Beguiling bad boys

• Bad boys: Past, present and fictional

By Georgette Gouveia
Westchester (N.Y.) Journal News

Colin Farrell's gritty party-boy image is part of his Hollywood mystique, and it's as marketable as it is maverick. Rebels are part of our pop-culture psyche. Advertiser library photos

Former President Bill Clinton used a roguish ploy to charm a fellow law school classmate who eventually became his first lady.

"Hey, for $183 million, he might change," Farrell observed.

Ooh, the bad boy — quick with a quip, lusting after ladies and ready to rebel, or at least mix it up.

"They're the straw that stirs the drink," says Michael Easton, who plays the beautifully tattooed, bloodsucking Caleb on ABC's supernatural soap "Port Charles."

Easton's vampire is among the fictional bad boys of this summer, who include Cal Trask, the charismatic Cain of Oprah's Book Club selection "East of Eden"; and Ryan Atwood, the James-Dean-style delinquent at the heart of Fox's new drama "The O.C."

But real-life bad boys abound as well. Bill Clinton has returned as a smooth-talking, red-headed Viking in Hillary Clinton's best-selling "Living History" (Simon and Schuster, $28) price), while domesticated daredevils Johnny Depp, Russell Crowe and Charlie Sheen (perfectly type-cast as a jingle-writing playboy on CBS' sharp fall sitcom "Two and a Half Men") have made headlines for trading their rakish ways for brides and babies.

And then there's Farrell, star of the new film "S.W.A.T.," who seems delightedly determined to drink, smoke, curse and fool around enough to make up for them.

It is one thing to play a bad boy on screen, or in the media. It is quite another to find yourself cast as the bad guy in real life, as Kobe Bryant and his fans are discovering. Regardless of what happens with the sexual assault charge Bryant faces, the basketball star has admitted to lying and adultery, observes Beverly Hills psychiatrist Carole Lieberman, co-author of "Bad Boys: Why We Love Them, How to Live With Them and When to Leave Them" (Signet/Penguin Putnam, 1997). A seeming good guy has left us to wonder who he really is.

Not so the bad boy. With him, you know where you stand, even if you don't like what he stands for. "There's a very honest quality to the bad boy," says Michael Easton, who plays Caleb in "Port Charles" as a creature driven by his need to feed and his passion for one woman. "The really bad person pretends to be what he is not."

The bad boy is not a hypocrite, says Dr. Robert Catenaccio, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. But this doesn't mean he's above fudging facts or bending rules to get what he wants.

Witness "fudger-in-chief" Bill Clinton's first encounter with his future wife, Hillary Rodham, as described in her memoirs. Bill fibs about having to register for the next semester's classes at Yale Law School so he can walk Hillary to the registrar's office. Then he persuades a guard to let them into the closed Yale art gallery in exchange for picking up the litter in the courtyard.

"We had the entire museum to ourselves," Rodham Clinton writes. "We wandered through the galleries talking about (Mark) Rothko and 20th-century art. I admit to being surprised at his interest in and knowledge of subjects that seemed, at first, unusual for a Viking from Arkansas. We ended up in the museum's courtyard, where I sat in the large lap of Henry Moore's sculpture 'Draped Seated Woman' while we talked until dark."

The can-do confidence of the bad boy, experts say, is made headier when you are its primary recipient.

"One of the big attractions of bad boys is that no one is going to get the better of them, and they can be protective of you," says Dr. Mark Goulston, a Santa Monica, Calif., psychiatrist. "Girls perceive them as champs."

And because they appear to be winners who can take what they want, being selected by a bad boy can make the beloved feel all the more special.

"He's a pet tiger," Catenaccio says. "But he's your pet tiger."

The appeal of the bad boy lies not only in his power and protection but in his vulnerability and need to be protected. This, experts say, is his paradox: His nature is both his Achilles' heel and shield.

The bad boy, Catenaccio notes, "is endlessly redeemable."

And he has to be saved, experts say, because often he is the product of a dysfunctional family, that favorite source of friction in fiction.

Antwone Fisher (Derek Luke), the title character in the 2002 film, is "a classic bad boy in the James Dean tradition," says Nicolaus Mills, professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, in that he is a decent young man put through hell by childhood trauma. In his therapist (Denzel Washington), he finds not only a surrogate father but a doorway to understanding, forgiveness and finally, transcendence.

Whether bad boys can grow up to become good guys — instead of remaining as they are or turning into grumpy old men — may depend on finding a trustworthy partner to whom they can open up and recognizing the shallow loneliness of their lives, Lieberman says. Fatherhood, too, may be a defining moment that separates the men from the boys, Goulston adds.

The jury is still out on how impending fatherhood will affect Colin Farrell: Model Kim Bordenave is expecting his son in early September. But for reformed hotel-room trasher Johnny Depp, a stable life in southern France with singer Vanessa Paradis and their two children has been a transformative experience.

"It gave me everything," he says in the current issue of GQ magazine, "a reason to live ... a reason to learn, a reason to breathe, a reason to care. ... Oh man, I wasted so much time."

On the other hand, he is marvelously loopy as a sea wolf in search of his land legs in the summer hit "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl."

So maybe bad boys don't die; they just rechannel their energies. And that, some observers say, is a good thing, particularly in our conservative times.

"We need that little spark of rebellion," Catenaccio says.

Adds Mills: "Despite all that has been done to them, bad boys have resilience. It's not a turn-the-other-cheek kind of thing, but something hopefully that can stand in opposition to official society."

Bad boys: Past, present and fictional

Bad Boys Hall of Fame

• Marlon Brando
• Lord Byron
• Bill Clinton
• Jimmy Connors
• James Dean
• Mick Jagger
• John McEnroe
• Ilie Nastase
• Dennis Rodman
• Howard Stern

Bad Boys Flying Under the Radar

• Leonardo DiCaprio
• Hugh Grant

Recently Domesticated Bad Boys

• Russell Crowe
• Johnny Depp
• Michael Douglas
• Sean Penn
• Charlie Sheen

Reformed Bad Boy Who Has Utterly Disavowed His Former Bad Boyishness

• George W. Bush

Fictional bad boys

• Achilles
• Anakin Skywalker
• Bugs Bunny
• Cal Trask in "East of Eden"
• Don Juan
• Heathcliff (the cat and the Emily Bronte antihero of "Wuthering Heights")
• Hermes (the Greek god, not the fashion house)
• Huckleberry Finn
• Bart Simpson
• Vampire Lestat

Bad Boy Poseurs

• P. Diddy
• Eminem

Congenitally Incapable of Being A Bad Boy

• Tom Hanks

Congenitally Incapable of Being A Bad Boy (Even Though He's No Saint)

• Tom Cruise

He Only Plays A Bad Boy Onscreen

• Brad Pitt

Too Boring To Be A Bad Boy

• Ben Affleck
• Matt Damon
• Jake Gyllenhaal
• Tobey Maguire

Too Nerdy To Be A Bad Boy

• Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass, purveyors of fictional journalism

Too Opaque To Be A Bad Boy

• Ashton Kutcher
• Keanu Reeves

The Anti-Bad Boys

• The New York Yankees (except for bad-boy ace David Wells).