The cover of the October issue of Vanity Fair features the requisite celebrity profile-atio (pitched with the coverline, "Golden Child: Kate Hudson is Beautiful, Talented and Hollywood Royalty to Boot." Coming next month: "Wild Stiles: The Inside Story of Julia Stiles's Radiance, Brilliance, and Ability to Heal Lepers with Her Touch"). But the real story inside this month's VF is the much-talked-about takedown of beleaguered comedian Mike Myers. Vanity Fair's been hyping the piece in advance for weeks; its impending publication made headlines (at least here in Canada) in several newspapers. The promise was a no-holds-barred, now-it-can-be-told exposé in which former friends and colleagues spill long pent-up tales of Myers's virulent egomania, unfettered plagiarism, and general rampaging out-of-controled-ness.

At this point, I should confess that I am predisposed to think good thoughts about Mike Myers, for several rational and not so rational reasons. First, he's from Toronto, as am I; second, he's always projected a kind of warm affability; third, he's one of the few SNL alum -- few comedians, really -- who've been able to produce consistently funny work; fourth, I know a guy who once saddled up next to Myers at a bank of urinals in a downtown Toronto bar, and, not able to resist the opportunity, told Myers how much he admired him. Rather than telling him to fuck off -- which, considering they were at a bank of urinals, Myers would have been well within his rights to do -- Myers was gracious and courteous and even struck up a brief conversation; fifth, it's kind of funny that he has the same name as the killer in Halloween; sixth, a comedian I'm friends with was performing a one-man show at Toronto's Second City. A few weeks later, he got a letter in the mail from Mike Myers, who had slipped into the back and caught some of the show, and felt moved to write a note of encouragement to my friend to let him know how much he'd enjoyed it; and seventh, when he's in Toronto, Myers stops in from time to time at a small alternative comedy night run by some people I know, and performs and answers questions and, by all reports, acts like a decent, good-natured fellow.

So I approached the VF article with a mix of curiosity and trepidation; while I like a good, thorough celebrity whupping as much as the next person, I wasn't particularly eager to find out that Myers is an unconscionable prick. On the other hand, in the wake of the blow-up over Dieter, and several of Myers's seemingly ill-considered boners (like the whole countersuit fiasco), it didn't seem impossible that might be a dark tale to be told about the monster behind the man. And there may well be such a tale to be told. You just won't find it in the October 2000 issue of Vanity Fair.

The tone of the article is set with the opening anecdote. (Actually, the tone of the article is set on the Contributors page, where Kim Masters, the article's author, is photographed looking like, so help me God, a chastising and disappointed mother.) The piece opens with a story about Brian Grazer, the Imagine executive in charge of Dieter. He runs into Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and, accidentally, Mike Myers and his wife, Robin, at a boxing match in L.A. The meeting is ill-timed, of course, because Imagine has just recently launched a very public lawsuit against Myers for breach of contract. Masters describes the confrontation:

"Grazer didn't see Myers at first. He greeted Katzenberg and his family, and then Spielberg and his wife, Kate Capshaw. At this point, Grazer realized that Myers was next in line. It was awkward, with the lawsuit hanging over the Myers project. But Grazer decided to be polite. To his horror, Myers stared at him coldly and barely returned his handshake. Worse, Myers's wife fixed him with an icy look and declined to extend her hand at all."

So, let's get this straight. The damning evidence here is that Mike Myers barely returned the handshake of a man with whom he was embroiled in a very public and increasingly nasty lawsuit? My God! Myers is barely a handshake returner! What was Grazer expecting? A hug? A noogie? Did Grazer really feel "horror" that Myers "stared at him coldly," as opposed to, one assumes, gripping him to his breast and proclaiming them blood brothers?

As the rest of the article unfolds, Masters makes a case for Myers as (a) a comedic plagiarist and (b) a tantrum-prone control freak. Let's examine the evidence:

The Plagiarist

Masters tracks down several of Myers's old castmates from his days at the Second City in Toronto, one of whom, Dana Andersen, claims that Myers stole the idea for the character of Dieter after playing the sidekick to a similar Andersen character named Kurt. Really, the most surprising thing about this allegation is that Masters wasn't able to turn up three or four more former colleagues to level similar accusations: Trust me, Toronto is rife with them. (There are scores of local comedians who claim to be the progenitors of the Wayne Campbell character.) I have no trouble believing that Myers pilfered elements of his characters from people he's worked with; this is, in my experience, a pretty common occurrence in comedy. But Andersen is not claiming that he created a character named Dieter, that Myers watched him from the shadows, and then stole the schtick whole-hog and rode it to stardom. Rather, he's saying that he created the idea for a snotty German guy named Kurt, and that Myers asked to play his boyfriend, Dieter. And then Myers played Dieter some more on SNL, and never phoned Andersen to invite him to a staging of the show. Does this mean that Myers is not Andersen's best buddy? Sure. Does it mean that Myers's rise to fame was fueled by someone else's brilliance? Uh, no.

A second piece of evidence is even less substantial: Masters reveals that Myers's Dr. Evil "seemed to be almost a precise rendition of an impression of Lorne Michaels that [Dana] Carvey had done for years backstage at Saturday Night Live." Now, if you've ever seen Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy, you'll have seen Mark McKinney's own riff on Lorne Michaels, which seems to be almost a precise rendition of Mike Myers's and, presumably, Dana Carvey's. As Myers himself points out, "[At SNL], everybody does an impression of Lorne Michaels. Dana had one, as did Phil Hartman and pretty much everybody including the receptionist." The crux of Masters's charge is the fact that Carvey's impression included the "pinkie on the mouth," which, of course, became the trademark of Dr. Evil. Now, there would seem to be a substantial difference between stealing a character from someone and using it for your own gain (thereby depriving that person of the opportunity to benefit from their original idea) and "stealing" a hand gesture that was part of an informal, backstage impression of an actual, commonly-mimicked person. But at this point, Masters's accusations have descended into a kind of Talmudic hairsplitting -- it's hard to imagine Carvey himself in a theatre screaming "Hey! That's my pinkie on the mouth!" -- and you start to feel like the person who should be complaining about not getting proper credit is Lorne Michaels himself.

The third example of Myers's creative sticky fingers is barely worth a mention, but here goes: Apparently, "none of his SNL colleagues had been aware" that his character, Simon, who sat in a bathtub and made "drawerings," was based on the lead character in a British TV cartoon Simon in the Land of Chalk Drawings, about a boy who could draw things and make them come to life. This story, like several in Masters's expose, manages to seem both (a) harmless, and (b) dubious. As Myers pointed out, the music used in the sketch was exactly the same as the music from the cartoon. How did SNL end up playing that music if they didn't know it was from a British cartoon show? Did Myers whistle it to them, and claim he'd thought it up on the spot? In any case, having grown up in Canada, I and everyone I knew immediately recognized the Simon character as being drawn from the cartoon (which airs here) and never thought twice about it. I mean, what's Masters point here, exactly? Because, God knows, no one on Saturday Night Live ever does a character that's inspired by another character on TV.

The Tantrum-Prone Control Freak

We'll just list off the juicy parts here: Myers threatened to quit the set of Wayne's World because they had margarine instead of butter on the craft table; Myers was very difficult to deal with on the sets of his various movies; Myers fired his manager because he refused to have a flight to New York that he was on turned back to L.A.

Let's examine them in order:

Complaining about the lack of margarine? Yeah, that does sounds pretty petulant.

Generally difficult to deal with? This I can also believe, if only because I imagine it's true of 90 percent of big-name actors. It bears pointing out, however, the way in which Masters tortures her material in order to present Myers in an unfavorable light. To whit, this story from the set of Austin Powers: "He often became agitated even though the filmmakers made sure to have a cooler filled with lunchmeat on hand at all times, and even though they hired a production assistant to point an air-conditioning tube at Myers whenever he wasn't on camera." Why is Masters juxtaposing these facts? Apparently to suggest that, despite the producers kowtowing to Myers irrational demands, he still refused to be civil. But she has spent the entire article up to this point detailing how concerned Myers is about the quality of his films -- a concern that presumably lay at the heart of the Dieter incident -- so you can only assume that he was becoming "agitated" because of unspecified conflicts over details of the shoot. If he was abusive, then detail the abuse. But what does the constant supply of lunchmeats or the air-conditioning tube have to do with anything? Is Masters suggesting that he should have hidden his agitation as a thank-you to the filmmakers for the stash of bologna?

As for the last story: Fired his manager because he couldn't get his flight turned back to L.A. This is probably the most damning tidbit in the whole piece, because it suggests a Class A Hollywood hissyfit of the type that, well, you wouldn't have expected from Mike Myers. But let's look at the tale more closely:

"Myers told the assistant to his manager, Erwin Stoff, that he wanted to meet with Stoff that day. The assistant said Stoff was on a plane to New York. And as the tale is told, Myers asked, 'Can't he have the plane turned around?' Stoff returned his client's call from the plane and said, 'I don't have that arrangement with American Airlines.' The relationship was effectively over."

First of all, it's possible to read this story as one in which Myers's "turn the plane around" request wasn't entirely serious; after all, even if the man is difficult -- even tyrannical -- he's assumedly not a moron. Surely he wouldn't expect that a plane would actually be turned around midflight. But let's give Masters the benefit of the doubt, and assume she's relaying the story in good faith. "The relationship was effectively over." Here Masters is implying a causal link between two events that isn't supported by the facts, or at least not supported by the facts she's elected to share. Did Myers fire Stoff on the spot? A week later? A month later? Masters wants you to believe that Myers canned his manager because he couldn't get a plane rerouted back to L.A. That may well be true, and if it is, it's a pretty ugly tale. But what she's written only implies that this was the case -- it certainly doesn't prove it, or, what's worse, even state it directly. It's typical of Masters's approach throughout the whole article: She implies, insinuates, and trumps up her prose ("To his horror, Myers stared at him coldly") but doesn't have a whole lot of actual evidence to wave in the air.

Ironically, the best unknown dirt on Myers that Masters unearths actually helped me better understand his stance on Dieter, and consequently made me more sympathetic towards his recent behavior. Masters tells a story about how Myers had toiled on a script for Wayne's World 2 that was based on the 1949 comedy Passport to Pimlico, under the assumption that Paramount could secure the rights to the story. When the studio failed, they had to ditch Myers's script, right before shooting was to start. Myers was reluctant to continue, which is understandable, given that they would have to slap a script together in a few weeks.

In a meeting with Sherry Lansing, the new head of Paramount, Myers said he couldn't make the film. Masters provides this account: "Over and over again, Myers petulantly declared, 'I can't do it. I can't do it. You can't make me.'" At which point Lansing, in the words of an eyewitness, "stretched out her talon and said, 'Let me be very fucking clear. [Paramount Studios C.E.O.] Stanley Jaffe is sitting in a room in New York right now with 15 fucking lawyers. And we've got a hundred-page lawsuit ready to file. You're making this movie, and if you don't make this movie, we're going to sue.'"

Now ask yourself this: If you were Mike Myers, and this had happened to you, and you did end up slapping together a subpar script in a few weeks, and then the movie was a flop -- a career-threatening flop, in fact, as Masters points out -- and then, several years later, you found yourself in a very similar situation, in which a studio was pressuring you into making a movie with a script that you thought was seriously flawed, except this time around you were coming off two huge hits and had an enormous amount of clout, is it unreasonable to think that you would try to avoid making the same mistake twice? And that, using your newfound clout, you would refuse to make the movie before serious revisions were made?

As I said at the start, I'm predisposed to think good thoughts about Mike Myers. He's a funny man. I'm sure he can be difficult, like most comedians and almost all stars. Despite Masters's best efforts, her cooler full of lunchmeats, and her tales of the purloined pinkie, all her article achieved, in the end, was to improve my opinion of Myers, or at least my opinion of the stand he took around Dieter. It's ironic that a magazine whose bread and butter is airbrushed, powderpuff celebrity profiles should falter so badly in this anomalous effort at an expose. Actually, come to think of it, it's not that ironic, or even that surprising.