Shannen Doherty has never left me cold, exactly; I quite simply never cared. Like many aspiring teenaged bitches in 1988, I appreciated (and still appreciate) her turn in Heathers as the green-clad, Melville-obsessed monster Heather Duke, but she was really just support for Christian Slater's overbaked Jack Nicholson impersonation and Winona Ryder cementing her now-ridiculed position as Hollywood's Muse of Edgy Filmmaking. Two years later, Miss Doherty joined the cast of Beverly Hills, 90210. I watched the show once, said, "Hey, it's that chick from Heathers," and then proceeded to ignore both the show and Miss Doherty for the rest of its ten-year run. Imagine my surprise, then, when I read Tony Romando's introduction to Miss Doherty's interview in the December lingerie issue of For Him Magazine. Apparently, by ignoring Miss Doherty and 90210, I had missed out on one of "the defining [televised] moments of our age." That's right, along with "the exploding space shuttle, Mr. Zapruder's 'Farewell, Mr. Kennedy' home movie, and the Reagan assassination attempt," the 295 episodes of Beverly Hills, 90210 have left an indelible mark on the hearts and minds of the nation. Yeah, Tony, when I think back on the defining worldwide events television brought me at the turn of the last decade, Brandon and Brenda Walsh moving from Minnesota to California is right up there with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Ceausescus getting Mussolinied by their former serfs in Romania. And linking the decidedly Gen-X triad of Reagan, shuttle, and Spelling with the 1963 assassination in Dallas? Whatever, you hack.
I should explain that For Him Magazine couldn't be further from holding a place on my list of must-read monthly magazines. Aside from Vanity Fair and the occasional Talk, I avoid celebrity blowjob rags like the plague. I particularly avoid the type of celebrity blowjob soft-core heterosexual porn offered by the recent explosion of "Lad Rags" -- pointless, tree-destroying crap like Maxim, Gear, and Front. And, of course, FHM, a newsstand blight across both North America and the United Kingdom best known for slinging barely-legal female "stars" like Majandra Delfino and Rachael Leigh Cook into pasties and panties and having them pose as if they're auditioning for G-String Divas. Or a bed in a Reno whorehouse.
(Full disclosure: at the height of 90210's popularity, I did purchase -- and save for all of eight months -- the Vanity Fair with Luke Perry posing on the cover with a very long gun. That issue has long since passed on to recycling heaven, but I still have the GQ from May 1993 with Cal Ripken, Jr., on the cover. I'm not made of stone, people. I just have some standards.)
Romando's fluff piece appears at the center of what I assume is the magazine's annual lingerie issue, FHM apparently attempting to build a brand as strong as Sports Illustrated's perennially-popular swimsuit edition. Unfortunately for FHM, Sports Illustrated seems to have more class in the proverbial cuticle of its proverbial pinkie than FHM could purchase for itself with the GNP of the reunified Germany. "LINGERIE SPECIAL," the cover screams. "A 20-page festival of intimate garments!" it goes on to promise. My stomach took that opportunity to promise me a twenty-hour marathon of retching should I actually buy the rag -- especially after I noticed another slug quoting "FHM's grandpa" as claiming to have "gotten scooty since Prohibition" -- but duty called. I plonked down my $2.99 and shamefacedly left the store. (I admit I was tempted to ask the sales clerk for a brown paper bag with my purchase, as I've caught the security guards in my office building sniggering over previous editions of FHM at the front desk while indulging surreptitiously in pocket pool. I'm just saying.) Miss Doherty herself graces the cover, threatening to pop out of a sheer leopard-print two-piece ensemble provided by Dolce & Gabbana. The accompanying tag urges me to "let Shannen Doherty put [me] under her sexy hex!" Thanks, boys, but if two months of Miss Doherty on Aaron Spelling's late-'90s version of Charlie's Angels-esque jiggle TV hasn't managed to convince me of her ample, um, charms, I doubt I'll be swayed by anything you have to offer.
I'd tell you more of the other contents of this issue, but I admit I skipped straight to Miss Doherty's section. After a couple of pages of Miss Doherty posing in "Donna Karen [sic] Intimates" and Tony's above-mentioned opening-paragraph atrocity, Romando goes on to wax nostalgic over his favorite 90210 moments, among them an accidental shooting death at someone's birthday party and a couple of other people getting arrested "for urinating on an Indian burial ground." And I chose to watch the glory days of Law & Order instead of this? What was I thinking? He goes on to fill me in on the early-'90s pop culture phenomenon I somehow managed to overlook entirely. "For a while, [Miss Doherty's] antics on the show with Luke Perry made them America's No. 1 couple, the subject of endless gossip and national fascination." I'd object again, holding up Julia Roberts's numerous marital woes of the era, the ratings for the Menendez and O.J. trials, and the newsprint devoted to Jeffrey Dahmer's Milwaukee antics as further proof that Miss Doherty and Mr. Perry were an easily-overlooked flash in the pop-cult pan, but you get my point. Romando does note that Miss Doherty made it through her days at Beverly Hills High to meet with "greater success than any of the regular cast, going on," he continues, "to star in the equally implausible WB hit Charmed," and I have to concede both points. Miss Doherty is the only one of that gang still pulling down a regular paycheck, and it is indeed implausible that Charmed lasted longer than a season. Before getting into the interview proper, Romando inserts one final ick-making observation: Miss Doherty, he claims, "still has the same trouser-troubling effect on the youth of America...Thank you, Hollywood." Thank you for giving me the mental image of teenagers nationwide whacking off to your magazine, Tony Romando.
Not.
Compared to all that precedes the interview, and compared to the interviewer himself, Shannen Doherty herself comes across as -- dare I say it? -- classy. Well, almost classy. In a white-trash, party-chick-and-I-know-it-and-I-don't-care sort of way. Not that that's saying much, I realize, but Tony Romando has the interview skills and social graces of a leering, drooling, pandering thirteen-year-old boy whose underwear, most likely, is both stiff and crusty. Romando opens by asking her if she resents her continuing public image as a "wild child." She acknowledges this "stigma," and goes on to explain that she's moved past that point in her life, having "worked hard to improve [herself] as a human being." "I don't want credit for it," she adds. "I just want people to knock it off. Enough is enough." Fine, Miss D., but you might want to choose a media venue higher up the quality food chain than this to make such an assertion. More fluff follows, with Miss Doherty offering her recipe for deviled ham sandwiches ("dump a bunch of mayonnaise in it and add chopped sweet pickles," for those of you interested), and revelling a bit in her "redneck" heritage. A mention of last season's made-for-non-sweeps-TV Satan's School for Girls allows her to segue into a peek inside her own painful high-school years, during which she took pains to change in the bathroom stall for gym class, shamed as she was by her "chicken legs." This bit of the interview faces a full-body, C. Gilson-clad, Jimmy Choo-shod Doherty triptych, which proves her legs are as bad now as they were then.
Moving past all this, Romando gets to one of the few interesting bits of the interview. "You were sentenced to 540 hours of community service for one of your 'incidents,'" he notes, and goes on to ask about the experience. Miss Doherty reveals that she bought her way out of it. "It depends on how much money you're willing to pay the government," she states. "For me, it was something like $60,000." I know I should hate her, given that this sum is roughly twice my annual salary, but if the Southern California judicial system really operates that way, and since she can so obviously afford to exploit it in this manner, I'm inclined to think, "More power to her." Miss Doherty goes on to discuss the incident that resulted in the loss of sixty thousand of her hard-earned dollars, noting it was precipitated by an unprovoked stranger calling her a "cunt" and spitting in her face. I take a moment to pity Poor Shannen. Then I remember that $60,000 and drop it. Chatter ensues regarding her reputation as an "ass kicker," an appellation she claims is unwarranted. "If somebody called me on it one day, like, let's say I started mouthing off to someone and they were like, 'Come here, bitch,' and got in my face, I'd start crying and run." Because she's a deviled-ham-eating redneck wuss. With the vocal inflections of a semiliterate Valley Girl.
The next bit of the interview does involve Charmed, so I feel compelled to relate it, despite the fact the imagery involved threatens to make me violently ill. Seems that once on the set, Miss Doherty took a spill while chasing after that week's guest demon. "I was wearing a G-string, and you know a G-string -- things shift in there. If you're gonna wear a G-string, you've got to really make sure that stuff is set in the proper place at all times. I flashed everybody behind the camera…" Thanks for sharing, Shannen. Up to now, I thought only drag queens had to tuck their business. I appreciate you disabusing me of that notion. Oh, and ick. Romando leaps on this bit of lascivious nastiness to carry the underwear discussion a bit further, noting, "Surprisingly, many women aren't huge fans of 'the string.'" Thankfully, I've never had the "pleasure" of wearing one myself, but I am capable of imagining the discomfort involved. So, try wearing one yourself, Tony, before you make "surprising" observations like that one. And shut up while you're at it, you slimy, smarmy creep. Miss Doherty, to her credit, notes simply that, while some women do not seem to mind skimpy underthings, she appreciates more comprehensive support. Tell that to the Charmed wardrobe mistress the next time she straps your braless ass into the Paisley Tit Sling of Poor Taste.
On to more "Shannen's a bad girl -- no, really, she is" nonsense. She reveals one of her favorite pastimes is to pull "drive-bys" and "stakeouts" at the houses of her ex-boyfriends, which she does after gathering a couple of gals from her posse into her Mercedes and swinging by the 7-Eleven for some Twinkies and Coke. I'd tell her to grow up and look into more creative ways to blow off steam, but such advice would fall on deaf ears, apparently, as she's convinced herself all women indulge in such behavior, given women are "pretty suspicious by nature." Romando takes this opportunity to generalize "men are liars by nature," and asks Miss Doherty to share some of the more outrageous lines she's received from her various male acquaintances. Her biggest peeve is pretty mild -- and pretty unbelievable: guys professing love after a week. She notes, correctly, that no one knows anyone well enough after a week to make such a claim, and terms such behavior "retarded." ["Um, okay. Didn't she marry Ashley Hamilton after having known him for, like, two weeks or something?" -- Sars] Romando reaches what I hope is the limit of his capacity for adolescent stupidity, using this statement to ask, "Speaking of retarded, you had an early role on Life Goes On where you played Corky's love interest. Did he grab your butt or get frisky?" Miss Doherty attempts to deflect this line of questioning, but Romando persists. "He didn't try to take you back to his twailer [sic]?" Miss Doherty notes only that Chris Burke "was a really sweet boy," and I pause to remove my eyeballs from my head to spray them with Lysol.
The remainder of the interview goes downhill from there, with the links from one topic to the next becoming nearly incomprehensible. Romando quizzes Miss Doherty on the contents of her trailer on the Charmed set, and asks what she finds most embarassing about it. She dives into the deep end of the Too Much Information pool, revealing she suffers from Crohn's disease, so the "guys that go in there to clean out the toilets" are her secret-shame-no-more, as they "[know] who craps the most out of all of us." She then paddles her way to the bottom of the deep end to note she once clandestinely vomited at a table in a Dallas blues club. Miss Doherty goes on to discuss her lack of equestrian skill, relating a couple of tales of being thrown from each of the horses she owns. One instance was so severe, Miss Doherty was ordered "to wear a back brace for 24 hours a day." Which, as we can all tell from her scantily-clad weekly appearances on the WB, is a bit of advice she's chosen to ignore.
My foray into the world of Lad Rags comes to an end with the following exchange:
Romando: Why do you suppose men fantasize about women riding bareback?
Miss Doherty: It's that whole Guinevere and King Arthur time period. I don't ride bareback and I wear underwear when I ride. And as far as the perverted side of it, which is the movement of a woman on a horse, it can appear to be sexual. But men will fantasize about almost anything.
Maybe the man interviewing you, maybe the security guards in my building, and maybe the trouser-troubled youth of America this slimy, sleazy excuse for a mainstream magazine targets for newsstand sales, Miss Doherty, but not me. Thanks for reaffirming my worst stereotypes of "the straights," and thanks for reminding me once again why I am happy not to include myself among their numbers. Now, can I have my $2.99 back?