one night I was at a dinner party at Spago when the man next to me suddenly asked, apropos of nothing, “Have you ever met Tony Curtis?”
“No,” I said.
“Well, you’re going to.” I was pondering the Zen koan quality of this exchange when I looked up to see a tanned and ascotted Tony Curtis magisterially approaching our table. As he cocked an eyebrow in my direction, I could practically see the thought bubble forming over his head: “Who is this? Nobody!” Which of course only added to the experience.
Match me, Sidney — I was having a Tony Curtis moment! I’d hoped for a Tony Curtis moment ever since reading something Bruce Jay Friedman wrote years ago about the fabulousness of life in Hollywood — that Tony Curtis was the kind of person who, when he tells a story about a man dropping a veal chop on the floor, actually drops a veal chop on the floor. Oh, to be in the vicinity when that chop hits the ground!
Restaurants like Spago serve a kind of “Twilight Zone” function in Hollywood. They are, besides safe zones for celebrities, portals for commoners to a different dimension — that of the rich and famous, or at least of the hip and happening. When this occurs often enough a restaurant becomes that ineffable thing known as a Hollywood hangout.
The atmosphere begins with the waiters, who are skilled at communicating that they are the social equals of the clientele without seeming overly familiar. Overhearing a heated discussion of “The Rules” at a Maple Drive lunch in Beverly Hills last year, for instance, the waitress had a couple of pithy comments to make about the book. When a customer at Orso on West Third Street joked, while fumbling for her Visa, “Will you take my Lucky’s charge card?” the groovily spectacled waiter deadpanned, “I’d consider Ralph’s.”
The New York-based Indochine, which has been frequented by Sharon Stone, Jerry Seinfeld and Julia Roberts since it opened its Los Angeles branch on Beverly Boulevard last December, is especially careful about this. “We have a stable of interesting wait staff,” says co-owner Jean-Marc Houmard, “people who are smart enough to have dinner with the people they are serving.”
but those in the position to know typically affect a certain helpless innocence when you ask them what’s the secret ingredient to their restaurants. “You know… (pause) … I don’t actually know (long pause),” muses Peter Morton of Morton’s, on why his namesake eatery remains the place for dinner Monday nights — so much so that the notorious Industry column in the old Spy magazine always ended with “See you Monday night at Morton’s!”
“At the end of the day, it’s just giving people what they want, I guess,” Morton sighs, sounding fairly bored. Hollywood restaurateurs are typically well-versed in this Hollywood jargon. They often use that ticlike phrase “at the end of the day,” or speak of diners as “the audience.”
Dining at Morton’s with a regular, however, is an object lesson in what makes a place like this work. Last month I had lunch there with screenwriter, journalist, actor, economist and all-around Hollywood gadfly Ben Stein, in connection with his new Comedy Central game show “Win Ben Stein’s Money!” Stein goes to Morton’s at least two or three times a week when he’s in town; that particular week, in fact, he would eat there five times.
Why? Because it’s his place. The food at Morton’s (which is actually quite good) is not the point, although the fact that they happily accommodate special requests is a definite plus: Stein wanted his lime-grilled chicken to be only white meat, and that’s just what he got.
He must have waved at and said hello to at least half-a-dozen people in the 90-odd minutes we were there, and he felt comfortable enough to repeatedly ask the hostess to turn the annoying music down until it reached a suitably low volume. Clearly, for someone like this, Morton’s is a home away from home.
In fact, the day Joan Rivers announced she was suing Stein for libel 10 years ago because of an article he’d written about her in GQ, Stein went to Morton’s for dinner. He was worried about people looking at him strangely, but the waiters all patted his back soothingly and one high-powered woman executive gave him a big hug and kiss and announced, “I’m with you!” (The case was later dropped, with both parties apologizing to each other.)
“I don’t want to sound like a cotton commercial,” says designer Barbara Lazaroff, who runs the Spago empire with her husband, celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck, “but a restaurant is part of the fabric of somebody’s life: where they proposed, where they cut that big deal, where they had their first date.” (Or where they went after they were sued.) A Hollywood restaurant often has a special knack for making Hollywood heavyweights feel comfortable during these moments of their lives … sometimes literally.
While designing the new Spago Beverly Hills, Lazaroff went to the home of the famously hefty movie mogul Marvin Davis — who often dines there twice a day — and took his measurements so she could make him his own special chair. (Davis had to wait till the new Spago opened for this perk because there wasn’t room at the original one in West Hollywood.)
The physical appearance of Hollywood hangouts ranges from the discreet, elegant luxury of Spago Beverly Hills — which took over the site of the old Bistro Garden, a longtime favorite of the Nancy Reagan set — to the open-air casualness of Kokomo in the Farmer’s Market at Third and Fairfax, where Denzel Washington once invited one of the actor-waiters onto the set of his new movie, and where eccentric old ladies from the neighborhood are indulged with endless coffee refills.
The original Spago West Hollywood has a buzzing, bistro-ish atmosphere, with the roaring fires in the open kitchen’s pizza ovens and a spectacular Sunset Boulevard view of the city from a surrounding wall of windows as focal points. The generally subdued Maple Drive in Beverly Hills is notable for its prized, plush booths — plus the loud, foul language that typically emanates from a particular booth in the corner frequented by Rob Reiner (often dressed in sweats) and Billy Crystal.
A hangout should have enough familiar faces so that the feeling is more of a club than a restaurant. “At a certain point, every place has to become some sort of variation on ‘Cheers,’ a community of regulars,” says Sean MacPherson, whose collection of restaurants — Jones, Swingers, Bar Marmont, the Good Luck Bar and the just opened El Carmen — makes him probably the preeminent creator of hot spots for young Hollywood. Swingers, for example, is a jumping, casual diner, while Bar Marmont is a dark, quirkily elegant place with a bald, transvestite hostess and a retro ’20s feeling. But the familiarity rule holds true for both.
MacPherson opened Swingers (which is in the Beverly Center neighborhood) with his partner at the time, Jon Sidel, long before the movie “Swingers” made this sort of in-with-the-in-crowd scene famous. A few years ago I had lunch at Swingers with Rosanna Arquette, who had just married Sidel. A parade of musician and actor acquaintances of Arquette’s stopped by the table literally every few minutes. “Tell Tom I said hi!” she said cheerfully at one point to a friend on his way to a Tom Hayden fundraiser. “I like Tom.”
Special clublike touches at these restaurants encourage conviviality. At the Little Door on West Third Street, for instance, where customers include Nicolas Cage and Rosanna’s sister Patricia Arquette, valets drive drunk customers home. There is no identifying sign outside — a typical affectation of happening Hollywood restaurants these days. “It’s like a game — if you really want to come here, you’ll find it!” says co-owner Stephanie Meschen coyly. “The best publicity is word-of-mouth, so we do no advertising whatsoever,” adds her brother and co-owner, Nicolas Meschen.
The Buffalo Club in Santa Monica also has no sign. Those not in-the-know would assume it’s just another warehouse in this industrial section of Santa Monica … except for the crew of valet parkers outside. These rather bleak surroundings make a rather magical contrast to the hidden interior restaurant and patio — described by owner Anthony Yerkovich, a TV producer who created “Miami Vice,” as sort of “an elegant take on a 1920s chophouse.”
The Buffalo Club goes the Little Door one better in that its phone number isn’t listed. This can inspire complicated games of one-upmanship, which of course is part and parcel of the whole Hollywood hangout experience.
“Do you have a Zagat’s?” a friend called to ask when we were planning to go there recently.
“No.”
“Oh, that’s OK, I know someone who does — I’ll call them for the number.”
“I have the number,” I said grandly. “I just don’t have a Zagat’s.”
Going to a Hollywood hangout doesn’t guarantee that you’re going to have a Hollywood experience, of course. But sometimes the stars are mysteriously in alignment and the entire event surpasses any tourist’s expecations. Many years ago Alan Blavins, who is the creative director of the San Francisco advertising agency Randazzo & Blavins (and also my uncle) visited Los Angeles as a tourist from the U.K. He went to Le Dome on the Sunset Strip, which then as now was a prime Hollywood hangout.
Within five minutes, in walked Elton John, resplendent in a lime green suit. At the bottom of the staircase was a prone Richard Harris, who’d apparently had one too many cocktails. Then the waiter came to take the order. At that moment, a woman walking by on Sunset Boulevard decided to lift her skirt and press her naked behind up against the Le Dome window, giving the diners inside a view to remember. “How would you like the steak?” the waiter asked.
“And, being English,” Alan recalls, “I said, ‘I’ll have it pinker than that.’”
Recently I took my 8-year-old daughter and her friend Perri to see “George of the Jungle.” Perri loves “George of the Jungle” so much that she didn’t mind seeing it a third time. What she especially loves, it turns out, is Brendan Fraser. This is why repeated “George of the Jungle” viewings reward Perri with subtle and myriad delights.
“Sometimes when I look at him,” she explained, “not when he’s smiling, but just when he’s going like this” (here Perri affected a blank, zombielike expression), “I think, Does he have a wife? And children?”
Ah, I thought. The birth of a fan. The nascent discovery that a celebrity can be a blank screen for reels of projected fantasies. Perri was so impressed when I told her I’d actually interviewed Brendan Fraser that her jaw dropped and stayed that way for several moments. “What did you think,” she finally gasped, “when you interviewed him?”
Well … “I thought he was very nice,” I said, which was true. But what I’d actually spent more time thinking was, “Oh, God, another one. Another shy, quiet, sweet young actor. And now I’m going to have to spend tons of time tracking down people he knows to say interesting things about him, because he doesn’t have much to say for himself.”
Or at least he didn’t until he started to loosen up. But at that point, exactly 59 minutes into the interview, Nancy Seltzer (his steamroller of a publicist) burst into the room and barked, “Time’s up!”
So what do we think when we interview people? Often, it isn’t pretty. “You are the biggest liar I’ve ever met,” a reporter I know who covered defense attorney Leslie Abrahmson in her pre-Menendez days remembers thinking. “You know I know you’re lying and you know I have to print this crap because I’m on deadline and I have a story to write.”
Former Sony Pictures chief Mark Canton once actually explained, “You know, I’m from the Age of Aquarius and …” to a reporter interviewing him about black filmmakers. The reporter’s rather prescient thought: “I give him three to five years, tops, before he’s booted out.”
City-beat reporters, on the other hand, are always traipsing for hours through schoolyards or urban renewal projects while interviewing some long-winded official. According to them, what they typically think while they dutifully jot down the official’s every word is, “God, I really need to go to the bathroom.”
I was musing about this after cleaning out my files the other day. Because among the reams of half-forgotten hack assignments was one called “The Best of L.A.: A Local Guide to a World-Class Experience.” It had an introduction by then-Mayor Tom Bradley — who it seems was not above taking on the occasional hack assignment himself.
“Whether you prefer to wander through trendy stores on Melrose or enjoy an evening of theater in downtown Los Angeles, you’ll find Catherine Seipp” (hey, that’s me!) “a terrific tour guide,” he wrote graciously … if indeed he did the actual writing, which I doubt. This gave us something more in common than our dual bylines. Because guess what? I didn’t do the actual interviewing of the dozen-odd local cultural experts I quoted in that piece.
Exhausted by the thought of such heavy-duty inanity, I paid an impoverished young actress with speedy typing skills $100 to make the calls for me. And she did an excellent job, turning in pages and pages of quotes. But when she came to Ruth Reichl, who of course is now The New York Times restaurant critic but then was still with the Los Angeles Times, she hit a snag.
Apparently Ruth took umbrage at the questions (basically, “Whither Los Angeles restaurants?”) because, as she informed her interviewer with an exasperated sigh, “Anyone familiar with my work already knows what I think of Los Angeles restaurants.”
But eventually Ruth loosened up and came through with some usable stuff. And here’s how they appeared in my researcher’s notes: “‘… I think we’re going to see a lot more cross-cultural cooking’ — Ruth Reichl (who’s kind of unpleasant and a bitch).”
I share this with you not to besmirch the doubtlessly lovely personality of Ruth Reichl, who was perhaps just in a bad mood that day, but to illustrate this tacit tension between interviewer and interviewee. I almost never write stories from other people’s notes. But when I do, I’m startled at how typical is such seething resentment toward the subject.
Once I was called to finish a story about women executives in Hollywood for a local magazine. The original writer couldn’t complete it because of an unexpected family crisis. Luckily, however, she was a veteran of the Time Inc. school of reporting — accustomed to providing thousands of words of raw material for someone else to turn into a story.
Slogging through a stack of perfectly professional notes, I was stopped short by the fury that erupted in the middle of a five-page interview with a Fox development vice president, who had started out as a casting director.
“‘… a friend said, “Go in there and lie and say you’ve done casting!” And so they hired me.’”
“– SUCH A LOT OF HOT AIR FOR NOTHING,” the reporter suddenly inserted. “BOMBAST. A GIRL IN LOVE WITH THE SOUND OF HER OWN VOICE. THINKS EVERYTHING ABOUT HER STORY IS SO WHIMSICALLY OFFBEAT, OUTRAGEOUS AND DELIGHTFUL. CLEARLY THINKS SHE IS DELICIOUSLY OUTRAGEOUS.
“‘… And I sort of took it from there,’ SHE SAYS, HER VOICE GETTING VELVETY WITH SELF-LOVE. ‘And I found a bunch of children they liked a lot. And that was the beginning of my career in casting!’ SHE EXULTS, BREAKING DOWN INTO A LOUD HAPPY LAUGH THAT INVITES MY ADMIRATION. CAN YOU BELIEVE HOW POMPOUS THIS BITCH IS?”
None of this found its way into the article. But it could have! So be kind to that drone hunched over that notepad. We know you sound fabulous to you. But think for a moment how you sound to us.
| weegee is dead; long live Mr. Rat.
That’s what I remember thinking, in the days after Diana’s death, when a paparazzo with the improbably Dickensian name of Romualdo Rat was among the Gang of Seven picked up by the Paris police for tailing the princess’s Mercedes. In the stiffly egalitarian New York Times, which bestows honorifics on serial killers and Nobel Prize-winners alike, the photographer picked up an apt title of his own: Mr. Rat.
Perversely, I couldn’t help but cheer him. I was tired already of the saccharine banalities about Diana; further, I saw her senseless death as a fairly straightforward case of drunk driving — or, in the British usage, “drink driving,” which always makes me envision a martini glass at the wheel of a sporty roadster. You can convince me that paparazzi are bottom feeders and bad customers, and that they make life hell for some celebrities. (If you need proof, rent a copy of “Blast ‘Em,” Joseph Blasioli’s stomach-turning 1993 documentary about “stalkerazzi.” Watching how these men work is nearly as shocking and revealing as watching how meat is made.) But you cannot convince me that they are guilty of murder. If Di’s addled driver thought he was trying to shake armed terrorists, he was very badly mistaken.
In an uncanny coincidence, an exhibit of paparazzi photographs — planned long before Diana’s death — opened last week at New York’s tony Robert Miller Gallery. The show, a glance back at the work of several decade’s worth of photographers like Mr. Rat, has a good deal to say about our fascination with star wattage, and with the informal and unposed “stolen” image. The show also chronicles (if not quite as dramatically as Blasioli’s documentary) the often uneasy relationship between celebrity photographers and their frequently unwilling prey. Like paparazzi pix themselves, the show is a guilty pleasure.
The photographs in “Paparazzi,” virtually all of them in black-and-white, date from the mid-1950s to the present. (The show’s final image is one of Diana, seen from behind, walking arm-in-arm with Ralph Lauren.) But the bulk of these images are from the late ’50s and early ’60s, surely the golden age of glamour in America. These weren’t just the Camelot years but the dawn of the jet set; indeed, many of the photographs depict celebrities stepping smartly off airplanes. The Italian photographer Luigi Leoni’s silvery images (all from 1960) of Eva Peron, Maurice Chevalier and actress Anna Magnani arriving at the Rome airport feel almost like formal portraits; the scenes are as ritualized as press conferences.
This was an era before zoom lenses and rat-a-tat-tat speed drives, when a huge pop of light from an outsized flashbulb cast itself over a subject as if the moment were a baptism. A photograph like Marcello Geppetti’s “Anita Ekberg in Her Convertible Mercedes With a Friend, Via Veneto,” taken one night in Rome in 1960, is an ample reminder of how moving true glamour, against all of our better instincts, can be. It helps to contrast this photo with a more recent image, a few feet away from the Ekberg shot, of singer Mariah Carey with her boss and former husband Tony Mottola; the pair look like they’ve been smuggled in from a Holiday Inn lounge act.
It’s no surprise that this show leans heavily on Italian photographers. The term paparazzi itself derives from a character in Fellini’s 1960 movie “La Dolce Vita,” a celebrity chaser named Paparazzo. One of the shocking things about this show, however, is how composed and artful many of these snapshots seem to us now. Partly this is nostalgia at work; partly it is simple talent. Geppetti’s 1962 photograph of director Michelangelo Antonioni and actress Monica Vitti fighting off a young photographer, for example, or Tazio Secchiarolli’s image, from the same year, of Fellini on the set of “8 1/2,” resonate like works by artists who have received far more acclaim. The photos feel like art, and they are priced like it. Secchiarolli’s Fellini shot is offered, in the show’s catalog, for $2,400.
Geppetti’s image of an angry Antonioni isn’t the only photograph here that depicts celebrities tangling, Sean Penn-style, with paparazzi. There’s a wonderful series of images by Secchiarolli in which Anita Ekberg’s James Bond-ish boy-pal Anthony Steel chases the photographer down the street. (Secchiarolli evidently kept shooting away.) Another series of Ekberg photos, these by Geppetti, shows the actress confronting paparazzi with a bow and arrows. A small notation in the gallery’s catalog reads: “Original arrows available for sale upon request.”
Writers and intellectuals have rarely been targeted by paparazzi — never mind the fact that both Susan Sontag and Philip Roth made the cover of Vanity Fair in the pre-Tina Brown early ’80s — and this is probably good for all of us. So it’s a bit of shock to stumble across photographer Dino Pedriali’s three very nude, very intrusive photos of the late writer Pier Paolo Pasolini taken through a large picture window in 1975. In the first, a hunky Pasolini reclines nude on a bed reading a book — his pose resembles that of a Playgirl centerfold — his manhood quite in evidence. In the second, he’s spotted the photographer and is leaping up in alarm. In the third he stands, defiantly naked, glaring out of the window with his face pressed against the glass. I walked past shaking my head and counting my blessings; at least it wasn’t a dangling Dean Koontz.
The spookiest and most resonant photo in the exhibition is without a doubt a 1960 Marcello Geppetti picture of Jayne Mansfield, taken near Rome. The image is titled, poignantly, “Jayne Mansfield Lying on the Ground After Having Been Assaulted by a Woman Jealous of Her Beauty,” and it shows a dazed, hurt-looking Mansfield on the street, in a white dress, surrounded by men who are about to help her to her feet. It’s a shot that resembles the famous photograph of Robert Kennedy following his assassination in 1968, and it’s the one that sticks with you and makes you uneasy as you leave this exhibit.
It wasn’t a photographer who physically assaulted Mansfield — yet she, like Diana, was attacked in a different manner almost daily because of her beauty and fame, caught in a crush of attention. It’s possible to believe that Mr. Rat didn’t kill Diana and still recognize that, for the photographers — and, by extension, for all of us — the line between love and hate doesn’t really exist any longer.
when Parade landed at Hollywood’s hometown newspaper of record a few months ago, a Rubicon had been crossed: The Los Angeles Times is now officially the biggest little hicksville paper in the world.
Parade, of course, is that venerable national supplement for papers too provincial or cash-strapped to have their own Sunday magazines. As a child I used to pore over Walter Scott’s Personality Parade during the short time my mother subscribed to the Orange County, Calif., Register; she was selling Oriental rugs out of the garage and needed to check that her ad appeared each week. But for years this was just a pleasant (if rather stupefying) memory, along with the Register’s wonderfully downmarket comics featuring the Jackson Twins and Dondi.
Oddly, Times readers now have two Sunday supplements, at least for a while. Although Spring Streetologists expected Parade to be the death knell of the failing Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, Times editors actually have put renewed effort behind it, and last Sunday the new, ad-fat, redesigned version — now hokily subtitled “The Best of Socal” — made its debut. Well, with the falling cost of newsprint and a booming economy, why not?
But despite that hideous new construction “Socal” (for Southern California — get it?) in the title, I did find myself spending more time than usual last Sunday flipping through the Magazine. The cover profile on Deepak Chopra, in keeping with the pokey metronome of L.A. Times time, was typically way behind the curve. But there were pretty good columns on gardening, home design and restaurants — plus a rather absorbing first-person entertaining column, courtesy of a woman who foolishly doubled the amount of mushrooms in a dinner party recipe and found herself still endlessly, tearfully chopping when guests arrived.
Then I returned the Magazine to its usual place on the throw-out pile, poured a really big cup of coffee and — it kills me to admit this — went out to the rocking-chair on the porch with … Parade.
My shock at actually now being in a demographic base of Parade, with its “Irritable Colon?” and “Foot Pain Is No Laughing Matter” ads, pales beside my shock to find that Parade is actually quite compelling.
Old people and their exercise routines. Chicken salad recipes. And “Ask Marilyn,” in which World’s Highest I.Q. Person Marilyn Mach Vos Savant answers anything you might care to ask. Last week: “People with minds like yours must be tempted to spend a lot of time in their heads … Do you have to train yourself to keep on smelling the roses?”
I don’t really want to read it, and yet, so help me, I do.
I subscribe to three daily newspapers, six weekly periodicals and around 10 monthly magazines — which here in the land of “but who has time to read?” pretty much solidifies my reputation as deeply strange. But here’s something even stranger: The magazines I most eagerly read, that I literally can’t wait to get my hands on, I not only don’t subscribe to — I’m embarrassed to be seen reading them in public. Besides Parade, here are my other secret favorites:
Bottom Line: This seductive little periodical is produced by Boardroom Inc., which also publishes books distilling boiled-down, practical information for the “but who has time to read?” crowd. Bottom Line, in fact, has transformed “but who has time to read?” from a plaintive whine into something of a battle-cry. I do have time to read, and I like to read, so I’m not sure why I find Bottom Line so irresistible whenever I happen upon it. I suspect the magazine functions as a sort of head-cleaning tape — its sheer inanity washing away the detritus of too much information.
The pithy, bland articles, which typically include the phrases “Did You Know That …” or “Expert Speaks” or “Useful Information for All of Us” in the headlines, buzz repeatedly around the classic ’90s themes of stock market investing, office politics, bargain hunting and diet tips. Little boxes suggest sending away for free pamphlets on anxiety disorders or “The Overwhelmed Person’s Guide to Time Management.”
The target audience seems to be that vast crowd of hapless Dilbert drones. This isn’t exactly my crowd, yet I find Bottom Line fairly regularly in friends’ bathrooms. Perhaps they find it soothing, at least in the bathroom, for the same reasons I do. Or maybe they just let it pile up. I suspect the real secret to Bottom Line’s success is that people who don’t have time to read also don’t have time to cancel subscriptions.
Westways and Avenues: Let’s see, how long have I been a member of the Automobile Club of Southern California? Twenty-four years, according to my card! And that’s how long I’ve been carefully crossing out the extra charge on my annual membership bill for an optional subscription to Westways magazine. Even cheapskates like me, however, are sent Avenues every month gratis. Avenues is a sort of stripped-down version of Westways, and like its grander sibling revolves around travel tips, car advice and whiling away the miles in Southern California (or “Socal,” as the new, improved Los Angeles Times Magazine would have it).
I love getting Avenues because every time it arrives in my mailbox I get a frisson of skinflinty satisfaction that it could have been Westways and I could have been out $17. And I love reading Westways (for free, at the doctor’s office) because of the fearsome Schadenfreude its masthead offers to Los Angeles journalists. Ah, yes, I remember those folks when they seemed to be on their way up. And maybe someday I’ll land there on the way down myself, begging for an assignment about museum-hopping — but not yet, thank God, not yet.
Reader’s Digest: The entire Reader’s Digest empire has been going through hard times lately. Last year a New York Times article about the magazine reported the problem of its aging audience in a nutshell: A Digest executive spied a young man engrossed in the magazine at an airport — but he’d hidden it inside another publication! I know exactly how that reader felt. I adore Reader’s Digest; I always have. But you’re not going to catch me reading it in public.
Every month its wonderfully sentimental articles make me well up at least once. This month (the September issue) it was “One Wing and a Prayer,” about a one-winged dove named Olive rescued by a hardscrabble Arizona farm family’s 8-year-old daughter. Olive then raised a baby shrike the family found orphaned by a rainstorm, and then she molted and died, all alone in her shoe box, and … excuse me, I need to get another Kleenex.
And yet I don’t subscribe to it. That would be fully entering a world of Hummel figurines and Nicoderm ads and “Humor In Uniform” and there I cannot go. Instead, I find myself putting the Digest on the checkout counter conveyer belt, hoping no one I know is in line behind me, month after month after month.
On my morning walk I pass by a house that often has fabulous things out by the curb on garbage day. One day it was a Nancy Drew hardback from the ’40s; another it was a 1967 paperback advice book for teenagers called “Date Talk.” But imagine my excitement at finding an entire year’s worth of Reader’s Digests! Free! For the taking! Since Digest articles by definition do not date, I promised myself that this plunder would last a year. Alas, I finished it in a few weeks and am back to furtively buying new issues at the grocery store.
Sunset: Recently I got into an argument with a friend about the virtues of Sunset vs. Martha Stewart Living. “But Sunset’s so boring!” she claimed. No, no! Or rather: Yes … but. Sunset, a regional institution as well as a media one, is gearing up for its 100th anniversary next year. Although a few months ago it completed a makeover of such subtlety that the in-house description is not “redesign” but “refreshening,” the magazine remains so hypnotically boring it approaches the sublime.
To enter this wonderfully realized world — in which irksome office concerns seem to have been banished by some all-powerful cult of leisure — you first must be, in a sense, open to boredom. That is, you must have nothing better to do than pore over the finer points of bulb planting or deck varnishing. This is not a state I enjoy admitting that I’m in to others, but there it is. Some people claim to find similar escape in Martha Stewart Living, but I think they’re fooling themselves. Constant, nagging questions distract from the Marthaland vision. Has Martha had a face lift? Or: Marzipan fruit … Why? The Sunset universe, on the other hand, is narcotically relaxing. I find even the occasional dissonant notes cozily predictable in their serene, unchanging awfulness. From a 1973 issue: Try paneling a bedroom in … garden benderboard! (Now there’s an idea.) From last December: Get in the Christmas spirit with … reindeer pati! (Sounds Donder-licious.)
Best of all is that people in Sunset photographs, unlike Martha, do not look better than you. They look as if they have eaten a few too many triple-tested Sunset recipes. And yet they seem happy — happy just cultivating their gardens. Is there a better vision of life well-lived?
Though no one would have predicted it 50 years ago at the dawn of the medium, one of the things television does extremely well is present a funeral — not only for Diana or Mother Teresa (whose service will be covered live on Saturday), but for John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Richard Nixon, Yitzhak Rabin, Lord Mountbatten and even Emperor Hirohito. Mourning no longer becomes Electra, but in a very odd way, it does become television — so much so that Michael Kinsley several years ago jokingly suggested that cable television would one day feature a new network called the Funeral Channel.
There are, of course, obvious ways in which the funerals of great political or cultural leaders make for memorable television. “It’s a spectacle without surprises for which television can prepare — kind of like a macabre sporting contest,” says Robert Thompson, the director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University. “These events are aesthetically perfect for TV because you know the star of the show will always hit the mark.” That’s especially true in the case of someone like Diana, a megacelebrity whose claim to fame came primarily through the print press, not through today’s traditional routes of TV or film. In death, TV could finally control her in a way it controls almost all other celebrities in life.
Such funerals also allow a nation — and now the world — to witness the ritual live and share its grief collectively. In fact, in a multi-channel cable age of atomized viewing patterns, they are among the only broadcasts left that attract such huge audiences, creating what scholars Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz call “holidays” of communication. Making that holiday even more notable, the networks usually forego commercials during funeral broadcasts. Such events are among the few notable occasions on television when God is mentioned, and among the rare times the rituals of organized religion are shown with respect outside the Sunday morning viewing ghetto. Funerals are also blissfully distinctive on television because they are virtually the only time when the voluble commentators stop commentating — if only for a few moments — and allow something to speak for itself.
Yet there are other, less evident reasons why funerals on television are such striking events. A funeral provides yet another way for television to engage in the popular enterprise of biography. In recent years, TV has rediscovered the notion that history can be entertaining — particularly if the political is made personal — and the result has been the A&E network’s “Biography” series, PBS’s “The American Experience” (which will feature eight biographies of 20th century presidents this season), as well as recent docudramas about George Wallace and Teddy Roosevelt. A period of mourning, followed by a funeral, allows network television to present a kind of grand biography in a way that time doesn’t allow on shows such as “Dateline NBC,” “PrimeTime Live” or even “Entertainment Tonight.”
There’s also a way in which a state funeral on television is better than being there in person, and not simply because you can see more clearly. Watching on TV allows the mourning viewer to express grief privately, in the comfort of the home. Moreover, as Marshall McLuhan frequently reminded us, television is a “cool” medium, and that coolness allows the home audience to distance itself from its sorrow and even from the fact of death itself. “Television takes the chaos of death, reduces it and puts a frame around it,” says Jan Gough, a former television writer and a recent graduate of the Harvard Divinity School. “On television, it’s all so contained, so distant and so safe.” The small screen affords the viewer a form of virtual mourning.
Yet for all the distance TV provides, a funeral is a striking media event because it does deal in a real way with death. Except for an occasional made-for-TV movie like “Brian’s Song” or the even rarer death of a regular character like Col. Blake on “M*A*S*H,” television reflects and reinforces American culture’s almost complete ignorance of death. (How many commercials are there for coffins or funeral homes?) Even old people don’t appear that often on television, in part because they might remind us that the Grim Reaper is lurking around the corner. As Robert Lichter, president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington, D.C., has pointed out, the Victorians openly discussed death but ignored sex, whereas our culture of television does the opposite. One of the basic conventions of TV drama and comedy is that no matter what happens, the stars will always return to fight or crack jokes the following week. “The purpose of a soap opera,” critic Dennis Porter once noted, “is to never end, and its beginnings are always lost sight of.” And, on television today, everything is a soap opera, including the news.
In contrast, a funeral presents finality, and it does so in a way that contrasts sharply with this medium’s constant, almost hysterical emphasis on the upbeat. Yes, television is especially adept at telling stories, but a human story that never ends is, at best, a lovely fairy tale. Moreover, with its trademark promise to disclose intimacy by going “up close and personal,” this medium revels in joy, anger and disappointment, but rarely shows us the kind of unspeakable sadness we see at a tragic funeral. After all, in the world of everyday television, Perry Mason and Mary Richards are immortal, and princesses don’t die in grisly car crashes; together they all live happily ever after in reruns. If TV funerals mesmerize us, it may be because they are a harsh reminder that this “window on the world” is really only a mirror in a fun house. And, despite all we may have seen or heard on television everywhere else, someday the world will truly break your heart.
saturday night’s waiter opened his recitation of specials by glibly informing us that Princess Di had been badly hurt in a car crash, her boyfriend killed, so he hoped our disappointment at not having pineapple salsa for the pork chop would be minor by contrast. A few of my dinner companions chuckled politely and resumed their conversations. I spent the rest of the evening feeling vaguely alarmed, like I wanted to go home, and slightly foolish for losing my appetite over a tragedy happening so remotely from me.
And yet, when I did get home and the first image to appear on the television screen was of the hideously mangled Mercedes being loaded onto a truck, a blue banner running the width of the picture proclaiming simply, “PRINCESS DIANA DEAD,” I didn’t think about feeling foolish. I just sat on the couch and cried for a woman I didn’t know.
I have a busy life and sadnesses of my own. Why do I feel such heartbreak over the death of not just any celebrity, but the most photographed woman of our time, a woman born to wealth and privilege, someone for whom I never expressed undue interest before? This was the question gently put to me by my (second) husband on Sunday night, as we were leaving for the summer’s last family mini-vacation and I was still clutching a newspaper in disbelief.
I can cite my mother ache for Diana’s two young sons, who woke to learn that they were motherless. The needlessness of her death is obvious, as is the waste of her youth, vivacious beauty and evident compassion. But ridiculous as it may sound, I feel Diana’s death as a more personal loss, one expressed, for different reasons, by the people of Diana’s ancestral seat in Northamptonshire, where the newspaper headline on Sunday read, “WE’VE LOST OUR PRINCESS.” Indeed, that is just whom I have lost. My princess.
My mother’s generation had two princesses. Grace Kelly, upon her marriage to Prince Rainier of Monaco, was the first, and it was no sheer coincidence that the White House era of John and Jackie Kennedy was known as “Camelot.” Diana Spencer and I were contemporaries, less than a year apart in age. Though she may have played the fantasy games that I played, imagining that a ’60s version of princeliness would carry me off (my friends and I played “Married to the Beatles,” and I wouldn’t be surprised if Diana did too), by a stroke of fate Diana was born into a class with real princes and the possibility for real-life fairy-tale romance.
What little girl has ever grown up not imagining that someday she might marry the prince? The games we play, the fairy tales we hear as little girls shape our romantic fantasies as women. (I’m reminded of a friend’s 4-year-old daughter, who recently sat next to a polite 12-year-old boy on a plane. Upon arriving at their destination, my friend’s daughter looked up at her seatmate, who had gamely played a few hands of Go Fish with her, and said, “Well, goodbye. It’s been nice being married to you.”) We play house, we daydream about movie stars and our friends’ older brothers, we plan our “weddings” during slumber parties. In the process, we begin to form our expectations for romantic happiness, and at least some of those expectations stick with us, no matter how outwardly realistic or feminist we pride ourselves in being. (Think of all the women you know who had white weddings after all …)
Of the estimated billions who watched sweet, shy, virginal 19-year-old Lady Di marry her prince, at least half of them must have been other 19-year-old girls like me, fascinated by the hand-sewn beading on the puffy sleeves of her dress, nodding our heads approvingly over the weight she’d lost in the stressful weeks leading up to the wedding, puzzling over the mysteries of marriage, especially to a man 12 years your senior with a bad reputation. About Prince Charles’ liking for the ladies, we thought with blind satisfaction: He’s been searching the world over (slipper tucked into his pocket), and now he’s found her, a girl pure enough and good enough to be his princess.
And Diana was not just Charles’ archetype (or so we thought at the time), but ours as well. She fit so well the role we had imagined all our lives that there was no room for envy, even little for emulation (the hair, the dress). In seeing Diana married to the prince, our fairy-tale fantasies were vindicated. That story about the prince arriving on his white horse — it was true after all. We had every reason to believe it would happen to us with our own princes.
And so in the years to follow, with our archetypal princess taken care of, we were free to get busy with our own fairy-tale endings, our carefully orchestrated pomp and blushing betrothals. Ominously, as we came to the part of the story that always reads “… and they lived happily ever after,” we began to realize that a whole bunch of details had been omitted about how you actually manage to live happily ever after with princes who, it turns out, maybe don’t love you or don’t love you enough, or with the pressure and power of families.
And here, then, is the ironic flip side of Diana, our princess: Diana, as her fairy tale dissolved and her prince failed her, became our sister. Once the truth of her unhappy marriage became known and the gilt of royalty rubbed off, Diana was just another girlfriend suffering the public humiliations of a cheating husband. Just another young mom with skittish, unhelpful in-laws and a husband who was jealous that she had so many friends. We could understand — those of us whose husbands didn’t love us, who felt isolated and trapped by circumstances, who wanted to protect our children from hurt, who lived through the failure of our romantic dreams. We’ll watch the kids tonight, we wanted to tell her. You could use a night off and a warm bath. And as mothers, as wives, as strong women, we rooted for her during her fight to leave the royal family on her own terms, with equal custody of her sons and a fair settlement for spending her youth with a man so craven that he would allow his family to browbeat him into marrying a 19-year-old — a girl! — he later confessed he never loved. Just as she vindicated our girlish belief in the princess of fairy tales, so Diana stood as an example of strength for all the women like her, like me, who suffered the bitter disappointments of unhappy marriages.
Just last week, or maybe the week before, I caught the headline of some magazine at the market checkout line. “Di in Love,” it said, or “A Boyfriend for Diana.” Something like that. Good for you, Diana, I remember thinking casually, hoping it was true. Just as I would hope for the happiness of any woman whose story I know as I know Diana’s: remotely, from a distance, but with heartfelt empathy. Just as I would be moved to tears if I learned of some other woman, someone not famous, who had suffered heartbreak after heartbreak to finally come right up to the lip of happiness, only to die for no good reason.
The belief in the fairy tale, that died a long time ago. Not because of Diana, but alongside her: As Diana was crying over Charles’ infidelities, I was crying over my first prince’s human frailties. The more important belief, the fleeting wish that, like me, Diana might have found some lasting contentment, died on Saturday night in Paris. And yet, as I lay in bed at night worrying about Diana’s two boys and hoping that their mother’s love will sustain them through this most horrible nightmare of childhood, I can’t stop thinking of Diana, too. And hoping that it really was true: that Dodi Fayed loved her passionately, and in these last five weeks of her too-short life she did feel that delicious ache of being loved and desired, that his body was perfume to her, that, right at the end, Diana, our queen of broken hearts, had had her faith in love restored. That she could fall in love and — maybe not live happily every after, but have a nice life with someone. Just like regular people.
