Justine Bateman, 1987

Source: Alan Light

I never did get to do my New Year’s “wrap-up” column (I got distracted by the H-1B visa thing, then the fires started). I feel bad not only because it broke a long-standing tradition (a New Year’s column that’s looser, less formal), but also, you only get that one blessed window per year…those weeks between Christmas, when all’s comfort and joy and politics be damned, and MLK Day, when we’re reminded that rapists are our betters, followed by Black History Month, the turdiest float in the Racy’s Parade of identity months we’ll have to suffer through till next December.

So even though, much like Eric Clapton’s son, I plowed right through my window, I do want to do a slightly looser column this week, because what better time to be frivolous than when your city’s burned to the ground?

Justine Bateman has been on figurative fire since the literal fires engulfed the town. Her Twitter’s ground zero for keen perspective on the disaster area. And by that I don’t mean Pacific Palisades, but Mayor Bass. Regular readers know that I gave Bass every benefit of the doubt when she was elected…perhaps out of sentimentality more than anything, as we attended the same high school. But I haven’t seen a black person mismanage a fire this badly since Richard Pryor.

Bateman’s been going after Bass and Newsom like a dervish. And I feel bad because I took a swipe at her in a 2023 column about the WGA strike, and looking back, it was undeserved.

I’m very proudly an arrogant douchebag, but you can only get away with that shtick if your broadsides are justified.

In fact, Bateman has a sharp wit, quite evident in her autobiography Fame: The Hijacking of Reality, which I strongly recommend; it has the same stream-of-consciousness, foulmouthed, breezy prose as my own Amazon-bestseller-turned-Amazon-banned autobiography.

The highest praise a banned author can give is to recommend someone else’s book.

One of Bateman’s tweets was in response to Newsom tweeting “Stop encouraging looting by lying and telling people it’s decriminalized. It’s not. It’s illegal—as it always has been. Bad actors will be arrested and prosecuted.”

To which Bateman replied:

You and Gascon and Bass sent out the invitations long ago to all criminals to come to CA and LA and practice their “craft.” You boasted that you would not prosecute rioters, trespassers, looters, shoplifters, etc. And they came. From other states, from other countries. You created a hostile living environment for all of us. That anyone thinks they can loot and commit arson in Los Angeles or anywhere in CA with impunity is because YOU made sure they got an invitation.

Go get ’em, Mallory!

When Newsom bitched about Trump’s nickname for him—“I remember the guy who called me Newscum in 7th grade”—Bateman replied, “Sounds like even at 13 years-old, people noticed something insincere about you.”

Coulter retweeted that one.

I had a huge crush on Bateman as a teen; I guess I still do. This is the first time in ten years I wish Friends of Abe still existed. With the sane members looking like the Happy Merchant and the good-looking members being bipolar religious fanatics, I loved bringing in new attractive female inductees because only in that hall of grotesqueries could I be the presentable one.

If you find a room where the curve favors you, treasure it.

I’ll offer this word of advice, though: Stay away from the Daily Wire, Justine! The whole thing’s just a shell company so Jeremy Boreing can write off his toupees.

I do want to offer context regarding one of Bateman’s tweets. In response to a tweet asking why the people of L.A. elected Bass in the first place, Bateman wrote “A vicious and highly-coordinated campaign against her very competent and qualified opponent @RickCarusoLA.”

Well, yes and no. Caruso was competent and qualified, but one thing stopped him from becoming the next Richard Riordan (L.A.’s last Republican mayor, 1993–2001). Riordan, who won the Hispanic vote, always had faith that you could be honest with voters, even brown ones, and win. Caruso was too timid. In the 2022 election, he refused to mention crime.

Talk about not reading a room. He thought it was still 2020 and we were all wearing George Floyd mourning armbands (which double as heroin vein tie-offs). In fact, L.A. grew sick of that shit by 2021, and, as demonstrated by Gascon getting booted in a landslide and Prop. 36 winning every county in the state last year, we were very ready for a leader to roll back BLM-mania.

Caruso could’ve been that guy.

Of course, I saw this clear as day in 2022, and I reached out to one of Caruso’s top aides (remember, just because nobody whose name doesn’t rhyme with Ran Roulter admits to reading me, people of note do read me, and know me). Caruso was running on two issues: Bass’ razor-thin connection to Scientology, and abortion. Caruso was so worried he’d be seen as antiabortion—which, yeah, will kill any candidate in this city and this state—that he spent every campaign dollar trying to assure voters that he was as pro-choice as Bass.

And sure, that was an important thing to mention.

Mention. Not build an entire campaign around, not when you have an issue on which you surpass, not equal, your opponent (in this case, crime).

So on 10/28/22 I let Caruso’s guy have it with both barrels (I’m redacting his name and response because it was a private communiqué):

I received a campaign letter from your team yesterday (all my neighbors did), so I thought I’d send you my reaction.

For the life of me, I don’t know why you’d send a letter like that to this neighborhood without mentioning crime. It’s such a bad move, it’s almost unbelievable. Who’s making these decisions? People in Beverly Hills-adjacent L.A. (Beverlywood, Cheviot Hills) are concerned with crime first and foremost; cars get stolen, catalytic converters get swiped, homes get broken into, we get robbed at diners, and our DA has damn-near stopped prosecuting all property theft.

And yet Campaign Caruso concentrates on Bass’ tangential association with Scientology (in the same year that a Tom Cruise movie is #1 at the box office, showing how LITTLE anyone cares about Scientology connections), and vague abstract scandals that don’t connect to voters’ daily concerns.

You’re NOT gonna win an abortion pissing-contest with Bass. Your only hope is to go hard on crime. Yes, you’ll lose some black votes (you were never going to win them anyway), but a coalition of whites/Hasidics/Persians and swayable Hispanics (have you even done polling on Hispanic attitudes toward law enforcement? Very positive; 50% of LAPD and LASD is Hispanic) could put you over the top.

Didn’t it even register with you why Bass refused to say “defund” in 2020? She knows it polls badly here. Only you don’t seem to know that.

So you ignore crime in favor of “I’m as Democrat as Bass” platitudes. No single-issue “who’s the better Democrat” voter will choose Caruso. You have to aim for the perfunctorily Dem/independent demo, and the not-passionately-partisan folks who notice the rise in crime and care about it.

It’s just stunning how badly this campaign’s been run.

Whoever’s been giving the advice will own the loss.

Yes, I’m an arrogant dick, but I always peg it.

L.A. was the first city in the U.S. to recall a mayor: 1938, when corrupt Republican Frank Shaw was recalled and replaced by fellow Republican Fletcher Bowron, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge.

And you know what issue drove Bowron’s victory?

Crime.

Bowron won 64 percent to 33 percent.

I’d be very happy to see a rerun of that. And I’d love to see Caruso give it a second go-round. But for fuck’s sake, Rick, take my advice this time and say the “c” word.

BTW, one bit of trivia about Bateman (remember, this is my “loose, informal column”): In her book she writes about how these days, with social media, it’s become too easy for trolls to harass celebrities. She boasts that in her day, when fans had to make the effort to send missives via hard-copy mail, she never received a single “poison dagger” letter.

Not true, Justine. You got ’em, you just didn’t see ’em.

In 1985 my childhood best friend, “the boy who tried to rape me” (I wrote about him years ago), had an entry-level job at Paramount: the mail room, where all young starfucks started back in those days.

Rapey McMee and I had made a full-length film together at age 13, and that actually meant something back in the early 1980s. But whereas I always knew I wasn’t made of corporate stuff, hence why I ended up in the world of indie film, Rapey wanted to do things the standard way: mail room to production assistant to “fuck the right fella” to producer.

So summer 1985 one of his jobs was opening Justine Bateman’s fan letters (she was on Family Ties at the time). All fan mail would be screened to keep the talent from seeing the truly awful stuff. And Rapey would call me to read the shit Bateman was receiving.

And man, was it ugly. Rape fantasies, S&M, fecal fetishes. I recall one letter from a guy claiming to be a doctor who said he’d discovered the cure for cancer but he’d only share it with the world if Bateman would blow him.

Dude’s name was “Dr. Salter.” I remember because Rapey and I made it a comedic trope that summer. We’d “Salter” people just for fun.

To a waitress: “I’ve discovered the cure for cancer but I won’t share it with the world unless you take this overcooked steak back to the kitchen and bring me the fucking rare I ordered.”

To a liquor store owner: “We’ve discovered the cure for cancer but we won’t share it with the world unless you sell us a twelve-pack without seeing ID.”

Bateman’s autobiography is highly critical of the industry, but she should know that she had people working hard to protect her from undue ugliness. And people like Dave ’n’ Rapey who found unending humor in the undue ugliness.

Rapey’s career went as planned, at first. He made his way up the corporape ladder, getting all the way to network VP, only to experience a terrible fall, most likely after inserting something where it shouldn’t’a been inserted inside a person not welcoming of the gesture, and now he’s completely out of the biz. He serves as an adjunct assistant professor at an NYC arts school.

Our academic institutions never fail to impress with their choice of faculty.

As for L.A., well, we’re boned too. But also, we’ve never been more primed for another Riordan. I hope Caruso, or somebody, recognizes that opportunity and takes it.

And follow Justine Bateman on X. We may have been robbed of a cancer cure because of her, but her tweets are decent compensation.