Rich Cohen

The person who should really write an appreciation of the late great Dom DeLuise is Burt Reynolds, who, even more than Mel Brooks, made of the jolly, beanie wearing fat man a side-kick and a legend.

fat great man appreciation

Writing a nonfiction story is like cracking a safe. It seems impossible at the beginning, but once you're in, you're in.

beginning you impossible writing

The Toothbrush mustache is the most powerful configuration of facial hair the world has ever known. It overpowers whoever touches it. By merely doodling a Toothbrush mustache on a poster, you make a political statement.

you political hair world

With George Clooney, the distinctive quality is a unique kind of American phoniness - charming because it's aware of itself as phony. It's as old as old Huck Finn, but, in our age, it has migrated from the fringes to the center.

old quality unique age

If you are money, then, when you die, you will be spent.

die will you money

I have long believed that celebrity, the way we worship and package and sell our pop stars, is what filled the need for gods that was once filled by the pictures in stained glass. Hollywood is post-Christian Venice - in other words, a pantheon of saints without the hassle and heartache of religion.

words stars long religion

When a movie star sits and talks to you, it's almost always, and only, because she's promoting something.

she something you always

It's a challenge, writing about actors, especially a good actor, because you can't always tell when they're being honest and when they're pretending - that is, when they're acting. The really good ones don't always seem to know themselves.

challenge good you writing

It's an established fact. Some women can't stand being pregnant, getting big and bloated, and hauling around a giant stomach, and some women, for reasons probably understood by Darwin, love it.

stand being-pregnant women love

The fact is Jerry Weintraub, the handsome, bearish movie producer, the man with the long career, who worked with Arthur Godfrey and Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra and George Clooney, is a great storyteller - he's this as much as he's anything else. He takes time telling stories, too.

great man time long

Most mustaches lie waiting for some Clark Gable or Tom Selleck to fix them in the mind. The greatest are identified with a single man, a bad man, usually, who so wrapped his identity with a particular configuration of facial hair that the two became inseparable.

man waiting mind hair

The Toothbrush mustache was first introduced in Germany by Americans, who turned up with it at the end of the 19th century the way Americans would turn up with ducktails in the 1950s. It was a bit of modern efficiency, an answer to the ornate mustaches of Europe - pop effluvia that fell into the grip of a bad, bad man.

end bad man way

When facing terrorism, especially in the wake of awful events, there is a tendency to despair, to see in the battle a problem without a solution.

solution terrorism battle problem