Recognizing that celebrities give and give and give, and rarely ask for anything in return, even when in dire need of assistance, rapper/actor/transportation engineer Diddy plans to introduce a high-end car service for plastered pre-hab A-listers eager to avoid a starring role in The Smoking Gun’s ever-expanding archive of embarrassing mug shots. That celebrities might actually entrust their well-being to a man who once stood trial for tossing a gun from an SUV that was cruising down the mean sidewalks of NYC in an attempt to evade police is a dramatic illustration of how a few platinum records can totally enhance your chauffeuring credibility. Cab drivers of America, brush up on your mic skills!
But is Diddy’s service really necessary? Yes, hardly a week passes these days without news of the latest celebrity DUI. But it’s also true that hardly a week passes without news of some new celebrity perfume. All it really means is that the worldwide celebrity population is enjoying explosive growth. Some famous people spend their spare time figuring out new ways to combine the revitalizing scent of peppermint with the alluring fragrance of gardenia; others get hammered at Moonshadows.
Approximately 1.4 million people, or one out of every 135 licensed drivers, are arrested for driving under the influence each year. Of those, perhaps two dozen or so are Hollywood celebrities. Remove Kiefer Sutherland and the cast of Lost from the list, and celebrities may actually be the most sober drivers on the planet. In fact, the truly notable thing about Hollywood lushes is how infrequently they get popped for mixing booze and directionally dyslexic jaunts down the Ventura Freeway.
In Los Angeles, after all, you have to drive at least 20 miles just to get to your carbon-neutral spin class. Also, most celebrity women are so skinny it doesn’t take much to get them sloshed; a single scoop of rum raisin ice cream puts lead-footed beanpole Paris Hilton over the legal limit. Celebrities are also expected to make frequent appearances at industry events and pretend like they’re having the time of their lives hanging out with Conde Nast senior circulation managers. Who wouldn’t be inclined to knock back a few too many under such circumstances?
And yet perhaps because stars are already using services similar to the one Diddy envisions, or have personal assistants ready to take the wheel as soon as the red lights start flashing, or do most of their traveling in SUVs carjacked by Lindsay Lohan, celebrity DUIs remain a relatively rare phenomenon. When they do occur, they often seem outrageous: Think of Nicole Richie driving the wrong way down a freeway, or the racist outbursts of Mel Gibson and Vivica A. Fox, or Bill Murray’s 3:30 a.m. joyride through the streets of downtown Stockholm in an electric golf cart.
But can any of those incidents compare to the July 2007 DUI of the Baptist minister from Bristol, Virginia, who first dropped his pants and relieved himself in front of a bunch of kids at a car wash, then greeted officers responding to the scene with a proposition involving far more intimate acts than blowing into a Breathalyzer, all while wearing a skirt? Or how about the 30-year-old woman from Naples, Florida, who backed over her step-father last summer as he was attempting to give her her first driving lesson, dragged him across the street, then crashed into a garage? When police arrived, they determined that her blood alcohol content was 0.146, or nearly twice the legal limit for those who actually have licenses.
As with YouTube, so with DUIs—the truly jaw-dropping work is being done by people no one’s ever heard of. In November 2007, as Lohan was cementing her reputation as the country’s most coddled vehicular menace by serving an 84-minute jail sentence after racking up two DUIs in less than two months, a sheriff’s deputy in the state of Washington was arrested for a DUI when state troopers clocked him going 95 mph on the freeway. Two hours later, police released him into the custody of his girlfriend; he got behind the wheel again, hit the accelerator and quickly earned his second DUI of the evening.
Ultimately, a judge deferred the deputy’s prosecution so he could seek treatment for his stupidity problem: If all goes as planned, he won’t be serving any time at all. Given that we apparently judge our celebrities more harshly than we do our law-enforcement veterans, Diddy’s car-service idea is perhaps more necessary than it initially seems. If he can save a single star from the lifetime psychic scars that come with serving nearly an hour and a half of hard time, it will all be worth it, won’t it?