Is Allure trying to make us hate Catherine Zeta-Jones? Reading “The Last Showgirl,” August, took our
inchoate suspicions about the actress—she comes across as exceptionally
high-maintenance, yes?—and magnified them. Naturally, there’s nothing outright
derogatory in the profile other than the detail that the Zeta-Jones/Douglas
décor includes a bronze statue of Atlas. (Just imagine the kind of
apartment that must be. Yikes!) But there are
enough ambiguous moments in the interview that we have to wonder whether writer
Brooke Hauser is trying to tell us something. Ah, subtext!
Catherine Zeta-Jones just
happens to be good at being a movie star. It’s evident in the langourous way that she moves through a room, as if
there were a trail of servants behind her, eager to peel her a grape.
Perhaps it’s because we don’t
employ any domestic help, but we aren’t even sure what this means. How does a person behave as if a squadron of
servants were tagging along? By barking
out random orders? Leaving a trail of
clothes on the floor? Even if you did
have an actual team of assistants standing by (as CZJ surely does), it would be
obnoxious to act as if you expected other people to do your bidding.
There’s a lot to glean from the bottles of Pellegrino, the housekeeper
padding silently through the apartment, the shelves dedicated to heavy, leather-bound
volumes of the couple’s past scripts, not to mention Michael’s two little gold
men. “My Oscar’s in Bermuda”—the
Douglases’ main residence—because “Bermuda’s never had one,” she quips.
A lot to glean, indeed! Gracious, those Bermudans must be so grateful
that someone so magnificent deigns to keep a gold statuette within their
borders! Do they give awards for condescension
and self-aggrandizement? Because maybe
she could keep those in Bermuda too!
Also, leather-bound scripts? Please. Like the repartee in Ocean’s
Twelve was worth immortalizing.
Click-clack past
the laundry closet, where she stops to roll her eyes and joke, “I’m constantly
in there.”
Oh, another hilarious riposte! We know it’s a joke because ultra-glam movie
stars would never stoop to doing
their own laundry! How preposterous! They have servants for that! Ha! Hey, Catherine? We aren’t comedy
experts or anything, but that remark is only funny to you because—wait for it—you don’t actually have to do your own wash. Outrageous privilege is, like, riotously
funny!
And finally:
“I didn’t want
to be another girlfriend of Michael Douglas,” she admits. “I remember feeling this immediate attraction
and going, What are you going to do: Invest, like, a night or something? I didn’t want to put myself in that
situation.” So, she did what any
self-respecting woman in her situation would do: She tortured him. “Nine months without a touch or a kiss,” she
says, with a light snort. “I’m sure he
thought, Something’s not right with this chick. It usually doesn’t take me this long.”
At last, clear instructions for self-respecting
women—simply string men along for months on end to make them appreciate
you. Playing hard-to-get is the only way
to make guys respect you, since you don’t have anything else to offer. Men do love a chase (and, apparently, being
chaste)!
Presumably, this article is meant
to be positive press (take note, Britney), and maybe CZJ is the kindest, most
generous person in the world. We’ll
never know her true nature for sure, but this article didn’t exactly have us
signing up for membership in the Catherine Zeta-Jones fan club. But what do we know? We eat the peel on our grapes.
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