Mad Man

You guys, seriously: What is it about people named Harry going to costume parties wearing inappropriate swastikas?

First—and still most famously—there was the youthful Prince Harry, who is still trying to live down in the British press (and if this article is any indication, the Jewish one) for misguidedly turning up to a “colonial and natives” theme party (which alone should tell you the kind of people we’re dealing with) in 2005 bizarrely wearing a Nazi Afrika Korps uniform (you have to love the specificity), complete with swastika armband.

And now, 10 years later and roughly 40 years wiser, 90’s heartthrob and former Mad Men star Harry Hamlin arrived at a Halloween party this weekend dressed as the late Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious, complete with cigarette, spiked hair, padlock necklace and—wait for it—a bright red t-shirt with a big black swastika on it. His wife, Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star and infomercial queen Lisa Rinna, accompanied him, dressed in fishnets and leopard-print bra as Mr. Vicious’s notorious paramour Nancy Spungen, who by the way, started life as a nice (if clearly mentally ill) Jewish girl from Philadelphia, making her an excellent person to reference the next time your mother tells you how disappointed she is in you.

Oy. Where do I even begin? I’ll start, I guess, by complimenting Mr. Hamlin on the authenticity of his costume. It’s true that Sid Vicious, a teenage junkie who couldn’t actually play an instrument and who often seemed to not know quite where he was most of the time, did occasionally wear a swastika t-shirt, presumably at the behest of Sex Pistols creator, manager, and provocateur extraordinaire Malcolm McClaren. (McClaren, who was Jewish put the band together from a handful of disreputable fellows who hung around his seminal punk boutique, Sex, which he owned with his then-wife, fashion designer Vivienne Westwood. It always amused me that for all their anarchical tendencies, the Sex Pistols were, in essence, a boy band.)

In his prime, Vicious also wore a variety of other items, including ripped white t-shirts, ripped white t-shirts upon which he had scribbled slogans and symbols, often in his own blood, or simply, his own bare chest, upon which he had done the same. Given this array of costume options, Hamlin’s swastika apparel has to be seen as a deliberate choice. His thinking, I imagine, went something like this: My name is Harry Hamlin, and I’m choosing “Swastika Sid,” not “Trackmark Sid” or “Anarchy Sid” or “Leather Jacket Sid” as my Halloween costume.

So what the hell was Harry Hamlin thinking? In this newly energized PC atmosphere—half the posts on my Facebook page seem to be about whether its “problematic” or not for a cisgendered person to wrongly appropriate the trans experience and identity in order to show up at a bar dressed as Caitlyn Jenner—I wonder if there was a moment when he put on the swastika, frowned at his reflection in the mirror, and called out to Lisa (as she was smearing her eyeliner in the next room), asking: “Honey, are you sure this is a good idea?”

I mean, just think about the context. It’s one thing for Prince Harry to wear a Nazi uniform to a party full of inbred poshos who were as like as not to look at him and say: “Ya, Granny went grouse shooting once or twice with von Ribbentrop, said he was a smashing chap, actually.” But it’s quite another for Hollywood actor Harry Hamlin to go to a Hollywood party in Hollywood (you see what I’m getting at here) and shake hands with various directors and agents and managers and showrunners who he might want to give him a job with a swastika emblazoned on his chest.

Which is why this had to be a conscious choice. He had to know what he was doing. Harry Hamlin put on that swastika just to get a rise out of people. To see how they’d react to such a blatantly suicidal gesture, the precise opposite of anything a sane, image-conscious celebrity would do. You have to hand it to him: that’s a pretty punk rock thing to do. Somewhere, if he can hold his head up wherever he is, Sid Vicious is smiling.

Hamlin and Rinna have since apologized.