David Baxter PhD
Late Founder
Say what?
by Marina Hyde, The Guardian
Saturday 28 March 2009
Time was when entertainers knew their place. Today they run riot, adopting orphans by the pramload, extolling oddball religions and even brokering peace deals. What's going on, asks Marina Hyde
On the eve of the last Palestinian presidential elections, a televised message was broadcast to voters. "Hi, I'm Richard Gere," smiled its star, "and I'm speaking for the entire world ..." Did you miss the meeting at which this got decided? Does it seem like an encouraging state of affairs? Do you find it confusing that Richard Gere should claim not simply to be speaking for himself (debatable), but for the whole of Earth? Then apologies for startling you, but this is your world. Try not to choke on it. In 1990 Richard was starring in Pretty Woman; 15 years later, he was making formal interventions into Middle East politics. The saddest part is that you weren't even in a coma for that period, so future generations are going to regard you as complicit.
Of course, we're not just talking about Richard Gere ? although, as planet spokesmodel, he's certainly a reasonable starting point. We're talking about the entire celebriscape, which in recent years has seemed to be expanding at least twice as fast as the universe it inhabits. Once upon a time, the entertainment industry was an industry that made entertainment. Its workforce was required to do quaint things such as show up to movie sets, or make music, or go to wild parties. Today, that brief has expanded slightly. It now includes proselytising for alien religions, trying to negotiate with the Taliban, getting photographed in a manner that basically constitutes an unsolicited gynaecology examination, and being brought in to fix the Iraqi refugee crisis.
Are you familiar with the term "mission creep"? Mission creep is the expansion of an enterprise beyond its original goals, typically after initial successes. Hilarity does not usually ensue. What does ensue are things such as the escalation of the Korean war, or the Crusades, or Sharon Stone explaining that earthquakes are visited upon Chinese peasants because of "karma".
So keep your wits about you, stardust consumers, and prepare to tumble down the rabbit hole. Above all, remember this: if the entertainment industry is the solution, we're asking the wrong questions.
When celebrities share
We have seen a wholly encouraging proliferation in the numbers of ways celebrities can communicate with a public anxious for news. Where once a star wishing to share themselves would be limited to traditional outlets, it is now possible to telegraph one's state of mind via an exciting new range of communicative platforms. Tattoos, fragrances, snack lines ? even sex tapes. And, in most cases, they're lucrative. Frankly, there's never been a better time to have nothing interesting to say.
Tattoos: Say it with body art
Where stars are concerned, tattoos exist for two reasons: to beam their powerful personal philosophy to the world, and to provide us with an aide-memoire of their romantic entanglements.
Falling within the former category are tattoos such as Billy Bob Thornton's "Remember the Alamo" and Robbie Williams' "Elvis, Grant Me Serenity". The latter category boasts entries such as David Beckham's earnestly misspelt Hindi triumph, "Vihctoria", and Eminem's belly-spanning tribute to his ex-wife, Kim, in which the words "Rot in Pieces" sit atop her open grave. Naturally, no treatise on this subject would be complete without running the rule over at the Zen mistress of tattoo affectation: Angelina Jolie, whose largest organ should be regarded as the Rosetta Stone of celebrity body art.
In fact, we probably shouldn't rule out the theory that Angelina is simply adopting or biologically spawning children as backup for the inevitable moment when she realises she has no available flesh left. Yet it seems she will at least endeavour to fill up Brad Pitt's defaceable torso first. The first Brad unveiled was a forearm tattoo of Otzi the iceman. The second was a mysterious series of parallel lines that were diversely interpreted as a tribute to the great Nintendo platform games of the 80s, and a diagram of the New Orleans levee system. As it turned out, the speculation was way off target: Angelina herself had created the cryptic hieroglyph. "We went to Davos," she said. "One night we didn't have anything to do, so I was drawing on his back. It's meaningful in that it's us making angles and shapes out of each other's body, that kind of a thing." No. That is not why it is meaningful. It is meaningful because the kind of people who get so bored that they doodle on each other and turn the doodles into permanent tattoos are now attending the World Economic Forum.
Celebrity product ranges: A better class of tat
With the arguable exception of incontinence pads, there is no product some celebrity or other wouldn't slap their name on if they thought there might be money in it. Don't believe it? Then it's probably time we talked about the Kiss Kasket.
Kiss are not merely a rock band you could never care about, no matter how many more eternities they keep flogging their face-painted, catsuited, age-inappropriate act. They're the most rapaciously merchandising entertainers ever to have existed. Against their awesomely shameless record, even will-this-do product spewer Gwen Stefani is a merchandising pygmy. This lot have licensed their name to more than 3,000 products, from the Kiss toothbrush ("Rock your teeth clean") to Kiss studded condoms (let's not and say we did) to Kiss bathroom tiles (really?) to Kiss Cabernet Sauvignon (OK, just leave now).
But in June 2001 it became clear that Kiss were not simply scraping the bottom of the barrel. The barrel had a concealed basement. And so to the Kiss Kasket, the world's first celebrity-branded coffin. Have you ever contemplated falling into death's embrace and thought how much sweeter it would be if a member of the entertainment industry had ripped you off one last time before your surviving relatives began shovelling in the earth? Then let's hear some more about the product that could make that happen. The Kiss Kasket featured the faces of the band's four founder members, as well as its logo and the slogan "Kiss Forever". It retailed at $4,500 unsigned and $5,000 signed. Come on: this may be a difficult time for you, but an autograph's an autograph. It's what the Kasket's kargo would have wanted. As Kiss frontman Gene Simmons declared on its launch : "This is the ultimate Kiss collectible." High praise indeed. "I love living," he added, "but this makes the alternative look pretty damn good."
Celebrity religions
Mainstream religion is a party to which everyone is invited. Wolves lie down with lambs, princes mix with paupers, and as long as you're not gay or into science or anything, you can be as humbly subordinate as the next speck of dust. Casting their eye over such a scene, however, any self-respecting celebrity would simply hiss, "Get off my coat" at the favela nun kneeling on their Dior, then screech the age-old question: "Where the hell is the VIP room?"
Scientology ? the religion with science right up there in the title
Our first port of celestial call is, inevitably, Scientology ? the religion started by a man who once said, "I'd like to start a religion. That's where the money is." Yet while we could fill hundreds of pages with accounts of the moneymaking schemes, the grand-jury indictments, the secretive compounds and the jaw-droppingly malicious houndings of people who have criticised the church down the decades, we must limit our examination to the celebrity angle.
Gingerly, then, very gingerly, to Scientology's most famous face. Everyone knows Tom Cruise is a Scientologist, but there was a time when we knew it less alarmingly, if you will. That time was during the years that the formidable Hollywood operator Pat Kingsley served as his publicist, who somehow preserved his image as an intensely enthusiastic, but basically likeable guy. The kind of guy Katie Holmes, the actress who gave us wholesome little Joey on TV's Dawson's Creek, might have had a poster of on her bedroom wall.
But you really can't keep a lid on Cruise's brand of nutty for ever, and in 2004 Tom ended his relationship with Kingsley and installed his sister, Lee Anne, a fellow Scientologist, as his publicist. You may as well regard this as year zero in terms of the emergence of the Cruise you know today. The one who surfs sofas. The one who derides women suffering from post natal depression. The one whose public behaviour caused the owner of Paramount to sever his studio's 14-year relationship with the actor's production company.
By 2008, things seemed to have settled down. Tom and wholesome little Joey had a toddler daughter together, and neither mother nor child appeared to be openly attempting to escape when they were seen in public places. And then came the videos. In early 2008 ? around the publication of Andrew Morton's unauthorised biography of Tom, funnily enough ? a series of leaked video clips hit the internet, featuring Tom talking about Scientology and attending church functions. They swiftly went viral, despite the Scientologists' fearsome efforts to cow host sites into removing them. The clips combined two distinct functions. First, they offered a revealing glimpse into the kind of highly produced material with which Scientology recruits are bombarded. And second, they pretty much dispelled the baseless rumours of Cruise's sanity once and for all.
Kabbalah ? not Jewish. Not even Jewishish
Light up your spirituality with scented candles, gird your wrists with $26 red string bracelets and prepare to accept the mystery of Kabbalah ? the Pepsi to Scientology's Coke.
When the Kabbalah Centre opened the doors of its LA outpost in 1984, the task of sparkling itself up looked gargantuan. Scientology was the voguish Hollywood religion, and even given celebrity weakness for any self-appointed guru who might blow through, you'd have placed Kabbalah's chances of gaining lasting purchase on the credulous entertainer market at slim to none. You'd have been wrong. In many ways, Kabbalah is The Little System Of Bull**** That Could.
Enter Sandra Bernhard. The comedian ? and long-time friend of Madonna ? began attending the LA Kabbalah Centre in the mid- 90s, and in retrospect is the celebrity who bore witness to the real Kabbalah messiah, Her Madjesty herself. Think of Sandra as Kabbalah's John the Baptist figure. In terms of faith-advertising pay dirt, Madonna's mere presence at the Kabbalah Centre says, "I was raised a Catholic but I once frolicked with a black Jesus on an altar in a video. Stigmata were involved. These days I like to crucify myself in concerts and I've dabbled in more dumbed-down mysticism than you've taken public transport journeys. But then I found Kabbalah, and it worked for me."
Perhaps most astoundingly, though, Madonna has been instrumental in casting this hotchpotch of hocus-pocus, cherry-picked fake Judaism and sharp business practice as the sceptic's faith. "Religion is not asking questions," she countered sternly when an interviewer described Kabbalah as a religion. "What I call 'religious thinking' is not asking questions." Wait ? Madonna thought she'd been asking questions? Mmm. Questions Madonna didn't ask of the Kabbalah Centre are things like: Would you mind if I took a look at your accounts? Why does the packaging of the $26 red string that you state has been wrapped seven times round Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem bear the words "Made in China"?
It would be all very well for celebrities to become involved with such obvious cults if they kept their opinions to themselves. Perhaps our best hope would be an LA-based religious war in which the mighty sparkly armies of the Kabbalah Centre and Scientology's Celebrity Centre square up after some hair-trigger event and become mired in a pointless 30-year conflict, preferably with debilitating numbers of casualties on both sides.
Celebrities and the Middle East
Time was when celebrities were wary of involving themselves in the complex hatreds of the region, perhaps acknowledging that the struggles of its politics were so labyrinthine and bloody that even an actor or a lead guitarist might have difficulty unravelling them. So thank pan-religious heavens that there now appears to be not a single tenuously famous individual with whom Israeli president Shimon Peres would not gladly hold bilateral talks.
In early 2006, as Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon was slipping into a coma after a massive stroke, Sharon Stone was readying herself to prove that nymphomaniac ice-pick murderers and Middle East peace envoys need not be mutually exclusive. The most excruciating moment of Sharon's peace mission? Her joint press conference with Peres ? words you probably never anticipated reading. "I admire you, sir, so greatly, it's beyond discussion, or I would just sit here in a puddle of tears," was her measured opener . "That I can sit beside you here is my greatest achievement."
The next body blow came when Sharon indicated that her aversion to no-nudity clauses might stretch all the way to geopolitics, as she made the sensational claim, "I would kiss just about anybody for peace in the Middle East." Oh Sharon, Sharon, Sharon ? Is it OK if we don't channel the entire peace process through your libido?
And so to March 2007, when it was once again Peres who reminded us how thoroughly on track the peace process was by scheduling talks ? his word ? with none other than Leonardo DiCaprio. Yes, yes. We all loved him in The Departed. No doubt he'd have some really interesting stuff to say on West Bank disengagement. No sooner had Leonardo been asked to assist in bringing peace to the troubled lands than he embarked on a whirlwind round of multilateral diplomacy, ultimately finessing all the main players in the region and overseas into signing a historic accord ? Oh no, hang on. He went back to Hollywood. But he did shoot a movie in which he and Russell Crowe play really hard CIA guys who smash terror cells in the Middle East , so that's sort of helping with the peace process, right? It's certainly helping remind people what the Middle East is all about.
So just sling another chair leg on the fire and synthesise delight that the peace process has such a hot A-list star attached to it. Let's accept that celebrity endorsement works. Let's picture people coming to their senses all across the world. "Oh, I was having a really tough time working out which of the many stalling global peace processes to back. I was going to go with those guys in Banda Aceh, but now Leo's endorsing that one in the Middle East, I'm so in! Titanic's, like, my favourite movie of all time!"
Let's concede that there are no hatreds so historically complex that they cannot be untangled by exposure to a physically attractive actor.
Celebrity parenthood
First to celebrity adoption, the tiger economy of celebrity parenthood. Adopting photogenic children is once again fashionable ? with early adopters of the adoption trend including Madonna, who selected a Malawian boy in 2006. Soon pretty much everyone was filling awkward silences on the red carpet by suggesting that somewhere out there was a picturesque foreign kid with their name on it. Here was Lindsay Lohan indicating it looked like fun; there was Gwyneth Paltrow declaring that she and her husband were "open to adoption" ? "I do feel we're so fortunate," she said, "and we kind of owe it to humanity."
A decade ago, the notion of the Paltrow-Martins having run up a debt to the human race that could be worked off only by annexing an orphan might have jarred ever so slightly ? but such is the adoption trend's extraordinary traction that it seems a perfectly reasonable statement to make in the course of promoting a motion picture.
Pretty soon, Angelina was inviting the world to understand the complex social engineering problems she faced, on one occasion breaking a three-second silence to explain why she finally felt she could have a biological child with Brad Pitt, as opposed to simply purchasing another one from a willing Third World orphanage.
But of all the spellbinding tales of celebrity parenthood, perhaps the most amazing is the Michael Jackson Is Allowed To Have Kids story. No matter how many narrative twists threaten to derail it, this one has the magical ability to regenerate itself and keep reminding you just what crazy looks like. It all began back in 1996, soon after the breakdown of Michael's first marriage to Elvis Presley's daughter, when dental nurse Debbie Rowe married the most famous man on the planet. She was already pregnant with the happy couple's first child, the wholly Caucasian Prince Michael. He was followed in 1998 by another little Caucasian baby, only this time the stork's gift was a girl, whom they named Paris.
What went wrong in Michael and Debbie's marriage? Gosh, it's always so hard to know, but about 10 minutes after Paris was born they agreed an amicable divorce in which Debbie waived all rights to the children, including those of visitation. They would live with Daddy in his adult fairground and wear scarves over their faces in public. In return, Debbie would receive a house in Beverly Hills and a staggered payment of $8m. It happens a lot with second marriages. You're more realistic.
But what of Blanket, the adorable stunt baby who exploded on to the public stage in 2002 when Michael encouraged him to crowd-surf off a Berlin hotel balcony? Well, his provenance is shrouded in mystery, but he does complete the Caucasian hat -trick for Michael. According to one interviewer, Michael is quite the paterfamilias. "Very quietly," they wrote, "with very few words, he was able to communicate to his son what was appropriate to do and what not." No doubt, no doubt. God knows, if Jackson had a parenting superpower, it would be boundary setting.
Celebrity jurisprudence: The Hilton Prison Experiment
Like its Stanford predecessor, the Hilton Prison Experiment gave the world a terrifying glimpse of the ease with which even well-adjusted members of society can adapt to playing out the darkest punitive fantasies. In June 2007, the world prepared to break a butterfly on a wheel. Paris Hilton ? whose only crime was to be a drink-drive, sentence-violating heiress of negligible moral code and almost mesmeric stupidity ? was sentenced to 45 days in LA's Century Regional Detention Facility. By court order, Paris was due to surrender her sweet freedom to tip knickerless out of nightclubs, to expand her menagerie and drone, "That's hot" at low-income families with whom she'd been billeted for her TV show, The Simple Life.
It was merely days before the incarcerated socialite was using her phonecard to call broadcaster Barbara Walters. Having described her iron-barred cell as "like living in a cage" (yet another surplus "like" in the never-ending Hilton monologue), she revealed that she had found God. "I'm not the same person I was," she said down a crackling phone line. "God has released me." Upon her actual release, she revealed to Larry King that she had spent the hours between lockdown and reveille pledging herself to the Almighty, and wished to announce two landmark charitable schemes divinely guided by His hand. One: a "transitional home" for women released from the jail, to break the recidivist cycle. And two: the Paris Hilton Playhouse, where sick children would enjoy toys and clothes donated by Paris and friends.
Alas, despite having been so convincingly found, God somehow managed to give Paris the slip again. How else to explain a life resumed exactly as it had always been? As for a ribbon-cutting date on the two charitable projects ? Does the Paris Hilton Halfway House today ring with the sound of liberated laughter, as recent releases clink their Goin'-Straight-o-'Tini glasses together and pledge themselves to their sister and mentor? Even now, are brave little infants forgetting about their impending death in the Paris Hilton Playhouse, where they are encouraged to spend afternoons sticking Play-Co-Cayn in Lindsay Lohan's generously donated skinny jeans?
This is going to be painful for all of us. But you need to understand that sometimes celebrities say things they don't mean. Sometimes they say them because they're tired, or upset, or on Larry King Live ... Listen, the short answer is that Paris remains busy with other stuff, OK?
This is an edited extract from Celebrity: How Entertainers Took Over The World And Why We Need An Exit Strategy, by Marina Hyde, to be published by Harvill Secker on 2 April 2009.
by Marina Hyde, The Guardian
Saturday 28 March 2009
Time was when entertainers knew their place. Today they run riot, adopting orphans by the pramload, extolling oddball religions and even brokering peace deals. What's going on, asks Marina Hyde
On the eve of the last Palestinian presidential elections, a televised message was broadcast to voters. "Hi, I'm Richard Gere," smiled its star, "and I'm speaking for the entire world ..." Did you miss the meeting at which this got decided? Does it seem like an encouraging state of affairs? Do you find it confusing that Richard Gere should claim not simply to be speaking for himself (debatable), but for the whole of Earth? Then apologies for startling you, but this is your world. Try not to choke on it. In 1990 Richard was starring in Pretty Woman; 15 years later, he was making formal interventions into Middle East politics. The saddest part is that you weren't even in a coma for that period, so future generations are going to regard you as complicit.
Of course, we're not just talking about Richard Gere ? although, as planet spokesmodel, he's certainly a reasonable starting point. We're talking about the entire celebriscape, which in recent years has seemed to be expanding at least twice as fast as the universe it inhabits. Once upon a time, the entertainment industry was an industry that made entertainment. Its workforce was required to do quaint things such as show up to movie sets, or make music, or go to wild parties. Today, that brief has expanded slightly. It now includes proselytising for alien religions, trying to negotiate with the Taliban, getting photographed in a manner that basically constitutes an unsolicited gynaecology examination, and being brought in to fix the Iraqi refugee crisis.
Are you familiar with the term "mission creep"? Mission creep is the expansion of an enterprise beyond its original goals, typically after initial successes. Hilarity does not usually ensue. What does ensue are things such as the escalation of the Korean war, or the Crusades, or Sharon Stone explaining that earthquakes are visited upon Chinese peasants because of "karma".
So keep your wits about you, stardust consumers, and prepare to tumble down the rabbit hole. Above all, remember this: if the entertainment industry is the solution, we're asking the wrong questions.
When celebrities share
We have seen a wholly encouraging proliferation in the numbers of ways celebrities can communicate with a public anxious for news. Where once a star wishing to share themselves would be limited to traditional outlets, it is now possible to telegraph one's state of mind via an exciting new range of communicative platforms. Tattoos, fragrances, snack lines ? even sex tapes. And, in most cases, they're lucrative. Frankly, there's never been a better time to have nothing interesting to say.
Tattoos: Say it with body art
Where stars are concerned, tattoos exist for two reasons: to beam their powerful personal philosophy to the world, and to provide us with an aide-memoire of their romantic entanglements.
Falling within the former category are tattoos such as Billy Bob Thornton's "Remember the Alamo" and Robbie Williams' "Elvis, Grant Me Serenity". The latter category boasts entries such as David Beckham's earnestly misspelt Hindi triumph, "Vihctoria", and Eminem's belly-spanning tribute to his ex-wife, Kim, in which the words "Rot in Pieces" sit atop her open grave. Naturally, no treatise on this subject would be complete without running the rule over at the Zen mistress of tattoo affectation: Angelina Jolie, whose largest organ should be regarded as the Rosetta Stone of celebrity body art.
In fact, we probably shouldn't rule out the theory that Angelina is simply adopting or biologically spawning children as backup for the inevitable moment when she realises she has no available flesh left. Yet it seems she will at least endeavour to fill up Brad Pitt's defaceable torso first. The first Brad unveiled was a forearm tattoo of Otzi the iceman. The second was a mysterious series of parallel lines that were diversely interpreted as a tribute to the great Nintendo platform games of the 80s, and a diagram of the New Orleans levee system. As it turned out, the speculation was way off target: Angelina herself had created the cryptic hieroglyph. "We went to Davos," she said. "One night we didn't have anything to do, so I was drawing on his back. It's meaningful in that it's us making angles and shapes out of each other's body, that kind of a thing." No. That is not why it is meaningful. It is meaningful because the kind of people who get so bored that they doodle on each other and turn the doodles into permanent tattoos are now attending the World Economic Forum.
Celebrity product ranges: A better class of tat
With the arguable exception of incontinence pads, there is no product some celebrity or other wouldn't slap their name on if they thought there might be money in it. Don't believe it? Then it's probably time we talked about the Kiss Kasket.
Kiss are not merely a rock band you could never care about, no matter how many more eternities they keep flogging their face-painted, catsuited, age-inappropriate act. They're the most rapaciously merchandising entertainers ever to have existed. Against their awesomely shameless record, even will-this-do product spewer Gwen Stefani is a merchandising pygmy. This lot have licensed their name to more than 3,000 products, from the Kiss toothbrush ("Rock your teeth clean") to Kiss studded condoms (let's not and say we did) to Kiss bathroom tiles (really?) to Kiss Cabernet Sauvignon (OK, just leave now).
But in June 2001 it became clear that Kiss were not simply scraping the bottom of the barrel. The barrel had a concealed basement. And so to the Kiss Kasket, the world's first celebrity-branded coffin. Have you ever contemplated falling into death's embrace and thought how much sweeter it would be if a member of the entertainment industry had ripped you off one last time before your surviving relatives began shovelling in the earth? Then let's hear some more about the product that could make that happen. The Kiss Kasket featured the faces of the band's four founder members, as well as its logo and the slogan "Kiss Forever". It retailed at $4,500 unsigned and $5,000 signed. Come on: this may be a difficult time for you, but an autograph's an autograph. It's what the Kasket's kargo would have wanted. As Kiss frontman Gene Simmons declared on its launch : "This is the ultimate Kiss collectible." High praise indeed. "I love living," he added, "but this makes the alternative look pretty damn good."
Celebrity religions
Mainstream religion is a party to which everyone is invited. Wolves lie down with lambs, princes mix with paupers, and as long as you're not gay or into science or anything, you can be as humbly subordinate as the next speck of dust. Casting their eye over such a scene, however, any self-respecting celebrity would simply hiss, "Get off my coat" at the favela nun kneeling on their Dior, then screech the age-old question: "Where the hell is the VIP room?"
Scientology ? the religion with science right up there in the title
Our first port of celestial call is, inevitably, Scientology ? the religion started by a man who once said, "I'd like to start a religion. That's where the money is." Yet while we could fill hundreds of pages with accounts of the moneymaking schemes, the grand-jury indictments, the secretive compounds and the jaw-droppingly malicious houndings of people who have criticised the church down the decades, we must limit our examination to the celebrity angle.
Gingerly, then, very gingerly, to Scientology's most famous face. Everyone knows Tom Cruise is a Scientologist, but there was a time when we knew it less alarmingly, if you will. That time was during the years that the formidable Hollywood operator Pat Kingsley served as his publicist, who somehow preserved his image as an intensely enthusiastic, but basically likeable guy. The kind of guy Katie Holmes, the actress who gave us wholesome little Joey on TV's Dawson's Creek, might have had a poster of on her bedroom wall.
But you really can't keep a lid on Cruise's brand of nutty for ever, and in 2004 Tom ended his relationship with Kingsley and installed his sister, Lee Anne, a fellow Scientologist, as his publicist. You may as well regard this as year zero in terms of the emergence of the Cruise you know today. The one who surfs sofas. The one who derides women suffering from post natal depression. The one whose public behaviour caused the owner of Paramount to sever his studio's 14-year relationship with the actor's production company.
By 2008, things seemed to have settled down. Tom and wholesome little Joey had a toddler daughter together, and neither mother nor child appeared to be openly attempting to escape when they were seen in public places. And then came the videos. In early 2008 ? around the publication of Andrew Morton's unauthorised biography of Tom, funnily enough ? a series of leaked video clips hit the internet, featuring Tom talking about Scientology and attending church functions. They swiftly went viral, despite the Scientologists' fearsome efforts to cow host sites into removing them. The clips combined two distinct functions. First, they offered a revealing glimpse into the kind of highly produced material with which Scientology recruits are bombarded. And second, they pretty much dispelled the baseless rumours of Cruise's sanity once and for all.
Kabbalah ? not Jewish. Not even Jewishish
Light up your spirituality with scented candles, gird your wrists with $26 red string bracelets and prepare to accept the mystery of Kabbalah ? the Pepsi to Scientology's Coke.
When the Kabbalah Centre opened the doors of its LA outpost in 1984, the task of sparkling itself up looked gargantuan. Scientology was the voguish Hollywood religion, and even given celebrity weakness for any self-appointed guru who might blow through, you'd have placed Kabbalah's chances of gaining lasting purchase on the credulous entertainer market at slim to none. You'd have been wrong. In many ways, Kabbalah is The Little System Of Bull**** That Could.
Enter Sandra Bernhard. The comedian ? and long-time friend of Madonna ? began attending the LA Kabbalah Centre in the mid- 90s, and in retrospect is the celebrity who bore witness to the real Kabbalah messiah, Her Madjesty herself. Think of Sandra as Kabbalah's John the Baptist figure. In terms of faith-advertising pay dirt, Madonna's mere presence at the Kabbalah Centre says, "I was raised a Catholic but I once frolicked with a black Jesus on an altar in a video. Stigmata were involved. These days I like to crucify myself in concerts and I've dabbled in more dumbed-down mysticism than you've taken public transport journeys. But then I found Kabbalah, and it worked for me."
Perhaps most astoundingly, though, Madonna has been instrumental in casting this hotchpotch of hocus-pocus, cherry-picked fake Judaism and sharp business practice as the sceptic's faith. "Religion is not asking questions," she countered sternly when an interviewer described Kabbalah as a religion. "What I call 'religious thinking' is not asking questions." Wait ? Madonna thought she'd been asking questions? Mmm. Questions Madonna didn't ask of the Kabbalah Centre are things like: Would you mind if I took a look at your accounts? Why does the packaging of the $26 red string that you state has been wrapped seven times round Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem bear the words "Made in China"?
It would be all very well for celebrities to become involved with such obvious cults if they kept their opinions to themselves. Perhaps our best hope would be an LA-based religious war in which the mighty sparkly armies of the Kabbalah Centre and Scientology's Celebrity Centre square up after some hair-trigger event and become mired in a pointless 30-year conflict, preferably with debilitating numbers of casualties on both sides.
Celebrities and the Middle East
Time was when celebrities were wary of involving themselves in the complex hatreds of the region, perhaps acknowledging that the struggles of its politics were so labyrinthine and bloody that even an actor or a lead guitarist might have difficulty unravelling them. So thank pan-religious heavens that there now appears to be not a single tenuously famous individual with whom Israeli president Shimon Peres would not gladly hold bilateral talks.
In early 2006, as Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon was slipping into a coma after a massive stroke, Sharon Stone was readying herself to prove that nymphomaniac ice-pick murderers and Middle East peace envoys need not be mutually exclusive. The most excruciating moment of Sharon's peace mission? Her joint press conference with Peres ? words you probably never anticipated reading. "I admire you, sir, so greatly, it's beyond discussion, or I would just sit here in a puddle of tears," was her measured opener . "That I can sit beside you here is my greatest achievement."
The next body blow came when Sharon indicated that her aversion to no-nudity clauses might stretch all the way to geopolitics, as she made the sensational claim, "I would kiss just about anybody for peace in the Middle East." Oh Sharon, Sharon, Sharon ? Is it OK if we don't channel the entire peace process through your libido?
And so to March 2007, when it was once again Peres who reminded us how thoroughly on track the peace process was by scheduling talks ? his word ? with none other than Leonardo DiCaprio. Yes, yes. We all loved him in The Departed. No doubt he'd have some really interesting stuff to say on West Bank disengagement. No sooner had Leonardo been asked to assist in bringing peace to the troubled lands than he embarked on a whirlwind round of multilateral diplomacy, ultimately finessing all the main players in the region and overseas into signing a historic accord ? Oh no, hang on. He went back to Hollywood. But he did shoot a movie in which he and Russell Crowe play really hard CIA guys who smash terror cells in the Middle East , so that's sort of helping with the peace process, right? It's certainly helping remind people what the Middle East is all about.
So just sling another chair leg on the fire and synthesise delight that the peace process has such a hot A-list star attached to it. Let's accept that celebrity endorsement works. Let's picture people coming to their senses all across the world. "Oh, I was having a really tough time working out which of the many stalling global peace processes to back. I was going to go with those guys in Banda Aceh, but now Leo's endorsing that one in the Middle East, I'm so in! Titanic's, like, my favourite movie of all time!"
Let's concede that there are no hatreds so historically complex that they cannot be untangled by exposure to a physically attractive actor.
Celebrity parenthood
First to celebrity adoption, the tiger economy of celebrity parenthood. Adopting photogenic children is once again fashionable ? with early adopters of the adoption trend including Madonna, who selected a Malawian boy in 2006. Soon pretty much everyone was filling awkward silences on the red carpet by suggesting that somewhere out there was a picturesque foreign kid with their name on it. Here was Lindsay Lohan indicating it looked like fun; there was Gwyneth Paltrow declaring that she and her husband were "open to adoption" ? "I do feel we're so fortunate," she said, "and we kind of owe it to humanity."
A decade ago, the notion of the Paltrow-Martins having run up a debt to the human race that could be worked off only by annexing an orphan might have jarred ever so slightly ? but such is the adoption trend's extraordinary traction that it seems a perfectly reasonable statement to make in the course of promoting a motion picture.
Pretty soon, Angelina was inviting the world to understand the complex social engineering problems she faced, on one occasion breaking a three-second silence to explain why she finally felt she could have a biological child with Brad Pitt, as opposed to simply purchasing another one from a willing Third World orphanage.
But of all the spellbinding tales of celebrity parenthood, perhaps the most amazing is the Michael Jackson Is Allowed To Have Kids story. No matter how many narrative twists threaten to derail it, this one has the magical ability to regenerate itself and keep reminding you just what crazy looks like. It all began back in 1996, soon after the breakdown of Michael's first marriage to Elvis Presley's daughter, when dental nurse Debbie Rowe married the most famous man on the planet. She was already pregnant with the happy couple's first child, the wholly Caucasian Prince Michael. He was followed in 1998 by another little Caucasian baby, only this time the stork's gift was a girl, whom they named Paris.
What went wrong in Michael and Debbie's marriage? Gosh, it's always so hard to know, but about 10 minutes after Paris was born they agreed an amicable divorce in which Debbie waived all rights to the children, including those of visitation. They would live with Daddy in his adult fairground and wear scarves over their faces in public. In return, Debbie would receive a house in Beverly Hills and a staggered payment of $8m. It happens a lot with second marriages. You're more realistic.
But what of Blanket, the adorable stunt baby who exploded on to the public stage in 2002 when Michael encouraged him to crowd-surf off a Berlin hotel balcony? Well, his provenance is shrouded in mystery, but he does complete the Caucasian hat -trick for Michael. According to one interviewer, Michael is quite the paterfamilias. "Very quietly," they wrote, "with very few words, he was able to communicate to his son what was appropriate to do and what not." No doubt, no doubt. God knows, if Jackson had a parenting superpower, it would be boundary setting.
Celebrity jurisprudence: The Hilton Prison Experiment
Like its Stanford predecessor, the Hilton Prison Experiment gave the world a terrifying glimpse of the ease with which even well-adjusted members of society can adapt to playing out the darkest punitive fantasies. In June 2007, the world prepared to break a butterfly on a wheel. Paris Hilton ? whose only crime was to be a drink-drive, sentence-violating heiress of negligible moral code and almost mesmeric stupidity ? was sentenced to 45 days in LA's Century Regional Detention Facility. By court order, Paris was due to surrender her sweet freedom to tip knickerless out of nightclubs, to expand her menagerie and drone, "That's hot" at low-income families with whom she'd been billeted for her TV show, The Simple Life.
It was merely days before the incarcerated socialite was using her phonecard to call broadcaster Barbara Walters. Having described her iron-barred cell as "like living in a cage" (yet another surplus "like" in the never-ending Hilton monologue), she revealed that she had found God. "I'm not the same person I was," she said down a crackling phone line. "God has released me." Upon her actual release, she revealed to Larry King that she had spent the hours between lockdown and reveille pledging herself to the Almighty, and wished to announce two landmark charitable schemes divinely guided by His hand. One: a "transitional home" for women released from the jail, to break the recidivist cycle. And two: the Paris Hilton Playhouse, where sick children would enjoy toys and clothes donated by Paris and friends.
Alas, despite having been so convincingly found, God somehow managed to give Paris the slip again. How else to explain a life resumed exactly as it had always been? As for a ribbon-cutting date on the two charitable projects ? Does the Paris Hilton Halfway House today ring with the sound of liberated laughter, as recent releases clink their Goin'-Straight-o-'Tini glasses together and pledge themselves to their sister and mentor? Even now, are brave little infants forgetting about their impending death in the Paris Hilton Playhouse, where they are encouraged to spend afternoons sticking Play-Co-Cayn in Lindsay Lohan's generously donated skinny jeans?
This is going to be painful for all of us. But you need to understand that sometimes celebrities say things they don't mean. Sometimes they say them because they're tired, or upset, or on Larry King Live ... Listen, the short answer is that Paris remains busy with other stuff, OK?
This is an edited extract from Celebrity: How Entertainers Took Over The World And Why We Need An Exit Strategy, by Marina Hyde, to be published by Harvill Secker on 2 April 2009.
