Thursday, June 25, 2009

Cautionary Tales

Sure, there's the cautionary tale of Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC) from yesterday, but it doesn't compare to the three celebrities that made this week's fated troika. I'm referring, of course, to Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson.

I had the pleasure to meet McMahon on the tail end of a flight to Vegas several years ago. Very affable, total gentleman. However, his dream career in Hollywood, the massive job security of sitting next to Johnny Carson on the couch year after year, had a dark ending turn well, when he suddenly found himself in big financial debt very late in life, after the good earning years (and they lasted longer than for most folks) were up. The moral: live modestly enough that you don't get nailed when the high-flying plane to Vegas comes down.

Ms. Fawcett had another path to caution. Blessed with a contemporary beauty and the sparkle to go with it, she sold 12 million posters and was a TV sensation...for a single year. After she sprang herself prematurely from her Charlie's Angels contract she admirably sought bigger, smarter, tougher roles and got a few of them, but it was struggle from thereon out, culminating with a late career lunge and sex symbol reprise and embarrassing drunken or pilled-out moments on Letterman and elsewhere. Whereas McMahon seemed to coast along the mega-capitalist entertainment system, Fawcett was more or less treated like a bauble, albeit one who gamely strove for better. So the moral might be to have a contingency plan when the system no longer needs you.

Which brings us to the Prince of Pop, or King, or gravy train for all those music and television executives who got their piece of Michael Jackson's never-to-be-duplicated package of talent. In Michael Kinsley's prescient 1984 piece on the cost of Jackson's success and it's place within the Hollywood system, he recaps the debilitating nature of Jackson's showbiz childhood -- rarely if ever in school -- and how those benefiting most from the system needed to keep him in Neverland to keep earning big:
What's happened to Michael Jackson isn't too different from what they used to do to young male singers in Europe a few centuries ago, to keep their voices sweet. In another way, it resembles the exploitation of child stars like Judy Garland in the heyday of the Hollywood studios. In fact, what American capitalism has done to Michael Jackson is even a bit like what the Soviets do to their women athletes.

...

Yes, I know, it's hard to feel sorry for Michael Jackson. Millions of dollars and zillions of adoring fans, a huge party in New York at which, says Rolling Stone, "a procession of CBS executives" rises to declare fealty. If he wants a duplicate of the Disneyland "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride built in his house (and he does), he can have it. But how many CBS executives or editors of Time would want their own child, at age 25, to want such a thing, to be babbling about misunderstood snakes, to be "like a fawn in a burning forest"?

So a contemporary of my generation and just a few years older than our President, who's just hitting his stride, burns out nearly twenty years after his heyday in what is sounding like a Heath Ledger prescription drug abuse tragedy. Of all the cautionary tales, Jackson's is the one that indicts others the most: his hard-driving stage dad, his enablers hired and percentage earners, maybe even the fans who love his music. The moral: grow up or die young. And mutilated.

It's all a bit reminiscent, particularly in Jackson's case, of Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon, the originally underground classic compendium of celebrity horror stories stretching from the Fatty Arbuckle silent era scandals to Jayne Mansfield's grotesque auto accident decapitation. Anger gave us the extreme version of those "the rich are unhappy" parables meant to keep the rest of us content with our lot, but one has to wonder if the three who just died would have been any happier without the fame. Didn't they need it to survive, like oxygen? McMahon laughing at the boss' jokes down at the local bar? Farrah as a small town mom? Jackson as a grade school teacher without the protection of wealth?

Okay, next three?

2 comments:

Master Fu said...

I think Michael Jackson's fame and money truly kept him from getting the clinical help he needed. He had a messed up life, possibly/allegedly committed atrocious unspeakable acts, was absolutely an unfit parent (you can argue this all you want no decent parent is going to hold their kid outside of a window.)

But because he brought those hits in the 80's / early 90's all is forgiven, and his death is a tragedy. A certain level of celebrity seems to be more powerful than a presidential pardon.

Anonymous said...

MJ is huge in death for the same reason he was huge in life: His ability to make money for other people.

What he had was WAY beyond celebrity -- Paris Hilton's a celebrity. MJ had the ability to crank out records that like clockwork made $billions, and thereby supported a small army of record industry companies, personnel, handlers, minders, marketers, etc etc etc, for decades, none of whom had any real interest in him getting any help if that meant the money flow might possibly stop.

I really can't think of anyone more uniquely talented at what he did - and generating enormous sums of $$ by it - while at the same time being so clearly unequipped to deal with it. (Although Mike Tyson comes to mind).

He's on the news now 24/7 simply because the cable nets know he'll keep people tuned it -- ie, make more $$ for them.

Meantime, I'm w/ you: I'm not down with these mealy-mouthed "Speak no ill of the dead" platitudes. I think when someone was horrible in life it's the job of the living to remind others of that every chance they get.

That's why I, for instance, believe that when Ronald Reagan died, instead of all the phony baloney on TV about how everything in the US should be named after him, his body should've been tied to a cinder block and thrown into the ocean. It would've been the fitting end for one who cheerfully and ignorantly did so much harm to so many for so long.