Celebrities Behaving Badly

While I'm on the topic of celebrities behaving badly, or poorly, or whatever the correct adverb may be, I thought I would share another quick story.

This one goes back several years. My first real job out of college was working as a production assistant for E! Entertainment. I was a wide-eyed college graduate beaten down by six months of struggling to find a job in Hollywood. I may have mentioned this, but I turned down a job working for the U.S. embassy in Berlin in order to work at E!

So was it worth it? While I did not enjoy getting hazed for saying my favorite TV show was Full House, or for not knowing who most A-list celebrities were, there were some perks. Soon after I began working there, Scott Baio became an employee. I knew who he was because the one slice of pop-culture I knew well at that point was '80s television, and he was the star of Charles in Charge. It was only this year that someone informed me that Chachi or however it's spelled is not actually short for Charles, and that he is better known for his work on Happy Days.

Anyway, back then, Scott was brought in to exec produce a show on former child stars, and the good people of E! had converted the conference room directly behind me into an office. I spent several months working about six feet from Scott. He usually kept his door closed, but that didn't matter much as I could hear him throwing tantrums perfectly well through a closed door. My does he have a bad ego. I don't think he conducted any conversations without dissolving into a shouting match, screaming demands. He scared me.

Because of this, I went out of my way to avoid him. I always looked down when he passed by. Both of us had a tendency to walk fast in opposite directions, so we were constantly bumping into each other. The only time he ever spoke to me, he walked straight up to my desk and asked for matches, and I think I screamed.