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Rick's Notebook
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| "Some Cynical Guy" No. 18: October
27, 2000
The Fickle Finger of Fame All celebrities are famous, but some celebrities are a little more famous than they deserve to be. Let me put the matter into perspective for you. You've heard of Tom Cruise, no doubt. Few members of our species who pay to sit in darkened auditoriums HAVEN'T heard of Tom Cruise, except possibly in remote areas of New Guinea and North Dakota. You know Tom Cruise even though he doesn't know you. You instantly associate the name with the technically handsome J.Crew face, the wide empty-eyed smile, the blockbuster films and especially the pivotal underwear scene from "Risky Business." Tom Cruise is one of the most famous living organisms on our planet, and for a man still relatively young his accomplishments are considerable. It even occurred to me the other day that Tom Cruise is currently more famous than Charlemagne. (I'm a student of history, so I often find myself thinking about people like Charlemagne.) In other words, if you went to the nearest mall, handed shoppers a list of famous people and asked them to check off the names they recognized, Tom Cruise would unquestionably collect more check-marks than Charlemagne. And this disturbs me. Let me tell you something about Charlemagne: he was the Napoleon of his day, the single most dominant figure of the Dark Ages. We're talking about a time when peasants slept in the same room with livestock and generally lost all their teeth by the age of thirty. Not that they'd have needed their teeth much longer, because the average life expectancy in those days was about twenty-seven. Anyway, during this murky epoch in European history, Charlemagne emerged as the sole beacon of enlightenment: he united nearly all of Western Europe under his benevolent rule; he encouraged learning and law and built the foundation of an empire that lasted a thousand years. So magnificent were his deeds that he was celebrated in medieval legend for centuries after his death. And today he's less famous than Tom Cruise, at least among people who don't practice history for a living. Am I being a curmudgeon if I observe that Tom Cruise doesn't deserve to be more famous than Charlemagne, that his talents and achievements don't quite measure up to those of the noble and puissant Frankish monarch? Granted, Charlemagne never earned $20 million per picture, but let's be reasonable: I'd venture to say that he deserves to be at least marginally more famous than Tom Cruise. But let's not get hung up on poor Charlemagne. After all, Tom Cruise is also more famous than John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States and the son of Founding Father John Adams. (For that matter, Tom Cruise is more famous than the old man, too.) More people today are familiar with Tom Cruise than they are with Thucydides, Thomas Aquinas, Ferdinand Magellan, Eli Whitney, Noah Webster, Edna St. Vincent Millay or Hubert Humphrey. Tom Cruise is better known than the Woolworth Building, the San Joaquin Valley and the 3,000-year-old nation of Armenia. His celebrity overpowers that of ancient conquerors Ramses II of Egypt and Tiglath-Pileser III of Assyria; the luster of his name overshadows the Temple of Diana, the Book of Kells and the Articles of Confederation. He is more renowned than the magnificent frigatebird, which has been soaring over tropical seas for eons. His reputation looms larger than that of Ganymede, the premier moon in our solar system. In fact, the name of this solitary star outshines entire CONSTELLATIONS like Canis Minor and Cassiopeia. Why is Tom Cruise so inordinately, confoundedly, maddeningly famous? As a cynic, I'd like to say that it's because so many impressionable people willingly pay to see a famous person on the screen. The more famous he becomes, the more people pay to see him. The more they pay to see him, the more famous he becomes. Makes sense, doesn't it? Nobody in their right mind would pay to see ME on a screen. And not all that many would pay to see Charlemagne either, even if he could be resurrected tomorrow and persuaded to speak a few words of strangely accented English in a scene with Meryl Streep. There I go with old Charlemagne again. It still rankles me that this heroic example of dead European royalty is less famous today than Tom Cruise. For that matter, he's currently less famous than Britney Spears, Sara Jessica Parker and Regis Philbin. Even the Icelandic singer Bjork is gaining on him. Is there no end to the eclipse of Western Civilization by the primal forces of pop? I suggest we look at some pop idols of the past. Right now I'm thumbing through a 1930 issue of Photoplay that I picked up a few weeks ago on eBay. Its pages are crammed with the names and pictures of men and women who were the hottest celebrities of their day. A few of the names still sparkle today, large as life: Garbo, Chaplin, John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, Laurel and Hardy. Others are recognized and appreciated by old film buffs like me, though their names mean little to contemporary moviegoers: their ranks include Jeanette MacDonald, Eddie Cantor, Warner Baxter, Bebe Daniels, George Arliss, John Gilbert, Clara Bow. But the vast majority of the names would simply draw blank stares today. Read this roster of discarded celebrities from seventy years ago, and shed a tear with the Cynical Guy over their fleeting fame: Virginia Valli, Willie Haines, Robert Ames, Marion Harris, Winnie Lightner, Olive Borden: all vanished like the old Confederacy. Lila Lee, Lois Wilson, Lowell Sherman, Anita Page, Louise Dresser, Kenneth McKenna, Edmund Lowe: a nation no longer turns its lonely eyes to you. Betty Blythe, Alice Day, Conway Tearle, John Holland, Dorothy Sebastian and one Hobart Bosworth, described in a Photoplay blurb as 'just elegant.' Nobody remembers his elegance now aside from perhaps half a dozen surviving fans in scattered nursing homes. Then there was the newly minted superstar Ruth Chatterton, about whom Photoplay gushed, 'Well, look at her now! A thousand marquees spatter her name nightly.' The lights have gone out on those thousand marquees, and nobody sees her name spattered anywhere today. Welcome to the celebrity compost heap, where one day's idols are the next day's mulch. Seventy years from now, will anyone but old film buffs recognize Tom Cruise's name? Will they remember the People Magazine covers, the grin, the dalliance with Scientology, the hundred flashes of paparazzi cameras as he and Nicole ducked into a limo? Maybe the ghost of Charlemagne has nothing to fret about after all. © 2000 by Bridget Petrella Media Relations. "Some Cynical Guy" appears here by permission of the publisher. "Some Cynical Guy" column archive:
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Rick Bayan was born and raised in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where he enjoyed an idyllic suburban childhood—the perfect background for a lifetime of cynical disillusionment. He has held a number of typical jobs for an idealistic liberal arts graduate, including assistant editor of Rubber Age and managing editor of Container News. At Time-Life Books he was assigned to write about plumbing fixtures. His work as copy chief for Day-Timers, Inc.,
won six advertising awards, none of which dampened his cheerfully morose view of business and life. He has written three books, including
Words That Sell and The Cynic's Dictionary, and tons of junk mail. Bayan, who claims to be a "kinder, gentler cynic," currently lives in Allentown, Pennsylvania. His weekly column, "Some Cynical Guy," is published and syndicated by Upbeat Online.
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