10 Embarrassing Ways Celebs Tried To Regain Lost Fame

Say what you will about Jerry Springer and his trashy talk show, the man was at one point an Ohio politician so honest he admitted to paying a prostitute with a check and put in charge of guarding Fort Knox as an Army Reservist.

No, if you really are digging down to the bottom of the barrel, you have to reach back to Morton Downey Jr., whose only real professional quandary before he rallied against cigarettes when he developed throat cancer was, "Where do I go after being in Predator 2?"

Downey Jr. preceded Springer's talk show by four years and was known for his blustery, throaty scream and goading guests into hitting each other and him with chairs. He pioneered the loudmouth talk show host.

Audiences eventually got tired of watching him tell guests to "zip it", and his ratings began to fall. His on-air behaviour also lost him a lot of advertisers. This was the late '80s, people had standards.

In a last-ditch effort, he came out of a San Francisco airport bathroom with a Swastika on his forehead and claimed to have been attacked by a Nazi. Police never identified a perpetrator, and it's worth noting that the Swastika was backwards like, you know, someone drew it on looking in the mirror.