2006: The year of celebrity apologies

updated 2:31 p.m. ET Dec. 1, 2006

NEW YORK - "Love means never having to say you're sorry," Ali MacGraw said in the 1970 tearjerker "Love Story," a line whose iconic status belies its lack of any discernible logic.

But that was so last millennium. In 2006, a better line might be: "Apologizing means never having to say you're sorry."

Rarely have there been so many prominent public apologies coming so close together, saying at once so much — "That wasn't really me, it was the booze talking, I have inner rage, I have a dark side, I'm in rehab" — and so little. So little, that is, about the actual transgression that made them necessary.

Entertainers, politicians, media figures, religious leaders. Why have public apologies become such a mainstay of our culture? It seems that the minute a transgression occurs, be it small or large, we wait for penitence. It's the other shoe that needs to drop before we can move on.

Maybe it's because as much as we love scandal — and we love it especially now that we can capture it on cell-phone video or stream it on YouTube — we love something else even more: "Everybody," says Ken Sunshine, a veteran publicist in both entertainment and politics, "loves a story of redemption."

And so, a thematic look back at a year in apologies, if you can call them that:

The ‘I am not a (fill in the blank)’ apology
The most recent specimen: Michael Richards, aka Kramer from "Seinfeld," who's having an unwanted second moment in the sun with his stunning "n-word" rant. In the first of several apologies, Richards made an awkward appearance on David Letterman's "Late Show" and explained that it was rage at being heckled that sparked his tirade: "I'm not racist — that's what's so insane about this." (His publicist said Friday he also planned a personal apology to the men he targeted.)

Was it effective? "There's a piece of it that doesn't fit for me," says Jerry Deffenbacher, a psychology professor at Colorado State University who studies rage. "It's not unusual for a comic to be heckled. I would want to know more about his impulse control history."

Impulse control was clearly a problem for a much bigger star — Mel Gibson — on the July night when he was pulled over for drunken driving and spewed anti-Semitic comments at the arresting officer.

"Please know from my heart that I am not an anti-Semite," Gibson said in a statement soon after the incident. "I am not a bigot." Jewish leaders said the healing would take work. "Anti-Semitism is not born in one day and cannot be cured in one day and certainly not through the issuing of a press release," noted Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.

For cultural critic Roger Rosenblatt, the whole apology business is just that — a business. "It's basically the way you get on with your career," says Rosenblatt, an author and essayist at Time magazine. "It wouldn't be made — or publicly received — if there weren't some tacit understanding that this is what you do in order to keep earning a living." Which means that those who accept the apology — the public, in other words — are part of the deal.

MORE FROM CELEBRITIES

Celebrities Section Front

Reps deny Gyllenhaal, Witherspoon breakup E-mail and a view: Polanski set for house arrest Despite criticism, Lohan to stay on at Ungaro Filmmaker Perry gives $1 million to NAACP Chef Paula Deen hit in face by charity ham Michael Jackson glove sells for $350,000 Michael Jackson’s doctor returns to work Miley Cyrus tour bus overturns, killing driver Britney’s paparazzo ex gets 45 days in jail Access Hollywood section Celebrities Section Front   Add Celebrities headlines to your news reader: