The Picture of John Stamos

 John Stamos is hiding something.  He has to be.  I don’t understand how this man has had such a long and varied 30-year career with no blemishes.  Yeah, there’s a divorce on his book and a drunken Australian interview, but that’s practically sainthood in terms of Hollywood.  He’s a television actor, he’s performed on Broadway, he’s an accomplished musician who has worked often with the Beach Boys, his musings have been published in the Huffington Post, and he’s gorgeous.

Seriously, you can hate all you want, but Helen Keller can see how gorgeous Stamos is,  and she’s blind.  And dead. What kills me about him is that it’s not only that he’s good looking- it’s that he’s gotten better looking with age.  This cat is so much sexier, sleeker, and more chiseled if you will (I will) at 50 than he could have dreamt of being at 20.  If he’s had work done, then he needs to do all of our eyes a favor and post his surgeon’s name in the back pages of Skank magazine, the grown folks’ section of Craigslist, or wherever his contemporaries will see it when they are shopping for tranny-hookers when their wives are out of town.  I am so tired of seeing these plastic, reptilian looking men who front like the stretched, collapsible, Dalian faces they currently bear are examples of the natural, non-surgical aging process .  “Bitch, I remember you in Rocky.  You looked more human after being pummeled in the face then than you do now.”  “Honey, I saw when your ass looked like a mammal in 9 ½  Weeks”, so on, etc.  John Stamos has a face that has the wear and tear of 50 year old man who has loved and laughed and lived.  And I, for one, am so happy to see it.

On top of him looking like your college roommate’s father who was your go-to fantasy on those special nights when you were your own friend with benefits, you never hear anything bad about him.  Co-workers praise him.  The ladies love him, girls adore him, I mean, even the ones who never saw him… Sorry.  I digressed into the words of Rob Base, but seriously, this man CAN’T be this good, right?  Maybe he was an incredibly selfless and kind, talent-free, Quasimodo in his last life and this is his karmic reward.  I don’t know, but I hesitate to run on about how fabulous he comes across because it seems like as soon as I hit “publish” there’s gonna be breaking news about a riot of drugged up runaways found in his basement in deluxe puppy cages, attached to punishing benches, or locked to cock and ball pillories. That or his housekeeping team will find drying human skin in the eaves of his attic. Better still, the latest issue of Weekly World News will have a genuine replica of his Faustian Bargain, which was originally signed in blood, and its sinister details will be listed inside the rag next to the latest info on the Bat Boy.  He comes off as being so good that there’s gotta be something dark and twisted that he has enough money to hide from the world, right? 

Or, dare I say and believe, is he really just a dude who is following his passion so fully, that there is no need for the darkness to welcome him as an old friend?  I am so jaded and judgmental, but I would really like to think it’s the latter, wouldn’t you?  Wouldn’t it be nice for a dude in Hollywood who has endured and come through seemingly unscathed, for once,  to end up really being a nice shorty pop who doesn’t have a penchant for beating people, or  abusing them when he’s nine kinds of hopped up on blow and Adderall?  That’s kind of like believing in Santa Claus, unicorns, and that the fat, ugly girl who is the most talented is going to get the romantic lead in a film. 

But you know what? I choose to accept that about John Stamos .  I mean the man went against his own publicity machine when he was hammered during that 2007 interview in Australia and flat out threw the cup of their kool-aide (jetlagged, stomach flu, lie, lie, lie) against the wall and said, “I was f*cking drunk!”  Standing slow clap for John.  Until I hear otherwise, I am going to believe that John Stamos is not hiding anything.  That John Stamos, who I thought would disappear from the small screen, every teenage-girl’s masturbatory fantasy, and the viewing audience’s collective memory after his role ended as Blackie Parrish on General Hospital, is the exact number of licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop.  That he is pink hearts, yellow moons, blue diamonds.  That John Stamos is not just bacon bits or bacon flavoring- but that John Stamos is bacon.  

Hot with a Chance of Sexy: Robert de Niro

In another Hot with a Chance of Sexy first, I give you the man who puts the "sex" in "sexagenarian": ladies and bitches, boys and girls, hogs and heifers, puppies and kittens, Robert De Niro. That it has taken me so long to include this man in the Hot with a Chance of Sexy feature warrants a kick in the tits for me because Robert De Niro is a bad ass.  What constitutes bad ass, you ask?  His talent, passion, smoldering "De Nironess", and the fact that he has had his name in a song title while he's still alive.  Not a lot of bitches can say that.

In fact, that Bananarama song, "Robert De Niro's Waiting (Talkin' Italian)", was my first introduction to Bobby (and I call him "Bobby" because we're cool like that in our friendship in my head) back in 1984 when I was 14.  I'd spent the seventies and early eighties watching movies like What's Up, Doc?, Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo, Little Darlings, Scavenger Hunt, and National Lampoon's Vacation. Robert De Niro, with his dark, serious, grown-folks movies was nowhere on my barely bleedin' tween ass radar.

Born in Greenwich Village on August 17, 1943, this actor, director, and producer has art in his blood. His mother was a painter and poet and his father was an abstract expressionist painter and sculptor.  Bobby Milk, as his friends called him because of his coloring, made his acting debut at age 10 playing the Cowardly Lion in his school's production of The Wizard of Oz.  From that moment, this sexy Leo knew what he wanted to do with his life.  He dropped out of school at 16 to pursue acting- studying at the Stella Adler Conservatory and Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio.

Bobby's first movie was playing opposite of Jill Clayburgh in The Wedding Party in 1963, but the movie wasn't released until 1969.  He got tons more attention playing a dying Major League baseball player in 1973's Bang the Drum Slowly.  I have never seen that movie, but I know that Bobby could still, to this day, bang my drum slowly and that's all I know.  Apologies- I digress.

One of my favorite De Niro stories- of Robert the Younger - is about how he got the role of the young Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather Part II:  it was partly because Coppola remembered and was so taken with him from his previous auditions for Sonny Corleone, Michael Corleone, Carlo Rizzi, and Paulie Gatto, in the Godfather.  Who knows how many times he actually auditioned for those 4 roles, and whether or not he actually got, or was promised one or more. He still came back to audition again for Godfather Part II. Now that is tenacity, perseverance, and self-confidence mixed with a whole lot of sexy.  And what did it get him?  Just an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.  Next time I feel like quitting something, I am not gonna go diggin' for that poem- I am just gonna think about bad ass Bobby D.

His 1973 collaboration with Martin Scorsese in Mean Streets, parlayed into a successful working relationship for the two of them that spanned decades.  All told, Bobby has done too many movies to list here, but interestingly though we tend to think of him in mob roles, he has done a wide array of films including Brazil, Midnight Run, Analyze This, Angel Heart, and Cape Fear. De Niro also showed his talent in directing with 1993's A Bronx Tale and 2006's The Good Shepherd.

This prostate cancer survivor has had some bad times while filming as well. In 1998, while he was shooting in France, he was hauled in by the French po-po for 9 hours and then questioned by a magistrate over a prostitution ring.  To say he was pissed and let them know he wasn't the one was an understatement to the fullest degree.  According to French newspaper, Le Monde, De Niro said of France,

"I want to get this fuck where he breathes!  I want to find this nancy boy...I want him DEAD!  I want his family DEAD!  I want his house burned to the GROUND! I wanna go there in the middle of the night and I wanna PISS ON HIS ASHES!"

Okay- that's a quote from The Untouchables, but it seemed appropriate because he was so mad. Actually he said that he would never go back to France, but he obviously recanted when he showed up as the President of the Jury for the 64th Cannes Film Festival in 2011.

Besides acting and directing, Bobby co-founded the film studio TriBeCa Productions and the TriBeCa Film Festival.  He co-owns Nobu and TriBeCa Grill, as well as The Greenwich Hotel and the restaurant inside of it called Locanda Verde.  He has been investing in the TriBeCa neighborhood since 1989 and has residences on the east and west sides of Manhattan, and an estate in Marbletown in upstate New York.  I'm sure all his successes have to be source of personal pride, but it also must feel good to know his wife, Grace Hightower, and 6 children and 3 grandchildren will be well provided for in the future.  Bad ass.