Leveling the playing field

By Karina Longworth
RAW STORY COLUMNIST

What Martha Stewart and Robert Blake have to tell us about the demystification of modern stardom.

My dad has a house in the foothills of Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles, in a kind of suburb of Hollywood called Studio City, where I spent a couple of months last spring on an ostensible working vacation. I was supposed to be beginning a massive research project on the rise and fall of Judy Garland, but work was going slow. I spent a good deal of time distracted by another epic chronicle of rich-and-famous rise and fall: “Celebrity Justice.”

“Celebrity Justice” is a new spin on the syndicated, low-rent entertainment news magazine, as scandal-hungry as “Extra” or “Inside Edition,” but without the occasional access to A-list interviewees that those programs enjoy. Because it focuses only on celebrity court cases, civil and criminal, “CJ” is not where you go to plug your new record or line of cosmetics - “CJ” is where you end up when you’re in trouble.

“Celebrity Justice” doesn’t fawn or sugarcoat. It works very hard to dispel the notion that fame is a divine gift bestowed only on the world’s most talented, and similar to MTV’s “Punk’d,” “Celebrity Justice” feeds on our ever-growing hunger to see celebrities fail as grandly as they succeed.

On “Punk’d,” baby-faced sitcom star Ashton Kutcher preys on innocent, unsuspecting young stars, embroiling them in high-stakes practical jokes in order to bring them a little closer to Earth - who can forget Justin Timberlake’s tears upon learning that his entire estate was about to be “repossessed”?

“Celebrity Justice” is the inverse of this idea: It only goes after celebrities who “deserve” it, who have managed to get themselves entangled with the law. Sometimes it’s just another one of Catharine Zeta-Jones anti-paparazzi lawsuits; sometimes it’s an inter-celebrity feud like the Kim Basinger/Alec Baldwin custody battle. But sometimes, more every day, the stakes are higher. This is an age of celebrity perps like we’ve never before seen.

Back in the old days, the studio-system era and for some while after, Hollywood worked overtime to cover up what its stars were up to. It was assumed that if the public knew too much about Clara Bow’s sexcapades, or Frank Sinatra’s mob ties, or Judy Garland’s pill popping, the credibility of these stars in good girl/hero roles would stagger, and box office receipts would drop in return. It was widely assumed that Lana Turner never would work again after her daughter was put on trial for shooting her mother’s boyfriend. (She did, though less frequently, and this might have had to do more with her advancing age than anything else.)

There was no such thing as a renegade entertainment news media in those days - paparazzi was a nuisance when leaving a nightclub with somebody else’s husband, but the tabloids weren’t nearly as vicious as they are today - and there was nothing in the league of “CJ,” a media product which stands to capitalize on everything that celebrities don’t want to talk about. Today we live in an era of 24-hour news, but more problematically, even in wartime it’s ‘news’ as a three-way split between human interest, entertainment gossip and actual news.

It’s impossible today for the rich and famous to live in a bubble - Hollywood as an institution is no longer strong enough to support it, and even if it was, the media-savvy star of today works wonders out of constant surveillance. It’s not the media-savvy star I’m concerned with, however; my real fascination is with the celebrity train wreck - the star who accidentally constructs his or her own downfall in public for all to see - and “Celebrity Justice” wants to fulfill my need.

The past year has been an especially fertile one for “CJ,” and for celebrity perp -. Michael Jackson is “CJ”’s wet dream: a star who is perpetually in court and perpetually willing to draw attention to himself. Jackson’s attorney, Mark Geragos, has had his hands full this year, what with Wynona Ryder’s shoplifting trial and the increasingly high-profile case of Scott Peterson. Phil Spector’s million-dollar bail has been posted, as has Kobe Bryant’s, and of course Martha, Martha, Martha (more on her later). But last spring, watching full coverage from my dad’s house in Studio City, not only on CJ but on E!, MSNBC and nearly every local station, one case stood out for me - pre-trial hearings were beginning in the murder case against Robert Blake.
You remember Robert Blake, don’t you? “Baretta”? I’m told he won an Emmy in the 1970s.

I’m 23 years old; I had no idea who Robert Blake was until the Bonnie Lee Bakley scandal broke, but through those hearings I learned that Robert Blake lived in northeastern Studio City, and that told me everything about his current celebrity status that I needed to know. The district attorney presented the four months of Blake and Bakley’s marriage as two-way anguish, motivated by the birth of their daughter Rosie and in spite of their mutual distaste for one another. ­I became obsessed with the geography of this particular scandal, as the prosecution traced a sleazy path through Studio City, from one of my childhood landmarks to the next, as Blake allegedly asked half of the local retired stuntmen to murder his wife before eventually taking the matter into his own hands. The story jumped from Dupar's to the Beverly Garland and, finally, to that tragic night at Vitello's. All I could think was, “Famous people don’t go to those places. They don’t live that kind of life.”

Studio City is not for the super rich or the super famous - at its best it’s for those who are “doing all right.” Studio City as a class construct can be summed up in one of its little perks: mandatory valet parking at strip mall family restaurants, such as Vitello’s, where Blake and Bakley ate dinner the night of her execution. The Studio City line officially starts about halfway down the hill on the Valley side, then stretches out a few miles north of Ventura Boulevard before bleeding into other, more suburban Valley communities like Sherman Oaks and Valley Village. Living “south of the boulevard” is equated with a higher socioeconomic status than living amidst the Valley sprawl. My dad shares a block, about a half-mile south of Ventura with Jennie Garth, Norm from “Cheers,” and one of the women from “She Spies.” (Oh, you don’t watch “She Spies”? Well, it comes on very late.) But if you live farther north, as Robert Blake did, amidst the concrete banks of the Los Angeles River, things are a little different. You definitely live in the Valley.

The woman from “She Spies” might be hanging onto the spoils of celebrity by the most tenuous of threads, but her very placement within the geography of Los Angeles means she’s “doing all right.” Robert Blake, having lived where he lived, is a sad summation of the eventualities of fame. The textbook Hollywood career follows a bell-shaped trajectory, long on the rise, short at the top and long again on the fall. As the average celebrity gets older, the sheen rubs off; he or she fades into the fabric of the “ordinary,” leading a progressively “normal” life and often dying in obscurity. After the murder of his wife but before he was arraigned as the crime’s only suspect, Blake announced he was selling the Studio City property, the so-called Mata Hari Ranch, a place where he effectively had been hiding out for 20 years. Three years later he is free on $1.5 million bail, and is basically homeless, with what assets he does have pledged to pay for his defense. Blake is staying at a friend’s house in Malibu under electronic monitoring until the trial begins. The prosecution’s case is strong and Blake’s health is failing, and at, this Emmy winner and previously respected (if out of work) actor probably will die in jail without a penny to his name, and a legacy choked by scandal.

So. Speaking of legacies choked by scandal...

The jokes that started so long ago are officially stale: Martha Stewart Living ... In Jail! The Omnimedia doesn’t have to end - she can, like, trade tasteful wall hangings for smokes! But the actual conviction of Martha Stewart last Friday on five felony charges - all of which stem from an alleged cover-up of inside information that led to a stock trade, but none of which actually are charges of insider trading - is a historic event in our media-bubble world. Day by day, her empire crumbles around her, first with Viacom canceling its syndication of “Martha Stewart Living,” then with her resignation from her own board of directors. The higher the rise, the harder the fall, but when was the last time a mainstream celebrity - not Suge Knight, not Heidi Fleiss, not Bobby Brown - at the top of his or her career, with hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank and his or her stamp on everything from television to magazines to bed sheets, actually went to prison?

Well, I guess I can answer that. I’m not thinking of Robert Downey Jr., who despite an Oscar nomination always has reeked of untapped potential, nor of O.J. Simpson, who was nowhere near the kind of A-list at the time of the Rockingham murders as Martha was at the time of the ImClone stock sale. The only possible parallel to this that we can call out of recent history is the conviction of Mike Tyson on rape charges, but even there we have a fundamental difference: As horrible as the crime of rape is, Tyson’s profession is based on his propensity toward violence, his ability to assert physical control within the confines of the ring, and his great success within that profession owes something to the brand of half-crazed brutality in which he specializes. Though maybe this shouldn’t be the case, convicted rapist Mike Tyson had no trouble going back to work after his release from jail because his faults, in which the crime resulted, are not incompatible with his strengths, which led to his success as a boxer.

Conversely, and not like we need reminding, but I don’t think there is any doubt that Martha Stewart is the most well-known 62-year-old homemaker in the world. The skills that have made her a celebrity and (former) billionaire are compatible with very traditional, very American values. On the one hand, she’s a one-woman Horatio Alger story, literally cooking up an empire out of her own home. On the other hand, she’s a damn good housewife, and whatever “scariness” she might embody as an independent businesswoman until recently has been ameliorated by the fact that her business is cookies, window dressings and flower arrangements. Martha Stewart does not have the super-human abilities of an athlete or the natural talents of a great singer or the uncommon beauty of a supermodel (although even in times of crisis, she looks damn good for her age) - she is simply a super-attenuated symbol of the everyday homemaker. And, again, rightly or wrongly, homemakers don’t get inside stock information, and if they did, the general consensus is that they wouldn’t lie about it. Martha Stewart is a “normal” person who was admitted into the rarefied air of the stars - but once you submit yourself into that world, you submit yourself to its consequences. Robert Blake, as an actor and TV star, offered himself up for it; Martha did not. Martha was Punk’d. Neither likely will see the top rung of the success ladder again.

Our world is changing, and Celebrity Justice is not the only architect of the revolution. Reality television is watched widely, cheap to produce and probably accounts for two-thirds of the primetime schedules of MTV (which invented the climate and still works it better than anyone else with the various permutations of “The Real World”) and FOX. The public fascination with this “Survivor” or that “Bachelorette” doesn’t last long, but there is an endless supply of losers standing in line for their 15 minutes of fame. The playing field has thus been leveled - anyone can be a star - but the bar has been raised. To the potential star, both “Punk’d” and “Celebrity Justice” ask: Is this, the potential of inevitable, pin-prick-quick descent, something you want hanging over your head, and if so, do you have what it takes to see it through?

Karina Longworth is a regular contributor to Raw Story. Her past columns can be found at the archive page.