It’s so interesting to me that people who are very, very rich can be broke and busted, while people who earn very little money can arrange things so they have relatively wide financial margins.
My daughter shared with me the news—from a couple of years ago: completely off my radar--about how Johnny Depp sued his managers for $25 million for misconduct; they countersued, saying JD owed them money. As part of the whole brouhaha, the managers claimed that any money problems Mr. Depp had were due to his extravagant spending. Of course, that led to a lot of news outlets reporting specifics about Depp’s monthly expenditures, which included $30,000 for wine and $200,000 for a private jet. In all, Mr. D.’s expenses ran about $2 million a month.
Anyway, what really seemed to get JD into financial trouble was a series of one-time expenditures that landed him in a vortex of cash outflow. Those included:
*More than $75 million to buy, renovate, improve, and furnish 14 residences, including an entire French village; a (small) string of islands in the Bahamas (Who doesn’t want their own string of islands in the Bahamas? Am I right?); five downtown L.A. penthouses; and a Kentucky horse farm;
*Over $18 million to buy and fix up a 150-foot yacht;
*Multiple millions buying and maintaining a fleet of 45 luxury vehicles;
*$5 million for an elaborate memorial service for journalist Hunter S. Thompson, which included a specially designed and built cannon to forcefully scatter his ashes over Aspen, Colorado.
Thinking about Johnny Depp’s financial margins—wide enough to allow for $2 million in monthly expenses—reminded me of another actor, Jussie Smollett, from the FOX TV show “Empire.” Smollett felt he was underpaid for his work on “Empire,” and I don’t know any details about that: I don’t know how much he was paid; I don’t know how much or little he was paid in comparison to his colleagues on the show; I don’t know how his pay compared to other actors doing similar work on different shows. So maybe he was underpaid; maybe not. That’s not really relevant to our conversation here.
Smollett faked a homophobic, racist attack on himself. He later explained that he believed—and this is where the logic wobbles—that his salary would increase if he were the victim of such an attack. Or at least that’s the understanding I came away with. It was kinda murky.
Around the same time that Jussie Smollett was in the news a lot, poet Alison Luterman published a generous, humanizing poem that expressed understanding for Smollett’s poor decision-making. Smollett’s chaotic, this-seems-like-a-good-idea logic gets gentle, decent treatment in Luterman’s hands.
Mostly, it all leaves me thinking: Why do we pay Hollywood actors so much and poets so little?
Here’s Alison Luterman’s poem about Jussie Smollett:
IN DEFENSE OF THOSE WHO HARBOR TERRIBLE IDEAS AT TAX TIME
By Alison Luterman
It must have seemed like a good idea at the time.
Like so many others. Sleeping with that guy.
Not checking the address. Letting him put it in
without a condom just the once. Who hasn’t done
all that and worse, is what I was thinking,
driving to H&R Block to get my taxes done
and listening to the radio where everyone keeps talking about
the young black gay actor who orchestrated
a fake hate crime against himself.
It must have seemed like such a good idea to him
at the time, I think, clutching to my chest
the scattered bits of our financial life—
receipts and pay stubs, the record of all I’ve spent
on poetry contests and that workshop
on musical theater—enough
to buy a hot tub, a cheap used one, anyway,
on Craigslist—and that might
or might not be a disaster, too, you never know.
I’ve booked an appointment
with the nicest CPA in the world—Dennis—
who says to me, “You’re not a cookie-cutter person.
Don’t be ashamed of your life.” Really, he should be a therapist
instead of an accountant, but I hope he stays at this job forever,
smoothing out my crumpled 1099s, recording
the five hundred dollars I made coaching
for Poetry Out Loud, the thousand
from that one contest I did win, and then all the bills
when our old home’s ancient plumbing gave up the ghost.
It’s more than I can face head-on, this evidence
of how we live and earn and spend and waste
our lives, and I heard that the young man, an actor, staged the crime
against himself because he felt he wasn’t being paid enough—
though I bet he was paid more than a poet—
well, who isn’t? And who, in the end, doesn’t feel
attention must be paid? Although few would go
to such lengths to get it. I’ve had my share
of Bad Ideas, God knows, and all of them seemed Good to me
at the time, and so have you, I bet, and so has everyone.
It’s the human condition, after all, to be assailed by a million thoughts
a day, most of them insane—I remember I once thought
of becoming a dominatrix, for example—that didn’t last long,
then I thought maybe I’d write a play
about a woman who becomes a dominatrix
in late middle age, to pay the bills—and well,
you see where all this is heading.
I have to forgive this young man his terrible
idea, I have to because, in my own way, I’ve been him.
And while we’re at it all those others
whose freakazoid fancies must have seemed brilliant
to them for a minute, the way all our eurekas do at three a.m.—
gleaming like fool’s gold … haven’t we all
chased them like magical butterflies
through the meadowlands of imagination,
only to end up empty-handed and chagrined,
and far from home?