Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley aren't just relics of the Wild West, argues "Lonesome Dove" author Larry McMurtry -- they're America's original celebrities.
At the end of the 19th century, Buffalo Bill Cody was arguably the most famous man in the United States, because he looked sharp while riding a horse. And Annie Oakley was arguably the most famous woman, because she looked comely while firing a gun. Commonplace as such superficiality may be — characteristic of celebrities from Ronald Reagan to Paris Hilton — the popularity of Cody and Oakley is hard to fathom in our megaplexed, multichannel, celebrity-saturated society. Not only were they, as Larry McMurtry notes in “The Colonel and Little Missie,” our first superstars. Adjusted for ego inflation and the explosion of media bandwidth, they were also, and will likely remain, our foremost.
Exactly who Cody and Oakley were, though, becomes less clear with each attempted biography. The greater the scrutiny, the less certain their history. Every detail is questionable. With his novelist’s eye and footing in the West, McMurtry is positioned to deliver as good a book on the pair as we’re likely to get. He has succeeded for the most part, by telling us all that isn’t known about them, that we might more fully appreciate the extraordinary story of their fame.
Annie Oakley isn’t quite as much of a mystery as Buffalo Bill. Having apparently led a less eventful life, there are fewer events concerning her that may be apocryphal. Still, we can’t be certain even of her real name: While we know that she changed it to Oakley — after a respectable neighborhood in Cincinnati — nobody is quite sure whether she was born Phoebe Ann Moses or Phoebe Ann Mozee. As for the year of her birth, it seems to have been 1860, though for most of her life she insisted on 1866. What nobody doubts is the desperate poverty of her childhood in Darke County, Ohio. McMurtry puts it best when he writes, “Charles Dickens had nothing on Annie Oakley.”
Somehow she figured out how to shoot. One story claims that, as a young girl, she picked up her father’s shotgun and hit a squirrel between the eyes. Another story makes the creature a bird, and holds that the recoil broke her nose. Either way, the animal probably became supper, and by the time she turned 15 she was bringing in game full time for a local grocer.
Or not quite full time: Like any good shot, she also entered skeet competitions, as ubiquitous in 19th century rural America as pickup basketball games are in Chicago or Detroit or New York today. That’s where she met her future husband, the marksman Frank Butler. We don’t know for sure whether she beat him at their first meeting by two clay pigeons or one. We do know that he became her manager, and, within a few years, she was an international superstar.
Buffalo Bill became famous first, though, and provided the stage upon which Oakley’s legend was made. He had a 14-year head start. William Frederick Cody was born in Iowa in 1846, and, while not as bad as Oakley’s, his childhood in the bloody Kansas territory would also have given Dickens a run for his money. (“In these parts,” McMurtry notes, “the Civil War lasted something like twenty years, rather than four.”) Then, in the same spontaneous, inevitable way that Annie got her gun, Buffalo Bill landed in the saddle. His first job, at age 11, was delivering messages for the Western freighting firm that would shortly found the Pony Express.
That did not make him, as legend has it, a part of the Pony Express, let alone its star rider. The mount he was assigned was a mule, and the extent of his run — from freight yard to telegraph office — was all of three miles. McMurtry believes that, by the time the Pony Express came along, 14-year-old Cody had advanced enough to become its youngest messenger, but the best proof McMurtry can muster is only that it makes a good story. (All the supporting evidence from Cody’s day, as McMurtry ably demonstrates, is not the least bit plausible, and the documentary evidence is spottier than Buffalo Bill’s arithmetic.) None of which would make much difference — since nobody has ever doubted Cody’s skill as a rider — except for the fact that he pretended to have been a Pony Express messenger, for more than 30 years, as the centerpiece of his performance in “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.”
In his world-renowned entertainment — which seems to have been a cross between a vaudeville act and a military parade — he also pretended to have done a bit of Indian killing. In particular, he was fond of showing how he’d taken “the first scalp for Custer” while he was employed as a scout by the Army. If he did so, it was in 1876, shortly after the massacre at the Little Big Horn had left Gen. George Armstrong Custer dead alongside 250 of his men.
According to Buffalo Bill, the scalp belonged to a Cheyenne chief named Yellow Hand, whom Cody caught early one morning leading a raid on the Fifth Cavalry. Yellow Hand challenged him to a duel. “We fired at each other simultaneously. My usual luck did not desert me, for his bullet missed me while mine struck him in the breast. He reeled and fell, but before he had fairly touched the ground I was upon him, knife in hand, and had driven the keen-edged weapon to the hilt in his heart. Jerking his warbonnet off, I scientifically scalped him in about five seconds.”
This turn of events has been refuted by many people, from modern historians to eyewitnesses in Cody’s own brigade. One account holds that Cody shot the Cheyenne’s horse and a fellow cavalryman hit the Indian. A differing account has another scout — Baptiste “Little Bat” Garnier — killing the warrior in a ravine, and leading Cody to the body several days later because Buffalo Bill wanted a souvenir for his wife in North Platte, Neb. Lulu Cody got the scalp all right, and Buffalo Bill used it in shows for the rest of his life, persistently calling the warrior Yellow Hand, when in truth the man’s name was Yellow Hair, and calling him a chief, when he was a mere lookout. “In fact Yellow Hair had not been a famous Indian,” McMurtry writes, “he became famous with his death.”
Indeed, the same was true of the Pony Express, which was made mythic posthumously as part of Buffalo Bill’s show. And it was true of Cody’s role as a hero of the West as well — he called himself a colonel because he liked the title — although of course he was alive and well at his center-stage apotheosis. “[I]t’s easy to forget that the narrative of his life is one story and the narrative of his fame is another,” McMurtry writes. Easy to forget, and essential to remember.
Then why the outsize celebrity? Annie Oakley was a good sharpshooter and Bill Cody was a good scout. Nobody ever disputed that. But by no means was either the best, even in these dubious areas of achievement. Others shot more clay pigeons than Annie. Many others slaughtered more Native Americans, to say nothing of buffalo, than Cody. But, had they been better at what they did, had that been the basis of their fame, they certainly wouldn’t have been superstars.
More than she was for her shooting score, Oakley was endearing to audiences for her pout when she missed a tossed penny and for how she kicked the ground with her boot when she hit the mark. As for Buffalo Bill, had he been a real Indian fighter, out taming the frontier, he wouldn’t have left the plains to perform in London, with a troupe of Native Americans, in front of Queen Victoria. “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West,” which traveled the world in various guises from the 1880s until Cody’s death in 1917, was presented as historical reenactment — Cody never called it a show — but the only history it really reenacted, by interminable repetition, was the history it invented.
In truth, the West was not won but lost, irretrievably, and Cody and Oakley became legends by turning it into a myth, almost perfectly devoid of authenticity. McMurtry notes that “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West” was popular, against all predictions, in cities such as San Francisco, because people living in such still-remote outposts “might prefer, for an hour or two, the fantasy rather than the reality.” He seems mystified, though, by testimonials by the likes of Mark Twain, who asserted that “[d]own to the smallest detail the show is genuine … wholly free from sham and insincerity.” He wonders whether Twain was drunk when he wrote those words. Twain probably was — a safe bet any day — but McMurtry’s perceptiveness unaccountably deserts him at this juncture: Like Buffalo Bill, Twain was a storyteller, and recognized the truth that legend makes of itself.
Indeed, “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West” was a more appropriate moniker than Cody may have recognized. By the turn of the century, the Wild West was more or less Buffalo Bill’s own possession, and, along with Annie Oakley, he was its chief asset.
Today we condemn celebrities for their shallowness. Their appearance is their talent. They’re a cultural null set. But, if we are to believe that Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley are meaningful — to acknowledge that we are a product of the stage-set Wild West they brought us — we would do well to give the likes of Paris Hilton more credit. The emptiness of celebrity is the vessel of our collective legend. Superstardom is our heritage.
When you think of Justin Bieber, the first thing that leaps to mind probably isn’t “spoiling for a fight, international fugitive.” But this weekend, the doe-eyed, blow-dried young idol startled his fans – and at least one paparazzo who underestimated him – by allegedly taking a swing at a photographer at a Calabasas shopping mall.
The lensman claims Bieber hit him as he was taking photos of the singer with his girlfriend Selena Gomez. After complaining of pain, the photographer was taken to the hospital and released shortly after. TMZ reports that witnesses say the man was blocking Bieber’s car and that after the scuffle, a person identifying himself as a lawyer approached the photographer and suggested he call an ambulance and file a police report. Sheriff’s department spokesperson Lillian Peck refused to comment on the case, but if a report has been filed, Bieber, who left the scene after the incident, would now be the subject of a police investigation.
It must be a particularly pugilistic time of year. Earlier this month, Will Smith slapped a Ukrainian television journalist who tried to kiss him at the Russian premiere of “Men in Black III.” Smith then told the crowd, “He’s lucky I didn’t sucker-punch him.”
Whatever went down, neither Bieber nor Smith are the first celebrities to get into it with an invasive press. Three years ago James Gandolfini hit a man who was videotaping him shopping in New York City. And Sean Penn has a long and storied history of mixing it up with the paparazzi – mostly recently in 2009, when he pleaded no contest to vandalism after allegedly “kicking and punching” photographer Jordan Dawes.
Whenever a celebrity loses his cool with a reporter or photographer, the story inevitably turns into an occasion for getting judgmental about both sides. You don’t have to look far in the comments of any article on the Bieber story to see a range of self-righteous responses — disgust at the invasiveness of the photographer, incredulity that the seemingly mild-mannered J.B. could take anybody on, the inevitable disdain for a famous person who dares to erupt in anger.
The fact that it’s Bieber makes the story so unique. It’s a reminder that everyone – even guys with soccer-mom hairstyles and Disney princess girlfriends – has their breaking point. It’s one thing when Nic Cage goes ballistic. What else is new? But there’s an assumption that nice guys like Will Smith and Justin Bieber never lose their cool. That they exist to blandly take whatever invades their orbit with the unflappable grace of Ryan Seacrest getting ashes tossed on him at the Oscars. Yet in an era of long lenses and the easy assumption that everyone in the public eye is fair game to be touched, to be thwarted in their movements, to have their privacy violated, it might be helpful for the gossipmongers and ambulance chasers alike to remember that everyone has a dark side. And that someday, Betty White just might haul off and belt you.
On the spectrum of Hollywood bombshells, the news Monday that John Travolta has been slapped with a lawsuit involving an alleged gay sexual overture ranks about as shocking as Lindsay Lohan getting picked up for violating parole. Whether or not the allegations can be proven true, the suit is just the most public acknowledgment of rumors that have floated around Travolta for years. So persistent and pervasive are the stories about his proclivities that back in 2009, Carrie Fisher famously boasted that “We don’t really care that John Travolta is gay.” But it turns out the most surprising thing about the whole dust-up is how fantastic a document the lawsuit itself is.
In the $2 million suit, an unnamed massage therapist alleges that back in January, he was summoned by the actor to a bungalow at a Beverly Hills hotel. The Plaintiff says Travolta attempted to touch him, touched himself and when the plaintiff made it clear the massage was not the happy ending variety, became verbally abusive. Travolta has already shot back with a countersuit and a statement, via his representative, that “None of the events claimed in the suit ever occurred. The Plaintiff, who refuses to give their name, knows that the suit is a baseless lie. It is for that reason that the Plaintiff hasn’t been identified with a name even though it is required to do so. On the date when Plaintiff claims John met him, John was not in California and it can be proved that he was on the East Coast. Plaintiff’s attorney has filed this suit to try and get his 15 minutes of fame. John intends to get this case thrown out and then he will sue the attorney and Plaintiff for malicious prosecution.” We may never know whether the Plaintiff, known only as “Joe Doe,” is the victim of harassment or a guy trying to cash in on decades of innuendo, but one thing is certain – his lawyers write a hell of a lawsuit.
We open on the night of Jan. 16. Beverly Hills. An “unidentified male” calls the Plaintiff’s cellphone and says he has a “celebrity client who [demands] full confidentiality,” and directs him to a location where the client will pick him up. Plaintiff “states that to his amazement, Defendant himself” appears, “wearing dark glasses, jeans with a very loose fitting athletic shirt and chronograph silver watch. There were Trojan condoms in the console of the vehicle, and there also appeared to be two or three wrappers from chocolate cake packages.” The chocolate cake packages are a nice touch, don’t you think?
The scene then moves to the hotel bungalow, where “there was an overweight black man preparing hamburgers …. From watching his skill and dexterity in food preparation, it seemed he was some sort of professional chef.”
Here’s where it gets interesting. The Defendant “shamelessly stripped naked in front of the Plaintiff, and the ‘chef’ was gazing at Plaintiff as he appeared to be semi-erect.” Over the course of the massage, the client “kept purposefully sliding the towel down that covered his buttocks to reveal about half of the gluteus area.” Soon, Travolta is trying to touch the Plaintiff’s scrotum, and snickering “to himself like a mischievous child.” When the Plaintiff refuses, Travolta allegedly offers, “Come on dude, I’ll jerk you off!!!” Three exclamation points.
But after promising to behave, and assuring the Plaintiff that “his predatory behavior was finally under control,” he begins masturbating. “Defendant’s penis was fully erect, and was roughly 8 inches in length, and his pubic hair was wirey [sic] and unkempt.” He then “lumbered to his feet and began to move toward Plaintiff with erect penis bouncing around with its stride.”
From this point, the narrative turns even more disturbing and pathetic. The Plaintiff claims Travolta became erratic, telling him “that Hollywood is controlled by homosexual Jewish men who expect favors in return for sexual activity. Defendant went on to say how he had done things in his past that would make most people throw up.” He then allegedly says he “knew a Hollywood starlet in the building that wanted three way sex and to be double penetrated.” When the Plaintiff refuses again, Travolta allegedly drops the matter and takes him back to their original meeting point, calling him “selfish” and “a loser” and paying him double the original asking price for their encounter.
It’s a sad, tawdry story, one that is nothing if not vivid. It will likely come down to one person’s word against another’s, with little satisfying result for any of the parties. But it is also one of the most strangely written documents to come along in ages, a dark tale short of evidence but long on exclamation points and editorializing about the Defendant’s “mischievous,” “lumbering” behavior. As proof of anything that transpired, it may not stand up. As the most vividly written thing since “Fifty Shades of Grey,” however, it’s just begging to become a movie.
Amid a stream of confetti, Lindsay Lohan arrives at court in Beverly Hills, Calif., on July 20, 2010. (Credit: AP/Jason Redmond)
When Lindsay Lohan moved two doors down from me last year, I had briefly fantasized about some sort of feel-good neighborly encounter between us. This happened on the night when I spotted the first of many satellite vans that would defiantly park in the red zone in front of my house. The van, coupled with the all-male paparazzi contingent prowling the alley behind my garage with an abundance of video equipment, provided me with a fresh understanding of what it means to live under siege.
And so, hunkered down inside my house, I had imagined the following scenario: The actress, fleeing down the alley from these men and unable to enter her own home, would accept my offer of temporary shelter. I’d quickly usher her into my living room where I’d offer her a non-alcoholic beverage. My cats, who normally hate strangers, would allow her to pet them and she would feel inspired to reveal some shard of a more authentic self that existed beneath her celebrity train wreck veneer. She would confide her secret fears, gripes and vulnerabilities and I would nod with empathy.
My ability to just listen to her, to treat her like any other human being, would move her to tears. She would confess that she had never met anyone like me since becoming famous, someone who could just interact with her without any other agenda other than offering assistance. I would modestly dismiss this compliment yet secretly bask in a newfound sense of warm and fuzzy altruism. We would hug goodbye, and I would proceed to tell friends and family: Wow, Lindsay is so down-to-earth! The media has her wrong!
A year later, the actress has fled my neighborhood and I never once spoke to her. I never rescued her from the paparazzi hordes. I never knocked on her door bearing a homemade fruit pie. And I never found out whether discrepancies existed between the LiLo of the tabloids and the young, often harried-looking woman who darted in and out of her garage as if she were a soldier en route from the minefield to the relative safety of the barracks.
Instead, my year-long experience as the actress’ nearly next-door neighbor can be summed up in three missed opportunities for potentially friendly interaction, all of which occurred in the alley behind our houses.
Missed opportunity No. 1: While taking out my trash, I spotted her engaged in the identical task. It was a Sunday afternoon and we both had our hair in ponytails and wore sweat pants and T-shirts. Our sartorial similarities made her seem all that more approachable. Be neighborly, I told myself. Go over there and say hello! Tell her you don’t really believe she shoplifted that necklace. But before I could act, she had disappeared into her garage. After that, I only saw her assistants take out the garbage, along with the many strangers who combed through it.
Missed opportunity No. 2: Driving my car one day, I almost ran her over. She had been speed-walking down a sidewalk that intersected the alley, and I had to brake hard to avoid a collision. I raised my hand in apology, and she gave me an uninterested glance before walking onward. Up close, I could see the roots of her bleached blond hair, and she looked tired, fragile and older than her 25 years. After that, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for her despite my increasing resentment that she had transformed my street into a media circus and necessary tourist detour from the nearby Venice Beach boardwalk.
Missed opportunity No. 3: My husband and I had just wheeled our bikes outside for a morning ride and could not help noticing the actress’s black Cadillac Escalade idling in front of our garage. So we stood there with our bikes and waited until she emerged from her own garage. We pretended not to watch her get into her vehicle and she pretended that we didn’t exist.
Recently, I told my sister that I had never met my famous former neighbor. She was shocked and not because she took me for a celebrity brown-noser. Rather, she lives in a New Jersey town where to be a good neighbor means to interact with the people who live among you. “I can’t imagine not knowing my neighbors,” she said.
I, on the other hand, have lived my entire adult life in either New York City or Los Angeles, in apartment buildings and on streets where most of my neighbors remained nameless if recognizable strangers. For the most part, I’ve lived in places that bear not even the slightest traces of the era where people traded gossip over clothing lines and knew when to knock on each other’s doors bearing cakes and casseroles. Today, I know much more about the lives of remote acquaintances who frequently post on Facebook than I do about the people who physically inhabit my street.
Of course, my neighbors and I knew plenty about the actress in our midst, no matter that she had installed a bamboo fence to obscure her roof deck. So when we did run into each other, we finally had a common topic of conversation to which we could collectively shake our heads and say things equal parts blasé and judgmental like: There goes the neighborhood. We could say these things with authority, because even though we couldn’t see beyond our neighbor’s bamboo fence, someone else could, since we could get online updates on the actress’ troubled life from dozens of celebrity news sites. Thanks to the actress in our midst, we now had a reason to gather on a street where privacy and anonymity generally trumped interaction. And we could mock her with impunity. Hadn’t the tabloids made it clear that she deserved it?
In truth, my fantasy of rescuing and bonding with the actress didn’t stem from a desire to be a good neighbor but from my own conflicted relationship with celebrity. As the actress’ year on my block progressed and people camped out on beach chairs hoping for Lindsay sightings, I had to ask myself whether I was any different from those interloping looky-loos I wanted off my street. Because while I might have physically avoided the actress all those months, giving her the privacy she seemed to desperately need, I also sucked up all the tabloid information on her I could in the name of wanting to know what was happening two doors down.
When meeting new people at parties, I could mention my famous neighbor and, boom, we’d have something to talk about for at least the next 10 minutes. I could feel special when friends told me they just spotted a fraction of my house in some TMZ photo that mostly depicted the side-by-side townhouses of the actress and on-again, off-again flame Samantha Ronson. My physical proximity to the actress made me interesting to other people and so I mattered in a way that could only apply in a world obsessed by celebrity and inundated by the public gossip of Internet tabloid culture.
A few months ago, I noticed the actress’ overflowing mailbox, much of its contents soggy from rain. So I did what I always did whenever I saw a crowd amass on the sidewalk in front of my house or spotted more than one news van parked across the street. I consulted TMZ and E! Online to help make sense of what I saw, and I learned, along with the rest of the world, that the actress, fed up with all the gawkers and stalkers, had evacuated Venice Beach for the Chateau Marmont.
Several days later, I watched two moving trucks cart away her belongings and observed her assistants darting in and out of her townhouse on last-ditch errands. Afterward, I went online to read more articles about the actress’s departure featuring anonymous quotes from my “rejoicing” neighbors who basically pronounced the nightmare over. The anonymous neighbors said other mean things about the actress that made me briefly resurrect my fantasy of rescuing her from peril. And then I said goodbye to the actress from a distance, in very much the same way I had not exactly welcomed her to the neighborhood.
Susan Josephs is a Los Angeles-based writer. She frequently writes about dance for the Los Angeles Times and is at work on a new play.
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Imagine, for a moment, that Dick Clark had died in 2002 instead of 2012. How would his obituaries have been different? In most ways, there would have been little change. In the last decade, Clark has continued with the ventures he’d been known for, hosting and producing a New Year’s Eve broadcast, various radio programs, game shows and TV specials. But there would have been two big differences. The first thing was Clark’s 2004 stroke, and his courageous return to public life despite a speech impediment modulating his famous voice.
And the second? The second is Ryan Seacrest.
Seacrest appears in Clark’s obits like the Boswell to Clark’s Samuel Johnson, quoted instead of family members as the apparent authority on Clark’s life and legacy. His tribute to Clark on “Idol” the night after his death became a news story in and of itself. For years, Seacrest had been slowly positioning himself as the new Dick Clark, taking over as the host of the New Year’s broadcast when Clark was ill, and modeling his career after Clark’s by taking ownership stakes in radio shows and TV ventures. Seacrest has become so entwined with Clark’s story that when news of the death broke, it was hard not to picture Seacrest kneeling in some dark rite, screaming to the heavens as Clark’s power possessed him, “Highlander”-style.
The problem with this image is that it’s far too interesting to have anything to do with Ryan Seacrest, a man who has made a career out of being professionally boring. If we’re going with a sci-fi reference, it’s easier to think of him like the bureaucrats in “Brazil,” toiling away in some back office, looking up briefly as an intern arrives to tell him the news, nodding curtly, shedding a single tear, and immediately returning to work. (During his tribute on “Idol,” he said that Clark was “in a better place saying, ‘Hey, let’s get on with the show, OK?’”) Seacrest is not someone who does dramatic things in fields. He is a person who stands in places of no place and intones blank words like a priest performing some long-deprecated rite. And he’s been very, very successful at it.
Seacrest’s extraordinary rise, so counter to the prevailing trends of the time, points to a current of artistic and social conservatism in the mass audience that persists despite the relentlessly progressive story we like to tell ourselves about the march of culture.
Like Clark, Seacrest got his start in radio. Clark’s early jobs were in an industry where local was king, getting spots at small-bore stations in upstate New York and only going national when “Bandstand” was picked up for TV distribution. Seacrest, however, came to radio just as it was being deregulated and local stations were being eliminated in favor of national conglomerates like ClearChannel. As such, he was able to move to Los Angeles and, at the age of 20, take over a morning radio show that became nationally syndicated. He followed that up with his own form of conglomeration, taking over the weekly “American Top 40″ from Casey Kasem in 2004, and launching his own new programming ventures, like “On Air With Ryan Seacrest,” a four-hour block he records daily and which is distributed to more than 150 stations nationwide.
But his big break was “Idol.” Premiering in 2002, it at first seemed an unlikely phenomenon. Why would anyone want to watch a “Star Search” where the contestants didn’t change? The country did not lack for pop stars, after all: Between “Total Request Live” and Radio Disney we were experiencing something of a bumper crop in those years. The success of “Idol” speaks to both the unalloyed effectiveness of its format and something deep in the national mood at that moment. Bathed in post-millennial anxiety, and eager as always to avoid discussing the possible causes of and responses to a national tragedy, “Idol” seemed to reflect our best selves. It was meritocratic (the best will win, regardless of their social position), individualistic (only single singers, no messy bands), populist (the people vote), and aggressively cheerful.
Key to that success was Seacrest. The judges represented the business aspect of the transaction, the reward at the end. The voters were America, of course. But Ryan was the Idol. For struggling amateurs, he was the end product they were training for, smooth, professional and unchallenged, a perfect pop product encased in a suit. While the contestants’ images varied, Seacrest’s presence on stage was a constant reminder of what the producers had in mind when they talked about a pop star.
There have long been rumors that Seacrest is gay. It’s hard to know what to do with these, exactly, but there is something undeniably unsettling about his sexuality. The image he projects is that of a non-threatening teenage boy, a pre-pubescent heartthrob like Ricky Nelson, David Cassidy or Justin Bieber. But Seacrest, who has dated Teri Hatcher and Sheryl Crow, is decidedly post-pubescent. He is, as they say, a grown man. Merv Griffin, who hired him to host a children’s computer-themed quiz show called “Click!” in the mid-’90s, said that “he had this spiky haircut, and we knew all the little girls in the audience would love him, and they did.” And they do. And he doesn’t care. Which is, maybe, a big point in his favor.
But it’s a point against the audience. All teen idols grow up, and as moral panicky as the process can be (“I’m Not a Girl,” etc.), we’ve seen it happen enough times now to know that part of the pleasure of a non-threatening teenager is knowing the threat they will inevitably become; Justin Bieber is fascinating because we want to see how it all spirals down. For Seacrest to stay in that neuter state reflects a childish, eyes-closed denial of reality among those audience members who still like it. The last decade has seen a remarkable opening of public discourse about all kinds of sex; currently the news media is tirelessly (and tiresomely) covering a story that basically amounts to “Hey, some people like bondage!” Adult sexuality is at least an option for our public conversations now, and lots of openly gay celebrities have remained idols in their own way, able to publicly pursue relationships without having to maintain the facade of blank sexlessness. But if Seacrest, the Delphonic seer of conventional wisdom, is in fact gay (or sexual at all) and truly thinks breaking face would kill his career, then maybe he’s right. For all the recent gains we’ve made, there’s a sizable portion of our fellow citizens who would much rather have Ricky Schroder stay a boy. Whether you want to have Seacrest or be him, he is selling the troubling fantasy that desire doesn’t have to be dirty.
Throughout a decade in which celebrity scandals were everywhere, Seacrest himself remained steadfastly above the fray. The scandal boom was great for entertainment news, but unstable workers are bad for the entertainment business. Scandal-plagued actors may get more publicity, but they make it a lot harder for a production to get insured, and the harder it is for the talent to hit their marks, the longer it takes to make the product. You never had to worry about that with Seacrest. A tireless worker and consummate professional, a morality clause would just be superfluous for any contract you might want to strike with him. In a decade of turmoil, Seacrest was the rock, the thing you could always depend on.
But since when has good TV been about dependability? The fun of watching “Idol” is its anarchy, whether it’s Paula’s looseness and Simon’s free-form contempt, an unknown amateur maturing into a star or flaming out under pressure, or the direction of each season, which producers, for all their tinkering, ultimately leave in the hands of the audience. “Idol,” at its best, is a show that can genuinely surprise everyone. In the midst of that glorious chaos, Seacrest stands apart, a stable center. His ability to parlay that personality into lucrative positions on other shows indicates that stability is what a certain portion of the audience wants. And that’s worrisome.
During an authoritarian period in American politics, culture was the lone bright spot. It seemed to be rapidly democratizing: corporate conglomerates were failing, user-generated content was everywhere, and even highly controlled mediums like TV were expanding their offerings to become far more adventurous. But no shift brings everyone along with it, and as easy as it now is to find people who like “Mad Men,” cultural progressives are haunted by fears about what everyone else is watching. Maybe, like Glenn Beck said, we really are surrounded; certainly a lot of people seemed to watch “Two and a Half Men.” Seacrest is like your square brother who went into banking: His success makes you wonder if the cultural power you feel when you’re with your people is really all that strong. Despite the fact that Ryan Seacrest has never done anything even slightly objectionable, people hate Ryan Seacrest. And that’s why.
“Idol” has, inevitably, begun to wane in influence and audience. As the paying audience for pop music massively declined during the ’00s, “Idol” had been able to stay ahead of the curve by making it about competition and narrative rather than music. But that audience had broken down too, splintered into niches by the expanding array of entertainment options. This should have spelled doom for Seacrest, eternally a mass-market guy. But he saw it coming, saw that the family-friendly audience he served would soon just become one market among many, and formed Ryan Seacrest Productions in 2006. His major hits so far have all involved the Kardashians, but he just signed a big new deal with Comcast, and more could be on the way.
If Dick Clark is an eternal teenager trapped in a ‘50s image of adolescence, Seacrest is a teenager from 2002 who’s persisted across time, simultaneously trying to please parents and safely experience more sensual pleasures from the standpoint of a moment when America had a serious interest in being pure and virginal. He’s achieved this by splitting his personality across business ventures, appearing as a squeaky-clean host on TV and radio while using his production company to push delightfully trashy reality fare like “Keeping Up With the Kardashians.” When we look at Ryan Seacrest, we see innocence; when we look at Ryan Seacrest’s productions, we see naughtiness framed as a secondhand experience. A man so averse to scandal that he takes pains to present himself as asexual, Seacrest is one of the few remaining examples of television’s “Least Objectionable Programming” doctrine, a remnant of the era of mass audiences. His particular evil genius has been to recognize that you can do just this but for every audience. Give the family hour what it wants, give the late-night gossipers what they want, and keep it all firmly separate with plausible deniability.
Michael Barthel is a PhD candidate in the communication department at the University of Washington. He has written about pop music for the Awl, Idolator, and the Village Voice.
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Adam Scott and Jennifer Westfeldt in "Friends with Kids"
We are living in a cinematic golden age. Exhibit A: that new Megan Fox movie.
The history of film is strewn with enterprising multi-hyphenates who knew how to rock a repertory. Orson Welles had pulled together a formidable troupe of regulars by the time he’d barely cut his wisdom teeth. Fellini and Hitchcock were known for their stock companies of familiar faces. But in recent years, strengthened by the talent pools of ensembles like the Groundlings and Upright Citizens Brigade, the power posse has become the norm — and it’s changing movies and television for the better.
Ten years ago, Jennifer Westfeldt co-wrote and played the title character in the entertaining little bi-curious romance “Kissing Jessica Stein.” Now she’s the writer, director and producer of one of the better anticipated movies of the spring – the reproductive comedy “Friends with Kids” — with a cast that includes the ubiquitous Adam Scott, Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph and Chris O’Dowd, as well as the aforementioned chick from those “Transformers” movies. It certainly sweetens Westfeldt’s marquee appeal that her partner – and a co-star of the film — is none other than Don Draper himself, Jon Hamm. But what will likely draw butts into theaters for “Friends with Kids” isn’t one star in particular, but the sum of its comic pieces. We’ve already seen Wiig, Rudolph, and Hamm score with “Bridesmaids.” Scott’s a reliably funny presence on the often pitch-perfect “Parks and Recreation,” and has shown his ensemble chops in “Our Idiot Brother” (with fellow workhorses Elizabeth Banks and Paul Rudd) and in memorable bits for the biggest, loosest comedy troupe in the world right now – Funny or Die.
For over a decade now, the likes of Judd Apatow and Will Ferrell have been paving a new kind of path – and along the way have changed the way both veterans like Ben Stiller and younger guys like Seth Rogen and it girl Kristen Wiig have shaped their careers. Think of it as the visionary-as-clown – the person who can whip up a diarrhea joke and direct and produce and do a guest stint on “Saturday Night Live” — and maybe wind up with a few Oscar nominations along the way.
What they – and now Westfeldt — have in common is the apparent great talent for playing well with others. She’s not Angelina Jolie, carrying blockbusters on her shoulders. She’s not Robert Downey Jr., cranking out “Iron Man” and “Sherlock Holmes” sequels. She’s more Robert Downey Jr. cutting loose in “Tropic Thunder.” But what a movie like “Friends with Kids” represents isn’t just an entrepreneurial spirit that’s becoming more and more the norm, but a truly formidable contemporary pool of talent. Anybody can get together a bunch of buddies to make a movie. But to watch actors like Scott or Rudolph or Wiig within the same frame is to see performers who at this point now have a lengthy history in and out of each other’s careers. Jon Hamm and Ellie Kemper didn’t just make “Bridesmaids” together – Hamm was one of Kemper’s high school drama teachers.
No wonder these actors know how to play off each other in a way that just seems to get funnier and more natural all the time. No wonder they move gracefully between acting and directing and writing for each other. And no wonder audiences are responding – comedy may rely heavily on self-deprecation, but there’s an extra refreshing lack of ego in the generous way these stars continue to grace each other’s work. Not everything they touch is brilliant, of course. (“Notes from the Underbelly”? Meh.) But the way they drop in on each other’s television shows, pop up suddenly together in a Funny or Die clip, represents the best of the “Let’s put on a show” spirit. It’s a star system where the star is eclipsed by the constellation. And one in which the words “Friends” in a movies title seems, happily, like truth in advertising.
Justin Bieber (Credit: Reuters/Eric Gaillard) 
John Travolta (Credit: Reuters/Thomas Peter) 
Amid a stream of confetti, Lindsay Lohan arrives at court in Beverly Hills, Calif., on July 20, 2010. (Credit: AP/Jason Redmond) 
(Credit: Fox/Benjamin Wheelock) 
Adam Scott and Jennifer Westfeldt in "Friends with Kids" 
