Tina’s Pity She’s A Horse

Tina Brown, image: nbcmv.comHear she got some friends together and put on a show. Missed it. Sushi & too-low-flying airplanes in Arlington. When Tina first broached Topic A, she threatened/promised more Larry than Charlie; if Gawker’s transcript of the Brown-on-Diller&Gladwell action’s any indication, she delivered. We can’t say we weren’t warned.
But in her Times column, she kicks herself (“I should have booked Celine Dion.”), Philip Johnson-style, who quickly called himself a whore before anyone else could beat him to it. But in an article where she also describes the dismal White House Correspondents’ dinner, is not the whores, or even Celine Dion (ba-dum-bum), but a horse, whose image lingers longest. Not just any horse, mind you, a “Republican warhorse,” the best the dinner could do in the “celebrity” department, Bo Derek.
Bo Derek, in Tarzan, image: skynet.be“Horse,” a not-unimportant word to the actress herself (more on that later), turns out to be one of only nine words (7 distinct words, 9 total) I actually remember hearing from Bo Derek’s mouth, in a torturous scene from Tarzan, the Ape Man. Derek, as Jane, and her father (played by the late, lamenting Richard Harris) had been captured by (literally whitewashed) savages. As the savages prep her as an offering to their Chief, Bo, on all fours, moans the immortal line, “They’re painting me! They’re washing me like a horse!” It’s worth noting that the director who put Bo in this scene was her husband (and Richard Harris age-alike), John Derek. (See another clip here for some equally unforgettable readings.)
Rather than buy this horrible movie (which is only on VHS, anyway), why not get Bo’s revealing new book about her relationships with her creepy old ex-husband and his other ex-wives, Ursula Andress and Linda Evans. It’s title? Riding Lessons: Everything That Matters in Life I Learned from Horses Let’s see Rick Santorum explain that one. Forget Celine. Tina on Bo and Rick: now that’s a 3-way worth watching