Are We Not Billy Crudup?
The date: May 15th
The place: Fifth Avenue at 18th Street
Sighted: "Saw Billy Crudup talking on his blackberry, huddled in a phone booth on 5th Avenue just below 19th street. He is short and had a stupid mustache which was creepily reddish and not the same color as his hair. Looked a little freaked out as I turned to look at him and realized who he was."
Celebrities are typically horrible people, but most of the time they have the decency to try and hide it. For instance, Naomi Campbell is widely known for her work with UNICEF. Most people know Lindsay Lohan for her selfless devotion to Kenyan AIDS charities. Who would ever suspect that these two women were legitimately terrible people, each horrendous in her own special way? That's why when we learn about celebrities behaving like the hideous monsters they truly are, we are disillusioned and betrayed, not only by the celebrities themselves, but also by trusted rags like Us Weekly and Celebrity Life & Style that peddle their false images to an unsuspecting public.
Luckily, in the case of Billy Crudup (allegedly pronounced "crew-dup")("right"), America was forewarned that this Pirate of the Caribbean imitator had a soul filled with soot. Even prior to The Event That Shall Remain Nameless, Billy revealed himself to be the pompous, pompous, jerk that he is, stating in interviews that, "every time I make a movie, I think it's going to be a huge hit" and faux-sheepishly "conceding" that "the bones on the side of my face are really pronounced and high and that there's a certain symmetry to my face." Thus it should have come as no surprise when in 2003 Billy left 8 month pregnant girlfriend of 7 years Mary-Louise Parker for his co-star Claire Danes (who herself left boyfriend of 7 years Ben Lee), and thereby jumpstarted a new bastard club in Hollywood which now includes the likes of bastards Tom Brady, Kevin Federline and Eddie Murphy. In the words of the wise prophet Justin Timberlake, what goes around comes around, and Claire, having learned from the best, left Billy for co-star/occasional gay man, Hugh Dancy. Devastated by this unforeseeable turn of events, and having discovered that Mary-Louise was back on the market after dumping her Weeds co-star Jefferson Dean Morgan, Billy seized the opportunity and placed a desperate phone call to Mary-Louise to beg for her back.
The shame was great that day, my friends, as Billy cowered in an obsolete phone booth, crying into his red mustache. Though Billy was no stranger to begging, in that phone booth he became a celebrity stripped of his charity work and façade as a decent human being—a regular loser forced to call an old girlfriend and weasel his way back into her pants, and life. In his acknowledgment of and apologies for his hideously blackened soul, Billy bridged the seemingly unbreachable divide between celebrities (who conceal their evil) and peasants (who must apologize for it). That was the moment that we were one with him.
