From the WSJ Opinion Archives
WONDER LAND
Talk Falls, Mariah Fired,
America Gets Real
The last gasp of the celebrity culture.
The end of Talk magazine this week was big news--if you live within 75 miles of Times Square (OK, 10 miles), or in ZIP code 90210, northwest Washington and maybe Boston. This isn't to say that the people who live in the rest of the U.S.'s 3.6 million square miles don't care about celebrities and buzz and what's up below East 14th Street. They're just not preoccupied with, well, talking about it.
Talk was run by a famous New York editor who was said to have an unerring feel for these things. So it must mean something that Talk tanked. It looks to me that what it means is the golden age of American celebrity is over at last. Or maybe it died some time ago and no one living in the caves noted above noticed. If we've learned anything from Enron it's that people who earn their daily bread by conjuring another fantasy before heading home--offshore shell companies, another Brad Pitt cover--also have a way of pretending that the fat lady couldn't possibly ever sing for them.
The bible of the age of celebrity now losing altitude wasn't Talk. It was People magazine, founded, incredible to think, in 1974--before Britney Spears even existed! Back then, the whole world of journalism and media laughed at Time Inc.'s editors for starting People, which is now the company's most profitable magazine. But I think the modern age of celebrity began 10 years earlier, with Muhammad Ali.
Not "Ali." That's the current movie starring Will Smith, the man People magazine reports (with a poll) most women would want to accompany to the Oscars, followed by Russell Crowe, Josh Hartnett and Benicio del Toro. Like most celebrities, Muhammad Ali was a real person before he became a celebrity.
What makes the coincidence of "Ali" the movie and Talk's collapse notable is that the film is giving many young people a chance to see the thing that transformed Cassius Clay, and thousands after him, into household names, that allowed Talk's editor to be famous herself for about 10 years. That thing was television.
Back in the mid-1960s, most TV sets still broadcast in black and white. Yes, Elvis had earlier lit up the Ed Sullivan show, and yes, the Beatles exploded on the same program. But with the Cassius Clay-Howard Cosell interviews, two smart, loud guys discovered they were in sync on that little square box's potential as a fame-maker, and they used it adroitly for years to pump air into their personas. They weren't merely famous, as with movie actors and athletes of old. They were something new; they were "personalities."
Cosell once said of himself: "Arrogant, pompous, obnoxious, vain, cruel, verbose, a showoff. I have been called all of these. Of course I am." It's a good list, and to have a shot at celebrityhood in our time you probably needed to be good at two of them. You could argue it's been all downhill since Ali, but what a long, slow ride it's been. Through Madonna, Prince, Drew Barrymore, Tonya Harding, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jim Jeffords, Emeril, J.Lo, Fergie, whoever. There are celebrity Web sites so sodden with names and pix that no computer has enough memory to download them all. When, as on Wednesday, EMI swallows $49 million to cut Mariah Carey loose, you know the end is near.
What happened? What happened is that the people selected for celebrity by "Today," MTV, VH-1, Barbara Walters, E!, Talk, People, Rolling Stone, Elle, et al., found out that modern media is the most voracious machine ever invented, exhausting almost anything it creates. Everyone knows Andy Warhol's famous remark that "in the future everybody will be world-famous for 15 minutes," and everyone wonders when that perfect day will arrive. On the evidence of the current issue of People, everyone's close-up has arrived.
The current issue, besides Prince Harry in rehab, has stories on a woman who bakes cookies for celebrities, Frank Sinatra's granddaughter who sings in a rock group, the 14-year-old star of a program on the Disney Channel, and the designer who makes clothes "for big time clients like Dwight Yoakam." With the hurdle for fame now about six inches high, no wonder a biopic about Muhammad Ali looks like the excavation of Atlantis.
The celebrity culture of the past 30 years, which eventually chewed up even serious American art, was largely the product of publicists, talk-show schedulers and editors merely trying to get through another week's assignments. The public was never in on this workaday conceit, and so took these seemingly grand lives seriously. Anna Kournikova! Even intellectuals and academics took it mostly at face value, rather than what so much of it was--shticks thought out and settled on in business meetings. We have the evidence of VH-1's wonderful interviews with horrifyingly ancient but remarkably sane rock 'n' rollers to prove it was by and large a hoot, a running, inside joke.
Meanwhile, the Museum of Modern Art recently put on a retrospective of Alberto Giacometti's sculpture and art. Giacometti, by the end of his life in 1966, could have been called part of the just-aborning celebrity culture. On finishing a tour through Giacometti's work, one had to feel moved--or disturbed. The work, the artist, the intent and the result were all, in every imaginable sense, real.
As you've noticed, there isn't much of that sort of thing now and hasn't been for awhile. But if Talk is dead, Mariah Carey wilting and People down to celebrity cookie bakers, this must be a good thing. The phenomenon was using up so much energy, space and time there was no oxygen left over for anything authentic. We have nowhere to go but up. So go.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
