WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT CELEBRITIES
*
The 20th-century comedian Fred Allen says in his book Treadmill to Oblivion that “a celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to become known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates, a wonderful writer whose book Between the World and Me exploded when it was published in 2015 and turned him into a literary celebrity, was devastated to see that when he bought a brownstone in Brooklyn, Its address, the price he paid for it, and his move-in date were printed in the New York newspapers. “It is true what they say about celebrity—-people suddenly don’t quite see you,” he wrote in the Atlantic. “You walk into a room and you are not a person, so much as symbol of whatever someone needs you to be.” The attention was so great, he announced, that he and his family wouldn’t move into the building after all.
There are all kinds of fame. You can be famous in one realm while in another no one knows who you are. I have an astrophy-sicist friend who every so often blows a gasket because he met Dr. Hecklemeyer Doofenberger. The Dr. Hecklemeyer Doofenberger. It’s the same thing with writers. Famous writers (with the possible exceptions of Stephen King and James Patterson) are not necessarily household names. But that’s one of the cool aspects of celebrity: you don’t have to be Madonna; you don’t have to be famous to everyone to be famous.
Since the dawn of the dinosaurs, celebrity has been a thing. OK, maybe not the dinosaurs (unless you count Stony Curtis from The Flintstones, which I do). In civilizations across the centuries, we would probably classify Queen Nefertiti, Cleopatra, those Russell Crowe–type gladiators, Julius Caesar, and Jesus as early celebrities. The rumors about Genghis Khan and Henry VIII and Marie Antoinette and Rasputin were as titillating to their kingdoms as the latest Kardashian nude selfie is to our world. When movies became popular early in the 20th century, we made international celebrities of performers like Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and Rudolph Valentino (swoon!). Our politicians have been famous for as long as there have been governments, and in our time some of them have gained celebrity status, such as when John Kennedy hung out with Marilyn Monroe. At the dawn of radio, professional athletes—including Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Joe Louis—who’d been known for their exploits on the playing fields or boxing rings only through newspapers assumed newfound notoriety. So did singers and musicians, from Bing Crosby to Elvis to Aretha Franklin to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. When television started appearing in average Americans’ houses in the middle of the 1950s, performers like Lucille Ball, Milton Berle, and Jackie Gleason became household faces. And as the number of entertainment outlets grew—from TV to cable TV to premium channels to Netflix and Hulu to on-demand movies to billions of websites from all around the world, now anyone with an iPhone and a less-than-normal amount of shame can be famous.
Which brings me to the moment when I start to explain this book to people.
“So, what exactly is this book about?” Griffin Dunne asks.
He is across the table from me at a café near his apartment in SoHo, one of New York City’s chicest—and most celebrity-filled—neighborhoods. He’s in his late 50s but could pass for twenty years younger, and is completely adorable in an Allman Brothers Eat a Peach T-shirt and baseball cap.
Looking at this bona fide famous person, an actor/producer/director who actually knows Madonna—MADONNA—-demands all my attention. His dad, Dominick Dunne, was in show business, too, and Griffin has lived around fame since he was in footy pajamas and a bathrobe. He understands it.
“It’s about the nature of celebrity,” I say.
He frowns and furrows his brow. I know that look. Timothy Hutton had it a few months before, as did pretty much everyone else I talked to about this book. Because they’re thinking: “What are you talking about, girl who wrote some books about dogs and friends and your mother, and how did I get roped into this conversation?”
“Who else have you talked to?” Griffin asks, trying to see if perhaps my earlier research will make this clearer. This sort of suspicion or wariness from celebrities is something I’m getting accustomed to. They need to be careful about what they say on the record: They’re not like those of us who freely talk politics with strangers on the subway, whose words are not headlines. Celebrity is both a reward for a job well done and a weapon to destroy someone’s privacy, reputation, and chance at a normal life.
“Timothy Hutton, Denis Leary, Michael Black, Adam Schweitzer, Julie Warner, Doris Roberts . . . ,” I begin, rattling off an impressive list.
“And what did you tell them to get them to talk to you?”
Oh my God. I want to run away with my giant New York City PS 87 tote bag filled with a pumpkin bread I baked for him, as well as signed copies of some of my books. Why did I bring these things with me? Because I’m not a journalist. David Frost didn’t bring Richard Nixon a Bundt cake when he interviewed him in 1977. No. Pumpkin loaves are for amateurs.
“Well, uh, they talked to me because, um, I knew people who knew them.” I say. “Not Timothy Hutton, though. I know him.”
“Oh, how do you know Tim?” Griffin asks, desperate to grasp at something to explain why he’s sitting here with me.
“I, um, met him on Twitter,” I say.
Griffin, I learn, is not on Twitter. He doesn’t understand how I got to “know” a great, Academy Award–winning actor through social media.
“Blech, Twitter. I can’t wait for it to just go away,” he says.
I try to explain the benefits of Twitter, and as I speak I can hear myself becoming one of the people I used to pass every morning standing outside the ABC building that housed the Live with Regis and Kathie Lee show. Five or six oddballs with autograph books came every morning to wait and get signatures from whatever guest was desperately darting from the building into their waiting limousine post-interview. Now that was me, the real-life Sandra Bernhard in The King of Comedy (though in my defense I wasn’t asking for autographs).
“But now we’re real-life friends, Tim and I.” I say “Tim” because his real-life friends don’t call him Timothy.
Griffin doesn’t look as if he believes me.
I think back to when I wrote my first book and people would ask me what it was about. I would start stuttering and then try to remember the flap copy: “Julie Klam was raised as the only daughter of one of the three Jewish families in the exclusive WASP stronghold of Bedford, New York. Her mother was something, her father was something else, and she ended up somehow turning it into a book?” All I can think now is how bad I am at explaining whatever it is I’m trying to do, but I know why. It’s just kind of embarrassing to explain to Griffin. (We are friends now, so I call him Griffin, instead of Mr. Dunne. Any day now, though, I might switch to Griff.)
In my desperation I look across the table at Griffin, and I think—I hope—that he is starting to understand what I want to know from him and what I’m trying to write about. Or maybe he just hopes to get back home to his beautiful apartment and gorgeous wife before the sun sets.
Why do we feel this way about celebrities—people we’ve never met? Why did my eighty-six-year-old grandfather when reading the Miami Herald once bark, “I hate Johnny Depp!”? I tell Griffin that by talking to the celebrities themselves about the concept of celebrity, I will better understand this relationship—-what they’re putting out, what we are getting back.
Griffin still doesn’t look completely convinced. So I give it one more shot.
“A few years ago,” I say, “my husband and I split up.”
Griffin nods.
“My daughter, who was then nine years old, was watching me going through some legal papers, and she saw her name and asked why she was in there. I explained that a lot of our divorce had to do with how her father and I could take care of her the best way possible. She suddenly got teary-eyed and asked me who would take care of her if something happened to me and her dad. I explained to her that now that we didn’t live together, it was very unlikely that something would happen to us at the same time. She wasn’t satisfied. I told her that years before, our plan was for her to live with one of her aunts and uncle, but now that she was a bit older, she could have a say in whom she lived with.
“She sat and thought for a couple of minutes and finally said, ‘OK, I choose Seth Meyers.’ ”
Griffin laughs. I remark, “It’s funny, but she’s only thirteen, so he is still on the hook for another five years.”
Without me saying anything more, he gets what I’m after.
Intermission 1
If you’re a writer, people always ask you what you’re working on. Most of the time, I tell them (a dog book, a friendship -column), and they nod and move on. Doing research for this book, however, I noticed something remarkable: just about every person I mentioned it to told me a story of a celebrity encounter. What I found—and continue to find—is that people vividly recall a sometimes-brief interaction that might have taken place forty years ago. They may not remember a second of their time in fourth grade, but they remember seeing Paul Newman putting gas in his Datsun that summer. That distinction is important to me—poignant and human. I obviously think a lot about celebrities and see them as significant. And I wanted to hear the celebrity stories that have affected others, so I decided to ask a large swath of people about brushes with celebrities that meant something to them, and I included them in this book. (The bios of those who shared their stories can be found in the back of this book.)
It must have been more than twenty-five years ago I spotted Audrey Hepburn on the men’s floor at Saks Fifth Avenue. She was easy to spot because she was wearing a belted trench coat, big sunglasses, and one of those tiny scarves tied around that perfect head. I was shopping for a birthday present for my brother-in-law, so it must have been in May. I couldn’t help myself; I started to follow her around the store. First she bought a cashmere sweater (for a man) and so did I. My brother-in-law loved that I bought the same one she bought. She started to look through a table of shirts but didn’t buy any. Me neither. Then she took the escalator down to the first floor and started to browse the makeup counters. No one recognized her! It was lunchtime, and I was late, so I left her to fend for herself. OK, it was a little bit of stalking, BUT IT WAS AUDREY HEPBURN!
—ESTHER NEWBERG
*
Several years ago I was waiting in a small lobby where a friend of mine, Nancy Ringham, was performing. The place was very crowded, and there wasn’t a lot of room to mingle. I’m standing there talking to somebody else when an old man just plows through the crowd, pushing me out of his way. That’s not the kind of behavior I put with—from anybody; I have a real scorn for people with bad manners. So I turned around and said, “Hey!” That got his attention. So this old man turned around and looked straight at me. It was Rex Harrison. Henry Fucking Higgins. He didn’t say a word—no apology, no acknowledgment, nothing. To him, I was just young and I was in his way. He clearly thought I was less than nothing. So I called him an “old man.” Loudly.
—MARY TESTA
TWO
CHILD STARS
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
*
There are monumental differences in celebrities having to do with what time in their lives they became famous. Someone who became a star at age forty-five, say, has a very different perspective on celebrity than someone who got their start in Gerber baby food commercials. I wanted to find out what it was like to grow up in the business from someone who lived through it. So I talked to the first child celebrity I remember vividly: Quinn Cummings.
I first saw Quinn in 1977. I was eleven; she was ten. She was on a movie screen; I was in a movie seat.
I had gone into New York City to spend the weekend with my aunt Mattie, and after one of the finest cheeseburger deluxes and Cokes I’d ever tasted in my eleven years on this planet, we went to the Sutton movie theater on 57th Street to see The Goodbye Girl.
Aunt Mattie bought tickets and we went to get popcorn. But no. To my shock, there was no popcorn. Instead, the concession stand was stocked with home-baked goods. Giant chocolate-chip cookies, slices of pink cakes, fruit tarts, and the huge dark-chocolate brownie that I selected.
(I know I loved The Goodbye Girl, but as God is my witness, I never see anything associated with that movie without thinking, “Mmmm, brownie . . .”)
When I admitted this to the now grown-up Quinn Cummings, she was gracious. “I’m so happy to be associated with any baked good.”
We became acquainted several years ago when she published a book edited by a friend of mine, who introduced us because she thought we would like each other. We emailed and didn’t meet in person until a few years later, and by that time I was as huge a fan of her writing as I was of her acting (brownie). From what I saw, she was a well-adjusted, healthy, down--to-earth, smart, decent, generous, animal-rescuing woman, and a very attentive mother. In short, she’s not a clichéd damaged grown-up child star. I also didn’t get the impression that Quinn was excited to be talking about her former career, but she was doing it to help me (see: generous).
As someone who has interviewed famous people for more than twenty years, I knew what questions to ask, but I also knew she’d been asked them eight zillion times. As much as I wanted her insider’s glimpse into celebrity, I also wanted Quinn not to hate this discussion, or me. So I took a deep breath and said, “I know you’ve been asked this, but I’m still curious: How do you think you escaped being a child-star casualty?”
WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT CELEBRITIES
*
The 20th-century comedian Fred Allen says in his book Treadmill to Oblivion that “a celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to become known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates, a wonderful writer whose book Between the World and Me exploded when it was published in 2015 and turned him into a literary celebrity, was devastated to see that when he bought a brownstone in Brooklyn, Its address, the price he paid for it, and his move-in date were printed in the New York newspapers. “It is true what they say about celebrity—-people suddenly don’t quite see you,” he wrote in the Atlantic. “You walk into a room and you are not a person, so much as symbol of whatever someone needs you to be.” The attention was so great, he announced, that he and his family wouldn’t move into the building after all.
There are all kinds of fame. You can be famous in one realm while in another no one knows who you are. I have an astrophy-sicist friend who every so often blows a gasket because he met Dr. Hecklemeyer Doofenberger. The Dr. Hecklemeyer Doofenberger. It’s the same thing with writers. Famous writers (with the possible exceptions of Stephen King and James Patterson) are not necessarily household names. But that’s one of the cool aspects of celebrity: you don’t have to be Madonna; you don’t have to be famous to everyone to be famous.
Since the dawn of the dinosaurs, celebrity has been a thing. OK, maybe not the dinosaurs (unless you count Stony Curtis from The Flintstones, which I do). In civilizations across the centuries, we would probably classify Queen Nefertiti, Cleopatra, those Russell Crowe–type gladiators, Julius Caesar, and Jesus as early celebrities. The rumors about Genghis Khan and Henry VIII and Marie Antoinette and Rasputin were as titillating to their kingdoms as the latest Kardashian nude selfie is to our world. When movies became popular early in the 20th century, we made international celebrities of performers like Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and Rudolph Valentino (swoon!). Our politicians have been famous for as long as there have been governments, and in our time some of them have gained celebrity status, such as when John Kennedy hung out with Marilyn Monroe. At the dawn of radio, professional athletes—including Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Joe Louis—who’d been known for their exploits on the playing fields or boxing rings only through newspapers assumed newfound notoriety. So did singers and musicians, from Bing Crosby to Elvis to Aretha Franklin to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. When television started appearing in average Americans’ houses in the middle of the 1950s, performers like Lucille Ball, Milton Berle, and Jackie Gleason became household faces. And as the number of entertainment outlets grew—from TV to cable TV to premium channels to Netflix and Hulu to on-demand movies to billions of websites from all around the world, now anyone with an iPhone and a less-than-normal amount of shame can be famous.
Which brings me to the moment when I start to explain this book to people.
“So, what exactly is this book about?” Griffin Dunne asks.
He is across the table from me at a café near his apartment in SoHo, one of New York City’s chicest—and most celebrity-filled—neighborhoods. He’s in his late 50s but could pass for twenty years younger, and is completely adorable in an Allman Brothers Eat a Peach T-shirt and baseball cap.
Looking at this bona fide famous person, an actor/producer/director who actually knows Madonna—MADONNA—-demands all my attention. His dad, Dominick Dunne, was in show business, too, and Griffin has lived around fame since he was in footy pajamas and a bathrobe. He understands it.
“It’s about the nature of celebrity,” I say.
He frowns and furrows his brow. I know that look. Timothy Hutton had it a few months before, as did pretty much everyone else I talked to about this book. Because they’re thinking: “What are you talking about, girl who wrote some books about dogs and friends and your mother, and how did I get roped into this conversation?”
“Who else have you talked to?” Griffin asks, trying to see if perhaps my earlier research will make this clearer. This sort of suspicion or wariness from celebrities is something I’m getting accustomed to. They need to be careful about what they say on the record: They’re not like those of us who freely talk politics with strangers on the subway, whose words are not headlines. Celebrity is both a reward for a job well done and a weapon to destroy someone’s privacy, reputation, and chance at a normal life.
“Timothy Hutton, Denis Leary, Michael Black, Adam Schweitzer, Julie Warner, Doris Roberts . . . ,” I begin, rattling off an impressive list.
“And what did you tell them to get them to talk to you?”
Oh my God. I want to run away with my giant New York City PS 87 tote bag filled with a pumpkin bread I baked for him, as well as signed copies of some of my books. Why did I bring these things with me? Because I’m not a journalist. David Frost didn’t bring Richard Nixon a Bundt cake when he interviewed him in 1977. No. Pumpkin loaves are for amateurs.
“Well, uh, they talked to me because, um, I knew people who knew them.” I say. “Not Timothy Hutton, though. I know him.”
“Oh, how do you know Tim?” Griffin asks, desperate to grasp at something to explain why he’s sitting here with me.
“I, um, met him on Twitter,” I say.
Griffin, I learn, is not on Twitter. He doesn’t understand how I got to “know” a great, Academy Award–winning actor through social media.
“Blech, Twitter. I can’t wait for it to just go away,” he says.
I try to explain the benefits of Twitter, and as I speak I can hear myself becoming one of the people I used to pass every morning standing outside the ABC building that housed the Live with Regis and Kathie Lee show. Five or six oddballs with autograph books came every morning to wait and get signatures from whatever guest was desperately darting from the building into their waiting limousine post-interview. Now that was me, the real-life Sandra Bernhard in The King of Comedy (though in my defense I wasn’t asking for autographs).
“But now we’re real-life friends, Tim and I.” I say “Tim” because his real-life friends don’t call him Timothy.
Griffin doesn’t look as if he believes me.
I think back to when I wrote my first book and people would ask me what it was about. I would start stuttering and then try to remember the flap copy: “Julie Klam was raised as the only daughter of one of the three Jewish families in the exclusive WASP stronghold of Bedford, New York. Her mother was something, her father was something else, and she ended up somehow turning it into a book?” All I can think now is how bad I am at explaining whatever it is I’m trying to do, but I know why. It’s just kind of embarrassing to explain to Griffin. (We are friends now, so I call him Griffin, instead of Mr. Dunne. Any day now, though, I might switch to Griff.)
In my desperation I look across the table at Griffin, and I think—I hope—that he is starting to understand what I want to know from him and what I’m trying to write about. Or maybe he just hopes to get back home to his beautiful apartment and gorgeous wife before the sun sets.
Why do we feel this way about celebrities—people we’ve never met? Why did my eighty-six-year-old grandfather when reading the Miami Herald once bark, “I hate Johnny Depp!”? I tell Griffin that by talking to the celebrities themselves about the concept of celebrity, I will better understand this relationship—-what they’re putting out, what we are getting back.
Griffin still doesn’t look completely convinced. So I give it one more shot.
“A few years ago,” I say, “my husband and I split up.”
Griffin nods.
“My daughter, who was then nine years old, was watching me going through some legal papers, and she saw her name and asked why she was in there. I explained that a lot of our divorce had to do with how her father and I could take care of her the best way possible. She suddenly got teary-eyed and asked me who would take care of her if something happened to me and her dad. I explained to her that now that we didn’t live together, it was very unlikely that something would happen to us at the same time. She wasn’t satisfied. I told her that years before, our plan was for her to live with one of her aunts and uncle, but now that she was a bit older, she could have a say in whom she lived with.
“She sat and thought for a couple of minutes and finally said, ‘OK, I choose Seth Meyers.’ ”
Griffin laughs. I remark, “It’s funny, but she’s only thirteen, so he is still on the hook for another five years.”
Without me saying anything more, he gets what I’m after.
Intermission 1
If you’re a writer, people always ask you what you’re working on. Most of the time, I tell them (a dog book, a friendship -column), and they nod and move on. Doing research for this book, however, I noticed something remarkable: just about every person I mentioned it to told me a story of a celebrity encounter. What I found—and continue to find—is that people vividly recall a sometimes-brief interaction that might have taken place forty years ago. They may not remember a second of their time in fourth grade, but they remember seeing Paul Newman putting gas in his Datsun that summer. That distinction is important to me—poignant and human. I obviously think a lot about celebrities and see them as significant. And I wanted to hear the celebrity stories that have affected others, so I decided to ask a large swath of people about brushes with celebrities that meant something to them, and I included them in this book. (The bios of those who shared their stories can be found in the back of this book.)
It must have been more than twenty-five years ago I spotted Audrey Hepburn on the men’s floor at Saks Fifth Avenue. She was easy to spot because she was wearing a belted trench coat, big sunglasses, and one of those tiny scarves tied around that perfect head. I was shopping for a birthday present for my brother-in-law, so it must have been in May. I couldn’t help myself; I started to follow her around the store. First she bought a cashmere sweater (for a man) and so did I. My brother-in-law loved that I bought the same one she bought. She started to look through a table of shirts but didn’t buy any. Me neither. Then she took the escalator down to the first floor and started to browse the makeup counters. No one recognized her! It was lunchtime, and I was late, so I left her to fend for herself. OK, it was a little bit of stalking, BUT IT WAS AUDREY HEPBURN!
—ESTHER NEWBERG
*
Several years ago I was waiting in a small lobby where a friend of mine, Nancy Ringham, was performing. The place was very crowded, and there wasn’t a lot of room to mingle. I’m standing there talking to somebody else when an old man just plows through the crowd, pushing me out of his way. That’s not the kind of behavior I put with—from anybody; I have a real scorn for people with bad manners. So I turned around and said, “Hey!” That got his attention. So this old man turned around and looked straight at me. It was Rex Harrison. Henry Fucking Higgins. He didn’t say a word—no apology, no acknowledgment, nothing. To him, I was just young and I was in his way. He clearly thought I was less than nothing. So I called him an “old man.” Loudly.
—MARY TESTA
TWO
CHILD STARS
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
*
There are monumental differences in celebrities having to do with what time in their lives they became famous. Someone who became a star at age forty-five, say, has a very different perspective on celebrity than someone who got their start in Gerber baby food commercials. I wanted to find out what it was like to grow up in the business from someone who lived through it. So I talked to the first child celebrity I remember vividly: Quinn Cummings.
I first saw Quinn in 1977. I was eleven; she was ten. She was on a movie screen; I was in a movie seat.
I had gone into New York City to spend the weekend with my aunt Mattie, and after one of the finest cheeseburger deluxes and Cokes I’d ever tasted in my eleven years on this planet, we went to the Sutton movie theater on 57th Street to see The Goodbye Girl.
Aunt Mattie bought tickets and we went to get popcorn. But no. To my shock, there was no popcorn. Instead, the concession stand was stocked with home-baked goods. Giant chocolate-chip cookies, slices of pink cakes, fruit tarts, and the huge dark-chocolate brownie that I selected.
(I know I loved The Goodbye Girl, but as God is my witness, I never see anything associated with that movie without thinking, “Mmmm, brownie . . .”)
When I admitted this to the now grown-up Quinn Cummings, she was gracious. “I’m so happy to be associated with any baked good.”
We became acquainted several years ago when she published a book edited by a friend of mine, who introduced us because she thought we would like each other. We emailed and didn’t meet in person until a few years later, and by that time I was as huge a fan of her writing as I was of her acting (brownie). From what I saw, she was a well-adjusted, healthy, down--to-earth, smart, decent, generous, animal-rescuing woman, and a very attentive mother. In short, she’s not a clichéd damaged grown-up child star. I also didn’t get the impression that Quinn was excited to be talking about her former career, but she was doing it to help me (see: generous).
As someone who has interviewed famous people for more than twenty years, I knew what questions to ask, but I also knew she’d been asked them eight zillion times. As much as I wanted her insider’s glimpse into celebrity, I also wanted Quinn not to hate this discussion, or me. So I took a deep breath and said, “I know you’ve been asked this, but I’m still curious: How do you think you escaped being a child-star casualty?”
