On the run from the Star Whackers: Randy and Evi Quaid

December 1, 2010 1:55 PM

‘Don’t let up on ’em. Drive ’em off the road. Starve ’em to death. Pull their money out of their bank accounts.’ The colorful, on the lam Randy and Evi Quaid are interviewed and profiled at length in the newest Vanity Fair and Esquire magazines.
posted by item (42 comments total)

“Priuses are deceptively roomy,” drawled Randy, who’s originally from Houston. “We’re tall people, and the legroom is important.”

This is the best viral marketing campaign EVER.
posted by mecran01 at 2:05 PM on December 1, 2010 [5 favorites]

I am fascinated by all of the coverage of these folks, but really think they need help--my fear is that the amount of media attention they're getting might fuel their folie à deux.

Randy Quaid was awesome in Kingpin and the vastly underrated Parents, so I have a soft spot for him.
posted by Sidhedevil at 2:06 PM on December 1, 2010 [1 favorite]

Cocaine is a hell of a drug...
posted by sunshinesky at 2:06 PM on December 1, 2010

Did Joaquin Pheonix publish an inside book on extreme lifestyle publicity stunts, or are the Quaids right?
posted by Liquidwolf at 2:11 PM on December 1, 2010

Anyone ever see that movie Bug? I'm reminded of the whole 'communicable mania' theme.
posted by FatherDagon at 2:11 PM on December 1, 2010 [3 favorites]

I saw them both on the Rick Mercer show here in Canada last week, and the crazy radiated off them strong and hot. Rick, to his credit, treated them relatively gently, but it felt kind of exploitative nonetheless.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 2:11 PM on December 1, 2010

This whole crazy melodrama kinda makes me want to try meth.
posted by BitterOldPunk at 2:12 PM on December 1, 2010 [3 favorites]

A couple of delusional lunatics fleeing imaginary pursuers? I smell a sitcom!
posted by JaredSeth at 2:15 PM on December 1, 2010

Their car, a black Prius, was crammed with stuff—clothes, coats, shoes, papers, a pillow, blankets, and an excitable Australian cattle dog named Doji

Oh wow, if there is a hell, and believe me I know what I'm talking about on this one, it's being trapped in a small car with an "excitable Australian cattle dog" who wants to bark. Mine makes this noise that can best be characterized as "doing the hyena", within a few seconds, every cell in your body wants to explode out the window, away from the sound.

I'd have to be on the run from some pretty scary crazy shit in my head before I'd seriously consider traveling under those circumstances.
posted by quin at 2:15 PM on December 1, 2010 [14 favorites]

Wow. Reading these articles, I don't know whether to feel sorry for them or hope that they sober up and realize all this is a madness of their own making.
posted by Kitteh at 2:17 PM on December 1, 2010 [2 favorites]

I just can't believe this. I mean, a Hollywood couple staying together for more than 20 years? Preposterous!
posted by robocop is bleeding at 2:18 PM on December 1, 2010 [2 favorites]

I'll assume meth-psychosis.
-paranoid delusions
-weight loss
-staying up all night driving
-unexplained loss of money and work absences

They need an intervention.
posted by humanfont at 2:26 PM on December 1, 2010 [3 favorites]

Dr. Drew to the rescue!
posted by elder18 at 2:33 PM on December 1, 2010

Well, I'm glad Evi remembered to bring her wrap-around bikini and thigh-high leather boots.
posted by Mavri at 2:36 PM on December 1, 2010 [5 favorites]

Wow. This is the first I'd heard about this stuff with the Quaids. I really don't know what to think...And it's too late in the day to be able to handle this level of crazy.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:47 PM on December 1, 2010

Back in the day, when things were wilder, we had a little song we would sing in these situations. It went something like this:

na na NA na
na na NA NA
Hey Hey Hey!
Cocaine Psychosis!
posted by vibrotronica at 2:53 PM on December 1, 2010 [2 favorites]

Just want to write Star Whacker somewhere, this seem like a pretty good place.
posted by Keith Talent at 2:54 PM on December 1, 2010

I saw this coming when he was living in that little house in the middle of nowhere and kept wanting to hit Clark up for money....

If I were Chevy Chase, I would change my phone number.
posted by HuronBob at 2:54 PM on December 1, 2010 [2 favorites]

They have the same kind of dog as I do! I don't know what that says about me...maybe she can protect me from the Star Whackers?
posted by ahdeeda at 2:56 PM on December 1, 2010 [1 favorite]

The whole point-and-laugh aspect of this is starting to feel a bit mean and weird to me. I was trying to put the whole "okay, it was kind of funny, but now it's just mocking people with some pretty obvious and serious problems" thing into words, and then I realized it had been said before, and better, by somebody else about somebody else.

Not that I used to be in their shoes, but y'know, the rest of it.
posted by Shepherd at 3:18 PM on December 1, 2010 [4 favorites]

My first thought upon clicking the Vanity Fair link was, "Ew. Really?"
posted by katillathehun at 3:20 PM on December 1, 2010

My first thought was "Hey, his wife is pretty hot." But then I am attracted to crazy.
posted by elder18 at 3:29 PM on December 1, 2010

Finally! An explanation!

...they're pants on head insane. Move along.
posted by lumpenprole at 3:31 PM on December 1, 2010 [1 favorite]

This is also the first I've heard of it...it's kind of a neat love story in a way, to find someone as crazy as you and crazy in the same way as you to go off together into really crazy shenanigans. I'm sure their crazy feeds on each other but I'm glad they found each other.
posted by vito90 at 3:40 PM on December 1, 2010

They love each other, Randy and Evi, desperately. They met when she was his driver on the set of Bloodhounds on Broadway in 1988; they were engaged within weeks. Their love is like fireworks, like language. During their first night in jail in Canada, before they were released and allowed to make their case for staying legally, they stretched out on either side of a shared cement wall and tapped messages to each other through the blocks, all night long. They positioned their bodies so that they could feel each other's heat and energy spilling through the cracks in the mortar.

Whoa.
posted by mistersquid at 3:46 PM on December 1, 2010

Problems began when “Evi became more and more involved, and as that happened it became more and more contentious,” Herrick said. A major issue was Randy’s costume, over which he insisted he had final approval. “He ended up in a very strange costume of [his and Evi’s] creation,” said Herrick. Randy dyed his hair beet red and wore a codpiece the size and shape of an official N.F.L. football. “It was a huge cock,” said Evi. “It was fucking great. It looked like gay Vivienne Westwood.”


I mean when you say you want a woman who has your back, can you say it any better than that?
posted by vito90 at 3:48 PM on December 1, 2010 [1 favorite]

it's kind of a neat love story in a way, to find someone as crazy as you and crazy in the same way as you to go off together into really crazy shenanigans.

The part where you fuck over other people for hundreds of thousands of dollars is a lot less romantic, though.

I mean, unless you dig the whole "Bonnie and Clyde" thing, in which I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.
posted by Sidhedevil at 3:56 PM on December 1, 2010

Anyone ever see that movie Bug? I'm reminded of the whole 'communicable mania' theme.

It's a real thing; it's called folie à deux. Great movie, by the way.
posted by infinitywaltz at 4:07 PM on December 1, 2010

The part where you fuck over other people for hundreds of thousands of dollars is a lot less romantic, though. I mean, unless you dig the whole "Bonnie and Clyde" thing, in which I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.

Bonnie & Clyde fucked over banks, not people. Big difference.
posted by Jon_Evil at 4:31 PM on December 1, 2010

their crazy reminds me of the long tirades of courtney love about the real estate and edward norton and all that. if you get people who are already crazy, and add drugs and fame and money, and then all the leeches and soulsuckers that are spilling out of the woodwork around fame and drugs - well, it's amazing to me really that we don't have more of this.
posted by nadawi at 4:38 PM on December 1, 2010

My first thought was 'crystal meth is a hell of a drug'

I'm going with that.
posted by empath at 4:50 PM on December 1, 2010 [1 favorite]

It's a real thing; it's called folie à deux.

Sounds like a duprass of insanity, to me, but I guess that's just semantics.
posted by Navelgazer at 5:19 PM on December 1, 2010

They will be killed in one of three ways, she says. (She does most of the talking.) She has interrupted the killers practicing. "Staging scenarios," she calls them. Dry runs, rehearsals, blocking for a gruesome play.

Their most likely end, the Quaids believe, will involve knives. Randy will be drugged in his sleep — "They know he has sleep apnea," she says — and Evi will be stabbed to death. Then they will put the knife in his hand. He will wake up and be locked away forever. Or he will kill himself in his terror and grief. The Star Whackers have stolen some of his songs — he writes sad, introspective songs on more crumpled sheets of paper — and the killers will lay one out on the nightstand or the kitchen counter. "Randy's songs read like suicide notes," Evi says. "That's how the cops will read them."

Or they will be hanged together, Randy and Evi, strung up from the rafters in a garage. Another song will surface. It will be ruled a double suicide.

Or they will be found in their car, parked overlooking the steel-gray sea, and they will be found sitting, frozen, hand-in-hand, their insides brimming with a lethal dose of Demerol, administered through Evi's stolen migraine medication. "A pharmacist told me they could put one hundred times the lethal dose in a single pill," she says.

This is either the staging a gruesome movie, three gruesome movies, or the elaboration of a journalist who was bored by the story he was told. Who foresees the setting for their death scene as one "overlooking the steel-gray sea"? Oh, or they could be crazy.

But we'll really bad when they die in one of these three ways. Or we'll feel worse when a terrible album of sad, introspective songs by Randy and Evi Quad is released.
posted by filthy light thief at 5:31 PM on December 1, 2010

the ballad of randy and evi could be done by wilco and billy bragg.

(also, gaga and jay z rule and are in no way in the same shitty group as keith urban)
posted by nadawi at 5:33 PM on December 1, 2010 [1 favorite]

Bonnie & Clyde fucked over banks, not people. Big difference.

The banks Bonnie and Clyde robbed (and item makes the really good point that they far more often robbed small mom-and-pop stores) weren't giant megacorporations like Bank of America--they were local banks, not insured against loss, and their being robbed fucked up the depositors significantly.

Businesses are run by people. They are not actually people themselves (pace the current US Supreme Court), but it's not like they're run by giant lizards from the planet Triton. And especially back in the days of Bonnie and Clyde and their predecessors like the James boys, the majority of banks were little tiny local businesses, so fucking over those banks meant fucking over people pretty goddamned directly.
posted by Sidhedevil at 5:49 PM on December 1, 2010 [5 favorites]

I just remembered that Randy Quaid played a paranoid, conspiracy-theory nut in Ron Howard's The Paper. Life imitates art. (If The Paper qualifies...)
posted by zardoz at 10:17 PM on December 1, 2010 [1 favorite]

The man was a pretty genius comic actor.

Can't tell if his downfall is due to drugs, actual pyschosis, or both.
posted by bardic at 10:41 PM on December 1, 2010

Actually, having now read the whole thing, it looks like (or it's being painted by VF as such) that Evi is the paranoid nut, almost certainly hooked on Demerol and then some, and Randy sounds like a naive kid, not understanding his personal finances and letting his wife string him along in her crazy. The last few paragraphs are pretty telling.
posted by zardoz at 11:18 PM on December 1, 2010 [2 favorites]

They stayed in hotels here at first, keeping on the move, but the hotels began calling each other. Doors were closed to the Quaids. One hotel, a five-star palace downtown, granted them entry, but they were put in room 911. "Come on," Evi says. "That was just mean." They've since relocated.

I'm gathering that waterboarding it ain't.
posted by telstar at 3:49 AM on December 2, 2010

Businesses are run by people...it's not like they're run by giant lizards from the planet Triton.

Oh not where I work.
posted by stormpooper at 6:25 AM on December 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

This story is compelling in a trainwreck kind of way, and I hate to say this but I sort of can't wait to see what happens next. Man, if the articles are accurate, crossing paths with Evi was not a great thing for Randy.

And this must be where I state, without irony or sarcasm, that Quaid was brilliant as the android Bruno in the undeservedly maligned Pluto Nash.

No, it's not a great movie, nor even a good one, but it wasn't that bad, just one of those films that became popular to bash, regardless of what merits it did or did not have. Like *cough* Gigli. Yikes! I'd better quit before I start defending that movie.
posted by 6550 at 8:25 AM on December 2, 2010

The situation looks like a classic cliché, so old it was nearly forgotten. But the crazy here is real, and it's a horror to see lives destroyed and efforts of other artists coming to nothing because someone crazy has managed to gain influence. But I am also puzzled. Why wasn't she unceremoniously tossed out on her ass shown the door the first time she pulled out a videocam at rehearsal?

Randy worked a lot. That's the most solid proof there is that he wasn't a primadonna, and didn't expect life on the set to revolve around his convenience. How did he come to think it was different for his wife?
posted by Goofyy at 8:50 AM on December 3, 2010