Joey, Divine, Tonya and Us

It was the kind of meeting made in Hollywood heaven: an agent, a private eye and the leggy ex-wife of a legendary mystery writer all coming together to talk about creating a television show based on scandal.

I listened with disbelief as they told me how they’d lined up Tonya Harding, Joey Buttafuoco, Gennifer Flowers and Hugh Grant’s good friend Divine Brown to be panelists on the show.

There hasn’t been such a gathering of intellectual colossi since the last meeting of Mensa.

“There’s more,” the ex-wife said. “Geraldo Rivera is interested in producing it!”

The room fell silent as they waited for my reaction. Receiving none, the P.I., feeling a little sheepish about it all, said good-naturedly, “It’ll be fun.”

Ruth Webb was in charge of the meeting. It is her theatrical agency that is promoting the idea of a show based on scandal. Webb is a woman in her 70s who gave up a career on the Broadway stage years ago when someone forgot to bring her a martini before the start of a performance. She said to hell with it and came to L.A.

Working with Webb in the “scandal division” of the agency is Sherri Spillane, the ex-wife of Mickey Spillane, who wrote all those Mike Hammer books, and self-proclaimed P.I. to the Stars Don Crutchfield, who usually busies himself with far more compelling matters than checking out scandals.

A fourth member of their party was never introduced, but was occasionally referred to as Nancy. Her job seemed to consist of nodding in agreement.

*

The idea for their show is a little vague, but will probably consist of the aforementioned cultural icons on a panel that will consider the merits of iniquities submitted by the same kinds of people who used to appear on “The Gong Show.”

The scandals that make the cutoff after being investigated for their legitimacy by Crutchfield will be discussed by the panel and one will be selected to become America’s Scandal of the Week.

When asked what kind of things they’d be looking for, the response from Spillane was that they wanted nothing depraved, leading one to believe that they didn’t consider the peccadilloes involving their panelists to be in that unhappy category.

I sense that they’re probably looking for shocking, community-type scandals with spicy, but not depraved, overtones, like an Episcopal minister caught naked with a barmaid in a cemetery behind the church. Fun stuff.

How the winner of Scandal of the Week will benefit from his or her winning entry is unclear, except that they might be signed to a contract with the agency and, in Webb’s words, “have their lives turned around.” Nancy nodded agreement to that.

“This is funny stuff, a joke,” the P.I. said somewhat uneasily. “But if six months ago you’d have told me my career depended on Joey Buttafuoco, I’d have said you were out of your mind.”

*

The idea for the show sprang from the ashes of Tonya Harding’s career. For those whom God has blessed by wiping their memory clean of the event, Tonya was convicted for her part in trying to hobble Nancy Kerrigan in order to eliminate her from Olympic ice skating competition.

Mickey Spillane’s ex-wife felt that Tonya had been unduly bashed by the media and signed her to a contract. A few weeks later the agency signed John Wayne Bobbitt and then Joey Buttafuoco and Gennifer Flowers, who blossomed into notoriety by claiming to have slept with Bill Clinton.

This resulted in the creation of a scandal division in the Webb Agency, which in turn escalated, if that’s the proper term, into an idea for a television show involving the worst that America has to offer.

I was told that there are also plans for a Scandal Cafe and a Scandal Walk of Fame in Beverly Hills. When this was mentioned, Nancy nodded so vigorously I thought her head would fly off. The idea obviously pleased her.

The agency will never want for offbeat panelists, representing as it does an L.A. cop who became a call girl, a Judge Ito look-alike, the irrepressible Tammy Faye Baker and New York’s infamous Mayflower Madam, Sydney Biddle Barrows, among others of equal caliber. Kato Kaelin was involved once, but got dropped.

What America probably doesn’t need is a celebration of scandal, but since television is already full of it, I suppose that a show of its own won’t hurt.

“Think of it,” the P.I. said somewhat unconvincingly, “as a breath of fresh air.” That’s asking a lot, but it seemed to present no problem for Nancy. She nodded very, very hard.