Let's Go to the Videotape

"Charlie is circling the drain."

That was one of the best comments I read after the latest Charlie Sheen episode hit the news. Only those not in comas at the time know what I'm talking about. That leaves a good deal of the population with knowledge of at least something of the events.

Back at the clipping pile and have come across a February 23, 2010 one saved from the NYT on Martin Sheen, Charlie's father. The occasion for the article was Mr. Sheen's reappearance in the play 'The Subject Was Roses', in a Los Angeles theater production. This time he plays the father, having originally played the son when the play was on Broadway in 1964. I remember ads for the 1964 play on the sides of 3rd Avenue buses as they passed the family flower shop.

Charlie Sheen is not really living a life others haven't lived before. But thanks to technology and whatever you want to call the current world of communications, he's certainly living it less privately.

Several years ago when I was reading The Dead Beat, the book on the art of newspaper obituaries, I never expected to get wind of a theory as to who Carly Simon might have been singing about in her song 'You're So Vain.'

Throughout my more recent life I always held to the premise that there were three things in life that ranked as the world's greatest mysteries. The first of course was: Who is Carly singing about?; Who is Deep Throat?; Is there life on other planets? Sometimes I changed the order.

In 2005, shortly before the book's release, one of those mysteries melted away. An assistant director of the FBI, Mark Felt, identified himself as Deep Throat, the news source who helped Bob Woodward write stories about president Nixon and the Watergate scandal.

Then I got to page 85 (hardcover) of The Dead Beat and was presented with the author's completely plausible theory on who Carly was singing about. I was so excited about having stumbled on a source that wasn't making the rounds of the media that few in my office building who happened to be with me in an elevator didn't also get this news from me. I set several youngsters straight that no, it wasn't James Taylor. Smugness set in.

Without permission, I quote:

Carly Simon probably wrote "You're So Vain" not about James Taylor or Warren Beatty or Mick Jagger, but about the dissipated eccentric William Donaldson, who left her her "when she was still quite naive." Donaldson wrote wonderful satirical books, but he also ran through several fortunes, pimped, and enjoyed crack cocaine and the date-rape drug Rohypnol (he liked to use it on himself). "It's such a nuisance," the Daily Telegraph quoted him in his obit. "The trouble is, it wipes your memory. You have to video yourself to appreciate just what a good time you had."

It's going to be somewhat like the groundhog seeing or not seeing his shadow, and the predictions for more or less winter. If Charlie does go to the videotape and likes what he sees, he can only do it all over again.

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