Salon.com > Daniel Harris

Reproduction of the rich and famous

Mon, 20 Nov 2006 13:00:00 +0000

Had Angelina Jolie and Katie Holmes given birth out of wedlock even 50 years ago, they may very well have been pilloried, not only in gossip columns and Sunday sermons, but on the floor of the U.S. Senate. When, in 1949, Ingrid Bergman became pregnant during her notorious affair with the Italian director Roberto Rossellini, Edwin Johnson, a senator from Colorado, rallied to the defense of motherhood and denounced her as "a horrible example ... and a powerful influence of evil," "an apostle of degradation" "whose unconventional free-love conduct must be regarded ... as an assault upon the institution of marriage." He then led a successful vote declaring her persona non grata, thus preventing her from appearing in American films for the next seven years.

By integrating her own pregnancy into the plot of her sitcom, Lucille Ball broke the taboo against media representations of expecting celebrities, but despite her unprecedented candor during the nine months preceding the birth of "Little Ricky" on the "I Love Lucy" show, cast members never once uttered the forbidden word "pregnant," even when episodes revolved around Lucy getting stuck in chairs and experiencing uncontrollable cravings for ice cream and sardines. Compare such prudery to the openness of the present when photographs of celebrities' newborn children, illegitimate or not, are splashed across the pages of People and Vanity Fair, and bloggers speculate if Katie Holmes has "preggo boobs" and if it is premature to put Maggie Gyllenhaal on a "bump watch."

The kitschification of Sept. 11

Sat, 26 Jan 2002 00:10:00 +0000

Within minutes after the collapse of the World Trade Center, inspirational songs, propagandistic images designed to feed the fires of patriotic fury, and poetry commemorating the victims began to proliferate on radio, television and the Internet. The Dixie Chicks performed an a cappella rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner"; car-window decals appeared featuring a lugubrious poodle with a glistening tear as large as a gum drop rolling mournfully down its cheek; refrigerator magnets of Old Glory flooded the market ("buy two and get a third one FREE!"); and the unofficial laureates of the World Wide Web brought the Internet to a crawl by posting thousands of elegies with such lyrics as "May America's flag forever fly unfurled,/May Heaven be our perished souls' 'Windows on the World'!" Gigabytes of odes to the lost firemen and celebrations of American resolve turned the information superhighway into a parking lot:

My Daddy's Flag

Arriving home from work and a trip to the store,
My 5 year old daughter greeted me at the door.
'Hi daddy!' she smiled, 'what's in the bag?'
'Well, daddy has brought home the American flag.'

America's greatest sexologist

Sat, 15 Apr 2000 16:00:00 +0000

Long before Dr. Ruth began televangelizing about the wholesomeness of doing it in the shower, playing doctor and "being sensitive to our partners' needs," Alfred Kinsey was observing, recording and, last but not least, having sex -- a lot of sex. In 1948 he shocked the world with his international bestseller "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male," the so-called Kinsey Report, in which he questioned the basic distinction between heterosexuality and homosexuality, proposing instead his "scale," a continuum of erotic responses that defied easy categorization.

Five years later, he published the companion volume "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female," an equally outrageous exposi of American Womanhood in which he moved the typical happy homemaker of the 1950s out of her kitchen and into the barn and the monkey house, side by side with her counterparts in the wild kingdom. His pioneering work on the nature of female orgasm, the masturbatory habits of adolescents and the prevalence of extramarital intercourse is so basic to the modern understanding of sex that at times it is difficult to appreciate his originality, so thoroughly have his trailblazing observations become the stock and trade of well-meaning sex columnists the world over.