Not Exactly What I Had in Mind (12 page)

A
CELEBRITY IS SOMEONE
distinguished for having been heard of by a whole lot of people. Wherever a whole lot of people get together, there have to be plenty of conspicuous, plainly lettered signs posted to keep them all from wetting their pants and falling over one another. That’s what a celebrity is: a sign saying
I HAVE BEEN TELEVISED. YOU WANT MY AUTOGRAPH
. The only difference is that a celebrity
causes
people to wet their pants and fall over one another. Even if he is Charles Nelson Reilly.

Fair enough, I guess. Only I remember a time when celebrities, like major-league baseball players, were fewer in number and you
knew
them. Maybe they weren’t particularly accomplished, but they had done something more than garble their lines on purpose and grin more or less engagingly so as to appear on “Foul-ups, Bleeps, and Blunders.” Maybe they were press agents’ creations, but at least they felt obliged to display a measure of personality, however trumped up. They worked at fame — disrobed at openings, threw drinks on other celebrities, wore trademark toupees, stole wives.

But over the past decade or so, a celebrity has become someone whose name and/or face you have seen more than twice while flipping through magazines in the checkout-counter line or switching from channel to channel, searching in vain for intrinsic interest. You don’t really care who they are, but — like certain French verbs when you are trying to satisfy your foreign-language requirement — they have popped up often enough that you feel vaguely as if you probably ought to know them.

Take the case of Julio Iglesias. I could not pick Julio Iglesias — by his face or by his voice — from a boatload of soccer players, and yet his name is lodged in my consciousness. Because he paid to have it lodged there.

Two years ago, Iglesias — a megastar Spanish crooner with a huge following in South America — regretted deeply that North America did not know him from a bale of hay. So he paid Rogers and Cowan, a p.r. megafirm, something like two million dollars to make him mega above the Rio Grande. America’s Next Lover was what he wanted to be.

I don’t love him. But I do know, and so do major numbers of other gringos, that he sang a duet with Willie Nelson on the Country Music Association awards show last year. (Andy Warhol’s prophecy that eventually everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes may never pan out, but it does appear that everyone will in time sing a duet with Willie Nelson.) I don’t know whether or not Rogers and Cowan arranged that performance, but I have heard the record that resulted when Willie and Julio went into the studio to do the song they sang on TV that night.

And when I heard it, I cried, “No, Willie! Sing a duet with Rosemary Clooney! Sing a duet with Freddy Fender! Sing a duet with any number of persons who, while working as many tough rooms as you have, became more good than celebrated! Do not sing a duet with this road-show Engelbert Humperdinck!”

But the thing had been done. Julio Iglesias was a giant in the industry.

It is no new development that fame is more lucrative than workmanship. But there used to be more of a connection between the two. It also used to be that when a President looked at the nation from the television screen, part of his expression said, “Well, hell, I’m doing the best I can. But being President is
hard,
goddamn it.” Presidents strove to be real. Now we have a President whose forte is a knack for simplified celebrity.

In its tenth-anniversary issue,
People
magazine picked the top celebrity of each year from 1974 through 1983. The first was Richard Nixon. The last was Ronald Reagan. I would not choose either man as America’s Sweetheart, but Nixon achieved his apotheosis through dedicated scrabbling, hard-earned governmental expertise, and profound character flaws. Reagan is a kind of logo, who knows as much about how the nation or the world functions as Betty Crocker knows about baking.

And yet Reagan works, in the thespian sense. He communicates serenity, because he isn’t thoughtful enough to have any shame. He believes in his good-guy role, so why should he question himself? He was not ruffled when he called his own dog by the wrong name in front of the dog and reporters. That is what I call your definitive tinsel figure: a person who feels that he can afford, psychologically, not to know his own dog. Eventually such a person reveals greater gaps in his knowledge. He feels safe in assuming, for instance, that the Nazi Holocaust has pretty much blown over.

Yet Ronald Reagan represents abiding values to millions of people. He shrugs and grins and doesn’t put himself out, and he is the most powerful man in the world. He
must have
paid his dues, because there he is. I would call it voodoo ascendancy, except that voodoo
gets down.
Celebrities today just loom large, like parade floats.

And yet I think more and more people are asking, “Who do celebrities think they are, anyway?” Celebrities today seem monumentally richer and more familiar. You’d think that a celebrity would feel obliged to be amazing, or at least colorful, but too many of them are content with being sufficiently famous that they don’t have to be interesting. So who needs them?

“What I want to know,” says my friend Jim Seay, the poet, “is how come every day it says in the paper that today is Bill Bixby’s birthday. Or Tom Jones’s. Or Loni Anderson’s. How come it never says today is my mother’s birthday? Or one of my uncles’? Or — I’ve got sisters, too. How come it never says it’s one of their birthdays? That’s what I’m interested in. I don’t
care
if it’s Tom Jones’s birthday.”

Seay comes from a county in Mississippi where the paper will have a picture of Mrs. Rainie Hazelrigs, who has grown a particularly large vegetable, and another one of Newland Fobes, who has killed three great big snakes. Mrs. Hazelrigs and Newland will be pointing to what they have grown or killed: the reasons for the pictures. Celebrities, to get their pictures in the paper, don’t have to have done anything. They can just be standing there.

Today’s celebrity is someone who has never allowed TV cameras into his home before, but he is making an exception this time, for “PM Magazine.” Here’s some good footage of him fixing himself a salad, just like a normal individual. Today’s celebrity is someone who is a very private person, really, who is uncomfortable with all the glamour and acclaim. Prefers simple pleasures, like ironing. Any normal person who said he or she liked ironing would seem crazy. But celebrities get
credit
for liking to iron. I want you to read this from a recent story about Jackie Onassis in
People:

She eschews bodyguards and entourages and sometimes travels alone on Doubleday business. “I walk fast,” Jackie explained. On a trip to Paris, she registered at the Hotel Crillon as “Mrs. Lancaster.” She met photographer Deborah Turbeville for a tour of the dusty back rooms at Versailles, which Turbeville later photographed for the 1981 book
Unseen Versailles.
“One time she leaned out of the limo window to ask directions,” says Turbeville. “She didn’t cringe in the car, making a big deal about it, like ‘No one should see me, I’m Jacqueline Onassis.’”

Well, hell, most people would feel unreasonably privileged to be able to afford to register at the Hotel Crillon as anybody. Most people eschew bodyguards and entourages without even thinking about it, and not because bodyguards and entourages don’t walk fast enough for them, either. Personally, if I had an entourage, I’d say, “Listen, y’all, I’m going to pick up the pace now,” and if they couldn’t keep up, I’d find me an entourage that could.

Now, I will say this: the way
People
puts it, it sounds as if Jackie Onassis
toured through the palace of Versailles in a limousine.
If she did, well, okay, that is interesting. My hat is off to anybody who would ride in an automobile of any kind right up the steps into a palace. My friends Slick Lawson, Susan Scott, and Greg Jaynes and I never did that, but we did close the castle of Versailles one night. We lurked around, hoping we’d get locked in, so we could sleep over in Marie Antoinette’s bed. That wouldn’t have been as interesting as tooling down the back halls in a big old long black car, but it would have been worth telling about if we’d managed to do it. But some Frenchmen made a sweep through the castle before locking up, and they made us leave.

I don’t think Mrs. Onassis actually got limoed from room to room at Versailles, though (saying, “Driver, that looks like an interesting torture chamber; pull over there”). I think what
People
means is that Jackie Onassis stuck her head out of a limo and asked how to get to Versailles. Actually, as I remember, the roads are pretty well marked. In fact, the way the franc is now, it’s a surprisingly cheap cab ride from Paris to Versailles. I know because Slick, Susan, Greg, and I missed the tour bus that night and took a cab back. I think it was just about twenty dollars, which split four ways is not bad at all. But nobody saw fit to write us up for getting a good deal like that. I have mentioned it myself a number of times, because I welcome the opportunity to let people know that I’ve been to France. Because it gives me a feeling of being snazzy. And people realize that I am trying to get them to help me feel snazzy, so they don’t look impressed. A celebrity, though, can stick her head out of a limo in France and people will rush to regard it as just-an-ordinary-Joe behavior, which is to say, another star in her crown.

Incidentally, according to
People,
Jackie Onassis recently “scored a major publishing coup by signing up Michael Jackson to write his memoirs.”

Jackie K. Onassis signs Michael “Beat It” Jackson. All right! We’re talking
elements.
That’s like the Hydrogen Sisters’ getting on the horn to Dr. Oxygen and saying, “Let’s make water.” The only thing is, do you think there is an actual book here? I mean even an actual nonbook? And if there is, do you think Michael Jackson is going to write it? I believe he could
sing and dance
his memoirs, and I would pay to see him do it, but I don’t see how it could take him very long. How old is he, nine? Even if he were Joan Collins’s age, I have an inkling he would be, as a memoirist, no Joan Collins.

Of course, I’ve heard of celebrities, in the sports world, who never even read their autobiographies. Just went over the pictures carefully. I talked to somebody the other day who had talked to a photographer who had taken pictures of Michael Jackson. The photographer had wondered what Michael Jackson would be like, between pictures. He reported that between pictures, Michael Jackson just stood there, with one glove on.

Which is fine with me. Michael Jackson puts out when he’s on-camera and keeps to himself when he’s off. That’s the way an icon ought to be. I don’t want him telling us what he’s really like. The next thing you know, Jackie Onassis will be signing up the Mona Lisa to write her memoirs. “I remember one day Da Vinch — I called him Leo Da Vinch, we would kid like that, he was just really very mellow — said to me, ‘M.L. …’”

Can you believe there is a TV show called “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous?” Actually, the life-style of the rich and famous consists of appearing as themselves on television. When they aren’t appearing on “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” they are appearing on “$25,000 Pyramid” or “Celebrity Hot Potato.” Can you believe there’s a game show called “Celebrity Hot Potato?” Lainie Kazan and Jan Murray were scheduled recently. I have never watched “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” but I know what the celebrities do on it. They talk about how busy they are (busy appearing on shows like “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”), so busy they hardly have time to just kick off their shoes and throw a couple of mahogany table legs on the fire, or maybe a couple of bodyguards, and relax like everybody else.

I think celebrities ought to have second thoughts about trying to make a virtue out of being like everybody else. Celebrities can lose their sheen, just like everybody else. Recently, I heard about a guy who got thrown into the drunk tank and tried to get out by exclaiming loudly that he played guitar with a big country-music star, which was true.

Finally, he got somebody’s attention. A jailer went back and looked at him through the bars and said, “You really play guitar with Doowayna Wheatstraw [not her real name]?”

“Yep,” said the guy.

The jailer looked at him for a minute. “I fucked her maid,” the jailer said, and then he walked away.

O
UT OF 104 PEOPLE
in town here, just one’s not famous: Hugh Odge.

Hugh says he doesn’t mind; he says he wouldn’t want the life of a Michael Johnson.

“Of a who?” we ask.

“You know. The one they set fire to. Radio musician.”

“Jackson?”

“No, I know it’s Michael something.”

“Michael Jackson.”

“I wouldn’t want all the screaming.”

Hugh, he’s something. Just takes not being famous in his stride.
People
magazine was going to do a story about Hugh: “One in a Hundred — A Town’s Sole Non-Celeb Knows Who He Is.” But Hugh said no, he wouldn’t be interviewed.

Different ones are famous for different things. Ordway Peary, you know, the ball lightning picked him up and flung him through a window of First Redeemed Church into Bethany Sweal’s open coffin while she was being funeralized, which of course made her famous, too, but she didn’t get any chance to enjoy it, even though Ordway startled her out of what it transpired must’ve been just a catalytic state, I think they said it was. They never did find out how she got into it. But even though Ordway startled her out of it, well, put yourself in her shoes. When she came to, in a casket with a man who looked familiar but was sooty all over and had his clothes, eyebrows, and hair singed off and little bits of stained glass and lilies stuck to him, why she had a heart attack and died. Bethany, you know, never married.

Ginger Creekmore, last year when she was nine, was the one wrote a letter to the President saying she knew he had the interests of the Free World at heart in some cute way. I forget how she worded it, but he read it out loud on national TV and praised her by name, and then she got interviewed and said she wanted to grow up and be the person who operates the electric chair someday, so I guess the press had a heyday with that. You know how the press will do.