Cool, Calm & Contentious

by Merrill Markoe

  “Every day you try to push me out of my own bed because of Pack Rule Number One?” I gasped.

  “I play along with an awful lot of your irrational bullshit,” he said. “I hope you notice how I rarely overindulge. I let you lie wherever you want, I am just quietly aware that I can take it all away from you if it should become necessary.”

  “And is that also why, during this so-called adagio movement, you always slam your head into mine and scratch my face with your sharp nails?” I asked him.

  “See the way you always dwell on the negative?” he said solemnly. “I have never hurt you, have I?”

  “Actually,” I said, “you hurt me almost every morning. Just last week you poked me in the eye with your paw. You knocked your head into my face and it made my nose bleed.”

  “No, I never did that,” he argued. “You’re thinking of someone else.”

  “I’m thinking of you,” I said. “That’s why as soon as I hear you make the leap to the edge of the bed in the morning, when you start to come racing toward me, I duck under the covers.”

  “You do that to avoid me?” he asked. Now it was his turn to be hurt. “I thought it was part of the way you sleep.”

  “I am trying to avoid injury,” I said. “Merrill’s Rule Number One. Obviously you don’t give any thought to the effect you are having on others. You’re heedless.”

  “Heedless?” he repeated. “I’m always shocked by the way you misinterpret everything I do. Apparently my magnificent wake-up techniques are totally lost on you. Sometimes I think that trying to communicate with you is futile.”

  “Hey, hey … wait a second,” I said. “Now who’s taking things personally? I think we communicate rather well.”

  “No,” said Jimmy, skulking off toward the door. “It’s useless. We don’t understand each other at all.”

  “Yes we do. We communicate great!” I insisted, ashamed of myself for having taken his well-meaning attempts to share and turned them into an argument against him. By questioning his good intentions, had I struck him too deeply? Had I done something to harm our relationship? I had never seen him quite like this—dejected, forlorn, gloomy—as he continued his mournful walk out of the room. Why was he suddenly reminding me of my mother?

  “Jimmy!” I called out as he avoided my glance. “Don’t be mad at me! Jimmy! Come on! Come back here. Please? Jimmy?”

  Cautiously he turned and looked me in the eye. I extended both my arms toward him. “Jimmy!” I called to him again, and again. “Jimmy! Come on now! I’m sorry. Don’t be like that. Don’t be mad! Jimmy!”

  Now I pulled out all the stops. I raised my voice up two octaves and extended his two-syllable name to eight syllables. “Jimmy, come over here,” I tried once more. “Can’t we have a truce?”

  Unable to resist a two-handed arm extension and an eight-syllable, opera-quality “Jimmy,” he sneezed, then thought for a second and trotted to the side of my chair. Once again he sat bolt upright, staring at me attentively, his tongue hanging out of the side of his mouth, his tail thumping against the floor.

  “So you accept my apology?” I asked. “You’re not too deeply hurt by the fact that I spoke so hastily when I said that …?”

  “Yes,” he said as I scratched him behind the ear. “The answer is yes. Yes to all three questions.”

  Celebrity Criminals and Criminal Celebrities: Celebrity 2.0

  You can predict the trends of tomorrow’s middle class by looking at what is taking place right now in bohemia and in the prisons.

  —my college criminology professor, 1970

  IN 1995, DURING THE RIVETING DAILY BROADCASTS OF THE O.J. trial, I made an appearance as a talking head on a CNN program, where I remarked that I was enjoying the televised trial show so much that I hoped, when it was over, some other screwed-up, narcissistic celebrity would have the decency to step up to the plate and commit an equally amazing world-class crime that broadcast television would feel compelled to cover.

  I was kidding.

  I thought I was making a laughably absurd statement.

  But the live audience on CNN didn’t take it that way. Instead, they got very upset with me for encouraging celebrity lawlessness. Later, I rolled my eyes and made fun of those people to my friends. I never imagined that someday I would look back and realize that those audience members were already tuned in to the trends of the future. Because as I write this, in 2011, I realize that to understand the joke I made that day, you had to also understand the archaic mid-twentieth-century model of celebrity and fame that was the standard when I was growing up.

  The way the old model worked was that when someone rose from that petri dish of crime, poverty, and obscurity known as “the gutter” to be shellacked by the glow of the spotlight and its accompanying benefits of wealth and privilege, they did so on the wings of special abilities they had carefully cultivated. The possibility of this blessed rise was the very foundation of our superior American way of life: the dream that you could float all the way to the top on clouds of hard work and talent. Once you got there, you would have your heart’s desire; you would automatically go to the head of every line, and they would name sandwiches after you!

  But the bargain you made to preserve your elite new position was that you also had to do whatever was necessary to safeguard your “good reputation” because now you were a positive role model for everyone else. The American middle class was prudish and judgmental. They expected you to be above reproach. Since everyone knew this, no sane celebrity would risk losing his or her place in the sun at the altar of poor impulse control, especially once they learned that the secret reward of fame was permission to partake of a smorgasbord of sin. All you had to do was keep the sin buffet a secret.

  Back in those olden days of 1995, when I was making jokes about O.J., it was difficult for me to imagine a time when every reputation would be so mutable that going to jail would actually add a layer of authenticity and charm to a lawbreaking famous person. I had no way of knowing that we had said goodbye forever to the kind of public ruin that had in the 1920s capsized the career of Fatty Arbuckle, a celebrity whose cautionary tale was always cited when I was a kid. I didn’t understand that we had begun an era of melding criminals and celebrities into one big celebriminal culture. Which is not a very fun word to say. (But “crimebrity” is worse.) So I’ll just call them Celebrities 2.0: voracious, fame-seeking creatures ruthlessly pursuing personal ambitions who feel very strongly that “the rules don’t apply to me.” Both live for attention and will do whatever it takes to capitalize on it, knowing that if they do it right, fame will be the result. And now, both categories are working with the same exact media tools.

  ACT 1: CELEBRITY 2.0

  Celebrities have long been the embodiment of middle-class ideals, the more perfect stand-ins for the rest of us. The big difference between twentieth-century celebrities and twenty-first-century celebrities is that the old model required the celebrity to have some kind of connection, however tenuous, to specific talents or abilities to really thrive. Therefore, a celebrity was usually an artist, or a public servant, a scientist, or a religious leader. Once the rise from struggling average person to prominent luminary was accomplished, society offered these newly designated superpeople a little more latitude than they did the average Joe. Everyone knew that talented people were often kind of weird and out of control. Thomas Edison reportedly slept under his desk still wearing his shoes and socks. James Joyce and F. Scott Fitzgerald drank too much. So did Jackson Pollock, who was, after all, a bastion of sanity compared to Vincent van Gogh. Creative geniuses were allowed to bend the rules a little as long as some talent—or unusual beauty or extreme wealth or interesting vision—was also part of the package.

  Not anymore. Now a morphing of crime with pop culture seems to have created a new strata of showbiz that probably isn’t going to go away, ever.

  Maybe it got its start back in the twentieth century with Frank Sinatra, a celebrity who wore his friendly connect
ion to crime proudly, like a contrasting-color pocket square. Over the course of his career, everyone learned that Frank Sinatra could be kind of an asshole. He was always mouthing off and getting into fights. He had an arrest record and hung out with Sam Giancana. But since it was his fluid artistry that made him famous, the asshole/thug stuff was noted, then shrugged off. Small price to pay for all the fantastic music.

  After Sinatra came the beginning of rock and roll and a whole new roster of sexy bad boys, many of whom had their own brushes with the law. But since it was the fifties, everyone still preferred to keep the worst of their behavior under wraps. Elvis and Chuck Berry and the rest were still concerned that polite society regard them as gentlemen.

  It wasn’t until somewhere in the late sixties that the concepts of outlaw and entertainer became laminated to each other like a big backstage all-access pass. During that period of cultural upheaval, as various Rolling Stones and Beatles were jailed for assorted excesses, at first the public reacted with shock. Careers had been ruined by less. Would this be their swan song?

  As it turned out, no.

  Mick and Keith were released back into the stream of pop culture, where they went from merely successful to enormously, astoundingly successful. And in the years that followed, too many other musicians to bother naming—as well as the actors, actresses, and models who admired them and wanted in on this kind of street cred—began to get into trouble with the law for various reasons: drug abuse, civil disobedience, assault. But now, instead of being excommunicated from public life and forever tainted like Fatty Arbuckle, they found their reputations enhanced.

  By the time guys like Axl Rose and Tommy Lee upped the asshole ante in the eighties, poor impulse control and its attendant brushes with the law had become a glamorous, integral, and expected part of the rock-and-roll persona. It’s kind of quaint to remember how, back in the twentieth century, we used to think you needed to do something besides be an asshole to grab the public eye. Maybe Axl appeared to be an unrepentant jerk, but that wasn’t the only reason he sold out stadiums. Even in the case of continually lawbreaking bands like Guns N’ Roses or Mötley Crüe, it was more a case of “Come for the music, stay for the cretinous behavior.”

  The nineties might have been the decade when the whole criminal-celebrity-asshole nexus really gelled sociologically because, at the same time that Axl Rose was hurling epithets at audience members and stalking off with their cameras, there was a big pileup of talk shows (Donahue, Geraldo, Sally Jessy Raphael, Jerry Springer, Maury Povich, early Oprah) whose main purpose was giving the spotlight to ill-mannered people who would have had no place on TV in any previous decade. Suddenly we were seeing, at center stage, a stream of regular people who did nothing else to distinguish themselves besides confess to behaving badly.

  We had, in one spectacular cultural moment, celebrities coming out onstage and in public life as the real-life assholes they may have always been in private and regular hard-core board-certified real-life assholes coming into a new life as celebrities in a kind of asshole version of the Hindu Wheel of Life. By the mid-nineties, grotesque, aberrant behavior in all areas had become as important a piece of the entertainment pie as juggling, magic, and unexceptional singing. It seemed to ring just the right zeitgeisty bell in the United States.

  Here, for the first time, were men and women whose sole reason for appearing on national television was to voluntarily admit to something that, in the fifties, they would have spent their life trying to hide (for example, infidelity, incest, hateful family interrelationships, shoplifting and prostitution, personality disorders). A troubled history with substance abuse or the law was now offering a clearer path to a television appearance than an acting workshop or a degree in communications.

  During that time, I became interested in the motives of these people. Why, I wondered, did anyone want to be seen on national TV insulting their relatives and looking like an asshole? In 1996, I worked as a reporter on a television series for Michael Moore where we investigated weird pop cultural inconsistencies. I anchored a piece that would send me to Mississippi to meet some people who had done this very thing. The show’s researchers connected me to five adult relatives of a family who had all been on The Jerry Springer Show, calling each other vile names. They lived down a country road in a mobile home that sat on a hillside behind the bait shop where some of them also worked. The heavyset sister-in-law seemed to have been the original instigator, so I turned to her for answers.

  “Why did you want to be seen on television screaming at your family?” I asked.

  Her first level of explanation was full of platitudes about therapy and needing the family to heal. But right underneath that layer, something else lurked: she felt she was “as funny as Roseanne” and that once she had climbed onto the platform of any sort of national television show, talent scouts and producers nationwide would spot her natural ability and give her a show of her own. That she had done nothing at all to prepare for this new career besides call the people closest to her horrible names didn’t occur to her or even matter. It was a small price to pay for a chance at a bigger stage, now that fame was apparently having a one-cent sale. Although the woman I talked to hadn’t done anything that could be considered criminal—besides emotionally extorting her loved ones—I believe that she and the other people from this glittering cultural moment laid much of the all-important “asshole who demands the public eye simply for being an asshole” groundwork that helped create the current semi-permeable membrane we now use in crime and celebrity osmosis.

  Looking back, maybe the harbinger of things to come—the comet in the night sky or the buzzard circling the dump before we made the big dive—was Joey Buttafuoco, as he milked his connection to a maiming assault on his wife by his teenage mistress all the way to multiple media appearances, his own show, additional criminal charges (insurance fraud, solicitation, and illegal possession of ammunition), and then, after all that, a radio show called Let’s Talk, about his recovery. Maybe we can now identify him as an early adopter of the coming wave.

  By the time the twenty-first century got under way, America’s industrial might had begun to wane. Not only was everything being manufactured in China, but jobs we’d taken for granted were being outsourced to India. We probably didn’t even need the added push from a behemoth economic crisis to prime Americans for embracing their new passion: an endless stream of celebrities they no longer had to look up to. Americans, fed up with admiring their betters, now welcomed the stars of reality shows as a form of celebrity double agent. Obviously, many of them were idiots, which meant that you could also look down on them. But they were rich and famous, so you had to kind of admire them, too, for somehow claiming a piece of the action for themselves. In one fell swoop they boosted your self-esteem and also offered you hope. Because, come on! These newcomers weren’t even spectacular assholes. They didn’t start a war or kill a bunch of people or form a cult. Rather, they represented a brand-new and different kind of asshole role model: a loving reinforcement of everyone at their worst.

  Here were the men and women you would move away from on public transportation, the members of your family you hoped you wouldn’t see over the holidays … placed on a pedestal to be stared at and admired.

  So as reality TV evolved to become the show business norm, it taught us over and over again that grabbing the spotlight with a public display of aggressive ignorance and boorish or lawless behavior was, now, a form of talent. To admire one of the Real Housewives, or someone on Jersey Shore or The Bachelor or whatever, was to admire the kind of inconsiderate loudmouthed asshole you yourself could easily be if you let yourself go.

  And facilitating this was a complete cultural rehabilitation of the idea of the tabloid. In the twentieth century, jokes that can no longer be comprehended by people under a certain age used to be made about “those newspapers no one wanted to be caught reading at the supermarket.” Ha! Not anymore.

  Curtain. End Act 1.

  ACT
2: CRIME 2.0

  Of course, the new celebrity/asshole/criminal paradigm comes with some built-in dilemmas. After having been elevated to star status, every new celebrity/asshole still has to figure out how to keep their momentum going. But how do they raise the bar, publicity-wise, when they are already famous for their obnoxious behavior? Traditional star-making fields like acting and music don’t really open their arms to these people for very long. Where oh where can they go for more time at center stage once they’ve had their turn on Dancing with the Stars?

  They can try to get another reality show, which works occasionally but not often. The attention span of the public has become very fickle. So they head for the same arena that even standard-model celebrities who have been knocked off the pedestal for box office failure, aging, weight gain, or substance abuse now turn to in ever greater numbers: crime.

  As every actor and actress who is suddenly not able to advance their cause through a new hit has learned, the publicity from crime is now equal to the publicity of a B-movie junket. In fact, it is better because it is more exciting to the general public. And it comes with a ready-made media platform: the news! After seeing how effectively mid-level showbiz personalities have been waltzing their way into more publicity via brushes with the law, celebrities of every stripe now have no problem with allowing cameras to observe them punching people, driving under the influence, buying drugs, shooting up, falling down drunk, and slandering everyone close to them. They know, instinctively, that the more attention they garner for behaving like thugs, the closer they will be to the cash register at the busy intersection where crime, sociopathy, and show business all collide. As of this writing, there’s even a Starline bus tour in Los Angeles dedicated to visiting just the sites of these kinds of disruptions.