Celebrities

Warning: This Blog is rated “R”. (Need to do this as I have some readers who have who have told me their children shouldn’t hear bad words.) Oh well, what can I say.

Celebrities

I have long been fascinated with our country’s intense interest in the lives of our chosen. These are people in the worlds of entertainment, sports and politics. At a very young age I learned of celebrities like Heavyweight Champion Jack Dempsey and movie stars like Charlie Chaplin, Tom Mix, Gloria Swanson and so on. They were written about in The Daily News, The Mirror, and most notorious, The Police Gazette. I do remember one Gazette headline, “Crooner Russ Colombo Shot by a Pal?” All the boys in PS 34 thought that was the funniest thing in the world. Fatty Arbuckle, the 350 pound comedian, got on top of some Hollywood starlet and killed her. Now that was almost as much fun as the Colombo thing, but there was that extra zest of sex. We didn’t have a clue what that was about, but we knew it was forbidden fruit.

Than there was the case of Errol Flynn and his encounter with a Starlet on his yacht. In the 30ies and 40ies there were all kinds of law suites that could result from some casual assignation, like “alienation of affection.” This girl friend of Flynn’s sued him for that and so the whole steamy story ended up in the tabloids. The young women described to the judge what happened on the boat. Flynn invited her to come on down to the cabin. Then he got undressed. The judge asked,”Did he have all his clothes off?” “No,” replied the woman, “he kept his shoes on.” Later on in the trial the judge asked Flynn why he kept his shoes on? Flynn replied, “Your honor, you have to be very careful about athletes foot.” Well of course the whole country got a great laugh out of that one. Yes, I know what your thinking, so how come Schrank remembers that so well? I’ll tell you later.

Keep in mind that was all well before television. Radio was just in its infancy. That meant the major source for this stuff came from the tabloids. We would pick it up primarily from our parents or older kids who were reading the tabloids. What was it that made this stuff about celebrities private lives so interesting and engaging?
With the advent of television this kind of celebrity gossip has become a major business enterprise. Which brings me to yes, you guessed it, Tiger Woods. I was sitting in a bar in St Croix. It was sometime around 4.30 and all the blue collar pickup-truck guys were there. The PGA was on the tube and it was Tiger’s first big win. The guys at the bar are pissin’ and moanin’. “Jesus Christ, now the fuckin’ niggers are gonna take over the only white man’s game.” I said, “Well, you got to admit he is one cool golfer.” That of course went nowheres, as I was told how we white folks have lost football, basketball and even baseball, the country’s signature sport. What did impress even the worst of the bar crowd was Tiger’s cool.

So what happened? We seem to have an obsessive need to create these celebrity heroes. We imbue them with all kinds of magical powers. They are not supposed to have any ordinary human foibles. Sports fans buy team jackets and jerseys to wear because, as one guy explained to me, “It makes me feel just like him.” With all this we still have that puritan streak that wants us to think of our heroes as chaste, sincere homebodies. It’s the sex stuff that we really eat up, because all of us have the same desires that we try to tamp down, but so often get the best of us. That’s why I remembered the Errol Flynn story so vividly. So what is going on here?

I need to go back to Walden Pond and Henry David Thoreau, who suggested that “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.” If that was true back in Thoreau’s time how much worse must it be now? Back then there was opportunity to gain some identity through individual effort, to make a living and support a family. The mass society that we live in now has very little room for individuals to become much more than another number in the world of people going to work in the office towers of the city or the assembly lines of the factory. It is in that “desperation” that people try to live another life by creating a closeness with a celebrity of their own choosing. We imbue them with the characteristics we admire and feel uplifted because he or she is us and we are them. The fans made Tiger Woods into somebody he obviously never was. It’s as if he was imagined by his fans into this chaste, clean, cool homebody where the word “cheated” would never be heard. Yes, like in “Home on the Range.”

It’s not that Woods went off the track. It’s his legions of fans who were off the track right along. They needed him to be this pure cool golfer who could show the world how great we are. Now he has behaved like so many who live in quiet desperation that we can no longer abide with him. He has really betrayed his fans by acting like so many of them. He broke that hero mold, so what have we got left. Nothing but that dammed old “quiet desperation.”

Thanks Kate N.H.W.Y.