A Hollywood Tragedy

A week ago, in Random Celebrity News, I mentioned the bizarre accident when actress Anne Heche plowed into a house and was sent to a hospital with burns. A few days later news came that she died of her injuries, but I let that one go, feeling no need to speak further ill of the dead. Stacy McCain has no such compunction:  The Tragedy of Anne Heche

Heche was something of a rising star when she hooked up with Ellen DeGeneres at a Vanity Fair Oscar party in 1997. Heche, then 28 and more than a decade younger than DeGeneres, claimed she had never before been involved with a woman before. Her relationship with DeGeneres lasted less than three years and, while it didn’t exactly end Heche’s career — she continued acting in movies and television up until her death — certainly it dimmed her star power in Hollywood:

“It changed my life forever,” Heche admitted to Page Six in 2020. “The stigma attached to that relationship was so bad … I didn’t do a studio picture for 10 years. I was fired from a $10 million picture deal.” 

Oh, it was the “stigma” that did the damage, was it? Never mind what the people who buy movie tickets think — “Damn those homophobes!” — and never mind, of course, that Heche’s status as “bisexual” seemed rather transient. She left DeGeneres for a man, and then left him for another man, and if she ever had any further involvement in what the media call “the LGBTQ community,” she never mentioned it publicly.

Toxicology reportedly found cocaine and fentanyl in her blood after she rammed her car into a home in L.A. in the middle of the afternoon last week, and she died after being removed from life support Friday.

Just for the record, I don’t approve of cocaine or fentanyl, either, and if any dopeheads feel stigmatized because of my disapproval, tough luck.

I find it hard to believe that her lesbian relationship with DeGeneris was a problem with the Hollywood crowd at all, where homosexuality has been common and accepted for years. More likely, her turning her back on it was a problem as it conflicted with the dogma that it is something you are born with and can't alter. 

She claimed to have been abused as a child, and led a rather tumultuous life. Craziness, drugs and driving do not mix. Yes, it is a tragedy.

But it will make a great movie!