There’s something about Cameron Diaz that she doesn’t want you to know. In January, the raunchy and rambunctious movie star got a serious makeover when she landed a role as a demure, prissy, blue-eyed poster girl for Japan’s Aeon school of English conversation.
Aeon is one of many chain English-conversation (“eikaiwa”) schools that cater to working adults in Japan, where English-language instruction is a thriving industry. Eikaiwa schools here operate much like chain gyms do in the United States: Individuals pay set membership fees for the privilege of purchasing anything from bargain group-class packages to “voice time,” unlimited hours of spontaneous English interaction with actual foreigners.
Diaz is not Aeon’s first famous foreign mascot. In 1999, following the colossal success of “Titanic,” an enhanced Celine Dion also appeared in ads for the conversation school. That year, the French Canadian singer grinned down at shoppers from a frighteningly large billboard above my city’s hippest, busiest street, her Roman nose seeming to sniff in approval at the pervasive air of consumerism in the neighborhood. And why wouldn’t it? Although Aeon is contractually bound to keep the cruder details of its endorsement deals under wraps, Dion’s face can’t come cheap.
Aeon is neither the only Japanese business to hire foreign celebrities as spokes-models nor the only one to alter a star’s image to meet Japanese tastes. Sometimes, endorsements help raise a star’s Japanese profile in time for a major motion picture release. (Just after the Asian release of “You’ve Got Mail,” advertisements for Nohohon, a canned chrysanthemum and dandelion tea, showed Meg Ryan happily consuming the bitter, grassy brew; previews for “Any Given Sunday” began showing in cinemas as Diaz’s Aeon poster was plastered across every available bit of wall space in town.)
Endorsements aren’t always promotional, however. In one pork industry commercial, Sylvester Stallone stands with his arms full of gift-wrapped hams. “Osebo,” he grunts at the camera in Japanese. Osebo are traditional “giri” (duty) gifts — melons cradled in tissue paper or costly crates of canned fruit juice and beer — presented to bosses, neighbors and extended family at the new year.
Arnold Schwarzenegger recently added to his income by appearing in several major Japanese ad campaigns, one for Sky TV (a paid movie channel) and the other for a tiny, amber bottle of syrupy liquid — an alleged potency cocktail. In the latter, he raises both huge arms over his head and flashes two V’s for victory.
Schwarzenegger, like a majority of the Western stars who opt to make guest appearances in Japanese ads, secured a secrecy clause for these endorsements, preventing the Japanese companies from disclosing his sponsorship of the concoction in the United States.
Although the Japanese public is aware that American movie stars expect their Japanese ad campaigns to be kept secret, most people don’t understand why secrecy is called for. “Must the ads be kept a secret,” a junior high school vice principal once asked me, “because Americans still feel something negative about Japan? Is it national ‘ijime,’ you know, ‘bullying’?”
This notion may be due in part to the fact that there is no Japanese word for “sell out.” In Japan, an actor, or “aidoru,” has finally achieved celebrity status when he or she is big enough to appear in a television ad, famous enough to represent a brand-name product.
I tried explaining to my Japanese friends how, in America, celebrity and product endorsement tend to exist in inverse proportion to each other. Here, brand-name identifications make celebrities seem approachable. As in, hey, no way! Whoopi Goldberg likes chewing candy, too!
But Ian Kennedy, a North American who has been living and working in Tokyo for the past decade, refuses to safeguard this secret of so many stars. If celebrities are our gods, then Kennedy, creator of the Big Sell Out Web site, is riotously blasphemous.
After its 1997 launch, his site, which features regularly updated pictures of celebrities in less than flattering poses (check out a grizzly Harrison Ford with a glistening chest, slack-jawed in the sauna after guzzling a tall bottle of Kirin lager), was widely covered by Suck and other publications.
A director from Hakuhodo Inc., Japan’s second-largest ad agency, told Associated Press writer Mari Yamaguchi that “Japan is far enough away that even if the ad is really bad, it goes largely unnoticed by the home-country fans.”
And although Kennedy continues to feature the ads on his site, and despite the media coverage he attracts, American celebrities, such as Schwarzenegger, who wouldn’t be caught dead shilling for, say, a potency potion in the U.S., continue to pose with Japanese products every month.
Following the enormous success in Japan of “The Sixth Sense,” Bruce Willis was signed to promote Georgia-brand canned coffee — he’s seen grinning with self-satisfaction from coffee vending machines across the island nation. Willis may be happy for the same reason Dennis Hopper gave the Sunday Mirror after the U.K. newspaper queried him about one of his Japanese advertisements: “I couldn’t believe what they were paying me,” the actor said. “If I could do one every year, I could retire.”
Japanese students are always asking me which of their beloved aidoru are most popular in the United States. It’s a little embarrassing to admit that none of their mainstream “tarento” (talents) has found a tremendous fan base in America.
In the Japanese commercial universe, American celebrities typically endorse Japanese products, while unknown foreign models or Japanese stars are used to sell American or other imported products. Using foreign faces to peddle Japanese products lends a mystique to the local goods by suggesting more widespread popular appetites for things homegrown. This approach is hardly new. Images of Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock were both used to peddle brands of Japanese whiskey. And Audrey Hepburn’s creamy complexion has sold millions of tubes of Japanese cosmetics.
So when the omnipotent Arnold “Suwasa-chan” appears on prime time and swears by Japan’s major movie channel, Sky TV, he not only sells the service but gives the important, face-saving illusion that he cares deeply about the quality of Japanese television programming.
When Diaz smiles out from Aeon posters in a pose intimating that she has found part-time work as an eikaiwa instructor, she’s suggesting that it’s not an impossibility that she’d be inclined to spend some downtime in Japan between films.
And when Japan’s adopted hero Leonardo DiCaprio takes the wheel of a Suzuki SUV and cruises, dimpled and impish, down a curvy, rural Japanese highway, he’s implying that the new generation of Americans feels a special fondness for the Japanese auto industry.
The only thing more traditionally Japanese than tea is perhaps the chrysanthemum, symbol of the empire. When Ryan licks her upper lip on television and declares her taste for Nohohon, she’s implying that the gaze works both ways. The Japanese viewer can imagine that, at that moment, someone in America is slouched on a sofa, sipping a fresh, iced can of Nohohon and watching a Japanese celebrity drink Coke. Just as her image is consumed by the Japanese public, when Ryan drinks Nohohon, she is consuming Japan. And that’s fair trade.
As name-droppers go, I’m no Dominick Dunne. Most of the names I could drop I met in the line of duty, writing profiles of movie actors for fashion magazines. Since those people were promoting films and their own careers, and since talking to me was often a contractual obligation for them, it’s impossible for me to front. (“I was talking to Keanu a few weeks ago …”) It’s like saying you scored with a prostitute.
But Dunne — bestselling novelist and “special correspondent” for Vanity Fair — was by his own admission a “natural born star fucker … before I’d even heard the term.” His new book, “The Way We Lived Then: Recollections of a Well-Known Name Dropper,” brings the pastime to a new level: The memoir is a cluster fuck of celebrity, crisscrossing (as he has) the worlds of Hollywood and New York, entertainment and society as effortlessly as a butterfly. Though the book offers plenty of evidence of his access to the lives of the rich and famous and features more recognizable names than Liz Smith’s Rolodex, I can offer my own humble testimonial to his ubiquity in several social worlds, while attempting to drop a few names myself.
I went to Dennis Hopper’s wedding party about four years ago. Actually it was the third reception held for his fifth marriage (to Victoria Duffy) and was held at the Manhattan home of artist Julian Schnabel. I had no business being there: An editor at a fashion magazine had invited me; they were going to run pictures of the fete and asked me to write a few words to accompany the photos. She canceled at the last minute (health reasons, as I recall) but still wanted me to attend. To make matters worse, Schnabel — a man who is politely reputed to be temperamental — did not want to see some fucking reporter standing around with his notebook out and did not want me bothering the guests. In short, I was supposed to blend. Tough when nearly everyone else in the room had their own A&E “Biography” special in their future.
From the art world there was Schnabel, of course, and David Salle, Ed Ruscha, Roy Lichtenstein, Mary Boone and more. (Hopper is a painter himself and an avid collector.) The Hollywood presence was mostly old school: Jennifer Jones (whose film career began in 1939), the late Roddy McDowell, James Coburn and a number of producers, directors and screenwriters. (“Most of my friends were working,” Hopper told me later. “Working or dead. I guess it’s about the same.”) And for real literary chops there were both Allen Ginsberg (already looking wasted from the cancer that would take him) and Norman Mailer, who spent considerable time talking to each other.
But in the midst of it all there was one man who was getting what ceramic artist Ron Nagle would call “the full cheese,” one guy everyone gravitated toward and paid obeisance to. Where a lot of these famous people seemed to know each other more through name-and-face recognition, this little white-haired guy in the owlish glasses seemed to know them all. He took all comers on with a handshake or a kiss and scanned the periphery with a practiced eye. (He made eye contact with me and did the shutter-blink of nonconnection: You’re nobody.) It was Dunne, of course, and his presence there — his importance there — is a testament to his survival skills, his tireless mingling and scene-making and the fickle hand of fame that (as he has said of Hollywood) forgives every sin but failure.
Dunne can also be held responsible for a new level of celebrity journalism (which someone once opined is to real journalism what military music is to music). Not the kind that I wrote, a simple profile of a celebrity. Not even the kind abundant in magazines today in which a celebrity profiles a celebrity. No, what Dunne hath wrought is the sort of celebrity journalism in which the journalist himself is a celebrity by dint of knowing celebrities. (Examples can be found in the current issues of Vanity Fair and Talk, just to name a few.) It’s a hall-of-mirrors trick and not an easy one to pull off: You have to have fucked a few stars yourself. And as Dunne makes abundantly clear in his breezy, occasionally alarming narrative, there is a definite price attached.
Dunne grew up in Hartford, Conn., Irish Catholic in a world of wannabe WASPs. His father was a renowned heart surgeon; his brother, John Gregory Dunne, became a writer of note himself. But Dominick suffered from “demons of inadequacy” that will seem familiar to many an Irishman. In the pages of “The Way We Lived Then” (which looks like a coffee-table book, chock-full o’ the author’s own black-and-white photos, and reads like a magazine article) he describes his first visit to Hollywood as a child. “On the tour bus that took us to the movie-star homes,” he writes, “I sat right next to the guide so I wouldn’t miss anything; actually I knew more about the stars than the guide did, although he knew all their addresses.” That would soon change.
Working as a stage manager in New York and Hollywood, Dunne managed to finagle his way into parties thrown by such bona fide royalty as Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall — a star-studded event that ended with everyone jumping in the pool with their clothes on. “I jumped in, too,” he writes. “I wanted to be part of it. I thought to myself, This is how I want to live.”
Problem was he couldn’t afford it. His lust for celebrity was greater than his cachet — until he married Ellen “Lenny” Griffin, an heiress to a wealthy American railroad manufacturing fortune and several stations above Dunne’s. (“I never told anyone that she was kicked out of the Social Register when she married me,” Dunne writes.) In 1957, when he was 30, the Dunnes moved to Los Angeles, where he worked for CBS’s classy “Playhouse 90.” Soon the Dunnes were carrying on like Sara and Gerald Murphy, entertaining constantly, keeping the names on their invitations au courant at all costs.
With this fascination with celebrity came a fixation on the crimes and murders of the rich and famous that bordered on the ghoulish. From the death of Lana Turner’s gangster boyfriend, Johnny Stompanato, to Dunne’s ringside seat at the O.J. Simpson trial (which he covered for Vanity Fair), this book features more beautiful corpses than a James Ellroy novel: Sal Mineo, Natalie Wood, they’re all here, culminating in the death of Dunne’s own daughter, actress Dominique Dunne, who was murdered by her stalker ex-boyfriend in 1982.
The chickens really come home to roost in Dunne’s tale, darkening the sky by story’s end in a way that gives this trip through celebrity city a gravitas that would otherwise be lacking. The myriad recountings of fabulous events grows wearying at times. The Dunnes threw the first Black and White ball in 1964. Truman Capote attended and then famously imitated the affair in New York a few years later, without inviting them (the bitch!). Dunne also conjures up a dinner party at David Selznick’s house that included Dennis Hopper and his first wife, Brooke Hayward (the daughter of Hollywood agent Leland Hayward and Margaret Sullavan and the author of “Haywire,” a classic growing-up-crazy showbiz bio). The Hoppers had just lost their house in a fire and Hayward began crying hysterically as Hopper and Dunne’s wife discussed Rimbaud while maids in black-and-white uniforms scurried about with desserts. It’s like a scene from Luis Buquel’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” and you half expect revolutionaries to appear and machine-gun them all. Which, in a sense, they did.
By the late ’60s, everything was changing: “Hairdressers started to be invited to parties,” Dunne writes with a straight face. One of those hairdressers, Jay Sebring, was murdered by the Manson Family, along with Sharon Tate and Abigail Folger. Things weren’t going so well for Dunne, either. Drunk and stoned most of the time, he lost his wife, his family, his home and his job. He was busted for bringing pot in from Mexico. He was repeatedly humiliated by the very society he had feted. Lowest of all, he even sold his Westie.
Dunne tells the story of his own demise with remarkable candor. “Today I think the reason I write assholes so well in my books is that I have the experience of being one,” he says, and reading his misadventures, it’s hard to disagree. The story of his recovery (he sobered up and began writing at age 50, God bless him) is brief yet inspiring — the kindness of strangers, really — and his ultimate success is the book’s final irony. Having been shunned by society, he paid it back in kind. He helped a reporter from the Washington Post uncover the David Begelman forgery scandal (around which Hollywood had built a wall of silence) and used the lives of those he had known as fodder for his novels. “My rationale,” he writes, “was that if I didn’t do it, someone else would have, and that writer might have been less judicious than I had been in presenting the story.”
By the time I saw him at Hopper’s wedding reception, more than 20 years after his return from purgatory, a lot of those same people were kissing his ring. His own celebrity came in fashions both unfortunate (his daughter’s death) and fortuitous. His influence on both Vanity Fair and Talk are no coincidence, given his debt to Tina Brown. It was she who brought him to VF and he thanks her profusely. Though his magazine writing is often lazy and unfocused, he brings the gold of celebrity journalism — access — to many of his stories and keeps the customers satisfied.
“The Way We Lived Then” is not entirely a guilty pleasure; there are some remarkable stories from One Who Was There, pictures of beautiful people at their leisure and some evocative writing. The downside of Dunne’s legacy is the fixation on writer status, as though an old-fashioned outside journalist couldn’t get the story. The November VF, for example, finds John Richardson writing again on his pal Picasso, while deep into her profile of Viacom’s Sumner Redstone, Judith Newman reveals that he is her father’s first cousin (both access and inside dope).
More alarming is the November Talk profile of French Vogue editor Joan Buck. Buck is enjoying some success there; the magazine’s numbers are up and she has been accepted into the shark-filled waters of Paris fashion. More to the point, she is famous by association (her father was a blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter; she is a close friend of Anjelica Huston) and pals to many in New York publishing, including Times theater critic Ben Brantley, Elle Decor editor Marian McEvoy and probably Brown, too.
All of which blurs the line a little bit more: Who are the celebrities, who the journalists? Dunne was profiled on CNN last week and I expect to see more on him soon. And he is as straightforward about his love of fame and its trappings as any old lady buying a copy of the National Enquirer (or Vanity Fair) at the supermarket. He gives good dish, he reckons, and you get what you pay for. (His book is $27.50, by the way.)
Besides, even those at the banquet often leave hungry. As my close personal friend Dennis Hopper told me a few years ago, after his party, “I wish I had a picture of myself with Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer.”
U2′s television special “A Year in Pop,” which aired last weekend on ABC,
started off with a song. That song. It was the first one of theirs I
ever heard. The year: ninth grade. The setting: a high school talent show
at an outdoor band shell on a damp Montana night. I remember my friend’s big
sister performed something from “South Pacific,” a jazz combo did “I
Can’t Get Started” and a garage band made up of seniors I barely knew played
a song that made me look at them in a whole new way. The guitar part had
this persistence, like it was tugging on your shirt sleeves, and the lyrics
were simple, but slotted into a circular rhythm that had this way of
kidnapping your head: “If you walk away walk away walk away walk away, I will
follow.” I was impressed enough to think out loud; when I expressed
admiration for their songwriting skills, the kid next to me said, “That’s U2,
you idiot.” I bought “Boy” the next day, and U2′s version of “I Will
Follow” was even better than those high school students’. Because U2
had … bells!
Other than some Elvis albums purchased under the influence of my mother
before I turned 10, “Boy” was the first rock record I ever bought. At
15, I fancied myself a serious connoisseur of the classical tradition, and I
think I wrapped myself in its pretensions as a way of escaping the horrors of
American adolescence. Debussy and Beethoven had absolutely nothing to do
with me or my life or my friends or lack thereof, and that’s why I liked
them. They came from separate planets where there was no such thing as P.E.
or driver’s education or student council, and since I didn’t have it in me to
imagine a better world, I’d check out for hours at a time, escaping to some Vienna or
Paris or Leipzig that no longer existed. Buying “Boy” was a big step, a
way of admitting to myself that art didn’t have to be abstract
or incomprehensible or 200 years old to be worthwhile — it could be anything that
sparks a direct, emotional response.
So hearing those bells and chords of “I Will Follow” the other night
inspired a fairly clichid sense of nostalgia — but only for about three
seconds. At one time, that song meant everything to me — it delivered me from
Mozart. But I don’t even particularly like it anymore. I no longer hear in it what the teenage me heard. For starters, the words, which once seemed so powerful, now seem
debilitating. I know now that if someone walks out on you, you don’t fucking
follow — you hate them until you don’t care anymore. But for the most part, the problem
is purely sonic. Having grown up with the here-there-everywhere U2, their trademark
aesthetic has become so ingrained and wallpapery (that Edge guitar, that Bono
moan) that any and all of their songs have become as unnoticeable as the McDonald’s “You Deserve A Break Today” jingle.
Like most everyone else, I gave up on U2 after seeing their ballyhooed 1988″rockumentary” “Rattle and Hum.” I’ll admit to having consumed a 32-ounce gin and
tonic before the curtain rose, but even drunk it was bad:
a drippy insult to American culture in the name of blood-sucking fandom.
Oddly, a discussion of the backlash against the film was one of the first
segments in “A Year in Pop.” Talking about the debacle, Bono defended his naiveti:
“It was complete news to us that the blues existed.” He probably only really understood the
blues after everyone started hating him as a culture vulture. By placing this fiasco of earnestness at the top of what was essentially an hour-long ad for their icy new album, “Pop,” the band seemed to be saying that since its audience rejected their love affair with rootsy, soulful authenticity, from now on they were only going to dish out vapid, glitzy cheese.
Any documentary narrated by the crazed Dennis Hopper, as this one was, is bound
to be uncomfortable. Between Hopper’s endless arsenal of rock
platitudes (“When they wind themselves up, U2 are still the biggest, baddest
band in the world”) and a cameo by the now late great Allen
Ginsberg (I really hope he got a lot of money for reading Bono’s lyrics to the
“Pop” song “Miami”), the whole hour felt like damage control. By
explaining their creative and financial lust for bigger and bigger stadium
shows, their infamous Kmart press conference and their launching of the tour
in Las Vegas, they tried to disguise their greed as ambition, using irony as their tired defense.
During “A Year in Pop,” Bono erroneously claimed, “In our moments, we’re definitely the most
interesting band on the planet.” Well, for a few moments when I was 15, they were the only band on the planet. But all that has changed. On “A Year in Pop,” U2 came off as stuck-up and pointless. And on their new clubby-cold album, I can’t even tell the songs apart. Still, even though I walked away from them years ago, I can’t bring myself to hate them. So what if I don’t care about “Pop,” or their Pop-Mart tour, or “A Year in Pop”? They gave me something bigger than a little old pop record: They gave me an introduction to a Pop life.
