Re: Teen Beat Off Magazine Vol 4
Taj Lash
Over its history, the magazine had multiple teen idols on its cover, including John Travolta, David Cassidy, Leif Garrett, Menudo, Michael J. Fox, Debbie Gibson, the Coreys (Feldman and Haim), Molly Ringwald, Tom Cruise, New Kids on the Block, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Devon Sawa, Jonathan Brandis, and more recently, Hanson, Ricky Martin, Leonardo DiCaprio, Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, Hilary Duff, Michael Jackson, Raven-Symon, Lindsay Lohan, and many others.
The mid-1990s saw a slump in the overall teen magazine market.[1] In 1998, the conglomerate's line of youth music publications was sold off to Primedia.[2] In 2001, after publishing up to twelve magazines each year, Primedia decided to reduce its number of publications to only four magazines per year, deciding to keep 16, Tiger Beat, Teen Beat, and BOP Magazine. In October 2001 the frequency of Teen Beat switched to quarterly.[3]
John Stamos was just a 17 year old aspiring actor when he first met Doreen Lioy. It was 1980, and he was putting off college applications while flipping burgers at his father's southern California restaurant. A mutual friend introduced him to Lioy, who was then one of the editors of Tiger Beat magazine. Doreen saw something in Stamos, and included a photo of them together in the editor's section of an issue of the teen magazine. "She groomed me," he recalled in a recent Entertainment Tonight article. Tiger Beat cover features soon followed.
In 1982, Stamos landed his breakout role on General Hospital, for which he'd later earn a daytime Emmy nomination. In 1984 he moved on to prime time, starring in two different short-lived but high-profile network shows over the next few years. In 1987 he accepted a role on Full House, a sitcom whose massive popularity would cement his celebrity status and keep him busy for the next eight years. I imagine by that point he had very little time to hang out with Doreen, but that's okay because she was keeping busy, too. In 1988 she accepted a marriage proposal from then-incarcerated Satanic serial killer Richard Ramirez.
John Stamos was just a 17 year old aspiring actor when he first met Doreen Lioy. It was 1980, and he was putting off college applications while flipping burgers at his father's southern California restaurant. A mutual friend introduced him to Lioy, who was then one of the editors of Tiger Beat magazine. Doreen saw something in Stamos, and included a photo of them together in the editor's section of an issue of the teen magazine. \\\"She groomed me,\\\" he recalled in a recent Entertainment Tonight article. Tiger Beat cover features soon followed.
Years later, Stamos found an article that his mother kept about the serial killer that mentioned Lioy. \u201CHere [Lioy\u2019s] talking about Richard Ramirez,\u201D he says, freaked out that she\u2019s saying the same things about Ramirez that she once said about Stamos. \u201CWhat did she see in me that she saw in him?\u201D
Australian hard rock band AC/DC has a more legitimate claim to a Ramirez connection than any other celebrity, though they probably aren\u2019t super interested in actually defending that claim. The fact that Ramirez left behind an AC/DC baseball cap at the scene of one of his murders is one of those Things You Don\u2019t Bring Up Around AC/DC, sort of like how the whole schoolboy look is uncomfortably close to the adult baby roleplay fetish, or could you please write one goddamn song in a different time signature just one I am begging you.
The band faced harsh criticism in 1985 following Ramirez\u2019s arrest, with some cities attempting to prevent them from playing scheduled shows on their US tour. Here\u2019s founding guitarist Angus Young defending the group in an LA Times article from that year:
Young pointed out how people constantly misinterpret their material. In defense of \u201CHighway to Hell,\u201D he pointed out: \u201CIt has nothing to do with devil worship. We toured for four years at a stretch with no break. A guy asked how would you best describe our tours. We said: \u2018A highway to hell.\u2019 The phrase stuck with us.\u201D
I mostly agree with him, but I also think this answer is kind of a cop-out. It\u2019s hard to accept \u201Chaha just kidding\u201D as the overall artistic intent when you read the lyrics to \u201CNight Prowler,\u201D the specific song in their catalog that reportedly spoke to Ramirez:
To be clear, it\u2019s not that I have objections to the content of the lyrics so much as Young\u2019s blanket dismissal of their sincerity. I can understand why he wouldn\u2019t want to embrace a real life murderer\u2019s appreciation for his art, but it feels disingenuous for him to pretend that the band wasn\u2019t intentionally using the imagery of a savage killer to establish a morbid, violent mystique for themselves that was already pretty common within the heavy metal genre. Ramirez\u2019s endorsement probably did just as much to solidify that mystique for the band as any of the songs on Highway To Hell, and while that\u2019s obviously not something any musician should want, it\u2019s an outcome you risk when you try to present dark subject matter with authenticity. It is simultaneously the worst and also the most meaningful compliment the band could have received for their song about murder, so I get why they don\u2019t want the credit, but it feels phony to say it was all just a joke.
Then again I held back the final line of that song to better support my argument here, and that line is, \u201CShazbot. Nanu nanu.\u201D So maybe it is all a joke? Maybe the song is actually about Mork from Ork being a Satanic rapist? Don\u2019t listen to me, what the hell do I know.
Sean Penn had a connection to Richard Ramirez too, and I don\u2019t just mean that they both beat up women. Penn served a brief jail sentence in 1987 for assaulting a photographer, and when prison officials decided that he was too famous for gen pop, the actor ended up doing his time in a secluded wing of the facility, just a few heavily-reinforced doors over from you-know-who. Here\u2019s Penn\u2019s story, from The Hollywood Reporter:
\\\"He wrote me [a letter],\\\" said Penn. \\\"I was down here on Bauchet Street, in L.A County Jail, in the cell kind of across from him. And after about a month of seeing each other around, he wanted my autograph. So he sent one of the deputies over, [and the] deputy came to my cell and told me: 'Hey, Richard Ramirez wants your autograph.' And I didn't trust the deputy because I'd gotten in some trouble inside there and just passing a piece of paper is contraband, so you can get extra days for that, and I already had extra days and I didn't want more. So I said, 'Bring the sergeant down here, and I'll talk to him and if he approves it. Then I want him to write something first and I'll write him something back.' So the sergeant came down and approved it, and they went over to Ramirez \u2014 this guard basically wanted to play Cupid, in some way. So, I get this thing from him and it says, 'Hey, Sean, stay tough and hit them again \u2014 Richard Ramirez, 666,' with a pentagram and a rendition of the devil.\\\"
Penn wrote back: \\\"I said, 'You know, Richard, it's impossible to be incarcerated and not feel a certain kinship with your fellow inmates. Well, Richard, I've done the impossible, I feel absolutely no kinship with you. And I hope gas descends upon you before sanity does, you know? It would be a kinder way out.'\u201D
OK Sean, just a quick \u201Cfuck you\u201D and let\u2019s move it along, huh? You\u2019re disavowing a serial killer, not writing another Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff novel. Presumably Penn left the letter anonymous, as signing it would technically have counted as an autograph.
The funniest thing about this is that in 1987 Sean Penn hadn\u2019t yet cemented his \u201Ctough guy/deep thinker\u201D public persona, so when Ramirez asked for an autograph he was definitely expecting to interact with fun party animal Spicoli, and ended up receiving a tiresome and overwritten lecture from a Serious Artist instead. Or maybe the funniest thing is that literally three paragraphs later in that article, Penn goes off on an angry rant about tabloid photographers invading his privacy, demonstrating that his post-release recidivism potential is basically the same as Ramirez\u2019s would have been. I honestly can\u2019t decide.
Of course, the gold standard of \u201Ccelebrities responding to Richard Ramirez\u201D is, without question, actor Ted Levine. Levine played Jame \u201CBuffalo Bill\u201D Gumb in The Silence of the Lambs, which you will probably not be surprised to learn was one of Ramirez\u2019s favorite movies. From a New York Post article:
The \u201CNight Stalker\u2019\u2019 serial killer was obsessed with the actor who played the mass murderer in the movie \u201CThe Silence of the Lambs,\u201D the dying con told The Post in his final interview.
Levine\u2019s brevity here is the only appropriate response. No one actually needs to spend any time analyzing Richard Ramirez\u2019s opinion on anything, because Ramirez was a sick and hateful moron. Fuck him. That\u2019s really all that needs to be said.
Buuuuuut\u2026Ramirez identifying Levine as \u201Cthat guy on the show Monk\u201D is just the funniest detail, and I can\u2019t let it go. I keep picturing Ramirez leaning forward on his shitty prison mattress, watching Tony Shalhoub perform his OCD Mr. Bean routine on a 10\u201D TV, murmuring \u201CAdrian, how are you ever gonna solve this one?\u201D to absolutely no one as he slowly and painfully died alone, literally turning green while his liver failed as a complication from lymphoma. The image of one of history\u2019s most brutal and sadistic serial killers finally receiving his just punishment for his litany of evil deeds - and that punishment being the Wednesday night primetime lead-in to an all-new Burn Notice - is so fucking funny to me that I want to cherish it forever, returning to it periodically to soothe myself whenever things get too stressful or difficult.
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