suri Cruise if she is, in fact, a flesh-and-blood baby? If there is no Suri,  is it also possible that Britney’s marriage is not “awesome”?  If K-Fed is on his way out, is it also possible that Star Jones might have had some medical help with her miraculous weight loss? If Star’s stomach is indeed the size of my thumb, is it also possible that David Gest is not the hot-blooded heterosexual he seems?

You see, I’ve often thought of Hollywood as a sweater.  A chintzy, cheesy, heavily perfumed sweater bearing many stains of indeterminate origin. Pull one thread and the whole thing falls into a pile of stinky, used-up yarn.  Yarn of deception, that is.  For me, that sweater started to fray when Nick and Jessica split.  Now when I hear some flack say, “My client will not dignify that with a response,” all I hear is: “The truth?  You can’t handle the truth.”

To hear it from publicists and their well-scripted clients, Hollywood is boring. It’s a land of non-events, non-feuds, non-vices, non-issues.  No one fakes pregnancies or breaks the law.  Everyone has authentic body parts and remains good friends with their exes.

NBC VIDEO Pitt on green building, fatherhood July 17: Actor Brad Pitt talks with the "Today" show's Ann Curry about environmentally-friendly building in New Orleans, and the joys of fatherhood. Today show

As a human being, I find this implausible.  I live very far from Hollywood, with no access to beautiful people, large sums of money, fast cars, drugs or power, and I still know people who engage in all sorts of reprehensible and self-destructive behavior. Last weekend I engaged in three. I’m willing to accept a little spin-doctoring, but when denials heap upon denials and denials fly in the face of common sense, who is a fan to trust?

Enter the tabloids, the magazine equivalents of the brazen hussy women chain-smoking down on the dock (or outside your local IHOP, if you’re landlocked). You know the type. They lure you with claims of exclusive insight into secret pregnancies. They dangle rumors of marital strife. They titillate you with the promise of celebrity cellulite and Eva Longoria without makeup, all for the low price of $3.95. So, if you’re a voracious truth-seeker like me, you look left and right, slip an issue under some Rolaids and The Economist (if the cover topic features a mushroom cloud, or is otherwise weighty enough to counterbalance “Get Janet Jackson’s fab abs!”) and off you go.  Real fans will take a dignity deduction if it means touching the face of pure truth, or at least something close to it.

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Sure, the tabloids are suspect.  The same people who brought you “Reese is pregnant!” downgraded their claim to “Reese is bloated!” at first sight of her fuming lawyers.  Sure, the gossip rags’ journalistic principle of “If you predict everyone is pregnant and everyone is broken up then, statistically, you’re going to get a major scoop at least once” is not exactly Pulitzer-worthy. But in these days when even the New York Times has its share of scandals, who are we to split hairs over the occasional exaggeration? 

Most important, unlike hired flacks who act coy, spit out terse disavowals or simply give the silent treatment to a nation crying out “Are those real?” the tabloids’ lies are always entertaining.  Mama always said: If you’re going to have smoke blown up your, ahem, nose, make it colorful, candy-coated smoke that tickles the senses and makes you feel like you’re flying in a sea of super-secret insider knowledge.

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