Rick's December Tirade
Rare Bird
I spotted her across a wide reflecting pool at Middleton Place, a
South Carolina plantation known for its resplendent
eighteenth-century gardens. She sat there motionless, over a hundred
feet away, with her back toward me -- so I lifted my official
Audubon Society binoculars for a closer look.
Peering through the eight-power lenses, I was able to pick out a
few vague field marks but still couldn't make a positive
identification. Stumped, I finally broke down and questioned the
others who had gathered on my side of the pool.
"What are we all looking at?" I asked.
It was Martha Stewart, they said. The Doyenne of Domesticity, the
Empress of Entertaining, the Fairy Queen of Festivity, the Godmother
of Gardening -- call her what you will, the woman invites regal
epithets -- had journeyed here, to this very place where I myself
had journeyed, to film a commercial for Kmart. Her technical crew
had been spraying the grass and hedges with artificial snow, while a
machine that looked like an oversized hairdryer belched swirling
flakes through the balmy subtropical air.
A small entourage of twentysomethings, oppressively chic in their
dark sunglasses and beige clothes, draped themselves casually around
their leader, who wore a powder-blue sweater and denim jeans. The
alpha-female turned her head to one side; it was Martha, all right.
Still ripely handsome in her late fifties, fresh from the triumph
of a stock IPO that had made her the richest woman in the republic,
Ms. Stewart sat broad-beamed in her little movie-set chair. Her
smartly bobbed hair glittered in the slanting sunlight like the gold
that Rumpelstiltskin spun from straw. (Martha probably would have
used flax, a softer and more supple fiber.) The woman who had
brought class to the masses, who had built herself a multimedia
empire out of decorative centerpieces made from acorns, gestured
quietly to one of her young acolytes as I peered through my
binoculars.
Surprised but not entirely ashamed by my abject
celebrity-fixation, I continued to peer. What was it about the
allure of the famous that made for such compulsive viewing? Why was
I gawking? Why, on a vintage fall day in the Confederacy, was I
wasting the magic hour when the sun sinks low in the sky and fills
the world with rosy gold light, to stare at a woman seated in a
chair? A fully clothed woman of advanced middle age. With her back
toward me, yet. From the way I gripped my binoculars, you'd think I
had just spotted a long-billed curlew or a purple gallinule.
As a professional cynic and a scoffer at the rich and famous, I
should have sniffed at the proceedings and walked away. But some
strange and elemental force kept me right where I was, by the edge
of the reflecting pool, watching Martha Stewart's billion-dollar
backside.
Shouldn't I have snickered at the surreal notion that Martha
& Co. would travel down to South Carolina to create a winter
tableau for Kmart? I'll admit I sneered at the faux-snow and
self-important young underlings, but the woman herself commanded
serious attention. After all, I had seen that earthy blonde face --
a face that mingled mature womanly sense with a dash of sly
sensuality -- on innumerable book jackets, in commercials, on the
Today Show back in the days of Bryant Gumbel. This was no celebrity
du jour; Martha Stewart was here to stay, a stout perennial among
the gaudy annuals.
Like Walt Disney and Hugh Hefner, Martha belongs to a small
circle of cultural eminentoes who have invented a personal
dreamworld and sold it to the public. In her case, that dreamworld
is the idealized country homestead of the vanishing upper-middle
class WASP, made suddenly accessible to millions who had never
consumed a watercress sandwich or set foot in an Episcopal church.
Even if not one woman in a hundred actually follows her
instructions for making festive centerpieces from acorns, they buy
her vision. They secretly want to BE Martha Stewart, with her classy
good looks and Connecticut manners, her gentlewoman-farmer's home
and voluptuous gardens, her limitless energy and knack for doing
creative things with gourds. She celebrates the perfectible life --
a perfection measured in fluffy souffles and strategically placed
dried-flower arrangements. She persuades her fans that Marthahood
lies within their grasp, and they believe.
Her zeal is compelling and possibly compulsive. If she were a
witch, she'd flavor her cauldron with mulled wine before tossing in
the eye of newt. If she were a vampire, she'd be decorating her
coffin with freshly gathered sprigs of mint. If she ran a
bawdy-house, you can bet she'd stuff all the pillows with fragrant
wildflower potpourri. What a Midas touch the woman has! What
maddening attention to detail! What feverish and all-consuming
enterprise! How does she do it? How does anyone? Why doesn't she
give herself a rest and order a Big Mac with fries?
Her achievement seems all the more impressive when you realize
that this embodiment of rarefied WASPdom is actually an Eastern
European ethnic gal (some accounts say she's Polish, others list her
background as Czech) who grew up lower-middle class in the urban
spillway of northern New Jersey. She worked as a model to put
herself through Barnard, became a stockbroker on Wall Street,
started a catering business and began to write. Like Archie Leach
transforming himself into Cary Grant, she created a fabulous persona
for herself and eventually took up residence there. It worked; it
felt right; it was, as she likes to say, "a good thing."
When F. Scott Fitzgerald observed that "the very rich are
different from you and me," he might just as easily have been
talking about celebrities. They ARE different. And Hemingway might
have replied, "Yes, they're more famous." For all their
fame and wealth, celebrities like Martha Stewart are still
flesh-and-blood creatures, born with two legs, two lungs, a
gall-bladder and a spleen. They need water and oxygen to survive.
They're invariably mammals. Like the rest of us, they're descended
from apelike creatures that prowled the ancient African plains.
True enough, but there was more than a reflecting pool separating
Martha Stewart from the curious onlookers at Middleton Place that
day. What is it, other than their fame, that makes celebrities
different from you and me?
Martha Stewart might have a finer mind than most of us, but the
majority of celebrities would be hard-pressed to break 800 on their
verbal and math SATs combined. If you need convincing, just watch
the next Grammy Awards telecast.
Martha Stewart might be more pulchritudinous than most, with her
tawny skin, warm-dark eyes and half-moon smile. But beauty is no
guarantee of celebrity; just ask any of the also-rans in the Miss
America pageants of the past eighty years.
Talent helps, and Ms. Stewart owns more than her share. But watch
almost any newly minted TV sitcom, subtract the laugh track, and
you'll wonder how most of these agreeably nondescript folks made it
past their first auditions. Any talent beyond the ability to attract
consumers for the sponsors' products amounts almost to a liability.
These mini-stars are essentially the people we'd like to be -- or at
least the people the entertainment industry ASSUMES we'd like to be:
glib, blandly good-looking, smartly dressed, well-adjusted,
oversexed, dripping with irony, surrounded by like-minded cronies,
savvy but not cerebral. And we could be even more like them if we
bought the cars and colas we see on their shows.
So how are they different? Do the celebrated ones possess some
internal moral compass that points them toward greatness... a
nobility and firmness of character that attracts legions of inspired
followers? Of course I jest. There are no great people today, only
famous ones. Our media explode with names, thousands of them --
overpromoted, overhyped, oversold, over and over again.
That overexposure is the key. Celebrities today benefit from the
vast hype machine that transforms minor competence into major
acclaim. Talk shows, reviews, tabloids, magazines, websites and
other forms of infotainment continually promote their careers free
of charge. Rolling down the slopes of publicity, little snowballs
gather more snow.
We begin to recognize the names after we see them in print half a
dozen times; then we connect the names to the faces. After reading
about a starlet named Jennifer Love Hewitt, we finally SEE Jennifer
Love Hewitt. We're impressed that we've seen a face we've read
about, so we read more about her. We're hooked; we watch her new
show. A celebrity is hatched. The mildly famous become famous; we're
looking at yet another example of that disturbingly inegalitarian
Biblical motto, "to him that hath shall be given."
Do they deserve their accolades and Jacuzzis, these beneficiaries
of hype? Everyone who does good work deserves accolades, if not
Jacuzzis. But where's the equivalent of "Entertainment
Tonight" for first-rate accountants, editors, biochemists,
advertising copywriters and high school geometry teachers? They get
their periodic pats on the back within their professions, but nobody
outside their field knows their names. We don't use binoculars to
peer at an award-winning chemical engineer. Even if we knew that he
was a renowned chemical engineer within his field, we still wouldn't
watch him. His name and face haven't been officially validated by
the media. He's just a garden-variety fowl.
Celebrities are the rare birds of the social landscape. During
our daily meanderings, most of us see nothing but the usual
middle-class robins or proletarian sparrows. A Martha Stewart
sighting surely ranks right up there with a great grey owl, if not a
bird of paradise.
On the far side of the reflecting pool at Middleton Place, it was
time for the cameras to roll. Martha was going through her paces,
outfitted with a scarf and woolen hat, strolling past a snowblown
tree and back again, again and again. Silently, mechanically, with
an air of almost grim determination. Take one, take two, take three.
This couldn't be much fun for her.
At "take nine" I realized that daylight was fading --
and that this back-and-forth strolling could go on forever. I wanted
to drive down to a nearby sea island and glimpse the savage beauty
of a wild beach in November, so I turned my back on Martha and her
twentysomethings, and walked to my car. I never heard her utter a
word.
We're obsessed by our celebrities, but fame is a famously
fleeting thing. Read these names and ask yourself if they mean
anything to you: Florence Lawrence, Mabel Normand, Wallace Reid,
Richard Barthelmess, Vilma Banky, Henry Wilcoxon, Pola Negri, Jeanne
Eagels, H.B. Warner, Ramon Novarro, John Gilbert, Francis X.
Bushman. These were among the brightest stars of the silent screen,
probably more celebrated in their time than Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks
are today. Yet their names are as dead as those of Aztec gods. In
sixty or eighty years, all but a few of our own celebrities will
have joined them in limbo. They won't be any more famous than the
fans who built websites like altars in their honor; they'll no
longer be rare birds, just dead ones.
Some people achieve fame through hard work, some luck into it,
still others, like Monica Lewinsky, have it quite literally thrust
upon them. A handful of celebrities like Martha Stewart, much as we
love to razz her, have built their fame on reasonably solid ground.
Whether her name will survive when her body has turned to potting
soil is still open to question, but at least the woman cultivated
her garden with panache.
Still, the nagging question remained. Had I been watching Martha
Stewart so intently because she had grown a vast empire from the
fertile turf of her imagination? Because she was blonde and buxom?
Because she had enriched the lives of countless women? Because she
knew how to fashion festive centerpieces from acorns? No, I was
watching her because she was famous. She was a rare bird, and I was
equipped with binoculars.
Now it was time to go and watch some real birds, the kind with
beaks and feathers. And in fact, on the way to that wild sea island,
I spotted a lone sandhill crane -- my first ever -- flying over a
barren field with its neck outstretched, crying out as it soared
into the setting sun. Here was a rare bird worthy of the name, even
if it had never created a festive centerpiece.
Here's the complete archive of Rick Bayan's immortal tirades for your reading pleasure:
December 2002 — Hello, I Must Be Going
November 2002 — A Raving Moderate
August 2002 — Is Western Civilization Worth Saving?
July 2002 — To Scam or Be Scammed
June 2002 — I Read the News Today, Oh Boy
May 2002 — Speechophobia
April 2002 — Fanatics on Parade
March 2002 — The Prestige Gap: A Lament
February 2002 — On Becoming a Dullard
January 2002 — Art for Slackers
December 2001 — An Unsolicited Christmas Card
November 2001 — A Tale of Two Tribes
October 2001 — On the Fallen Towers
August 2001 — Why Do We Bother?
June 2001 — Notes from a Doomed Planet
May 2001 — The Museum of Discarded Names
April 2001 — Indecision
March 2001 — A Slight Case of Insanity
February 2001 — Letter to a Conscientious Critic
January 2001 — The Cynic's Inaugural Address
December 2000 — The 50th Tirade
November 2000 — Travel Advisory
October 2000 — Beyond Work
September 2000 — More Work
August 2000 — Work
July 2000 — The Doves' Nest
June 2000 — Great Affectations
May 2000 — Tale of a Virtual Village
April 2000 — The World Is My Obstacle Course
March 2000 — A Living Heck
February 2000 — On the Treachery
of Time
January 2000 — A Letter to the
Future
December 99 — Rare Bird
November 99 — Not Just Another
Obscure Ethnic Group
October 99 — Extinction Reconsidered
September 99 — Good Life, Bad
Life, Better Life
August 99 — Household Relics:
An Elegy
July 99 — A Meditation on Profanity
June 99 — In Praise of Sloth
May 99 — A Bug's Death
April 99 — Obligations!
March 99 — The Courage to Be Ordinary
February 99 — A Grave Story
January 99 — What's Left for
Men?
December 98 — On the Uses of
Friends
November 98 — A Cynic's Thanksgiving
October 98 — Grand Illusions
September 98 — Filth
August 98 — Will the Real God
Please Stand Up?
July 98 — Adventures in Downsizing
June 98 — Lady Longevity
May 98 — Uniquely Human, Uniquely
Clueless
April 98 — The Mathematics of Excess
March 98 — Humbuggery
February 98 — Love and the Single
Cynic
January 98 — By the Sweat of
Your Brow
December 97 — Is Suffering Unfashionable?
November 97 — The Tao of Housekeeping
October 97 — The Sensory Deprivation
Blues
September 97 — Down with Natural
Selection!
August 97 — Noise
July 97 — On Eating Our Fellow Creatures
June 97 — Trouble in Book-Land
May 97 — Interview with an Unemployable
Man
April 97 — The Cynic's Dream
March 97 — Inequalities
February 97 — Flesh and Mortality
January 97 — How to Be a Success
December 96 — Why I Can't Hate
Christmas
November 96 — How I Became a Cynic
