We are swamped by a culture of celebrity. Our politicians are more image than reality. Our actors often become our politicians because they have shown the ability to "play" leaders. Churchill, in today's America, would be too short, too unleaderlike, but John Wayne could have been president, if he'd lived, but probably not poor homely old Abe Lincoln.
Celebrities affect us all. They help us decide what to buy and what "look" (a real 21st century American word) to approximate. For instance, Michael Jordan shaved his head. Then other black athletes got shorn and shiny pated. And now, every third, bumpy headed, never-played-a-sport white boy is sculling. Because it's a look that says something about the baldy even if what it says isn't true.
We all eventually feel like we know celebrities: sports stars, movie actors, television personalities. All of us. Nobody, not even a cynic like myself, is immune.
I can't remember ever fondly thinking about England's Princess Diana, to me a totally media-created figment of the British public's imagination. A shopper. A failure as a wife. A bulimic.
But then one night I was sprawled on a couch in Kitsap County, after a hard day of newspapering, watching the news, when word of her death, and a picture of a terribly ruined automobile, flashed on the screen.
Unbelievably, to me anyway, I started crying. Not gut wrenching sobs, but not simply eyes spotted with a tear or two either. I was crying. Something about her youth, her sad life, and all the news reports ofher I'd seen, and casually dismissed, made it feel as if, if not a sister, a fairly close neighbor, had died way too young.
For a few days I watched everything, from the build up of her funeral to her burial. If asked I couldn't have quite explained.
But her death made me sad. In a very strange way, global media has made us all one. I thought of Diana again the other day when I heard Paul Newman had died. Now here was a celebrity. Talented, beautiful, generous, giving a higher percentage of his income to charity than Bill Gates and company. A movie star who didn't want to live in Los Angeles. A movie star who stayed married to his second wife for more than four decades, until he dies.
Almost anyone I've talked to over 50 remembers Paul Newman fondly. Talking to a neighbor about him, noticing her eyes brimming with tears, I felt almost exactly the way I'd felt a couple years ago talking to my favorite cousin about the death of my favorite aunt, her mother.
Not all younger folk even realize he was an actor. According to friends, Newman kept a letter over his toilet from a young lady who loved his salad dressing. The girl wrote that her friend had mentioned Newman was a movie star once.
If your movies are as good as your salad, she wrote, I'd like to watch one.
Paul Newman somehow touched us. He was a cheerful rebel, not a James Dean pouter, and not a Ramboesque murderer either. He was a guy who took the heads off of parking meters in Cool Hand Luke, a sad chain gang movie that Newman somehow raised, in certain scenes, from black comedy to funny as hell farce. And the film gave Americans a great line: "What we have here is a failure to communicate." A pithy sentence that could be the motto of today's United States, equally divided between blue states and red states, war mongers and peaceniks, spendthrifts and poor folk. Palins and Bidens.
The list of good and even occasionally great Paul Newman films could fill an entire column: "Slapshot," "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "The Verdict," "Road to Perdition," "Harper," "Hombre," "Hud," "The Long Hot Summer," "The Sting," "The Color of Money," and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." To name just some, not all, as I only have room here to scratch the celluloid surface.
Paul Newman seemed like, and according to intimates, actually was a good, funny, generous man, who despite massive fame, didn't take himself too seriously. He will be missed.[[In-content Ad]]
