Author: nymag.com: People

The Sheen Stimulus

$1,845: Estimated price of dinner for nine at Daniel, where on October 25, Sheen, three buddies, and five women, including ex-wife Denise Richards and escort–porn star Christina Walsh (a.k.a. Capri Anderson), enjoy dinner in a private room.

$11,800: Price for two bottles of the 1959 Grand Vin de Château Latour that Sheen orders for the group.

Illustrations by Jacob Thomas

$3,500: “Appearance fee” for Walsh’s escort services for the evening. (Walsh claims she was never paid.)

$1,195: Estimated cost per night of Sheen’s suite in the Plaza Hotel. Walsh tells Good Morning America that Sheen’s friend told her to “make sure [Charlie] gets up to his room and stays in there.”

$80: Estimated price of a gram bag of a certain “white powdery substance.” Walsh claims she saw Sheen snort said “white powdery substance.”

$7,000: Reported amount Sheen had to pay the Plaza for the damage to his room. Walsh says Sheen put his hands around her neck and threw a lamp at her as she made a motion to leave. According to a complaint Sheen filed against Walsh, Walsh had stolen his watch, and Sheen became “extremely upset.” Walsh then reportedly locked herself in the bathroom and called a friend who was “working” in the hotel. The friend phoned the front desk. The front desk called the cops.

$2,350: Cost of two adjoining suites across the hall, where Sheen’s daughters and Richards slept.

SUBTOTAL: $27,770

+ $165,000: Price of Sheen’s lost Patek Philippe watch, according to Sheen’s lawsuit. We’re assuming he bought a new one.

TOTAL: $192,770
(“A guy has one bad night, everyone goes insane,” Sheen says two weeks later.)

(Photo: MCT/Newsom)

A man named Ted Williams just had a more exciting week than you. On Monday, he was homeless and panhandling in Columbus, Ohio, carrying a cardboard sign that read I HAVE A GOD-GIVEN GIFT OF VOICE. By Thursday, he was being interviewed on the Today show and fielding job offers from Kraft Foods and the Cleveland Cavaliers. What happened in between, obviously, was YouTube. A journalist from the Columbus Dispatch had filmed Williams beside an off-ramp, doing his version of busking—stepping up to a car window and breaking into a resonant radio-announcer bass, that voice of clean suits, slick hair, and corporate reassurances. The voice just happened to be coming from a homeless man in a camouflage jacket, which gave it a whiff of magic. Viral video begat informal campaign: Here’s a likable, needy person who wasn’t kidding about having a gift, so can we maybe find him a job?

It worked, which has been wonderful to see. And soon enough, Williams was being compared to Scottish singer Susan Boyle—another in a long line of underdogs who opened their mouths and surprised the world by having something lovely come out. We especially love stories of unlikely triumph when there’s a remarkable voice involved. A voice can seem different from a “skill” or “talent”; those words imply learning and practice, and our lives are already full of the boring hard work that stuff implies. A voice like Williams’s seems more innate—a light that will sit inside, through the grimmest or most mundane circumstances, just waiting to shine out. Blessings always beat the grind.

Williams’s story, of course, is more complicated than that. He’d worked in radio in the eighties, before running into problems with alcohol and cocaine. That means this isn’t just a homeless man who turns out to have talent and find success; it’s also a talented, successful man who wound up homeless. (I can’t help comparing this path with that of, say, Glenn Beck, whose dip into radio and drugs, around the same period, spat him out in a slightly different direction.) Williams says he’s been clean for two years now. He’s lucky that his particular ability could be stored safely in his throat and recognized from passing cars—unlike, say, a knack for accounting. And one imagines he’ll require sustained and unmagical friendship, attention, and support to genuinely rebuild his life.

On Today, Williams thanked religion (and “the God of my understanding,” a term from substance-abuse recovery) for helping him get here. He also said he was unlikely to repeat his past mistakes, because he now has gratitude for life. That observation is not exactly a secular one, and it’s a whole lot less fun than Cinderella stories; it might even mean we should be less thrilled by stories of magical gifts and life-changing discoveries, and more appreciative of whatever workaday grind we already have. Sometimes stories of hope are a real buzzkill like that.

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Illustrations by Zohar Lazar

Venerable gossip columnist Liz Smith, 89, has been in the ­catbird seat of New York gossip for over 50 years, with ­columns in the Daily News, Newsday, the Post, and ­syndication in over 70 newspapers. She got her start ghostwriting Cholly Knickerbockers’s column in the Hearst news­papers. The Post dropped her column in 2009, though she’s still in other papers. Steven Gaines is author of such books as Philistines at the Hedgerow: Passion Property in the Hamptons and co-author of Obession: The Lives and Times of Calvin Klein.

Steven Gaines: You once said something to me years ago, just in passing: You don’t have to sleep in the bed that you made. That people are forever escaping their follies.

Liz Smith: If you’re just guilty of public opinion, you can work against that to come back. A lot of people have. Eliot Spitzer is on the rise. Clinton totally became a ­reformed character, or he appears to have become one. Anybody can come back from anything, I think, if they haven’t killed somebody or committed a criminal act.

S.G.: I’m surprised how easily Don Imus came back. He was off the air for a little while after the “nappy-headed” comment in 2007, and then he’s back as strong as ever.

L.S.: Well, he made a really righteous apology. Also, Imus kept on being on the air, and the victory will come to those who are constantly in the limelight. If you’re on television enough, you become some kind of a classic, whether people hate you or love you. Look at Jennifer Lopez. Wasn’t she with Sean Combs when the gun went off in the nightclub and all of that? She wasn’t too popular and then she took up with Ben Affleck and then she … Now she’s a beloved figure, I’m telling you. Paula Abdul—a big comeback.

S.G.: Marv Albert had trouble coming back from his sex scandal. It involved biting.

L.S.: It’s hardest to come back after something specific and, I’m sorry to say, in my opinion, small. Eliot Spitzer’s involvement with a prostitute was a real scandal because he was so brilliant and rising. The difference between him and Congressman Weiner is that the latter treated his own body like a kind of joke, and it made him a joke.

S.G.: There are some things that other people just don’t want to forgive you for. For instance, Woody Allen and Soon-Yi.

L.S.: That’s exactly right. And he was kind of arrogant when that happened. But now he seems to have changed. And also, he made a success of the thing that was a scandal. He made a success of his marriage, and he suffered terrible losses, whether we think so or not. He lost touch with his own child, and he changed his life. And he is a much nicer person now. But listen, things have changed drastically. Divorce itself, the very word used to be a scandal. And now it doesn’t even—you don’t pause. You’ve got Newt Gingrich married so many times, and he’s running for president. But because the Internet tells all, and so quickly, nobody is sure what they believe. So the result of this instant news and the press hyping it up into a scandal—well, the Post is a good example. They make big mountains out of molehills every day. They’re going now with this prostitution scandal. And I don’t blame them, but I’m not very interested in that. I don’t know who any of the people are.

S.G.: I know, I’m not at all interested.

L.S.: But the enhanced access of the instant news, so that gossip columnists of my kind couldn’t even exist today, the result is total cynicism on the part of the public. They’re quick to point the finger, they’re quick to be reassured. Thinking about Lindsay Lohan; she has become a scandal because the press overemphasizes her every move. Addicts have been forgiven. But she was so attractive when she first appeared—and so your admiration, your scorn, and your pity all mingle when you think about her. She becomes a scandal, like, “Why can’t that girl pull herself together?”

S.G.: Scandals used to be more rarefied.

L.S.: Ann Woodward—this was a ­really great story. She shot and killed her husband in their home and claimed she thought he was a burglar. It was said she committed suicide when she read the Truman Capote version of the story. And her mother-in-law was protecting her two grandchildren and refused to say anything about the fact that a lot of people believed that Ann had murdered William. That was a great story. That had class.

S.G.: Do you remember when I wrote the Calvin Klein book? The fury that that caused? They said I outed Calvin.