Teflon Mel? ... Gibson after his arrest.
Photograph: AP
Actors, it seems, never tire of telling us that they are nothing like the characters they play. Woody Allen, for instance, is not really a neurotic, nebbish New Yorker. Robert De Niro does not go around shooting people and shaving his hair in a Mohican, and Anthony Perkins did not really dress up in his mother's clothes and assault women in the shower.
Similarly the real Mel Gibson would never dream of claiming that "Jews are responsible for all the wars in history" or addressing a female police officer as "Sugar Tits", even if he meant it affectionately. All of it, he said, was a "drunken display" blossoming out of a "moment of insanity" and played out "in a world that seems to have gone mad".
This, in a nutshell, is Gibson's defence. It was the booze what done it and the planet's gone bazonkers. Time will tell if the jury buys it, although the early signs are not encouraging, what with widespread condemnation in Hollywood and the abrupt cancellation of his miniseries on the Holocaust (which was the result, one presumes, of the Jews starting that damn second world war). The long-term damage to Gibson's career, however, is altogether harder to assess.
While history is peppered with celebrities who shot their mouths off and landed in hot water, most of them have emerged with little more than a mild scalding. Sean Connery once gave an interview in which he implied that it was OK to give your lady-friend a little slap if she got out of line and it did his career no harm at all. In the 1970s, Eric Clapton extolled the virtues of Enoch Powell and warned against Britain becoming "a black colony" and is now revered as rock's grand elder statesman. A few years back, while playing at the US Open, the tennis star Lleyton Hewitt complained that his black opponent was receiving favourable calls from a black linesman. Few people batted an eye and he went on to win the tournament.
The experiences of these men will no doubt provide succour to Gibson as he dons his hair-shirt and prepares to set forth on his long and painful "path for healing". In fact, try as I might, I can think of no examples where a prominent public figure has suffered career ruin as the result of unscripted comments; no one who is still wrecked, still despised, and still being held to account.
Instead, the logic appears to be that scandal begats remorse and remorse begats redemption, and hey presto, before you know it you're making an appearance on Oprah and shaking your head in bemused wonder at that wild old night when you railed against those "fucking Jews". Fitzgerald was wrong. There are second acts in American lives and I suspect that Mel, like the rest of them, will swiftly rise again.
