On the pop front, it's been a tabloid jamboree for several delicious weeks. I've never been interested in Lindsay Lohan (in "The Parent Trap," she sure was no Hayley Mills), but I sat up and took notice at her sensational appearance last month at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's annual Costume Institute Gala. Since the dawn of Hollywood, a star has known how to make an entrance and depart in glory (a skill shrewdly mastered by Sharon Stone).
At the Met, Lohan arrived fashionably late, looking fabulous in a swirling black gown with an exquisitely tantalizing see-through bodice. And mirabile dictu, that gal knows what to do with her hands and how to hold a handbag! Inert, over-enlarged, weight-trained hands and limp, dangling arms are my beef against our current crew of starlets -- like Kirsten Dunst, who's appealing enough as an Angie Dickinson without the sizzle but whose klunky man-paws we've been forced to contemplate from "Marie Antoinette" through "Spider-Man 3." In the studio era, young actors (from Lana Turner and Ava Gardner through Rock Hudson) were taught basic skills of charm and grace.
After her Met epiphany, Lohan managed to stay in the news by crashing her cocaine-laden Mercedes convertible into a curb and shrub on Sunset Boulevard, fleeing the scene, and then passing out at dawn, open-mouthed like a groggy sailor on a bender, in full view of a passing paparazzo. This efflorescence of her ho-hum fleece-hoodie-and-sneakers mode was followed by the prankish surfacing of eye-opening photos of a visibly hazy but magnetically glowing Lohan horsing around with kitchen knives in kinky lesbo sex-play. Whether Lohan's acting career is permanently off the rails isn't clear, but as a childhood fan of Confidential magazine (the ur-tabloid of the 1950s), I'm enjoying every minute of this decadent spectacle. Scandal is the oxygen of showbiz.
Lohan's travails were swept away, however, by Paris Hilton's histrionics. Oh my, what a wailing and a rending of garments! Poor Paris, dragged sobbing off to jail while shrieking for Mumsey -- it would break your heart if Paris hadn't shown such disdain for the law and if her obnoxiously self-righteous parents weren't always planning posh parties for her. Drunk driving, Paris' worst offense, is a public menace.
At first, Paris seemed to be adopting Martha Stewart's admirable stoicism about the slammer, but things rapidly fell apart. Paris' early release after three days (reversed by the judge) caused an explosion of international indignation. The issue was the equity of American justice, which should properly be blind to wealth and rank. I burst out laughing when I heard the BBC World Service radio announcer report in hushed, plummy tones about "the American socialite Paris Hilton," immediately following a segment on troubles brewing in the Saudi royal family.
However, I was disturbed by the litany of too many commentators claiming that Paris had done absolutely nothing to earn her celebrity. It's true Paris had become overexposed, but only because she lacks Madonna's brilliant facility for changing styles and personae to keep it all fresh. Paris was stuck in the rut of one look and was getting too long in the tooth to play the daffy ingénue.
While Paris became known to a wide audience through her self-parodying role in "The Simple Life," that TV show is a relatively minor phenomenon. The fact is that Paris has been a reasonably successful professional model since she was 19, seven years ago. Her collective body of work belongs to the chronicle of our time. Paris' distinctive, riveting and often choreographic visual images were produced improvisationally on the nightclub scene as well as in formal shoots for commercial clients like Guess. She has given pleasure and diversion to cultural voyeurs around the globe and should be respected for it.
What links the Lohan and Hilton cases is the weird behavior of the parents -- either flaky and dysfunctional or overbearing and coddling. The Lohan and Hilton mothers seem to reject aging by trying to keep their daughters in developmental limbo. Paris in particular seems to have become a psychic prisoner, turned into a flash-frozen marzipan doll by her belligerently benevolent mom. Neither family is typical, of course, but are the Hiltons exposing an unhealthy symbiosis in recent American family life? Adulthood keeps getting postponed for white middle-class girls, who even after they arrive at college are obsessively linked by umbilical cellphones to their hovering parents, who want to shield their progeny from all of life's nicks and scrapes.
Next page: When stars had real stature
