SALON

Tom Cruise

Wednesday, Jun 30, 1999 4:00 PM UTC

Cruising Cruise

What exactly is it about Tom Cruise that has captured the imaginations, and libidos, of gay males?

By
  • more

    • All Share Services

One of the earliest and most trenchant intimations I had of my own homosexuality came while watching Tom Cruise in the 1983 comedy “Risky Business.” I say this with a certain amount of embarrassment — because who, after all, wants to admit to being aroused, as a 10-year-old boy, at the sight of a barely-post-pubescent-himself movie star dancing in his snug white cotton underwear? Indeed, I’m not sure I should be mentioning this at all, for fear that I’ll undermine what I really want to say about Cruise, about how original and daring an actor I think he’s become.

But the problem is that I can’t seem to say the one thing without saying the other. My admiration for him as a performer is entirely bound up in my desire for him as a sexual persona. In fact, I don’t think Cruise can separate these elements either; whether he realizes it or not, he’s grown as an actor by exploiting the very things — a classic face, a perfect body, a predilection toward sexually ambiguous parts — that have also made him a gay icon. Is it any wonder, then, that in our impaired film culture, in which male sexuality is rarely addressed on-screen, and even more rarely addressed in film criticism, Cruise has had such a hard time gaining widespread respect? Or, to put it another way: Whether you’re gay or straight, until you allow yourself to be turned on by Tom Cruise, you can’t begin to see how very far he’s come. (I hope, and expect, this progression will continue with his much-speculated-upon performance in the soon-to-be-released “Eyes Wide Shut,” co-starring Cruise’s wife, Nicole Kidman, and directed by Stanley Kubrick.)

I can already hear the objections: from the one group of moviegoers cemented in their belief that Cruise will never be anything more than a transparent pretty boy, and from the other that will disapprovingly sneer, “When are you people going to give up? He’s not gay.” The former objections I will address in due time, but to those who would argue the latter, let me state this right away: I don’t care whether any of the rumors that have dogged Cruise from virtually the start of his career are true or not. It doesn’t matter to me. What does interest me are the rumors themselves, because in many ways they are a necessary starting point for a critical analysis of the actor’s work. Cruise has repeatedly — and vehemently — denied these rumors, including taking successful legal action against a London newspaper that called his marriage to Nicole Kidman a put-on. But still they persist — to the point where one wonders if the actor’s work isn’t feeding them. Has Cruise (consciously or unconsciously) been telegraphing gay signals that audiences (consciously or unconsciously) have been picking up on?

A scene in “Losin’ It” (1983), a crass teen comedy in which Cruise plays one of three California high school students who head to Tijuana to get laid, certainly suggests that there’s something more sexually complicated about him than anyone has ever acknowledged. Taken “upstairs” at a strip club, Cruise is led into a room of prostitutes where his buddies give him first choice. His gait hesitant, his hands lodged in the pockets of his pants, his face sweetly telegraphing the panic of a confident young man gradually losing his cool, he selects a much older woman. But the desire soon caves in on itself. Alone with the prostitute, he realizes that he won’t be able to perform — and he captures a quiet, lingering moment of sexual dejection.

Tom Cruise has played the role of confident, cocksure stud so many times — and so effectively — that most viewers tend to forget how many moments there are just like this one in the Cruise canon. In “Risky Business,” for instance, Cruise imagines himself home alone with his high school dream girl — the music swells, their shirts come off, they begin making out. And then sirens, flashing lights and a curious mob of neighbors outside interrupt them. The next shot is of Cruise lying in bed, with a sheet covering his lower body and his hand beneath that sheet. The joke is that this is a masturbatory fantasy gone awry — and yet Cruise doesn’t play it for laughs. When he bounds out of the bed and begins looking through an alternative newspaper for a prostitute — first enraged, and then sad and awkwardly tensed up — he limns a genuinely moving portrait of a young boy frustrated by how long it’s taking for him to become a man.

Yet, I’m not trying to suggest anything so banal as Cruise’s heterosexual failings in “Losin’ It” or “Risky Business” being symbolic of a latent homosexuality, in either the characters or the actor. (He does, after all, successfully lose his virginity in both of these films.) Instead, I think these moments convey something far more difficult — a state of almost constant sexual vulnerability. Few of Cruise’s talented contemporaries right now — not Denzel Washington, Tim Robbins, or even the swaggering Vince Vaughn or the sublimely vapid Keanu Reeves — are uninhibited enough to convey real sexual impulses on screen. The one or two who can, say Nicolas Cage or Sean Penn, do so through macho ferality — Penn violently finishing himself off in the woods after a tryst with Jennifer Lopez in “U-Turn,” or Cage lecherously placing his hand between Laura Dern’s legs as he follows her up the steps in “Wild at Heart.”

But when it comes to deeply lived-in portraits of human sexuality, Cruise is the most original talent we have — particularly in the way he so readily establishes his characters through heterosexual posturing and then strips away the layers of control. Watch the scene in Oliver Stone’s “Born on the Fourth of July” (1989) where Cruise, playing all-American jock turned paralyzed Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic, lies beneath a Mexican prostitute. As she writhes atop him, moaning and kissing him, Cruise begins to shake with tears, slowly at first, but then almost violently — his character exhausted by an inability to feel anything below the waist, and yet still seeking some way back to masculinity. Here, and in so many other moments throughout his career, Cruise is unafraid to portray a man completely overwhelmed by his own sexuality. He can’t do it, but he can’t not try to do it, either — and within that contradiction he finds a fragility that is deeply resonant. And it’s here, too, that I think we locate one of the primary sources of a gay audience’s identification with him — as a man who can never divorce sexuality from self-consciousness.

In “Born on the Fourth of July” he’s playing a literal version of a common gay state of mind — the man paralyzed by sex. “Risky Business” and “Losin’ It” offer something similar — unable to control his impulses, and yet completely terrified to act upon them, he’s acting out emotions that just about every gay person has experienced firsthand. In these films (and in many others) he may be playing straight characters, but through his confusion, desperation, all-consuming need and occasional self-hatred, he winds up offering the closest thing we have to a homosexual sensibility in movies today.

There is, however, another important part of Cruise’s pull on gay audiences: the homoeroticism. At times, of course, his films have seemed like the worst sort of gay kitsch. “Top Gun” (1986), for instance, features so many rapt shots of towel-and-underwear-clad men lingering in locker rooms that it inspired Quentin Tarantino’s gay interpretation in the film “Sleep With Me.” (“Ice comes up to Maverick, and he says, ‘Man, you can ride my tail anytime!’ And what does Maverick say? ‘You can ride mine!’”) And then there is “Interview with the Vampire” (1994), featuring a blond-tressed Cruise joining with Brad Pitt to act out a bitchy Leopold and Loeb-style marriage in which every bloodsucking murder becomes a tableau of orgiastic ecstasy.

But there is more to this than a few Rock Hudson-style double entendres and gay camp moments; and to understand how deep Cruise’s homoeroticism goes, we need to pay attention to the Cruise image, to the body and face and how he uses them on-screen. Indeed, however attractive you do or do not find him, one thing is certain — the camera utterly adores him. Part of this, I think, is because his boy-next-door features — the high, even-tempered cheekbones, the just-too-big nose, the sparkling blue eyes — relax on screen instead of tensing up (see Scott Wolf or Freddie Prinze Jr., two current neo-Cruise boy stars), and so he draws you in, even when his face isn’t being terribly expressive.

And then there is the smile — the big, toothy, preternaturally bright smile that, in its ubiquity, truly seems to beckon to a homosexual audience. Indeed, the fact that it is a “heterosexual” smile may very well be at the heart of Cruise’s gay appeal — which is to say, the more that smile gleams at us, the more its possessor comes to embody an entire spectrum of homosexual desire and fantasy: from the forbidden older brother protector (“All the Right Moves”), to the dangerous carnal predator (“Cocktail,” “Interview With the Vampire”), to the straight-boy dreamboat who just might be willing to entertain sexual alternatives (“Top Gun,” “Jerry Maguire”). Cruise uses his body in much the same manner — as a fundamentally ordinary entity that has astonishing erotic range.

We first got a good look at that body in the opening scene of “All the Right Moves” (1983), a clumsy, touching melodrama about a Pittsburgh teenager trying to secure a football scholarship. Clad (once again) only in his underwear, Cruise gets out of bed and does a set of start-the-day pushups — and it’s immediately apparent that although he’s supposed to be a playing a football player, his body looks a lot more like a swimmer’s: lithe, muscular, perfectly smooth. Indeed, there’s something terribly prissy about Tom Cruise’s body — as if he spends too much time working on it, trying to make it look perfect. In lesser hands (Rob Lowe’s, say, or Emilio Estevez’s) such a scene might easily have degenerated into self-parody — the smoothed-out, muscled-up gay porn cover boy playing to the mainstream crowd, but Cruise made it work. And I think that’s because he can use his body so fluidly — and so ambiguously.

Take, for instance, the underwear dance in “Risky Business.” Cruise bounces around the room, half lost to the music (Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll”), half self-conscious of his own outri exhibitionism. When he concludes by plopping onto the couch and throwing his body into a quivering frenzy, he manages the near impossible feat of making narcissism extremely sexy. In “The Color of Money” (1986), he does an even more glorious dance, this time at a pool hall to Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London.” Cruise shuffles forward and back, eyeing the pool table and taking one perfect shot after another, slicing his cue stick through the air to the beat of the music — until he stops, ostentatiously runs his hand over his impeccably coifed pompadour and repeats the lyrics of the song, ” … and his hair was perfect.” If Tom Cruise had never done anything else in film, those two sequences alone might have made him a gay icon — because in both he gives gay viewers their ultimate movie star: someone half-repugnant, but still magnetic; the perfect embodiment of heterosexual desire, when he isn’t acting so gay.

So why has Cruise had such a hard time gaining critical respect? Granted, those early performances aren’t so much the product of a good actor as a promising talent; in Ridley Scott’s “Legend” (1985) and Brian DePalma’s “Mission Impossible” (1996) he is kept reined in by a director determined to be the star; and in Ron Howard’s “Far and Away” (1992) he is flat-out awful. But just at the point when Cruise gave his first completely fleshed-out adult performance in “Born on the Fourth of July,” he seemed to be written off for good. “Cruise has the right All-American boy look for his role here, but you wait for something to emerge and realize the look goes all the way through. He has a little boy voice and no depth of emotion,” Pauline Kael wrote at the time, pointedly summing up the criticisms that have stuck with him perhaps even more insistently than the gay rumors.

Again, maybe it takes a gay perspective to be able to see his career in the fuller light in which it demands to be viewed. His work can be divided into three distinct sections: the losing-his-virginity period (“Losin’ It,” “All the Right Moves,” “Risky Business”), the cocksure-stud-learning-about-the-world middle period (“Top Gun,” “The Color of Money,” “Cocktail,” “Rain Man”) and the grown-up man wrestling with impotency period (“Born on the Fourth of July,” “The Firm,” “Interview With the Vampire,” “Jerry Maguire”). And when considered together, these three sections make for a completely original whole — a chronicle of one man’s sexual life journey, a multifaceted portrait of innocence and corruption, assuredness and dysfunction, the ordinary and the taboo. But few viewers can acknowledge even this considerable achievement, because they can’t see Cruise as having made any progress at all; for them, he will forever be remembered for the posturing and mugging of his middle period.

To some extent, I agree. There isn’t much depth of emotion to Cruise in “Cocktail” or “Days of Thunder.” But those performances still seem right to me — and though I know it’s a dicey game to praise shallow acting by saying that an actor is playing a shallow role, Cruise has made the shallowness an essential part of his journey. His performance in “Jerry Maguire” (1996) is his first great one precisely because he’s playing off the shallowness, and using it to throw his audience off guard. In that film, he plays a vapid man — a sports agent with a hot-to-trot fiancie and an expensive car — who experiences a moment of gravity. His actions in that moment cost him his job, and send him on a new life path. The twist is that he spends the rest of the film trying to convince himself that he hasn’t made a mistake.

The joy of “Jerry Maguire” is that it becomes a summation of everything Cruise has done so far — a film about a young man inching toward sexual and emotional self-definition. The great triumph of Cruise’s performance is in his subtle acknowledgment that self-definition may never come — that it may be more than any American adult male living at the end of the 20th century has any right to expect or ask for. My single favorite moment in the film has nothing to do with sex, but in a way it expresses the ultimate Tom Cruise-ian sexual state. It finds the actor driving alone in his car, returning from what he thinks has been a successful business meeting. High on the moment, he wants to sing, but he can’t find the right song on the radio — until he comes upon Tom Petty’s “Free Falling.” That the lyrics of this song — “and I’m free, free falling” — are not quite appropriate for a man trying to avoid free fall himself occurs to Cruise in a flash, but he squelches such bad thoughts and keeps singing, laughing, trying to generate for himself a moment of good will and hopefulness. In other words, as a man (and as an actor) he’s learning that adulthood is all about playing through your vulnerabilities.

All of which brings us to “Eyes Wide Shut,” his three-years-in-the-making collaboration with Nicole Kidman and director Stanley Kubrick. The film is purported to be a psychological thriller about the sexual obsessions and fantasies of a married couple in New York City. Not surprisingly, the first images shown of the film were explicitly erotic ones: a 90-second clip shown to exhibitors in the spring, in which Cruise stands with Kidman naked before a mirror, kissing and fondling her to the insistently nervy beat of Chris Isaak’s “Baby Did a Bad, Bad Thing”; and a 30-second trailer, in which this kissing scene is intercut with other shots of Cruise and Kidman attending a swank social event. It’s impossible to know what’s going on in either of these clips, but credit Cruise with at least this much: He’s generated a mountain of hype by keeping audiences guessing about how twisted his next set of sexual adventures will be.

And credit him with a certain amount of bravery: It’s clear that Cruise is putting his neck out farther than ever before. He’s also opening himself to a whole new round of questions about his marriage and his sexuality — and this time, if the film is as explicit as it’s said to be, he may even have to answer them. Can he pull it off — the big role in the last movie by the great director? I have some doubts. Having watched him and liked him for so many years, I don’t want to see him stumble, and certainly not on such a grand scale. Then again, Cruise probably isn’t too concerned himself. He’s dared to take sexual leaps forward before, without knowing where he was going to land. And it’s probably the ultimate testament to his maturation as an actor that — if the odd, disturbing images of his naked groping with Kidman are any indication at all — this time he’s working without a net.

Christopher Kelly's criticism has appeared in Premiere and Film Comment. More Christopher Kelly.

Tuesday, Dec 8, 1998 8:00 PM UTC

The cruise cocoon

A guest lecturer on a luxury Aegean voyage asks: Is this any way to see the world?

By
  • more

    • All Share Services

So there I was, comfortably settled on the deck chair, the sun suffusing me with warmth, the glistening Aegean surrounding me, a book in hand, ready to be read, but no real urgency to do so. Yes, almost perfect. Then, a tap at my shoulder, “Excuse me, I don’t mean to interrupt, but could you tell me about the ancient Minoans? It says in my guidebook that they all perished in 1750 B.C., but you said in your lecture that it happened in 1400. So which is it?”

Not the kind of question you really want to answer on a beautiful day of cruising on a gorgeous 175-foot yacht from Santorini to Crete. Not really the kind of question I wanted to answer just then, and not really an interesting answer. But then again, I was there to answer questions like this and dozens of other more obscure, less obscure, silly, smart, banal. I was on this yacht not because I’d won a prize, and certainly not because I’d paid $7,000 for this privilege — excluding airfare, plus a $1,000 premium for single-occupancy. I wasn’t there to work on my tan, or to stare deeply into the lolling waves and allow myself that delicious mesmerizing sensation of time ceasing and life passing hypnotically as the moment evaporates on the surf, as your very being gets drawn into the white foam, and you can almost picture yourself as some ancient mariner, pre-Coleridge, voyaging God knows where for who knows how long, like some Odysseus on a trip that will hopefully take somewhat less than the requisite 10 years, seduced by the waves … “Excuse me, but could you tell me some more about the Colossus at Rhodes?”

And why shouldn’t they ask? They had paid good money. They had traveled halfway around the world, promised in their glossy brochures that they would spend a luxurious week and a half aboard a world-class private yacht with world-class facilities, state-of-the-art navigation equipment, superb international cuisine, gracious staff, guided tours of some of the most magnificent ruins of antiquity, several days in Athens and then Istanbul, excursions to idyllic islands and exquisite coastline — and me. Well, not me, precisely. Rather, a “guest lecturer,” who happened to be me.

At first, it seemed like the ideal arrangement. All expenses paid. Luxury accommodations. A chance to revisit some of my favorite spots on the planet. Three or four formal lectures and an opportunity to relax a bit at the end of a busy summer. My friends rolled their eyes every time I mentioned it. “I don’t want to hear about it!” one said. “Oh, you!” was all another could muster. “How? All I want to know is how?” asked one person. “You don’t know anything about antiquity or the Aegean! You’re, you’re … a writer!” she said indignantly and stormed off during a party.

Fair enough, though not really accurate. I did know something about the region and its history, but I couldn’t argue the impression that the whole thing seemed, well, like the ultimate free lunch.

It wasn’t. Boy, was it not.

To begin with, there’s this newly burgeoning world of tourism, the cruise industry.
In the past decade, the cruise industry has left the Love Boat in its wake,
and today, thousands of Americans who otherwise might be driving that
Winnebago through Yosemite are instead traveling the world by ship. New liners
are being built and launched each year, and they sail to the four
corners of the earth. The cruise industry is expected to grow by an
astonishing 35 percent a year for the coming years.

At first glance, why not?
Cruise ships take much of the hassle out of travel. You don’t have to worry
about hotels and restaurants, about renting a car or making reservations,
about navigating through unfamiliar countries or about trying to make yourself
understood where you don’t know the language. And cruise ships are family friendly, with built-in, floating child care, an attentive staff and a guaranteed social
life. And it’s all very safe. The excursions from ship to shore are planned
out for you. The buses meet you at the dock, whisk you to the site replete
with English-speaking tour guide, then whisk you to a pre-arranged meal at a
tourist-friendly restaurant, and then back to the ship and onto the next port
of call. And if you have a bit more to spend than the average family, you can
go upscale, to a luxury cruise, or to a private, 175-foot yacht, with fewer than 30
passengers, a dozen crew and one guest lecturer.

Of the passengers on my cruise, only four, or two couples, were under 60 years
old. The rest were between 65 and 92. They were educated and affluent. They
were respectful of other cultures, curious, on occasion playful. They were
happy to be traveling, seemingly content in their lives and thrilled to be
seeing places they had dreamed of seeing for decades. A fair number were on
their second marriages, and this trip was their honeymoon. That included the
oldest person, a 92-year-old retired university administrator who had served
as dean of a prominent state research university in the 1960s. Several were doctors or lawyers; one was a retired clergyman of a very large
and prominent urban congregation. Yet another was a former research scientist
and engineer for an aerospace/defense firm. All in all, it would be hard to
come up with a more successful or well-educated group.

But that didn’t make spending a week and a half with them fun. The trip that
seemed too perfect on paper turned out to be far more difficult than
I had anticipated, and made me question not only myself but the whole
industry now devoted to bringing the world to you on a ship.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - –
-

Four lectures, 45 minutes to an hour long. That was all that was officially asked of me. Four lectures. On archaeology and the life of Heinrich Schliemann, the man who unearthed ancient Troy at the end of the 19th century; on the Crusades and the Knights of St. John of the Hospital, who ruled the island of Rhodes until evicted by the Ottoman Turks in the early 16th century; on early Christianity, the isle of Patmos and the writing of the book of Revelations; and on Istanbul, which was our final destination. The lectures were scheduled according to when the yacht was due to dock at the various ports; three were after breakfast, and one took place just before lunch. In addition, I was asked to lead an informal discussion on Islamic fundamentalism and modern Turkey, which I did after dinner and several cocktails.
All of the passengers and most of the crew attended the lectures. The passengers were attentive, except for one 82-year-old man who kept falling asleep because his hearing aid was broken, and the crew were attentive, except for the two waitresses from the Seychelles, who didn’t understand much English. The atmosphere was relaxed, and I encouraged people to ask questions as they arose and to challenge me if they didn’t understand or didn’t agree. I was often asked to clarify or elaborate, but rarely did anyone raise a contrary voice.

In the eyes of the passengers, I was the designated expert. I was part of the package deal, sort of a second coming of the Encyclopedia Britannica. “Oh, you’re so smart,” became a common refrain. I was constantly sought out for my opinions, my ideas and my data, often on subjects of only tangential relation to the areas we were visiting. “So, Zachary,” said the former defense worker, “what do you think of this prick Clinton? An informed guy like you, I’d like to hear what you have to say.” And of course, I did have an opinion about Clinton, and I did offer it, but after a few days, I began to wonder: Why are these people listening to me? Why was what I had to say about Clinton or art or food of any greater worth than what any of the passengers had to say, or the cruise director, or the waitresses? Why did I get the distinct feeling that I could have said just about anything and they would have nodded gravely and said, “Yes, you’re right,” or at the very least pondered my responses seriously.

At times, I felt like the professor in a “Doonesbury” cartoon years ago. He
notices during his lectures that the students are frantically taking notes,
and it occurs to him that no one is actually paying attention to the substance
of his lectures. So he starts making stuff up. “God is dead. Right is wrong.
Black is white.” One student turns to another while scribbling and says, “Wow,
this is really cool. I never knew that.” The professor collapses on the
lectern, despondent.

Over the course of the trip, I became acutely aware of the cult of the expert,
and of the peculiar fetish for knowledge and education that we have. I was on
the ship to fulfill a certain task, of no lesser or greater importance than
steering the ship, cooking the food, cleaning the rooms and organizing the
schedule and logistics. And much like the captain of the ship, the
cooks, the waitresses and the stewards, I was treated the way I was because
of my function, and my function was Knowledge Guy.

We see the same dynamic every day on television, where someone is presented as
“an expert” whose opinion is supposed to count. The problem with expertise
isn’t just that the people identified as experts sometimes aren’t. For me, the problem
with being a guest lecturer was that I’m not sure that anyone actually heard
anything I said.

Perhaps I’m being unfair. After all, I actually liked most of the people. The
Boston Irish former defense contractor had a delightful conspiracy complex. I
said over dinner one night that one place I’d like to visit is Angkor Wat in
Cambodia. After the meal, he beckoned me over. “Psst,” he said, “I was at
Angkor Wat once.” “Really?” I asked, “What was it like?” “Don’t know,” he
replied. “Dark helicopters, late at night, early ’60s, can’t say more.” The
former president of the large state university talked about his new book on
American morality, and many of the passengers generously bought drinks for me
and shared their stories, of marriages, kids, deaths, divorces, careers and
earlier travels.

But I still felt that I was engaged in a numbing endeavor, and the nature of
cruise travel was at the heart of the problem. Even with a small group on an
intimate ship, cruise travel creates a cocoon enveloping the traveler in a
gauzy web of security. Cruise travel surrounds the passengers in a glass
bubble that allows them to see the sights but not smell the smells, touch the
terrain or interact with the place. Cruise travel is virtual travel. You’re
there, but not there. You’ve left your country but you haven’t really gone to
another country. Instead, you’ve taken your country with you and you see
another world entirely through the lens of your own.

Take the ancient city of Knossos on Crete, or the majestic ruins of Ephesus on
the coast of Turkey. Knossos, inhabited more than 3,500 years ago by
mysterious groups known as the Minoans, is an archaeological site meticulously and
controversially restored by Sir Arthur Evans in 1900, with glorious colorful
frescos and throne rooms. But now, thanks to cruise ships, the site is overrun —
even in late September — with thousands of tourists, so many that the fresco
rooms have been closed because the moisture from condensation of human breath
and sweat is eroding them. Dozens of tour groups flood the site throughout the
day, and guides lead the groups through the various stations, five minutes
here, two minutes there. And then, lunch at a nice antiseptic restaurant in
Heraklion, and then back on the ship. It’s almost impossible to actually
contemplate the site, and it’s even more unlikely that you’ll actually have to
meet a Greek, other than the tour guide and the bus driver.

Ephesus is one of the richest cities of early Christianity and now an
extensive site that will take years to excavate. The day we were there,
several massive ships had docked in Kusadasi, the port 20 miles from the site,
and these ships then offloaded 5,000 souls who went directly to the
site for two hours and then back to Kusadasi for some shopping in
thoroughly westernized shops whose only claim to Turkishness was the fact that
they were grouped together in something called a “bazaar” — which was no different
from American strip malls but at least had an exotic-sounding name.

Travel agencies tout these trips for allowing the traveler to see some of the
wonders of the ancient world, but what they see mostly is other tourists and
professionals who make their living catering to tourists. According to the
guides I talked with, the growth of the industry in the past decade alone has
been incredible. Ten years ago, Ephesus was attracting maybe a quarter of the
visitors it does now, and the Turkish government is trying to increase the
number. The same goes for Greece, or for almost every country in the world.
Tourism is a huge business that guarantees an influx of hard currency. And
cruise ships seem to have cleared the major road blocks that had kept the
numbers of tourists lower: ease and safety. Cruise ships
provide a blanket of comfort and security, and in response, millions more go
to places such as Turkey and Thailand.

At one level, what’s the harm? Tourism doesn’t destroy cultural diversity. Tourism tends to stick to such narrow paths that the cultures outside the
tourist routes aren’t affected. Yet, tourism could
eventually destroy the delicate ruins that tourists come to see. In Egypt, for example, the
tombs in the Valley of the Kings have already suffered damage that they had
managed to avoid for 4,000 years. But at the same time, the money from tourism
allows the host country to spend more money on archaeology and preservation.
The excavation of Ephesus, to take one site, is funded largely by the entrance fees
that tourists pay to visit.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - –
-

Throughout the cruise, I couldn’t help but feel a deep sense of loss. A loss of experience. A
loss of vitality. A deadening mundaneness. The passengers were most alive when
they got disoriented, in the Istanbul airport, or when the Aegean refused to
cooperate one evening and violently rocked the boat with immense lolling
swells. Then they were forced to confront the environment around them, to
integrate the unknown, to grapple with it, even though it was threatening and
uncomfortable.

For that is the great and eternal secret of travel: It isn’t easy and it isn’t
always fun. The cruise industry is transforming travel into vacation, but not
all travel should be vacation. Sprawling on a beach is one thing, but trying
to combine the ease of a vacation with the challenge of learning about
something unfamiliar makes for a depressing juxtaposition.

It might have been better if there had been no guest lecturer, if there had
been no tour guides providing reams of history and lore in one-hour lumps. It
might have been better because trying to know oneself and the world requires
effort and work, and the cruise industry is about making life hassle-free and
effortless. It caters to every desire, and people often desire to know more.
So what do you get? You get the guest lecturer. The cruise-ship industry wants
to satisfy the mind and the body. “Look, we’ll give you both creature comforts
and edification.” But edification as a product, edification as a bonus, well,
that isn’t really edification at all. It’s an illusion of knowledge and of
learning, brought to you by Disney.

Edification isn’t something you can give someone. It isn’t like a shipboard
buffet or nicely made beds. If you want to learn about another culture, about
history, about an alien society, you have to touch it, you have to talk to the
people, you have to read and think, and grapple and struggle, and realize in
the end how much you still don’t know. The cruise ship gives people the
illusion that they’ve learned something, when all they’ve learned is what it’s
like to travel on a cruise ship. I hope the passengers did learn something. I
hope they did have fun. But for me, I felt mostly sadness and a sense that
this face of the future is slowly but surely destroying the past.

When the trip ended, we all exchanged numbers, and some of the passengers have since sent me photos and thank you notes. I’m sure most of them will treasure their experience, and some may have fond memories of me, as I do of them. But weeks later, I’m still left with a queasy feeling, as if I participated in a hoax. The more I’ve thought about it, the more I agree with my friends who rolled their eyes and called the whole thing a scam. It was, but not in the way they meant. I felt like a party to the scam, responsible for creating an illusion. Part of me wants to write to each passenger and say, “Look, what you got from me wasn’t knowledge or learning. It was the hint of knowledge, a taste of learning, packaged and neatly wrapped and then stowed away. What you saw wasn’t ancient Greece or modern Turkey but nifty little portions offered to you in predigested mouthfuls.” But then again, most of them would probably read that and say, “Why is he so upset? That nice young man, so smart. What a nice addition he was to the cruise!”
SALON | Dec. 8, 1998

Continue Reading Close

Zachary Karabell is the author of "What's College For? The Struggle to Define American Higher Education" (Basic Books). His new book, "The Last Campaign: How Harry Truman Won the 1948 Election," is published by Knopf. More Zachary Karabell.

Wednesday, Oct 7, 1998 7:00 PM UTC

Maiden voyage

She was an impressionable 19-year-old passenger; he was the worldly cruise ship photographer. When he said, "Take off your shirt," what was she to do? By Susanna Stromberg.

By
  • more

    • All Share Services

People get lonely on ships. People get bored cooped up on a floating island the length of a football field with 3,000 strangers. People get lustful sitting in the cocktail lounge, sipping their second Bloody Mary at 10 a.m., with nothing but time, watching the wistful blond gazing out the window onto the aqua-colored glaciers as the ship floats by.

“Would you like another?” the cocktail waitress propositions, coyly, handing you a third, fourth, fifth drink before you can answer.

“What the hell. Charge it,” you say with reckless abandon, pounding your fist on the table for emphasis, flinging your room key toward her with a flip of your wrist. You’ve got nothing to lose. You don’t know any of the other passengers — you’ve taken a cruise to meet someone, after all. In all likelihood, you’ll never see them again. Besides, you say to yourself, what’s life if you don’t live it?

People develop a false sense of confidence talking to the bartender in the disco, leaning across the bar, dipping their fingers into the bowl of maraschino cherries, dancing with men twice their age, exchanging flirtatious glances across the room with Paul, the ship photographer.

“So, is it going to happen with us?” Paul whispered as he settled into the booth next to me. Our thighs touched beneath the table. He took my face between his hands. “Well?”

I set down my Electric Lemonade — the bartender was right, you couldn’t taste the alcohol — and considered his question. Paul was wearing a fluorescent green sweater that glowed like anti-freeze under the flashing lights of the disco ball. The room spun. A couple dressed in shiny blue leisure suits pranced onto the dance floor. He swung her between his legs then pulled her in close to him and dipped her into a low back arch. Everyone let out an “Oh!” Then the room was filled with applause.

Nineteen-year-old girls on a cruise with their family get lightheaded and giddy in a hot, dark room filled with music and cigarette smoke and booze. They feel flattered by the attention of men with deep blue eyes and chiseled jaws — “He looks just like Val Kilmer!” Distracted, my mind swam away from Paul’s question into the sea of glitz and Electric Lemonade, past the curl of his upper lip, his lovely English accent. People become disoriented. Frozen. Mesmerized. Silent. What was the question? How should I answer? I was a novice at dating, never mind a 10-day affair with a cruise ship photographer.

“I’ll take that as a ‘yes,’” Paul said, stroking my thigh. Then he took my hand and led me out of the bar, down long, windowless halls to a flight of stairs and into the bowels of the ship, to a door marked “Photographer.”

“You’re not supposed to be here,” he hissed, looking around him. “I could get in a lot of trouble.” An adventure. Suddenly I felt careless and daring. I pushed open the door.

The room was filled with three large color photo processors. Photographs hung by clothes pins from plastic cord spanning the room — like the colorful laundry that you see hanging between buildings in photographs of Italy. Only here the laundry was pictures of people. Other passengers, posed with their families, wearing their most elegant attire. Photos taken that evening before dinner. I thought I saw a picture of my grandmother, her smoke-gray hair coifed neatly into a dandelionlike puff. But many of the passengers were old like my grandmother. Their gray hair and sallow skin gave the “laundry” a decidedly drab tinge.

Then I noticed a bulletin board on one wall, layered with different photos: topless women, women in underwear, women with puckered lips, pouty lips; women whose expressions were so seductive my legs tingled.

“This is my studio,” Paul said. “Take off your shirt.”

This was all my grandmother’s fault. A hassle-free way for the 10 of us– my parents and sister, my three cousins, their parents, Grandma and me — to spend some quality time together, to merge our otherwise disparate lives into a common experience: a cruise to the Inside Passage of Alaska, on the Love Boat.

The ship had plunged through the icy gray water of San Francisco Bay trailed by streamers, confetti, seagulls and champagne bottles as we headed under the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a regal boat, bright white, gigantic. My sister Elizabeth and I had leaned over the railing at the back of the ship and stared into the churning water. A witch’s brew of mysterious potions loosened from the bottom of the ocean swirled into the salty spray as we sailed away, leaving behind our cares and woes, charging into new territory: glaciers, killer whales, dolphins, salmon hatcheries, dreary fishing towns, Electric Lemonade and topless photo sessions.

The irony of a family cruise to Alaska on the Love Boat was not lost on us. My sister, cousins and I were all between 17 and 19 years old. The point of a cruise on the Love Boat was to give your lonely soul some respite from its loneliness. The point was to wake up in the arms of a smiling stranger and feel at home. And not “home” in the mom-dad sense of the word. Because if you did happen to hook up with a fellow passenger, a crew member or, say, a Russian double agent, this is not something you’d want your parents to know.

Going on a cruise is a little like being stranded on an island of wannabe hedonists, people doing their damnedest to escape the gritty reality of their daily lives in Kansas, New York, Oregon or Texas. Everyone has the same goal: to step out of reality into the nebulous padded room of their ultimate fantasies. It is a virtual heaven where the crew are the angels. The angels’ job is to make your experience airy, care-free and relaxing, to encourage you to behave devilishly, to forget your sorrows and your responsibilities, to appease your every whim. It is a little like being king or queen of your own island where total strangers (the crew, other passengers) are automatically your friends. Where everyone smiles because they too are king or queen. Where you are indulged at every moment.

In other words, if you don’t like something, just send it back.

“I wanted steak,” my cousin Marcy said, tears welling in her pale blue eyes. Her blond hair draped across her shoulders like a shawl. Her fingers trembled as she clutched her linen napkin to her mouth.

Marcy and her twin, Casey, had ordered halibut steaks. They were shocked when they were served fish rather than beef. I looked from Marcy to Casey to see if she was crying, too. Like frightened Italian greyhounds, their bodies quivered from the shock of being served the unexpected. This was not supposed to happen on a cruise. Prepaid experience was the point, after all. And they were the queens. Twins. Wide-eyed. Terrified. Shaking.

“Feesh!” said our waiter Guiseppe, with a flourish of his Italian accent, as he removed the halibut steaks from in front of my cousins. He was an excellent server. His skill and personality were just solicitous enough that you felt special but not so much that your personal space was invaded.

“Ha! Ha! What is feesh, anyway?” Guiseppe crooned. “Take eet away. Bring these preetty girls a real steak!”

Paul shared a small windowless room with Philip, his assistant. Philip was the guy who wore the clown suit and posed for photos with the passengers. I’d watched the two of them together flashing knowing glances as clown-Philip posed with a female passenger, one arm around her shoulder, the finger of his other hand pointing at her breasts, his jaw dropped in
mock surprise. In another photo he posed with an old man, this time with a gigantic smile, pointing at his bald head.

Philip had the top bunk.

“I’ve never brought a girl down here,” Paul said. “Usually it’s Philip that’s the playboy.”

Whenever Philip brought a woman to bed, Paul said he’d hide under the covers and pretend to sleep.

“Not that it’s possible with the creaking springs overhead. It’s just an unspoken rule between us,” he explained. “What girl? In whose bed?”

Presently we were alone in Paul’s room. It was already the sixth day of the cruise, and until now we’d always gone to his studio. Unlike in his studio, photos of his family and some postcards decorated his walls. Several shot glasses and a miniature Eskimo carved from ivory — “To remember Alaska by” — sat on his dresser. He poured me a stiff drink from a bottle he pulled from the dresser drawer. We sat quietly on his bed, suddenly shy. There was no strobe light to impair my vision, to set my brain spinning. This was my first drink of the evening. After dinner, we’d run into each other by accident as I was heading to my room to change before going to the disco.

“Come with me,” he said. “I’ll show you a little about my life.”
His room was not at all like the plush blue mini-suites my family and I inhabited on the top deck. Everything — the walls, the dresser — was painted a dingy “regulation” white. The bunk bed was a narrow twin.

“Are you cold?” Paul said, pulling an oddly shaped brown synthetic fur blanket around me. Absently, I fingered the fur, running my fingers along the length of the piece. There was a sleeve, a leg.

“What is this?” I said. “A bear suit?”

Paul nodded, leaned toward me and kissed me sloppily. I leaned back on the mattress, the bear suit falling away. Just as he slid his hand under my shirt, the door knob rattled, then there was the sound of a key in the lock.

“Shit,” Paul said. “That’s Philip. You better hide. Lie really flat and don’t move.” He pulled the bear suit over me and sat on the edge of the bed.

The synthetic fur smelled musty and dank, like a kid’s playroom, a mixture of sweat and potato chips. I listened to Philip rattling the lock. My heart was beating so fast I felt sure that the pile of fur was moving like a sleeping animal. Silence. I
held my breath and counted to 20. Nothing happened.

“Phew, that was a close call,” Paul said, breathlessly. “You can come out now.” He peeled the brown fur off of me, my fists still clutching it around my head. He laid it on the floor like a rug. Then he lay down on the bear suit.

“Hey, down here,” he said, beckoning me to the floor. “You’ve got to have at least one authentic experience. Don’t you want to do the nasty like the Eskimos did?”

My grandmother’s idea of authentic was forcing all of us to tour an Alaskan salmon hatchery on our first shore stop. She was
equally excited when the ship detoured from its regular itinerary and headed toward the port of Ketchikan, Alaska, a real fishing town. But just as the fish/steak had been a consternation to my cousins, Ketchikan was a shock to me. After nearly a week of floating past beautiful, pristine glaciers and forests with a perpetual high, Ketchikan was like waking up to a terrible hangover. It was a shabby, weatherbeaten place
of worn, splintering wood buildings, built on a narrow piece of land wedged between a sheer rock wall and the water. The buildings looked empty and dark. It seemed impossible to me
that people actually lived there.

From my perch on a velveteen couch in the ship’s lounge, Electric Lemonade in hand, Ketchikan appeared to offer nothing in the way of comfort or beauty. Perhaps if I’d paid more attention to the ugly little towns along the way instead of my pretty Paul, Ketchikan wouldn’t have been such a blow. At the very least I might have suspected that the bubble that had surrounded me, protecting me from remembering the world
outside, might soon deflate.

The look of disgust on my own face stared at me from the reflection in the window, and for a fleeting moment I felt ashamed for the way I was thinking. Yet I quickly blinked away this thought, sucked down my drink and watched a large group of seniors who were laughing and telling dirty jokes, oblivious to the dreary existence of the world outside.

The cruise director suddenly gathered 20 pairs of these seniors onto the dance floor of the lounge. “Boy, girl, boy, girl,” he yelled, pairing them off. He handed out belts with aluminum cans attached at the waist to the women. To the men he gave belts with strings attached at the waist. At the end of the strings were stones that dangled between their legs. They dutifully strapped them on.

“OK, boys and girls, guys and gals, who knows how to play
Ketchikan Catching Can?” He howled in the voice of a sportscaster, passionate, robust, as if something really important was happening.

“Remember, no hands,” he said, and pressed “play” on a tape player.

Olivia Newton-John’s voice filled the room.

“Let’s get physical, phy-si-cal. I wanna get phy-si-cal …”

The seniors promptly clasped their hands behind their backs and began to gyrate, rotate and thrust with their hips, knees bent, deaf to the beat of the music. I watched in awe as they engaged in a geriatric rendition of Jennifer Gray and Patrick Swayze in “Dirty Dancing: The Golden Years.”

After several minutes of grunting, wheezing and sly laughter, a thin voice rose from the writhing mass of bodies and creaking bones: “We did it!”

The cruise director raced over to the winning couple — their bodies pressed firmly together, chest to chest, belly to belly, waist to waist — and raised their arms in victory.

Sure enough, the man had managed to swing the stone on the string to the height of the woman’s waist. The woman had swiveled her hips, bent her knees and caught the stone in the can strapped to her waist — the Ketchikan Catching Can.

The last night of the cruise I stayed late in the disco well after the rest of my family had gone to bed, waiting for Paul. After that night in his room, things had tapered off. I wanted to see him one last time. At last he arrived, slobbering drunk. He tipped his head toward me and then slouched into a booth nearby. We exchanged glances for several minutes until I got
up the courage to talk to him.

“Well,” I said. “What’s going on?” I felt angry and insulted that
suddenly he was ignoring me.

“You won’t be seen with me in public,” he stammered. “It’s like you’re avoiding me. We say two words, I buy you a hot chocolate. I go to pay. And you’ve disappeared.” This was true. Several times on deck he’d bought me a frothy hot chocolate in a tall parfait glass with whipped cream. I’d taken one sip, set it down, then disappeared. Secrets. Shame. Self-consciousness. I’d felt awkward about socializing with Paul during the day, when everyone — my parents, my aunt and uncle, cousins, grandmother, other guests — would see. What would they think of me if they knew what was going on?
Somehow this mattered. I hadn’t forgotten that one day the
cruise would end. This wasn’t how I was in my real life. The
alcohol-inspired boldness that propelled me through the night had no power in the bright light of day. So, while I thought of Paul constantly during those 10 days, by day I avoided him. It never occurred to me that he’d ignore me back.

I picked up my drink, took a deep breath and swerved over to his table. “Well,” I said, with a mock English accent. “Is it going to happen with us, or what?”

“Oh,” he said, scanning the room, suspiciously. “There are spies on this ship. My girlfriend, she has spies. I’ve received a warning.” Girlfriend? Spies? I scanned the room. He had to be joking.

As he uttered the words, a tall, slender woman with bad teeth and bouncy red hair pushed her way past me into the booth. I recognized her as one of the cabaret dancers who’d spread her legs for the audience the first night of the cruise — in the dance where they straddled chairs, rolling their pelvises back and forth as if they were riding horses, polishing the seats with their buttocks.

“He’s got a girlfriend, you know,” she said, glaring at me from below her hooded eyelids, painted with a smoky shadow.

“Buzz off, Rochelle,” he said. “We’re just friends.”

By then I was feeling disoriented, disappointed and out of sorts. Suddenly I realized that while this cruise was my vacation, for Paul, it was his life. At the very least, it was where he lived for months at a time.

“I’m warning you. She’ll hear about this when she gets back,” Rochelle said, and stomped away on her high black heels.

Then Paul got up and headed for the exit. I followed him.

“What’s happening?” I said, catching up with him. He smelled of garlic and onions and alcohol. He looked somber and sullen. “Walk me to my room, at least.”

“I can’t,” he said, leaning toward me with his lips puckered. He was so drunk that he lost his balance and pinned me against the wall with his body. We would’ve made good partners at Ketchikan Catching Can. Missing my lips, he planted a slobbery kiss on my neck. “I can’t help myself with you.”

On a cruise, when you drop your napkin, someone picks it up. When you break the plate glass of the coffee table in your mini-suite, as I did, someone replaces it. You become deaf to consequence. At the same time, you consciously or unconsciously assume that for the duration of your cruise,
time has frozen in the outside world, and that world will be just as you left it when you return — the gray buildings, the purple mountains, the geography that you call home.

Not much can wake you up from this daze, but the baritone rumbling of a glacier calving can. It began quietly — like the deep, thick purr of a large cat far away moving closer. The sound filled my ears and settled onto me like thick clouds or
volcanic ash. Then a chunk of ice the color of the
Caribbean broke off and began to tumble, followed by an avalanche of smaller pieces, plunging into the sound. A spray of icy water rose high into the air, almost as high as Old Faithful. For a split second, everyone on the deck of the ship was silent. Frozen.

I had never seen anything like that, something so beautiful and graceful and powerful at once. I had never been totally paralyzed when I wasn’t scared.

Time, as it turned out, hadn’t stopped while we were floating around. Suddenly I felt mortal. The myth of care-free, no-consequence vacationing was exactly that, a myth.

On the 10th day, my family disembarked together, following our fellow passengers like cows to a slaughter. Everyone looked tired, their shoulders slumped forward carrying suitcases. This was not the same spunky group that had boarded 10 days earlier. I saw Paul at the bottom of the gangplank snapping photos as the passengers stepped off the ship onto the dock. His skin looked pallid in the morning light. He was wearing his blue nylon Love Boat baseball jacket with the name tag that said “Richard Avedon” pinned over the left pocket.

I held my breath as we approached the bottom of the ramp. My jaw clenched and my body went rigid. Would he say something to me? I hoped not.

Instinctively I looked past him. Still, no one could know.

“Have a safe trip,” he said to the passengers in front of us, his standard farewell.

“Wait,” he said, as we started to pass. He touched my grandmother’s shoulder, willing her to stop. Then he motioned us to cluster together.

“One more photo with a grizzly bear,” Paul said, motioning behind him. Philip appeared next to my grandmother and draped a furry arm around her shoulder. We all clustered around her and posed for the photo. I could not see Paul’s expression as he raised the camera in front of his face and snapped the picture.

As he lowered his camera, our eyes met.

“You folks have a nice trip,” he said, turning to the next group. Then we stepped onto land.

Continue Reading Close

More Susanna Stromberg.

Tuesday, Nov 4, 1997 8:00 PM UTC

gandhi was no pitchman

Apple clicked on the wrong icon for its "think different" ad campaign.

By
  • more

    • All Share Services

I‘m writing this on a Macintosh, which is the only kind of computer I’ve ever owned. But if I ever need another one (and I may not — I just use it as a glorified typewriter, and so it has oceans more power than I require), I’m going to buy a PC. And all because of an ad.

I was leafing through some magazine at the library when the back cover caught my eye: Mahatma Gandhi, cross-legged in front of his loom, wire-rim glasses perched down his nose, wearing only a loincloth that he had doubtless made himself. And in one corner, the Apple logo and the words “Think Different.”

Despite its wounded grammar, this ad is not very difficult to decode. Gandhi has great power as an icon (in the archaic meaning of the word). One look at him and you think, “simplicity,” “calm,” “rebellion without violence.” The associations come as quickly and as powerfully as they do in an ad with, say, Pamela Anderson Lee, where you immediately think, “sex on a beach.” And for Apple, of course, it’s important to endow its box of chips with those associations. Fairly or not, Apple has long since lost the battle for “efficiency,” which is the chief virtue of the data age. It’s stuck defending a few niche markets — design, education, certain kinds of media — where rebellion remains a nostalgic touchstone. So Gandhi makes a certain kind of mercenary sense.

But Gandhi is different. While it is ignoble to use Albert Einstein (another of Apple’s icons) as a pitchman, it is not perhaps immoral in quite the same way. Einstein was more or less a part of his century; his magnificent mind did not take him outside the flow of recent history.

Gandhi really is different, far more different than the copywriter seems to have understood.

He was the eruption in this century, and in some ways this millennium, of a venerable idea, an idea that stretches back at least to the Buddha — the idea that by leaving yourself behind you find yourself, that by renunciation you conquer. So it is bizarre to use him to sell products. When he died, all his belongings — toothbrush, Bhagavad Gita, loincloth — fit inside a couple of shoe boxes.

But that’s not the real degradation. Were Apple merely selling computers it would only be grubby to use Gandhi’s picture. Instead, of course, they’re trying to sell each of us an image of ourselves. Which is precisely what Gandhi spent his life trying to help people strip away. In the fight for Indian independence (against the biggest brand name of his era, the British Empire), he succeeded in helping a nation shrug off its own internalized sense of subjugation, its own sense that Britishness, like Appleness, was superior. And he did it without trying to substitute the usual nationalist passions.

He went well beyond that, too — his battle against the caste system was in reality a battle against even more insidious self-labeling, against identities ingrained in the unconscious of an entire subcontinent. And though he was a devout man, he even tried to fight against the religious brands — his prayers each night came not just from the Hindu scriptures, but from the Gospels, from the Koran. He was assassinated by a fanatic Hindu precisely for his lack of brand loyalty.

Gandhi believed there was something sacred and lovely at the center of people, and that to get to it each of us needed to cut through the various lusts and fears of everyday life. That was hard enough to do in village India; how much harder in our time and place, when we live amid a hurricane of messages and symbols all designed to overlay our own identity. Gandhi, in other words, was the chief spokesman against the consumer mentality since Christ — against the idea that the ownership of a particular kind of computer might free you, make you more creative or rebellious or attractive.

Trying to sell a Macintosh with Gandhi’s image is every bit as ironic as selling cigarettes with a picture of healthy, sexy young bodies. (Or as ironic as the Land Rover ad some years ago that said: “Celebrate Thoreau’s Birthday. Drive Through a Pond.”)

Eknath Easwaran, the California meditation teacher whose book “Gandhi the Man” is the simplest, and therefore loveliest, of the many Gandhi biographies, describes seeing Gandhi meditate during the evening prayer service in the last years of his life. The text that evening was from the second chapter of the Gita. As the sonorous verses were read, you could see him completely absorbed, his mind growing calm and still. His concentration was so complete that it was no longer the second chapter you were listening to, it was the second chapter you were seeing, witnessing for yourself the transformation it describes:

They are forever free who have broken

Out of the ego-cage I and mine
To be united with the Lord of Love.
This is the supreme state. Attain thou this
And pass from death to immortality.

On the other hand, you could have 1.6 Gb, a 10xCD-ROM, 128 MB RAM and a smug dose of superiority.

Continue Reading Close

Bill McKibben is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, and founder of the global climate campaign 350.org. His latest book is "Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.". More Bill McKibben.

Monday, Nov 3, 1997 8:00 PM UTC

Whipping boy to the stars

Celebrity biographer Frank Sanello suffers the wrath of Sharon Stone, Tom Cruise, Eddie Murphy and -- worst of all -- their lawyers.

By
  • more

    • All Share Services

| Uh-oh. I see that my old pal, celebrity biographer Frank Sanello, is in trouble again — this time not with the celebrity in question, Sharon Stone, but with Sharon Stone’s lawyer. “I didn’t think you could defame a lawyer … that’s like a Hun suing for invasion of privacy,” Frank says in a press release he wrote a couple of weeks ago (and faxed to me for my opinion) but later thought better about actually releasing.

I liked its lead, though: “Luckless celebrity biographer Frank Sanello can’t get a break …” And I’ll tell you, I’ve always liked Frank. When he sees me searching the locker coin return slots for forgotten quarters at the Academy library of motion picture history, he rarely says a word. He’s a good kick-boxer and has offered to teach me handy shortcuts to killing someone with just one kick. In his spare time he teaches tae kwon do to AIDS patients fearful of gay-bashers. He constantly buys presents for neighborhood children and tries to find homes for abandoned pets (he has three dogs and three cats).

Anyway, according to his book, “Naked Instinct: The Unauthorized Biography of Sharon Stone” (published last summer by Carol Publishing Group’s Birch Lane imprint), on New Year’s Eve, 1996, Frank was with 10 people having dinner at a restaurant on the West Side. At the table was William Skrzyniarz, of Rosenfeld, Meyer, Susman — the Beverly Hills entertainment law firm that represents the actress. Frank introduced himself as a writer working on Stone’s biography.

Then, as he recounts the event in his book, “Skrzyniarz told me after two bottles of Merlot … ‘When Sharon wants someone, she rents a hotel room and tells him exactly when and where to show up. She makes it clear it’s a one-time opportunity, take it or leave it. She’s made the move on some major names.’ Skrzyniarz became circumspect when I asked him to name names.”

Why would any attorney be so loose-lipped about a client? According to one litigator familiar with this case, lawyers can be terrible gossips. In fact, this attorney said, during the O.J. Simpson trial, the defense team was constantly having to tell their people to stop leaking things to the press.

I often happen upon Frank when I’m doing research at the Academy library near Beverly Hills. He’s a familiar figure there in his tank top and pumped-up, suitable-for-gay-bar-hopping physique, surrounded by piles of yellowing newspaper clips, tapping away at his laptop. There’s a story behind the stereotype, though. One night a few years ago I ran into Frank after a screening of some gangster film, which had put him in a reminiscent mood.

He remembered how, when he was a boy growing up just outside of Chicago, a pathetic-looking, out-of-work hit man approached his father in a restaurant, hat in hand.

“Mr. Sanello,” the man asked, “you got any work for me?”

“Sorry,” said Sanello pere. “Times are tough.”

“Frank,” I said, “why was that man talking to your father?”

“Oh, I thought I told you. My father was a prizefighter during the Depression. But he wasn’t able to make a living at that, so he became the chief bodyguard for the head of the Irish mafia in Joliet, a suburb of Chicago. He was also the bagman.” So Frank has many happy memories of being out with his father and seeing every policeman they passed greet them with a big wave and a smile: “Hi, Mr. Sanello! How are you?” It was kind of a Pavlovian response, because they were so used to associating the elder Sanello with money.

“My father was the sweetest guy,” Frank continued. “And the most masculine man I ever knew. He was so secure that he never minded I didn’t like sports.”

Frank writes about silly things but he has a solid education. He was an English major at the University of Chicago and holds an MFA in film from UCLA. After writing seven unproduced screenplays, he turned to entertainment journalism, working for the Los Angeles Daily News (where we met in the early ’80s) and UPI before becoming a celebrity chronicler. “My publisher says Jimmy Stewart’s looking bad,” he told me busily when I ran into him at the library a few months before the actor’s death. “So they’ve assigned me a new book: ‘It Was a Wonderful Life.’”

The Stewart biography, a $5.99 Pinnacle paperback from Kensington Publishing, was of course a valentine. (Disappointingly, its title ended up simply, “Jimmy Stewart: A Wonderful Life.”) But luckless celebrity biographer that he is, even that job got Frank in hot water. He had faxed a series of questions about her father to Stewart’s daughter, anthropology professor Kelly Stewart Harcourt, and was so impressed with her eloquent answers that he decided to lump them together as an afterword — which the publisher prominently promoted on the cover.

Because of the ensuing letter of complaint from Stewart’s estate, Frank promised to ask his publisher to remove the afterword from all subsequent printings of the book. (An easy promise to make, since the first printing was a rather ambitious 200,000 copies, and there probably won’t be any subsequent printings.) “I feel terrible that I’ve offended Dr. Harcourt,” Frank says. “She was kindness itself.”

The unauthorized celebrity biographer’s road is not an easy one. Frank has published half-a-dozen of these books in three years, and they typically involve some sort of scrape with publicists and/or lawyers. His 1994 biography of Tom Cruise concluded that, contrary to urban legend, Cruise is not gay — gay fans just like to imagine that the actor is. But even before he’d begun asking around about this taboo topic, Frank and his then-publisher, HarperCollins, got a stern letter from Cruise’s lawyer, Bert Fields. Within days, HarperCollins canceled Frank’s contract.

The Cruise bio was later published by Taylor Publishing of Dallas, best known for its high school yearbooks. “So you can see how far I’d fallen,” Frank notes ruefully.

That was a hard blow because about a year earlier, Geena Davis had filed a $2 million lawsuit against Frank as a result of a Woman’s World magazine profile he’d written about the actress. Frank remembers this as “My Nightmare, Part One.” The case was eventually settled out of court, but he lost six months of work. The Woman’s World piece was highly complimentary, but the magazine had decided to make one of the story’s quotes — “I want to have a baby” — into a big, screaming headline.

“She claimed she never said it,” Frank says. “But why would I make up something as lame as that?” He thinks the problem was that Woman’s World had held the article for months, and by the time it appeared, Davis had moved on from the boyfriend she allegedly was thinking of having a baby with to a new one. “I think she had to sue to prove her true love to him,” Frank theorizes.

Things started looking up when Eddie Murphy picked up that transvestite streetwalker last May. It was great advance publicity for Frank’s next unauthorized bio, “Eddie Murphy: The Life and Times of a Comic on the Edge,” due out in December from Birch Lane. The publisher balked at using one of Frank’s best anecdotes, in which a transvestite porn star named Geoff Gann (aka “Karen Dior”) recounts how he and Murphy had sex several years ago in Murphy’s limousine. Fortunately, Frank was able to produce a polygraph test that indicated that Gann (whom Frank has known for about 10 years) was telling the truth, so the episode is included.

So why does someone become a celebrity biographer? (Other than the simple factor of money, of course.) “Well, writing about superstars is a dirty job,” Frank says, paraphrasing an old Burt Reynolds line, “but somebody’s got to do it.”

Continue Reading Close

Catherine Seipp is a regular contributor to Salon. More Catherine Seipp.

Page 22 of 22 in Tom Cruise

Recommendations