Thirty-three years after posing for a photograph with a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun – a move which led her to be dubbed as ‘Hanoi Jane‘ – actress Jane Fonda has publicly apologised for pissing off most of America.
‘It was a betrayal,’ Fonda told 6O Minutes host Leslie Stahl. ‘It was the largest lapse of judgement I can even imagine.’
The largest lapse of judgement imaginable? Well, Jane, you’re entitled to your opinion … but surely spraying harmless peasant villages with skin-dissolving napalm was slightly more of a boo-boo than your daft little camera antics?
As ever, there’s a very immediate reason for this sudden turnaround. Jane, you see, has a new book to promote: 600-page opus My Life So Far. Hecklerspray warrants a guess that the Barnes & Nobles of Bush-loving Middle America may not have sold quite so many copies were it percieved to be the work of some pansy, ban-the-bomb tree-hugging liberal …
And so Jane says ‘sorry‘.
Hecklerspray can only wonder what happens next. Will the left-wing Hollywood elite of today – Tim Robbins, Sean Penn, Michael Moore – suddenly perform similar screeching U-turns when they’re on the cusp of releasing their leather-bound memoirs?
It’s a depressing thought: Michael Moore sitting down on some chat show in three decades time, shrugging his weighty shoulders and saying: ‘Yes, I do regret that anti-war speech I gave at the Oscars. On second thoughts, Iraq really had it coming, didn’t they? Those sand-dwelling bastards deserved every carpet-bombing our great leader threw at them.’
Maybe Sean Penn will look back at The Assassination Of Richard Nixon – a masterpiece, by the way – and say: ‘that was a bit political, wasn’t it? Sorry about that. You can discover my lighter side in my new autobiography, Still A Bad Boy, available in all good bookstores Monday.’
Doesn’t sound all too likely, does it?
Hecklerspray says: enough of this. We think it’s time for a new Hanoi Jane. Keira Knightley strapping on a Camp X-Ray jumpsuit, anyone? How about Scarlett Johannsen recording a grainy vaguely-threatening video from some far-flung cave in Afghanistan?
Here’s a new hecklerspray competition: send us your best ideas for celebrities in controversial poses and maybe – no promises, but maybe – we’ll get some Photoshop-savvy office junior to fix up your idea (assuming your idea isn’t hopelessly, hopelessly libellous)! Entries to: [email protected].
Oh, and Jane? We hope your book does well. At least, we hope it has a longer shelf life than your principles …