Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality by Neal Gabler

Author:Neal Gabler [Gabler, Neal]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Sociology, Entertainment, U.S.A., Retail, American History, History
ISBN: 0375706534
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1998-01-01T15:00:00+00:00

II

THE ZSA ZSA FACTOR

NOW CAME the problem. With so many celebrities, the media had to distinguish between the stars and the character actors, between those who commanded the media spotlight and those who had only been grazed by it. A new nomenclature was required. Andy Warhol claimed that a friend of his named Ingrid had coined the word “superstar” in the early 1960s, when she began using it as her surname to grab media attention. It got her the recognition she sought—she became a minor celebrity—but it also became a handy label to sort celebrities, and it led to an Orwellian hierarchy that could have occurred only in the age of entertainment: In the life movie all celebrities are equal, but some celebrities are more equal than others.

For conventional entertainers, however, there was a much larger problem than taxonomy There was competition. Before the expansion of celebrity, when they were the only ones acknowledged by the media, it had been easy. After the expansion, when it seemed everyone had become a celebrity and every celebrity was an entertainment, conventional entertainers suddenly found their work having to compete with the lives of presidents, criminals, fashion designers, florists, recluses, other entertainers, even generic models. “Metaphor has left art and gone into current events,” film director Mike Nichols once lamented. “Who in the fuck is going to compete? Where is there a hero who can fall from greater heights than Michael Jackson? Where is there more naked rivalry than between Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan? What couple can you write about that is a stronger metaphor about relations between the sexes than the Bobbitts?” * This was a whole new world of entertainment, and it demanded new configurations between work and life, between traditional entertainment and the life movie.

One of the early trailblazers in this process of discovery was a statuesque showgirl named Peggy Hopkins Joyce. Joyce had been born in 1893 into poverty in Norfolk, Virginia, but escaped it at sixteen, when she ran off with a vaudeville bicyclist. She eventually found her way onto the stage as a Ziegfeld girl, and she even appeared in a handful of films. Still, it wasn’t much of a career, and in 1928 it effectively ended with her appearance in the play The Lady of the Orchids. By that time, however, she had already discovered a new vocation: divorcée. Joyce was married six times and divorced five, after the first marriage always to and from wealthy men and always with great media fanfare. Even those who had never heard of the actress Peggy Hopkins Joyce knew the bride (in her last film, International House, in 1933 she pointedly played herself), and though her profession had originally fueled interest in her life, her life easily overshadowed her work, making her one of the first performers who successfully negotiated the transition from the stage to the life movie.

Zsa Zsa Gabors achievement was much more complex than Joyce’s and constituted a considerable advance over hers because Zsa Zsa had no work to kindle an interest in her life.

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