Levi Johnston's Sad, Tacky Tell-All
Bonnie Goldstein
Woman Up Editor
Posted:
09/22/09
I could not agree more with Mary that the 2004 vice presidential candidate from North Carolina hit a new high on the tackiness meter with the tidbit that he and mistress Rielle Hunter wiled away their romantic moments planning their wedding (with entertainment by the Dave Matthews Band no less), while his terminally ill spouse was using her limited energy to get him elected in 2008.Speaking of vice presidential candidates, with the October issue of Vanity Fair now on newsstands, the article, " Me and Mrs. Palin, by Levi Johnston," Sarah's erstwhile son-in-law proves there is a lot of tackiness to go around.
The 19-year-old ex-fiancé of Sarah and Todd Palin's oldest daughter, Bristol, was paid generously by the magazine for his first-person accounting of their shotgun engagement and his temporary place among the members of Alaska's first family. Neither VF nor Johnston have announced exactly how much he was paid, but back in 1989, VF was paying $2 a word. Levi's schoolboy tattle was over 10,000 words so, do the math.
Although the electrician's apprentice/hockey star-turned model/essayist writes: "Sarah had always treated me very well, sometimes saying, 'I love you, son,' to me," he has a strange way of showing his appreciation. The unemployed dropout felt compelled, apparently, to share the detail, "Bristol thought that Todd was having an affair with a friend of the family."
Teenage daughters' boyfriends have a unique rivalry with their girlfriends' mothers, and Levi seems to be raising the ante with his little boy's grandmother. Maybe he thought Bristol needed him to stand up to "Sarah Barracuda," but he doesn't do the girl any favors by writing, "'I hate her' definitely came out of Bristol's mouth about Sarah."
Levi's other careless observations and skewed perspective on parenting and education include: "There wasn't much parenting in that house. Sarah doesn't cook," and, "I actually never saw Sarah reading much at all -- once in a blue moon, I'd see her reading a book, and I've never seen her read a newspaper."
I understand why VF commissioned the Levi Johnston byline. Sarah sells magazines. The satire, "Levi Johnston's Blues," written by Nick Hornby and Ben Folds, begins, "Woke up this morning, what did I see? Three thousand cameras pointing at me." When VF Editor Graydon Carter made the assignment, it must have seemed propitious that the Johnston essay would follow VF's anonymously-sourced Todd Purdum piece on the former VP candidate that, coincidentally, hit computer monitors only days before she resigned from her governor's job.
I'm not sure if money alone motivated the young man to "tell all," however. There's the attention, of course, ("It's weird going to the airport and having people run up to you and ask for your autograph . . . it's kind of cool."), but it also struck me how many times Levi used the word "mom" to describe Sarah Palin in the four-page article.
The things the author had to say about his own mother, Sherry, (to whose home he returned in February) were fewer and scarier. Here are a couple: "I didn't think Sarah wanted my mom around all the cameras because she had been arrested for selling prescription medication a week and a half earlier," and "Bristol said my mom was an idiot."
Luckily for their little boy, at least, the young lovers actually seemed to communicate with each other ("Bristol and I were at a tattoo parlor in Wasilla -- I was getting her name tattooed on my ring finger.") One unfortunate confidence may suggest why he insulted his almost mother-in-law so rudely, "Bristol told me after the convention that her mother didn't like me."