Sometime during the mid-1980s, a notorious rumor that Richard Gere (Pretty Woman) allegedly went to hospital to remove a gerbil he had stuck up his own rectum began circulating. The story sounds ludicrous. It is ludicrous. And yet, forty years later, the rumor has never quite died.
So, how did it start? Why did it persist? And is "gerbiling" really a thing? In the aptly and suggestively named Gerbil, a 12-part series produced by The Hollywood Reporter, Allen Salkin dives deep into all of those questions.
Salkin is a veteran journalist, made clear in the opening episode when he talks about being one of the few people who have been on staff at both The New York Times and The New York Daily News. The battle between those two journalistic sensibilities is one of the main animating forces of the podcast. For the most part, at least in the majority of the eight episodes released at the time of writing, it’s the tabloid luridity that wins out.
The funny thing about an hours-long investigation into a rumor like this is that after you hear the grim details described a few times (and they are very grim), they eventually become audio wallpaper. That fact that Salkin’s tone is still full of arched eyebrow innuendo even half way through the series is, frankly, a little grating. And my irritation has plenty of time to build; 12 episodes, which range between 40 minutes to over an hour, is a lot of episodes to dedicate to this rumor. While there is certainly more to it than at first meets the eye (Salkin does excavate details that are worth exploring), Gerbil would undoubtedly be a more engaging podcast at half the length.
The length problem is exacerbated by Salkin’s tendency towards showing off his working, even when that working makes for dull listening. This is particularly evident in episode seven, devoted to ascertaining the earliest mention of the rumor in print. Even at the end of an hour of hearing him phone up people and asking them to recall a minor detail from forty years ago, Salkin still doesn’t have it nailed down. Although the journalistic rigor is admirable, whether we as an audience needed to hear it at such length is another story. The whole episode could have been condensed to a ten minute segment with nothing important lost.
Similarly, while his choice to make himself the main character of his podcast is a valid one, this often translates into an apparent supposition that every thought he had during the investigation is worth sharing. The worst of this transpires when he shares the case notes from his therapist from many years earlier: he disclosed that he felt like a rodent, and today wonders if that’s why he’s so invested in this case. Vulnerability is generally worth encouraging in any kind of storytelling, but here not only is it uncomfortable to listen to, it just adds nothing at all. Like a lot of the worst tangents Gerbil takes, it feels like self-indulgent padding.
What makes this all the more frustrating is that within what’s so far amounted to over six hours of listening time, Salkin has made a number of valuable discoveries. For one thing, the rumor itself did not originate with Gere as its subject but with a Philadelphia news anchor, attaching to a couple of other figures in regional broadcasting before it landed on the Hollywood icon. Covering those early victims, Salkin finds the rumor’s roots in homophobia; while Gere is not gay (or has never publicly come out, anyway), his sexually ambiguous roles in movies like American Gigolo seem to have primed him as an easy target upon which to hang such suggestive whisperings.
Gerbil is always at its strongest when it’s in this star studies mode, delving into Gere’s career of both massive hits and protracted lulls, the aloofness of his persona, and his political activism, attempting to ascertain how the combination of everything left him vulnerable to these lastingly lewd whispers. Yet it seems that whenever we hit on an interesting thread, it’s never too long before we are subjected to another grossly explicit description of "gerbiling," or another tedious, repetitive tangent.
Still, two-thirds of the way through this unwieldy series, whether Salkin’s investigation will lead to any concrete answers remains a stubbornly intriguing question. One thing is for sure: this investigation would be a far more compelling listen if there wasn’t so much of it.
