On the night before I moved away from my hometown, I leaned over and kissed Larry Kaminsky. Larry was the stupidest boy in our class and the butt of all the jokes. But he wore his jeans slung low on his hips, in a style that continues to attract me even to this day, and he was the sexiest boy I knew. When I kissed him, all the kids in the play ground started pointing at me and whispering and saying that I had cooties. You remember cooties, don't you? That nebulous social disease--an unseen, unknown curse that comes upon you when you do something stupid or gross? The plague you can't really catch, but being around someone who has it leads other people to believe that you have it, too, which amounts to the same thing?
Cooties are a childish thing. So it's hardly surprising that, schoolyards aside, the place they thrive in, the place that's a virtual petri dish full of cooties, is, yes, that playground of the stars, Hollywood. And Hollywood cooties are a truly virulent strain. I may have been horrified at getting Larry Kaminsky's cooties, but I knew I was leaving town and that the people in my new neighborhood would never know about it. But since no one ever really leaves Hollywood, once you've got them in this town, they're almost impossible to get rid of.
Even stars of heroic proportions are subject to cooties. Faye Dunaway, for instance, got cooties after she made Mommie Dearest and people seemed to confuse her with the wire-hanger-wielding Joan Crawford (who in real life, I might add, never got cooties). Dennis Quaid got them after Great Balls of Fire, because his over-the-top, over-hyped portrayal of Jerry Lee Lewis just didn't cut it, and because Jerry Lee Lewis himself has cooties. Mickey Rourke has cooties-- not because he insists on being a Rodeo Drive homeboy, not because of the greasy hair, the stupid bandana or the Harley, but because he keeps making those semi-pornographic movies, and seems to enjoy them. Michael J. Fox got them because he wouldn't settle for being the clean-cut, shallow guy that he really is. Fame, massive popularity, a new baby, and a shitload of dough weren't enough... no, he had to go make Casualties of War. Daryl Hannah has them because she still looks like a mermaid six years later. Richard Gere, even before he became the butt of emergency room jokes all over the country, had a case of cooties the Dalai Lama couldn't cure. Those uniformly wooden, narcissistic performances after he was so good in Looking for Mr. Goodbar just pissed people off. Steve Guttenberg (who bears a striking resemblance to Mickey Mouse with muscles), has cooties so bad that starlets who've worked with him talk openly about what a lousy kisser he is. And Rob Lowe, what can I say? He caught cooties initially by doing a duet with Snow White on the Oscars, then caught another dose--the first case of video-sexually-transmitted cooties ever reported.
And speaking of the Oscars, I think the real reason people watch them is to see who'll get cooties on live television. If Kim Basinger weren't so hot off of Batman, she might have gotten them this year because of her Star Trek dress and her unprompted defense of Spike Lee (who probably doesn't need some glamorous honky telling the world how fab he is). Sally Field clinched hers for being too needy (they may have really really liked her when they gave her a second Oscar, but by the time she accepted it, they were already beginning to shiver). Teri Garr got hers the way Rob got his, by acting in one of those deadly Oscar production numbers (cootie watchers take note: all production numbers lead to cooties). Barbra Streisand almost got them by almost falling down in a see-through jumpsuit--but money, money, money kept them away.
Which reminds me, power is probably the only real cootie vaccine. Don Simpson, Jon Peters, and Cher all have transcended cooties: nobody with that much clout has cooties no matter how creepy they are. Which shows that you should not fuck with Mike Ovitz, who can give you cooties for looking at him the wrong way, but who doesn't have them himself. Okay Mike? Of course, power comes and power goes. David Puttnam, once a Coca-Cola cohort and head of Columbia Pictures, got cooties for being an arrogant Brit and assuming that he knew more about Hollywood than anyone else.
The one thing to remember is that there's no such thing as cootie justice. You can get cooties even when you do the right thing. Cliff Robertson wound up with stool-pigeon cooties, even though just about everyone applauded him for blowing the whistle on David Begelman. (Begelman got cooties in that celebrated scandal too, but they're like trompe l'oeil cooties: he's made so much money for the right people that to a lot of folks the critters looked like dollar signs.) Danny Aiello (referred to as Danny Iego by his fellow actors) should have cooties for continually saying how he's as good as Bobby De Niro, but he doesn't. Yet, Sylvia Miles shouldn't have them because she's a great actress, but she keeps pointing that out, so she does. Chris Walken has them, but shouldn't--sure he's a little scary, with the electric hair and all, but the reason he's got cooties is that he was there when Natalie Wood took a dive, which was just bad luck. Andrew Dice Clay should have them and probably will, but not nearly as bad as he deserves. John Travolta has them even after a successful comeback, which makes no sense at all. (Maybe it's the Scientology.)
Directors, you might think, would be less susceptible than stars to cooties. But, in fact, they have very inventive ways of getting them. Michael Cimino's hubris and excess not only brought down a studio, but assured him his place in the Cootie Hall of Fame. Francis Ford Coppola got cooties for boring everybody for the last decade. John Frankenheimer has them because he's the angriest man in the world (Dennis Hopper recently lost his by finally becoming a nice guy). Peter Bogdanovich has cooties thanks to his obsession with his murdered lover Dorothy Stratten and the fact that he recently married her little sister, and because he just seems like the creepiest man in the world anyway. John Landis has them for putting actors at risk and for not seeming to care. Susan Seidelman has them partly because she never lived up to her potential after Desperately Seeking Susan and partly because she keeps claiming that her new movie lives up to her potential after Desperately Seeking Susan. Roman Polanski got cooties not because he had sex with a 13-year-old, but because Charles Manson killed his wife (trust me on this--sex with an underage girl gets you congratulations in Hollywood, not cooties). Sondra Locke knows she has them, but she thinks they're just the fallout from Clint Eastwood (who doesn't have them); the real reason is that when she had a chance to make a movie, thanks to Clint, she made Ratboy!
There seems to be a preponderance of intra-family cooties in Hollywood. Sofia Coppola has them, but I'm not sure if it's because after getting the opportunity to co-write her father's segment of New York Stories she wrote that vapid segment, or because she caught her father's cooties. (Her performance, as well as his directorial performance, in The Godfather III will either seal her fate or prove that the Coppola name has been unfairly tarnished.) The whole O'Neal clan has cooties--Ryan, Tatum, and Griffin (causing the death of his best friend, Gio Coppola, would have been enough, but Griffin already had them from his father anyway). Surprisingly, Ryan's longtime love Farrah Fawcett doesn't have them, but she may catch them when she co-stars in a new series with him. Don Johnson is right this minute giving cooties to Melanie Griffith--their campaign to be an acceptable, Architectural Digest couple (the Rosemarie and Robert Stack of their generation) doesn't add up for those in the know. Dennis Quaid is giving them to Meg Ryan ("What?" all my friends shriek. "She's really going to marry him?") Marty and Charlie Sheen don't have them (although one more report of a trashed hotel room and Charlie might get them), but the auteur of the family, Emilio Estevez, does. Brooke Shields has them, not because she can't act her way out of a Calvin Klein ad, but because her mother Teri has brought a new level of horror to the term "stage mother." The Brando Kids have them, but not from their dad (see the cootie-proof sidebar): no, they needed a dead body to get theirs. And then there's the Allen family: Debbie. Karen. Nancy. Steve. Marty. Must be the name itself.
Some cootie strains are amazingly site-specific. For example, you can be big on television, but still have movie cooties. Roseanne Barr has them so bad that they almost rubbed off on Meryl Streep. Bill Cosby can't seem to shake his movie cooties, but he has enough clout and money that we're likely to keep seeing more and more of his cootie-infested films. Mark Harmon can't shake his movie cooties either: he played Ted Bundy so well on the small screen, but on the big screen he really does seem like Ted Bundy. Don Johnson has movie cooties because when he's larger than life, he seems lower than low. Cybill Shepherd has them because she made a lot of critics think she was talented in The Last Picture Show and they won't be fooled again.
One of the most interesting cootie phenomena is the "Cootie Movie," a film so icky almost everyone associated with it is at least temporarily tainted. Even a movie that has a cast of stars, great expectations, and does big box office can get cooties. Steel Magnolias, for example, is a cootie movie--even with its glittering cast and an Oscar-nominated performance, it still felt (as somebody suggested to me like material that would have been better played by a repertory company of drag queens. The remake of Stella was a cootie movie for sure, no matter what Bette Midler says. Less Than Zero won a Cootie Movie Oscar, and Andrew McCarthy the Cootiest Actor Award. Then there's Hello Again, starring the tallest cootie in the world, Shelley Long.
Corey Haim and Corey Feldman already have them because they are the nightmare versions of teenage actors, a nightmare phenomenon itself, and because drug problems are passe. Most of the brat packers came down with them, which is hardly surprising. And poor Molly Ringwald, the most talented of that crew, seems to be taking career advice from the Cootie Monster. A whole group of young actors seems to be trying to get cooties. Julia Roberts is gonna get them if she keeps romancing and discarding her leading men. Johnny Depp is gonna get them if he keeps tossing around those engagement rings. And the latest Depp-engage, Winona Ryder, courted the cooties in a big way by being too tired to do The Godfather III, a film any other actress would have died for.
And now for the stars of the Cootie Hall of Fame: James Woods and Sean Young have created their own ultra-virulent cootie strain. Everyone agrees by now that he has them. Noting your SAT scores in every interview is just too heavy handed; comparing yourself at every turn to De Niro and Nicholson is foolish when you yourself recently starred in The Boost; and divorcing the much ballyhooed beauty Sarah, months after marrying her. . .you can't help wanting to give this guy a wide berth. Sean, Woods's partner in litigation, has them too... her unusual mental state is discussed openly in print, and her being let go from Batman and Dick Tracy in the same year would have been reason enough. The important point is, though, that neither James nor Sean would have been major cootie cases if they hadn't gotten together. The dynamics of their relationship seem to have had a synergistic cootie effect. Whatever happened on the set of The Boost (another cootie movie), they should thank their lucky stars that they didn't stay together and have children. Cute little baby, right? Only don't get too near... this one has cooties so bad that they might want to get out that plastic bubble John Travolta was in in that weird TV movie. This movie star offspring would be the cootie kid that ate Hollywood.
You don't have to die young to be cootie-proof, but it sometimes helps. If Marilyn Monroe had lived, she would probably have done something sooner or later that would have exempted her from this list. But she took too many pills, so now she's safe. Elizabeth Taylor is still kicking, but she's cootie-proof partly because she spends so much time almost dead. Of course, she's done everything in the public eye all along and said "screw you" to anyone who didn't like it, and that's had a certain cootie-proofing effect. Anjelica Huston, Jacqueline Bisset, and Audrey Hepburn are all cootie-proof because they're sexy, classy, talented and take risks (though one more Wild Orchid, and Bisset could prove me wrong). Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, and Louis Malle are all cootie-proof because they're wild, crazy guys, who do work that's better than anyone else's. Woody Allen is cootie-proof because he's stuck to his guns and made us laugh and cry in the process, and because he has Vincent Canby to apologize for him when he does make dreck. Marlon Brando is cootie-proof because he's always been the epitome of cool, and not even his later antics (having an Indian refuse his Academy Award, getting so fat that he can hardly stand) put a dent in his game of playing hard to get. If Sean Connery weren't cootie-proof, what he said about slapping a woman around being not such a bad thing would have left him crawling with the critters. But actually, and this just proves how cootie-proof he really is, he's more popular now than ever. And, last but not least, Donald Sutherland is cootie-proof. I know, I know, he's played all those creepy characters. But I love him. Blame it on Larry Kaminsky.
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Martha Frankel is a free-lance writer based on the East Coast who wrote the column "Knifestyles of the Rich and Famous" for the original Details.