Men Behaving Badly? Get Damage Control on the Line

Imagine you are arrested for trespassing in a stranger’s home and falling asleep, or running through traffic screaming and carrying a loaded gun, or consorting with a prostitute in your car just off Sunset Boulevard.

Such a move might be a career buster for the average Joe, but if you’re a movie or TV star, the world can be a far more forgiving place.

Just as in previous eras, today’s Hollywood is replete with stories of men behaving badly, from Robert Downey Jr. and Martin Lawrence to Hugh Grant, whose arrests in the above incidents made news around the world.

On Monday, Christian Slater, who has appeared in such films as “Broken Arrow” and “Interview With the Vampire,” was arrested on assault charges after an alleged biting incident and an altercation with police in a fashionable Westside high-rise.

Slater may have to weather comedians’ barbs and harsh tabloid scrutiny, but with the help of Hollywood handlers, the 27-year-old actor may join his peers in shaking off the bad publicity.

With multimillion-dollar careers in the balance, actors turn to damage-control experts who urge their clients to apologize openly, arrange attention-getting public service photo ops, enroll them in substance abuse recovery programs or simply counsel them to lie low and keep their mouths shut.

Whether any of this works depends on the public’s perception of the individual star; audiences will more easily tolerate celebrities’ misbehavior if the actors come prepackaged with a roguish image.

Slater, who three years ago was arrested at a New York airport for carrying a pistol in his luggage, was shown in TV news footage Monday in the back seat of a car with a towel draped over his head, hiding from a phalanx of cameras that recorded his departure from a police station parking lot.

Slater is scheduled to be arraigned Sept. 2 in West Los Angeles. He has turned to Sitrick and Co., a Century City-based public relations firm that specializes in “crisis communications.” The firm, which has handled such high-profile clients as Kelsey Grammer and Kim Basinger, has refused to give out any information about Slater.

“You still have a lot of respect for the antihero in this country,” said agent-turned-manager Joan Hyler. “A certain amount of rebellion is in the tradition of American movie stars. Look at Robert Mitchum.”

The change today, Hyler said, is that actors aren’t really protected by the studios anymore.

“In the ‘40s, you had studio press agents whose job it was to cover it up,” she said. “You don’t have that anymore. Everybody is freelance.”

Whether their brushes with the law will stick to the celebrity’s overall image is hard to gauge, says Henry Shafer, executive vice president of Marketing Evaluations Inc/TvQ, a research group based in Manhasset, N.Y., that measures a celebrity’s recognizability, popularity and appeal.

The lasting nature of bad publicity will be affected by several factors: the severity of the misdeed, how the celebrity reacts afterward, the extent of media coverage it receives and the original image of the celebrity.

Bill Cosby, for instance, had a very strong positive image, and his recent revelation of an extramarital affair may prove to be just a blip in his overall assessment by the public, Shafer said. Conversely, O.J. Simpson’s image, a very positive one before he was charged with double murder, will probably never recover, according to Shafer’s research.

“It could [seriously tarnish an image] depending on how much press and coverage it gets nationwide and how long it stays in front of the American public,” Shafer said. “How it impacts image varies from where they’re coming from in terms of what they had already established with the public.”

Some stars’ images may not be that far from their bad-boy misdeeds.

“It kind of goes hand in hand with the image that that personality has been exuding previously to the American public,” Shafer said. “If they’re kind of an off-center personality versus someone who’s straight and narrow, it’ll be judged differently.”

Some can benefit from grinning sheepishly and saying, “mea culpa,” but some may not.

“With Hugh Grant, it was brilliant, I wish I’d thought of it,” said Sherri Spillane, an agent who specializes in controversial, high-profile clients at the Ruth Webb Agency in Sherman Oaks.

“He went on ‘The Tonight Show’ with his bad-little-boy smile, and people basically forgave him. I don’t know if that would work for everybody. It might backfire. It depends on the personality and the crime. If some Hollywood star murdered somebody and went on the ‘Tonight’ show and smiled and looked sheepish, I don’t think it would work.”

Spillane--who has represented Tonya Harding and Joey and Mary Jo Buttafuoco--has a message for celebrities, which she wishes they would heed:

“You can’t keep your image from being tarnished once it’s tarnished,” she said. “Everything else is trying to keep it from getting it worse and trying to turn it around again. Look what happened with Frank Gifford [a reference to vivid tabloid reports of an alleged extramarital affair]. It never goes away. Half of that reason is the media will never allow it to go away. In Gifford’s obituary, it will say it.”

Damage control strategy varies according to the deed, said publicist Pat Kingsley, but one rule of thumb prevails: No lying.

“You have to either tell the truth or no comment,” said Kingsley, who represented Grant during his much-publicized incident with a prostitute. “I think people appreciate the honesty factor.”

Although an actor’s legal problems may not affect his overall appeal--Lawrence, for example, starred this summer in the moderately successful “Nothing to Lose”--they can affect offers for work.

Another example: Downey had been considered virtually uninsurable for studio film work after his repeated arrests last year for heroin and cocaine possession and subsequent flight from a rehabilitation facility. But Downey recently began filming “U.S. Marshals,” a big-budget Warner Bros. film after having secured a new type of coverage--lock-down and incarceration insurance.

Some of the attention focused on celebrity foibles may have to do, in part, with an expansion of print and broadcast outlets devoted to covering the entertainment industry. Magazines like Entertainment Weekly, the cable network E! Entertainment Television and TV magazine programs like “Hard Copy,” “Inside Edition” and “Extra” didn’t exist until recent years.

“Now that there are all these tabloids paying all this money [for dirt on celebrities], there’s a reason to keep the story alive, especially for other people involved in the scandal,” Spillane said.

The roguish image of some stars is difficult to overcome.

Consider Charlie Sheen. The actor, son of Martin Sheen and brother of Emilio Estevez, has seen his public image take a beating time and again, whether by going into substance-abuse rehabilitation, by pleading no contest to a misdemeanor charge of attacking his then-girlfriend or by becoming a star witness in the Heidi Fleiss prostitution trial, at which he testified that he had ordered call girls from the Hollywood madam at least 27 times.

With all that baggage, he was ripe for a comedian like Jay Leno to make fun when Sheen failed to appear at the last minute on Monday’s “The Tonight Show.”

Eighty minutes before the show began taping, Sheen’s publicist, Jeff Ballard, called Leno’s producers to tell them that the actor had been in a minor accident involving a stretch limousine near Sheen’s home in Agoura Hills. The limo owner said a group of bikers had run the vehicle off the road and into a ditch.

After getting the news that their lead guest was a no-show, the producers grabbed Rob Schneider, who was already on the lot taping promotional spots for his NBC comedy series “Men Behaving Badly,” and convinced him to appear as Sheen.

“Listen, Charlie Sheen’s got limo problems,” Leno was shown telling Schneider. “He can’t do the show. Can you be Charlie Sheen tonight?”

“Charlie Sheen?” Schneider replied. “Jay, I’m on a show called ‘Men Behaving Badly.’ I think I can play Charlie Sheen.”

Later, Schneider as Sheen waved and blew a kiss to “a friend of mine, Heidi Fleiss.”

Ballard said Sheen went home after the accident and tuned in later. “Charlie watched it and thought it was hysterical,” he said.

Times staff writer Brian Lowry contributed to this story.