Quote of the Day (Brooke Shields, Suffering a Case of Massively Mistaken Identity)

“The other day, I was in the airport and the flight attendant came up to me and said, ‘Oh my God, you’re Caitlyn Jenner!’”—Actress Brooke Shields, during her debut show at Manhattan’s Café Carlyle, quoted by Jacob Bernstein, “‘Fame Is Weird,’ and She Knows It,” The New York Times, Sept. 21, 2023

(The accompanying picture of Brooke Shields was taken Feb. 21, 2018, by Greg2600.)

Quote of the Day (George Clooney, on Celebrities’ Twitter Presence)

“If you're famous, I don't—for the life of me—I don't understand why any famous person would ever be on Twitter. Why on God's green earth would you be on Twitter? Because first of all, the worst thing you can do is make yourself more available, right? Because you're going to be available to everybody. But also Twitter. So one drunken night, you come home and you've had two too many drinks and you're watching TV and somebody pisses you off, and you go 'Ehhhhh' and fight back. And you go to sleep, and you wake up in the morning and your career is over. Or you're an a--hole. Or all the things you might think in the quiet of your drunken evening are suddenly blasted around the entire world before you wake up.”—American actor-director George Clooney quoted in Tom Junod, “George Clooney's Rules for Living,” Esquire, December 2013

Well, I suppose that the publicist for George Clooney finally persuaded him to the contrary, because four years after this Esquire rant, the actor-director opened his own “George Clooney Official” Twitter page. Nevertheless, Mr. C. must have warned that he would strictly limit his involvement, because the tweets and retweets consist mostly of pictures of himself and his wife, with minimal commentary.

Every other day, if not more often, Clooney must nod his head over his foresight of nearly a decade ago. Though hardly shy about expressing his opinions, he knows that old-time movie stars loomed large for a reason other than the big screens of the Golden Age of Film: that overexposure removes the mystique invested by fans.

Moreover, as someone who admitted to Newsweek 10 years ago that his past life of substance and and womanizing precluded a life in politics, Clooney knows all too well the perils of going online and venting to the world before you’ve had time to think it over and calm down. Even if you’re not a party animal but simply love the sound of your own voice (an occupational hazard in the entertainment industry), you run a big risk of looking stupid.

Bette Midler, that means you.

You’d think that the singer-actress would have learned her lesson from three years ago, when she tweeted that women “are the n-word of the world,” or especially last year, when she mocked Melanie Trump’s accent and called her an “illegal alien”—in both cases, sparking a backlash that led the outspoken entertainer to issue uncharacteristic apologies.

But here she was at it again this week, when frustration over Joe Manchin’s opposition to the “Build Back Better” social spending plan of the Biden administration led her to lash out at the Democratic Senator from West Virginia for wanting to keep all Americans like his state: “Poor, illiterate and strung out."

Less than an hour later, Midler was backtracking with a tweeted apology to West Virginians (“Surely there’s someone there who has the state’s best interest at heart, not his own!”)

No matter. In politics, this would have been considered a gaffe, a statement that, for anyone not named Donald Trump, would have halted any possibility for further advancement.

In entertainment, plenty of people feel that she was right the first time. And therein lies the problem.

Statements like Ms. Midler’s only reinforce the conviction of many in Red America that liberal elites are condescending and unworthy of support (even someone like her, who has funded programs for neighborhood revitalization and wounded veterans). She made it that much harder to move back into the Democratic column a state that had once firmly backed the New Deal.

An additional history lesson might be in order here. Ms. Midler, like all non-indigenous Americans (including me), are descended from groups who, for the longest time after arriving on these shores, were “Poor, illiterate and strung out.” 

Maybe she should get a copy of Oscar Handlin’s The Uprooted so she can better understand how alienated and resentful the recipients of taunts such as hers felt in the 19th century—and how belittling those remarks remain to the underprivileged and marginalized of this country, whoever they are and wherever they live.

(The photo of George Clooney accompanying this post was taken at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 9, 2011, by Ed Van-West Garcia.)

Quote of the Day (Saul Bellow, on How Being a Celebrity is Like ‘A High-Voltage Cable’)

“To be a celebrity is like picking up a high-voltage cable which you can’t release. I saw it with Marilyn Monroe, she lived in a state of horrible excitement, and died of it. I didn’t want to be ignored or obscure, but I didn’t want to kill myself.” — American novelist and Nobel Literature laureate Saul Bellow (1915-2005), "Saul Bellow Interview: 'My Agonies Over Writing,'" interviewed by David Pryce-Jones for Telegraph Magazine (UK), Oct. 3, 1975, reprinted June 10, 2015

Quote of the Day (Jo Ellison, on Madonna and Other Aging Celebrities)

“None of us will be spared from eventual obsolescence, but while most of us only learn the extent of our irrelevance when we realise we are mentally incapable of programming the Sky box, or have become the last refusenik to subscribe to the office's new ‘collaboration hub,’ it's a far bleaker world for creatives who suffer the ignominy of age while simultaneously having fame wrested from their fingertips by younger models.”—Jo Ellison, on Madonna and other aging celebrities, in “Trending: Have You Hit the Age of Irrelevance?” The Financial Times, June 15-16, 2019

John Wayne was over 60 when he wore an eyepatch for his Oscar-winning role as Sheriff Rooster Cogburn in True Grit. I'm not sure why Madonna's wearing one at roughly the same age, except maybe to do what she's always done: acted unconventionally.

If she wanted another hit, she evidently got it, as her latest collection of tunes, Madame X (yes, you can see that letter) ranks #1 on the Billboard chart. But the musician who ranks #2, Bruce Springsteen, is almost 10 years older, and he didn't need any eyewear.

(Photo of Madonna taken by MTV International during the world premiere of her music video "Medellin" on MTV, Apr. 24, 2019.)

Quote of the Day (Daniel J. Boorstin, on ‘The Hoaxes We Play on Ourselves’)

“We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories to the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.”—Historian and Librarian of Congress Daniel J. Boorstin (1914-2004), The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961)

Pulitzer Prize winner Daniel J. Boorstin—who died at age 89 on this day 15 years ago in Washington, DC—-first came to my attention through a child’s history of the United States, The Landmark History of the American People: From Plymouth to Appomattox. As an adult, I consumed (with varying degrees of enthusiasm) his trilogy The Americans and a later one on global cultural and intellectual achievement (The Discovers, The Seekers and The Creators). In his 60s and 70s, he also performed admirably as head of the Library of Congress by protecting his institution from the budget wolves and know-nothings of Capitol Hill.

But these days, I think that I will have to read a work of his more contemporary—and, it sounds from the above quote, more farsighted—than even his cogently argued histories: The Image. That analysis described the first stirrings of the celebrity culture that was already taking hold in the early postwar period, a trend that, by being tied to news events created specifically for promotional purposes, would color and distort American journalism and government for the last half-century.

In particular, the “pseudo-event”—which Boorstin described as a promotional tactic designed to elicit news coverage, with a carefully choreographed “script”--has come to mark politics in the Trump Era, as Conor Friedersdorf describes in this piece for The Atlantic in December 2016.

Boorstin’s definition of a “celebrity”-- "a person who is well-known for his well-knownness"—can describe not only Kim Kardashian but Donald Trump, a bankrupt builder who created a spurious reputation as a great deal-making. Trump’s pre-Presidential career climaxed with The Apprentice, “a program on reality TV, the beating heart of the pseudo-events industry, where teams competed in pseudo-projects to avoid being pseudo-fired,” according to Friedersdorf.

It bears repeating what Friedersdorf notes about the start of the Trump candidacy: “Trump began the most consequential phase of his political career by declaring his doubts about President Obama’s birth certificate and sending or pretending to send a team of investigators to Hawaii to probe the matter. Roger Ailes would reward him with recurring interview segments on Fox News, each a pseudo-event in itself. On those segments, pseudo-events were discussed by Trump and pseudo-journalists. Among actual journalists, there was deep disagreement about whether Trump’s statements about running for president should be taken seriously.”

Quote of the Day (Fred Allen, Describing At Least Some of Those Appearing Last Night on the Oscars)

“A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to become well-known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized."—American radio comedian Fred Allen (1894-1956), Much Ado About Me (1956)

Tweet of the Day (‘The Naardvark,’ on Natalie Portman as Part of a New Nickname)

“If Natalie Portman dated Jacques Cousteau they would win celebrity couple nicknaming forever with ‘Portmanteau.’"—The Naardvark (TV comedy writer Bryan Donaldson), tweet of Oct. 23, 2014

(The image accompanying this post shows Natalie Portman in the film Planetarium.)