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It has come to this: Diminutive actor Danny DeVito, who gained notoriety a few months ago for showing up sloppy on television and blaming it on too much treacly lemon liqueur, has been signed up to promote ... treacly lemon liqueur.
Danny DeVito’s Premium Limoncello has begun a national rollout, according to Long Island spirits distributor Harbrew Imports.
In November, a dopey-acting, word-slurring DeVito appeared on ABC’s coffee klatch “The View,” bumbling, burping, rambling on. The clip is now a YouTube fave, viewed a couple of million times.
To whoops and hollers, DeVito tells Barbara Walters and the others about how he was out all night partying with George Clooney.
Rosie O’Donnell asks him, “Have you been to sleep yet?”
DeVito replies, “I don’t know.”
At one point he says, “I knew it was the last seven limoncellos that were going to get me.”
And zip-bam-boom. A brand is born.
Rick DeCicco, Harbrew’s head honcho, heard about DeVito’s notorious appearance, said company spokeswoman Karen Pineman. “Rick thought: Danny drinks this stuff. He likes this stuff. He should put his name on it. So Rick sent Danny some cases of it as a joke.”
Eventually, DeCicco arranged to meet DeVito at the Friars Club in Manhattan and the two hatched a scheme. Rather than feeling embarrassment for boorish behavior, DeVito is taking life’s lemons and making limoncello, selling it for about $24 a bottle.
DeVito did not answer e-mails sent to his agent. Pineman said DeVito had been out late the night before, got up early to do an interview and fell asleep in the car on the way to “The View.” “He certainly hadn’t been drinking,” Pineman said.
She said he had been drinking limoncello the night before and had occasionally enjoyed it in the past.
Celebrities endorse shoes, perfumes, clothing lines, fried-chicken franchises, even hooch: Bench 5 Scotch is named for baseball Hall of Famer Johnny Bench, and Old Whiskey River Kentucky Straight Bourbon, inspired by a Willie Nelson song, comes with a guitar pick dangling from the bottleneck.
Other celebs have made scads from scandals. Monica Lewinsky flacked for the Jenny Craig weight loss program. Paula Jones, Marla Maples and Donna Rice sold No Excuses jeans.
Now Donna Rice Hughes says she’s not sure she played her cards right back in the 1980s. “It’s one of those things that I do regret,” said Rice Hughes, who today runs Enough Is Enough, a non-profit organization that focuses on making the Internet safer for children.
“After the scandal with Gary Hart broke,” Rice Hughes said, “there were tremendous offers coming at me all the time. I made a decision not to exploit what had happened. ... I turned down millions and millions of dollars.”
But she was a professional actress and model, so when the No Excuses offer came along, she agreed to wear the jeans as a model, but not as the former object of Hart’s desire.
“I was very naive,” she said. She hadn’t even shot the ad before the world knew the Colorado senator’s paramour was flacking blue jeans. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, she said, she decided not to break the contract.
“Perhaps I should have walked away at that point. I really didn’t know what to do,” she said.
Putting DeVito’s name on the very drink that caused him humiliation is like putting Britney Spears’ name on underwear or Michael Vick’s on dog food. Critic Bob Garfield of Advertising Age said: “Why would a company hire an alleged abuser to front a controlled substance? It’s a mystery to me.”
The jury is out on how the public will receive DeVito’s booze. “It’s smart marketing to cash in on a celebrity’s publicity,” said Michael Scippa of the Marin Institute, a California-based alcohol industry watchdog group. But it’s also “the height of corporate irresponsibility.”
Celebrities “are seen as role models. ... We would love to see celebrities come out on the other side of this issue and become advocates for drinking less. That would be doing the country more good,” Scippa said.
Jeffrey Pipes Guice, editor of the trade newsletter Beer, Wine & Spirits, said, “These celebrity spirits are only good as long as the celebrity is actively endorsing them.”
They are vanity products, he said. “The only one I can think of that has ever lasted a lifetime is a drink that’s called the Shirley Temple – made of ginger ale and grenadine.”
