6 Real Celebrity Friendships Better Than Any Fan-Fiction
If you believe in gossip news, celebrities' lives are fueled by feuds, petty drama, and sordid breakups with each other. But that's just one side of the coin. Sometimes, two celebrities manage to meet in the wild and actually not throttle each other on sight. They might even have an awesome time together. And sometimes, just sometimes, the ones who actually become friends will make you do a triple take and say, "Wait, what the fuck?"
Prince And Muhammad Ali Geeked Out Over Magic Tricks Together
Although they were both titans of their respective fields, there really was no reason for Muhammad Ali and Prince Rogers Nelson to interact in any way. One was a towering sports machine made of punches and bravado, while the other was a diminutive sex-and-music god whose most notorious fistfight was against Sinead O'Connor. They occupied worlds that don't easily interact. Yet one fine day in 1997 saw these two image-driven celebrity juggernauts meet, sit down, and ... perform magic tricks?
Awww.
Look at two of the biggest symbols of self-confidence of our time just completely fanboying over each other and grinning like little children. The meeting took place in a five-star hotel room in Washington, and almost got off to a bad start when Ali welcomed his guest with a heartfelt bellow of "Prince!" and Ali's daughter chastised him by threatening that they'd start calling him Cassius Clay if he wouldn't keep up with The Artist's naming policies. However, the situation immediately defused as the starstruck Prince basically jumped into Ali's arms. They spent the whole day together, just enjoying each other's company and acting like little children. Their biggest bonding experience proved to be magic tricks: Ali taught Prince a special move wherein he appeared to levitate, and Prince improved the trick by pulling it off while standing on a table.
That's the sort of sentence that tends to need pictorial proof, so here, have some.
That's the thing about celebrities: Even famous people have folks whose work they greatly admire. Prince happened to be a lifelong fan of Ali, and when the latter's people contacted him on a whim for a meetup and a little promotional work for World Healing Project, he cleared the right fuck out of his insanely busy schedule and hopped on a plane. Unbeknownst to Prince, the admiration was mutual, and what by all rights could have been a fairly detached meet-and-greet between two professional celebrities with planet-sized accomplishments (and the egos to go with them) soon melted into a heartwarmingly awkward meeting between two human beings being big ol' dorks.
Snoop Dogg And Martha Stewart Are Good Friends And Frequent Collaborators
The rap game is a social one, fueled by feuds, collaborations, and tight cliques. As the official stoned uncle of hip hop, Snoop Dogg knows this better than anyone. He's rapped with, for, and at some of the best in the business. However, one of his more unknown collaborators is the biggest hardass of them all: A former model and an ex-con whose beef game is so strong that she can smack down A-listers like Gwyneth Paltrow with nothing but a simple pie recipe.
I'm talking, of course, about Martha Stewart. Yes, that Martha Stewart. She's running with the Dogg. Here they are together in 2015, having the kind of fun you can only have at Justin Bieber's Comedy Central Roast:
Where Stewart told pot jokes, and a fellow roaster swears she got stoned with Snoop at the afterparty.
Incredible as it may seem, Snoop's cool-and-mellow attitude and Stewart's homemaker talent and surprising knack for throwing shade meld seamlessly into a perfect storm of personal chemistry, and the two seem to end up forming a team in whatever situation they find themselves in. Snoop happily calls Stewart his homegirl, and describes the unlikely duo's relationship as a special bond that goes way back. Stewart, who at this point is clearly the more gangsta of the two, has opted to keep her comments cooler, and settles to call Snoop a funny guy. But her reserved comments cannot belie the chemistry of these two entertainment juggernauts. Here they are competing for prizes on $100,000 Pyramid:
"We don't care about the prizes. We're winning just by sitting here."
Here they are adorably cooking mashed potatoes way back in 2008:
At some point, they decided to graduate from guest spots and just start making a show together. Yes, it will be a reality show about dinner parties, and no, they're not even bothering to pretend that the words "Bon Appetizzle" aren't going to feature heavily.
Groucho Marx And Alice Cooper Had A Nighttime Friendship Club
If I gave you a thousand tries to come up with the most outlandish celebrity friendship you could imagine, I bet it wouldn't even occur to you to pair Alice Cooper -- the make-up-wearing, guillotines-and-snakes-wielding granddaddy of shock rock -- with an old-timey Hollywood entertainer like Groucho Marx -- the fast-talking comedian whose career started in the freaking 1900s (the decade, not the century). You can barely picture the two occupying the same era. You definitely can't imagine them being on speaking terms. Yet, somehow, they not only knew each other, but they were also close personal friends.
While the pair might initially seem like an odd couple, remember that Marx, with his innuendo-laden comedy style, was a veteran entertainer who was not unfamiliar with pushing the envelope himself. Not only had he seen his share of showbiz shit, he had actually invented a whole bunch of it. As such, he wasn't the least bit taken aback by Alice's nation-shocking antics, and in fact they met when Groucho randomly went to an Alice Cooper show. He immediately recognized the theatrics and labeled Cooper "the last chance of vaudeville" -- a label which greatly pleased him.
Groucho presumably had less pleasant things to say about Alice's mustache game, though.
Cooper and Marx used to live near each other, and it just so happened that Groucho suffered from frequent bouts of insomnia. He soon figured out that the rock guy who lived practically next door tended to keep rock star hours, and started inviting Alice over to hang out in the small hours. The two soon bonded and became outright friends, and Marx knighted Alice with the nickname "Coop" -- the same one he had used for Gary Cooper.
They also maintained a healthy professional respect for each other. Cooper was a self-admitted huge fan of Marx, who in turn liked Cooper's shows so much that he started bringing his old-school A-list Hollywood chums with him to reminisce about the ways they used to pull guillotine gags in the 1920s. This could create some interesting situations for performers less accustomed to the presence of legends than Alice himself. It was not unknown that the band's skeleton-costume-clad backup dancers were strutting their stuff onstage, only to glance to the side and mentally shit a giant brick as they realized that Fred fucking Astaire was watching them.
Mel Gibson And Britney Spears Bonded Over Celebrity Freakouts
Britney Spears has been rocking it pretty steadily for a while now, so it's easy to forget that around 2007-2008, she was in full former child star meltdown phase. She shaved her head and made faces at cameras. There were rumors of drugs and bad behavior and psychological problems and whatever. You know the drill; you've seen variations of it with a fuckton of celebrity teen millionaires who suddenly need to figure out how to grow up (or whether to grow up at all).
It's rarely a dignified process.
As the first and most visually enticing high-profile Mouseketeer meltdown of the ascending internet age, Spears quickly wound up a celebrity pariah with very few outspoken supporters. Oddly enough, one of these supporters was Mel Gibson, who himself had been recently knocked off his place as one of the hottest shits Hollywood had ever managed to squeeze out thanks to a certain DUI arrest and the ensuing racist tirade. Gibson wasn't satisfied with just giving a few "the girl has a tough time, let her figure it out" interviews, either. He recognized Spears as a fellow celebrity in trouble, so he personally reached out to her, and the two bonded quite well.
How well? No one seems to know. Some say they just had dinner and a bunch of talks. Others say Gibson flew Spears to his private estate to recuperate. Others still swear they went to a beach vacation together. However, it's noteworthy that no one appears to insinuate this was anything but a platonic friendship. Even the vacation one specifically mentions that they took their respective families with them, thus saving this entry from turning into a creepy May-December sex thing.
Since you now have the image in your head anyway, feel free to picture them both at the absolute top of their hair game.
Luckily for Gibson, Spears wasn't the sort to forget a good deed (although she appears to have wisely refrained from publicly defending his more questionable remarks and assorted career-destroying gaffes). In 2010, when Gibson was locked in a brutal custody battle with his soon-to-be-ex-spouse, Spears stepped up to the plate and started counseling him in turn, usually in the form of long phone calls late at night.
Man, I can't decide what's more impressive -- the fact that these two famous folks with literally no reason to know each other but mutual goodwill have spent countless hours of their time counseling each other through their assorted fuck-ups, or the fact that every gossip e-rag in existence isn't latching on to all that obvious innuendo in an attempt to score yet another "famous people who might fuck" scoop.
No matter what you think of Julian "Wikileaks" Assange, the train of thought is going to revolve around politics and law. The dude's whole deal is revealing a whole bunch of information, getting stuck in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, and avoiding Sweden. It's easy to imagine him as a solitary, semi-mysterious figure, living in monk-like isolation in his safe haven and periodically leaking important documents that everyone freaks out over for three days and promptly forgets all about. Famous as he may be, he's not exactly the kind of guy to hang out with the fluffier end of the celebrity spectrum.
So anyway, here's a picture of him hanging out with Lady Gaga.
They couldn't agree if the dress code for the meeting was "chic funeral" or "at this point of my isolation, you're lucky if I bother wearing pants".
What does one of the biggest pop stars of our time have in common with a guy who pisses off countries for a living? I don't know. You don't know. It's entirely possible neither of them knows. Still, in 2012, the two had a five-hour dinner at Assange's embassy hideout. Here's the cheap speculation: We know that Gaga is something of a political activist, so it could be that she merely wanted to meet the dude who lined up with her beliefs (when she could spare a moment from launching her new perfume). We can also reasonably assume that Assange was already bored as seven hells in his hideout, and figured that a few hours with the woman who happily staples a bunch of steaks together and calls it a dress would break up the monotone of his existence.
Now, here's the advanced speculation: Isn't it weird that, contrary to the attention-seeking instincts of everyone involved, it appears that no one has revealed a goddamned thing about what went on during said dinner? The sole picture we have of their meeting is a grainy fucking thing that Gaga posted on her Littlemonsters.com site with no explanation. Five hours of awkward conversation over three courses just seems like a hugely wasted publicity opportunity for both of them. Oh, and we also know that they've kept in touch, at least to some extent: A recent documentary on Assange features some playful dialogue between the two.
You know what? I'm calling it. Those fuckers are totally gearing up for a collaboration. Wikileaks: The Mixtape is about to drop, and the world's going to flip its absolute shit at tracks like "Trump's Actual Tax Records" and "The Emails (Y'all Know Which Ones)."
Hunter S. Thompson Regularly Caused Mayhem With Don Johnson
Have you heard the story about when revered gonzo lunatic Hunter S. Thompson was asked to describe the sound of one hand clapping, and answered by slapping the asker's head so hard the guy had tinnitus for days? According to some sources, that poor slappee was none other than Don Johnson, Miami Vice powerhouse and noted personification of 1980s superficiality. It's not like Johnson just randomly happened to walk past Thompson chanting zen horseshit until the writer decided to slap the sculpted 5 o'clock shadow off his face, either. These vastly different men were actually perfectly good friends, and regularly indulged in the kind of mayhem that would cause every single character Johnson has ever played to shoot them on the spot.
Although there appears to be few, if any, pictures of the two partying together, this may actually be a blessing in disguise. The image of the combined dress senses of Raoul Duke and Sonny Crockett hitting the town together would be more than enough to melt any monitor.
Hell, the latter alone will explode most unprotected retinas.
The thing to remember here is that although Johnson tended to play squeaky-clean, ultra-stylish cop types, his own lifestyle was far closer to the folks Crockett and Tubbs were chasing. He owned 20 cars and a season pass to Betty Ford. He took drugs by the bucket, and it wasn't unheard of for him to phone-order 25 girls from modeling agencies to entertain him and a couple of friends. His co-star in Nash Bridges was Cheech Marin, for fuck's sake! Oh, and he also happened to live next door to Thompson. As such, the men naturally gravitated toward each other, and were extremely close friends for over 20 years.
That's not to say their coexistence was an amiable 24/7 drug-fest, though. This is still Hunter S. Thompson we're talking about. The writer couldn't resist making his pastel-wearing friend the butt of his famously erratic practical jokes. Thompson was fond of waking his friend up in the morning by jumping in a convertible and driving donuts on Johnson's driveway while firing assorted guns and fireworks and screaming from the top of his lungs. And that was just a gentle wake-up call. Here's Johnny Depp recounting the time when Johnson was coming over Thompson's house at 3 a.m., and Thompson decided to greet him with a full-blown ambush with live weapons.
Yeah, let's just say it's not entirely surprising that Don Johnson refers to their friendship as "challenging."
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