Marcia, Marcia, Marcia ... (or, Curtains for Cross?)

Will, o Lord, will there ever be a time when celebrities learn the benefits of keeping their homemade porn under lock and key? (Or maybe, just maybe, not making it at all, or at least destroying it outright once they're, er, done with it?) But then, what would the tabloids or other assorted sleazebuckets do with their time? Still, after the sordid examples of Pamela Anderson, Paris Hilton, Jamie Foxx or Colin Ferrell (or, way back, Rob Lowe - or way, waaaaay back, Jayne Kennedy), you would think that the stars would have gotten the lesson that the nudie pics or film that you make for your own consumption could easily fall into the hands of someone with, say, questionable ethics.

(I'm not counting those stars, usually of the D-or-below-list, who enthusiastically take part in their own debauchery becoming public fodder, usually for profit and profit. And why are those usually the people we don't want to see naked like Tom Sizemore or Screech from Saved by the Bell. Huh?)

But I digress.


The latest victim of the lost porn syndrome is Marcia Cross, the redheaded beauty who plays the painfully neat and repressed Bree Hodge on Desperate Housewives. Bree, of course, would never have naked photos of herself lying around the homestead on Wisteria Lane. Or if she did, she certainly wouldn't have accidentally thrown them in the garbage, potentially for all to see. But that's all fantasy, folks. In real life, Cross or her new husband, Tom Mahoney, or someone in their employ or otherwise seems to have done just that.

According to the New York Daily News (story can be accessed via the above subject line), more than 200 photos of Cross are now in the hands of one David Hans Schmidt, a peddler of celebrity smut of all kinds - some procured legitimately, and some not so much. Not all of the photos are of the R-rated variety, but apparently enough are to get Cross' attention. Among the shots are those of Cross showering outside in the altogether, and Schmidt has quite conveniently said of the flame-haired actress that "the carpet does match the curtains."


Lovely. Class like that is in such short supply these days.

Cross wants her photos back, but Schmidt says that, since they were indeed in the trash, the pictures are no longer hers. And there's probably some validity to his argument, since cops often will wade through a suspect's refuse for evidence and get to keep it on those very grounds. Schmidt, to his "credit," has offered to sell them back to Cross, but apparently his price was too high for Marcia's people, and now the chance of them seeing the light of day are pretty good.

In my mind, both sides have screwed this up, beyond the obvious. Schmidt should have published them or sold them immediately, not allowing Cross to even know about what was going on until it was too late. And in any other situation, Cross should have beaten Schmidt to the punch by making a quickie deal with Playboy.com for a fresh batch of nude shots, thus circumventing Schmidt's unsavory business. (She's pregnant with twins, though, so that option was probably not viable - even if she had even thought seriously about doing it.) So now we're going through this nasty business.

Don't get me wrong - I for one would love to see Marcia Cross nude. But on her terms, not because some glorified pimp is trying to make some blood money off of somebody's mistake. Maybe the up side is that this will finally scare celebs into keeping the skin trade among themselves.

Then again, Paris Hilton still walks the earth.

Note: Of course Schmidt has his own Web site. You'll have to look it up yourself, but I love his stern warning that he will turn in any "snuff film producers and agents" who try to do business with him. Glad to know he cares.