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30. Jordy
At four years old, Jordy Lemoine waddled onto the French pop scene with the hit Eurotrash anthem "Dur dur d'être bébé!" ("It's so hard to be a baby!"), becoming the youngest singer ever to have a charted number-one single. "And mommy says/ go to bed, brush your teeth/ Don't pick your nose, don't do this, don't do that." Le pauvre! But things only got rougher for France's cutest export. The French government banned him from the airwaves, fearing his parents were violating kiddie protection laws. The parents then creepily opened a Jordy farm, a sort of French gloss on the Neverland Ranch that was forced to shutdown amid further accusations of child exploitation. When Jordy's parents divorced in 1996, he was freed from the millstone of child-stardom and has reappeared for a second act only recently: on the reality TV show Celebrity Farm 2 (which he won); and as the frontman of the so-called "indie" band (read: Eurotrash) Jordi and the Dixies. Has Jordi really grown up? In 2006, he published his memoir Je Ne Suis Plus Un Bébé written, incidentally, with the help of his mother.
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29. Fawn Hall
"Sometimes you have to go above the law," Fawn Hall famously declared during her testimony at the 1989 Iran-Contra trial. Hall, who worked for Oliver North for three years, admitted to shredding classified documents in an attempt to cover up President Reagan's involvement in overthrowing the Nicaraguan government, and overnight became the nation's most infamous administrative assistant. When the trial ended, she departed Washington in disgrace, moved to L.A., and in 1991 married Danny Sugerman, former manager of The Doors, who got her hooked on crack. In the mid-'90s she checked into a rehab facility and cleaned up. Today, at forty-eight, she works at a bookstore called Book Soup in West Hollywood, selling self-help tomes and Zagat guides in relative anonymity.
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28. Jessica Hahn
Hahn was the busty Long Island church secretary who felled the career of famed televangelist Jim Bakker with a single unholy dalliance. Jessica Hahn, then a twenty-year-old virgin, claimed Bakker lured her to his bed ("When you help the shepherd, you help the sheep," he reportedly said) and drugged and raped her before handing her off to a fellow preacher. Bakker vehemently denied the allegations, but only made matters worse when he paid out $279,000 in hush money. Needless to say, the cherub-faced preacher resigned. (Though his replacement, Jerry Falwell, wasn't much better, as poor Tinkie-Winkie can attest.) Hahn, for her part, blew through the usual roster of post-sex-scandal gigs: a few Playboy spreads; appearances on The Howard Stern Show (see her shake her boobies awkwardly here); a guest role on Married... With Children; a coke habit. Miraculously, the episode didn't shake her devotion. "Tammy Faye, I pray for every day," she told Larry King in 2005. "I really liked her. I wanted to be, like, in their family. . ." |
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27. Six-Year-Old High-School Graduate
At an age when most of us were wee bobbleheads upchucking on our parents' shoulders, Michael Kearney was describing to his pediatrician the precise coordinates of his ear infection. And at ten years old, this homeschooled New Jersey prodigy nabbed an entry in The Guinness Book of World Records as the youngest person ever to graduate from college. But how smart is he, really? Let's consider the facts: His earned his degree from the University of South Alabama in anthropology. (Gravity-bong major.) This, only after putting in a year and a half at Santa Rosa Junior College. (Tweaker school.) He proceeded to collect several more degrees — in computer science, geology and chemistry. (Perpetual student.) Sure, he got a perfect score on his Johns-Hopkins math exam at age four, penned a 118-page master's thesis titled "Kinetic Isotope Effects of Thymidine Phosphorylase," and taught chemistry to college students older than him, undoubtedly much to their horror. But where is he now? Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, that's where. (Nerd slum.) |
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26. Gennifer Flowers
"Before Paula Jones and before Monica Lewinsky and very much during Hillary," wrote the New Orleans Times-Picayune's Chris Rose, there was Gennifer Flowers, a walking billboard for Aqua Net who emerged during Bill Clinton's 1992 bid for the presidency and alleged that the two had carried on a twelve-year-long affair. She was the proto-other woman for our country's first, ahem, unitary executive. In her 1995 memoir, Gennifer Flowers: Passion and Betrayal, she wrote, per Wikipedia: "The first time he [climaxed during oral sex]. I was taken aback. I was saving that for my husband, if ever. But Bill was gentle and held me after." She married a stockbroker, the awesomely monikered Finis Shellnut, and the two fetched up in New Orleans in 2001 after Flowers had some weird epiphany at the Big Easy birthplace of Madame X, the subject of the scandalous John Singer Sargent painting. (Long story.) Until Katrina hit, Flowers was a well-regarded lounge singer in her own joint, the Kelsto Club, an old French Quarter cathouse. She left the city briefly for Las Vegas but has since returned, to great local fanfare. In December, Flowers said she'd consider voting for Hillary Clinton, and in May she announced that she was auctioning off the original, unedited tapes of her surreptitiously recorded conversations with Bill Clinton. As the auction company put it in a press release: "These are the only tapes in American history to date where a then presidential candidate and now former president is heard speaking with his mistress."
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