Reach for the Stars, Again. … Celebrities as fads — here today, gonged tomorrow. [Circa April, 1978]
Celebrity Star Bores
In a world where Telly Savalas speaks and people applaud; all things are possible. I have seen sack dresses. I have met the Captain and Tenille.
A lady told me of a man who took her out one night. He was a handsome, fashionable man. They ate at a Chinese restaurant, and he talked of the Five Flavors. After dinner they returned to his apartment, where he played a Linda Ronstadt album and invited the lady to share his Thai stick. Later he played a Chick Corea album and mixed vodka gimlets, as only he knew how. She browsed through his books. There were books about films and books about orgasms and books by people with Gallic names. Between two large volumes was a paperback edition of Are You Running with Me, Jesus?
“Someone must have laid that on me as a goof,” he grinned tentatively.
She rifled through the pages. A photograph fell to the floor. It was a picture of him, proud and crewcut, doing the Watusi in madras shorts.
His hand trembled, and he never called her again.
In the silence of this poor soul’s penance there was truth: the wages of gaucherie are death. To be trendy, you must be wary. Burn your Che posters behind you; scatter your witty T-shirts to the wind. There is no defense from the sneer within. You saw it in the Voice? Yes, but that was months ago. Think twice, frail earthling, before you next eat frozen yogurt. And answer me this: What ever happened to Quadraphonic?
Now the loud adoration like an ocean in their ears. Now the money and nice metaphors like petals at their feet. But soon they will be taken over the lea, to that place where Joey Heatherton reclines and symbolic poets seek redress, where Connie Francis and Eldridge Cleaver maunder in the wind. Over there, by the tulip tree: Jack Paar and Erica Jong embrace ziplessly. There even the sunsets are bland.
Soon Farrah Fawcett-Majors will stand before the mirror and, like Schopenhauer, wonder why. A bionic hand will reach out to console her, as her pennyweight breasts dwindle in the dusk. The twelve-year-old boys who discard her will recall her in later years. “Farrah. Oh, I remember her. She was the one with the freeze-dried hair and the paralytic grin. Seemed like if you stuck an icicle up her ass, it wouldn’t melt.”
But have faith, Farrah, for there are possibilities to be explored. Perhaps, like Twiggy, you can make an album of modern Countryand-Western music.
Good-bye, Fonzie. It is sad to see the world’s oldest teenager fall from grace. Yes, we know all about it. There is a person in there, a gifted actor, Henry Winkler. Yes, we know all about it. Russ Tamblyn said the same thing.
They waken with a jolt and sniff anxiously at their armpits for the scent of obsolescence. Orson Welles makes Citizen Kane and is embraced and hallowed by the handmaids of culture. Days pass, and he discovers that he has become NBC’s court fatso, shuttling his bulk and his airs from “The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast” to “Hollywood Squares.”
It happens so fast. I encountered two young girls browsing through the bins of a Los Angeles record store last year. One girl held out a copy of Magical Mystery Tour and called to her friend, “Hey, look! Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings.”
Fame, said Matthew Arnold in one of his more lurid moments, is a hussy. Mark Spitz, I am sure, would agree. Where is Carroll Baker, who, in 1964, was to be the hottest hunk of Hollywood flesh since Marilyn Monroe? I am sure that I saw her comparing six-pack prices in an Altadena supermarket in 1973, but I may be mistaken. Of the current whereabouts and doings of the Singing Nun, I dare not even hint.
Joseph Heller would have been wise if he had never published Something Happened. He could have gone on forever as the brooding-genius author of Catch-22. Instead, he has been turned away as a one-shot writer, a sort of literary Petula Clark. In his New England woods, J.D. Salinger smiles, humming “Downtown” as he endorses his royalty checks.
Not even revolutionaries are immune. The next time you see Bernadette Devlin — if you ever see her again — she’ll probably be bouncing fatso jokes off Orson Welles on “Hollywood Squares.” Jerry Rubin is just another short person with a receding hairline. Six will get you ten that Huey Newton isn’t even on Leonard Bernstein’s Christmas-card· list anymore. Mark Rudd gave himself up last summer in New York, but few could recall what for. If Bernadine Dohrn had a party, would Angela Davis come? Does Meyer Kahane do alterations? If Timothy Leary tries to fuck with your molecular structure, tell him to take a bus.
I sincerely hope that Lance Loud is doing well, and that he is hard at work on his craft. Remember, Lance: Ars longa, vita brevis.
Sometimes a person’s spiritual essence falls from vogue, and this situation is truly pathetic. Be aware, born-again putti of all denominations, that you have had your day. And with you, the lapdogs of est. To see and hear Valerie Harper and Cloris Leachman on “Dinah!” as they tell rapturously how est changed their lives is an experience not unlike watching refried beans coagulate on someone’s face during lunch. Next time you feel the urge to be reborn, please do so somewhere else. Do it over the lea, in that place of primal screams and poodle-faced maharishis and Dianetics. Anyone who has ever referred to How to Be Your Own Best Friend as “The Book” should be forced to read aloud from Kiss Me Deadly under threat of severe hostility displacement. Little mercy shall be shown, for it is believed that anyone found underlining in Passages deserves his fate.
Do not invest heavily in punk rock. Those New York groups with the Tzara-like names are losing what little power they had. In two years, all that will remain of punk rock will be a handful of embarrassing memories and Handsome Dick Manitoba of the Dictators. He will enjoy a career more illustrious than the combined careers of Louis Prima and Jim Morrison. C.B.G.B. will be reclaimed by the Bowery and become once again the great skid-row bar it was until 1970.
Another musical trend that would be wise to begin checking its pulse is that part of country music that consists of stale metaphorical references to half-warm beer (usually Lone Star), cowboy hats, pickup trucks, faded jeans, and your warm and tender body close to mine. Surely these people can find day jobs. Deportation to 1967 is imminent. Jerry Lee Lewis will rise again. (Think about it, darlin’.)
No one will ever again utter the words roots, thrust, aesthetic, macho, rip-off, or orientation. Nothing will ever again be referred to as the pits. Those little mechanical people who read the news on television may be forced by acts of terrorism (picture your local TV newsman; now picture him bald) to stop speaking that gray-cardboard English taught at the College of Android Knowledge. No one will ever again relate to anything. There will be no more phenomena.
Perhaps we have already seen the last of those movies that portray microcosmic life at the razor’s edge of Los Angeles. We will not suffer being told again that Los Angeles is a dark, glowing metaphor of something eternal and indomitable in the American soul. Robert Altman will move to the great Northwest, because people can breathe there. Jack Webb, the true film auteur of Los Angeles, will regain power.
There will be no more Third World Art — whatever it was to begin with. Notice to all environmental artists: Get a job.
Stay away from the work of all hip novelists. Hip novelists are people who cannot write well, so they write hip, even though they’re usually not hip or even hep. The typical hip novel is one that seems to have been written several years ago but wasn’t. Burn your copy of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues while there is still time. Or hide it. (Wherever you keep your beatnik poetry will do fine.) Also stay away from all hip journalists, previously known as new journalists. These are people who think The White Negro was an important work. They favor such titles as “The New Numbness” and travel in packs. Their consciences give off an odor, which perceptive noses can detect.
When a trend dies, a new one takes its place. We eat goldfish today, carry Free Speech placards tomorrow, wear. safety pins the day after that. When a cultural hero wakes up, looks in the mirror, and, much to his sadness, sees Sammy Davis, Jr., there is a new hero to take his place. (How else is one to explain not merely the success but the very existence of John Denver?) They come; they go. In the calm and secure center of all these metamorphoses, all this flux, are the mercenaries of hype, those whose sacred and lucrative duty it is to breed and nurture and testify for the vogues and heroes of the day.
These are the people who told us in 1968 that the Boston sound (or, as at least one of them had it, the Boss-Town Sound) was going to be the next big thing in rock ’n’ roll. These are the people who told us in 1972 that Jonathan Livingston Seagull would change our lives. These are the people who gave us Pat Boone and heavy metal. These are the people who gave us monotheism. They have been with us always, and they always will be. They were there when man first raised a Hula Hoop to the northern light and saw that it was good. They will be there to hand out two-drink tabs when the first stage is built on the moon. They are the brokers, the keepers.
“Lou Reed, down three and a quarter. Ralph Nader, up an eighth. High-fiber diets, no change. If Steve Martin hits ten, throw a press party.”
One girl held up a copy of Magical Mystery Tour and called to her friend, “Hey, look! Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings.”
Publicity is stranger than fiction. The mercenaries of hype will look you in the eye and tell you that they would still rave about Roy Clark even if he weren’t a client. Mystified, they will ask how it possibly could be that you don’t want to have lunch with Marvin Hamlisch. They will cast pity upon you, wondering aloud how a writer could pass up a chance to essay the scented sea that is Nick Nolte’s soul. They will obscenely expose their Master Charge cards and entice you to follow them into clubs where sensitive young creatures strum guitars and rhyme abstract nouns.
They begin to infest your days, your hours, your minutes on earth. They will circulate your name and number among their eerie race. One morning a new publicist, one fresh from the miasma of Ur-publicity, will call to tell you that Bo Diddley is into some heavy new trips. You express a morbid interest, and already it is too late. The next thing you know, you are locked in a room without windows and Mr. Diddley is telling you all about it. To paraphrase Milton: One can run, but one cannot hide. You might escape Bo Diddley today, but what of tomorrow and the impending pain of drinks with some human you have been excitedly told is the Rod McKuen of Scotland?
I recall being woken one wintry morning by the ringing of my phone. A fast, squeaky sound, like talons of ice, came to me with disarming intensity. It was a voice.
“Bloontz is dying to meet you,” the voice said.
These words struck my sleepy mind as being quite supernatural. With as much fear as distaste, I whisked away the squeaky voice, as one might whisk away a menacing insect. On two occasions after this, I experienced little nightmares in which pale ectomorphs closed around me in a stifling ring of publicity flesh, chanting endlessly that slobbering, bloated, fecal syllable, Bloontz.
A year later, in a different city, in a chilly room filled with tables and large, condescending avocado plants, a publicist approached me from the larboard, took my wrist, and said, “Bloontz would still like to meet you, darling.” The last I heard of Bloontz was in the form of a telegram: PLEASE COME TO BLOONTZ PARTY.
When the short publicist and I next met, I spoke first. “I am ready. Take me to Bloontz.” I breathed Tullamore Dew and hostility upon the head of the short person.
“Forget Bloontz,” the short person said. “I’m doing Neil Sedaka now. You’ll love him; he’s one of those rare people.”
“But I want Bloontz.”
Sloughed off by the Polack joke of pop, Bloontz has not survived, but the publicist has — undying, sovereign, short.
Walk carefully in the forest of vogue, lest you be found with Bloontz on your hands, flagrante delicto. Within every fiery idol is a Frankie Avalon waiting to get flushed down the bowl. Make one wrong move and you’ll end up in a work shirt at a Free Tom Hayden rally, or fettered to a buck-fifty seat at a Chad Mitchell hootenanny, or engaged in dialogue with a viable cross section. Where are Mort Sahl’s fans, Eugene McCarthy’s supporters? And what have they done to Yoko Ono, who only wanted to sing? The implications are fearsome.
You can act cool. You can say that marijuana just puts you to sleep, and that you haven’t read a book in seven years. You can say that you don’t listen to anything but Bach and the Doors. You can say that you judge movies by their camera angles. You can say whatever you will, but in the end you’ll slip, and Marshall McLuhan won’t be there to catch you. Just keep telling yourself, as you walk through the valley of the shadow of gauche: Marilyn Monroe died for my sins.
There is something beyond cool, however. Bad taste is timeless and the best way to avoid being caught culturally out-ofsync. Get in touch with your preternatural slob-soul. Next time a friend sniffs a wine cork at dinner, tell him that he looks stupid. Use the word scumbag at your next job interview. When people around you talk about movies, tell them that you heard Aldo Ray’s got a new one coming out. And, of course, do the Watusi.
To be honest, we did not know exactly what to expect when this assignment dropped into the queue. Whatever we expected, though, it was not “wages of gaucherie are death.” … Granted, things have changed as much in the literary world over the past 50 years as they have everywhere else, but where we sit today seems less like evolution and more like interstellar travel. … In fairness, this does happen to be an article about people and fads that were presumably forgotten in 1978, but if anyone tried this writing style these days, our copy editor might throw books at them — if our copy editor could find a physical book anywhere.
For those of you that did not bother to look it up, “ars longa, vita brevis” means roughly, “Art is long. Life is short.” … at least according to an official literary source. It sure does not seem like much in the official literary category happens much on social media, right? … Maybe if celebrity-types tried that they’d last longer … again.
