One evening a coupla years ago i was walking up Broadway to 47th Street and Henry Winkler was walking down and we pass thisclose so I smile and say “Hey Fonz, how ya doing?” and he scowls and tells me to fuck off.
I am a little stunned and I turn around to watch him walk away and now Henry is shouting at someone on his cell..
So when people discuss nice/nasty celebrities, I put Winkler on the nasty side but Mark E. Smith, who is a notoriously tough cookie but was really sweet to me when i interviewed him back in the early 80s, on the nice side.
Now here’s the moral: Henry was probably (actually, definitely) in the middle of a huge fight. Do I want to be judged on my worst moments? I don’t wanna be judged on MY BEST moments.
I took a little of his humanity, the same way we take Bono’s or Chris Martin, or any of the many egomaniacs we spend our time skewering, humanity by turning them into something they are not for our entertainment.
So here I give you a Springsteen quote, unadorned and it just shows he had a neighborhood kid film the band post-Born On the Run.: “The guy who shot all the footage was the kid in the neighbourhood who had the camera. He wanted to be a film maker at some point. It wasn’t going to go anywhere so we weren’t worried about it. He’d come up the studio with his video camera and he was easy to ignore. Then he sat on it for 30 years. He was good about it… he said, ‘I don’t know, is it mine or yours?’ I paid him for that so I guess we sorted that out, but it was good of him not to do anything for 30 years!”