The Fame Lunches Read online

  For those of us who harbor a special fondness for the young Michael Jackson, who remember him as an impossibly animated little boy who made frequent guest appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, performing as the pint-size lead singer in the perennially cheerful family musical group known as the Jackson 5, the distance he has so clearly wanted to put between himself and his origins is especially disconcerting. He was a human jumping bean with a well-behaved Afro, a heartbreakingly open smile, a huge voice, and a precocious ability to convey grown-up emotions. But what demons had we failed to pick up as we watched him, in black and white, from our living rooms, some of us already in pajamas—demons so extravagant that they required a desperate pilgrimage from one impersonation to the next? What legacy of family disrepair had been hidden behind the smooth television presentation of that remarkably polished young crooner who should, by all rights, have only recently graduated from listening to bedtime stories?

  There is something about Michael Jackson that reminds me of those plastic replicas of the male and female body we all saw at some point during our formative years (as the Wonder bread commercials called them). These see-through models, in which the organs are on display—the brain, the heart, the kidneys—were meant to help us understand how humans worked from a biological perspective. Unmappable terrain like the emotions didn’t show up, of course, which left us in the dark about something that was at least as important as where our gallbladders were located. In some sense, Jackson is a flesh-and-blood version of those models, only this time the area on display is the whole submerged terrain of the psyche. He represents in his one tortured and talented being every conflict of identity imaginable—beginning with race and gender—on the most astonishingly primordial level.

  He is, in a way, a psychiatrist’s diagnostic dream—or nightmare. If you were to throw the book at Jackson—the psychiatric bible known as the DSM-IV—most of it would stick. He is, one might conjecture, an Axis II borderline (“borderline” being one of those catchall terms that are used to describe people whose problems lie somewhere on the continuum between garden-variety neurosis and bloodcurdling psychosis) who suffers from body dysmorphic disorder (a relatively newly diagnosed psychic ailment that means that one is preoccupied with an imagined physical defect—that you continue, say, to experience a consuming hatred for your nose even after you’ve had it reshaped); gender-identity diffusion; and some variant of OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder). And that’s just for starters. One imagines he has sought therapeutic help, like the former Beach Boy Brian Wilson, who looked to a New Age therapist—a Svengali of sorts—to overhaul his psyche, one dominating father replacing another. Then again, Jackson’s might well be the plight of the VIP therapy patient, essentially untouchable except through his handlers. “I doubt that therapy would have helped him,” observes Glen Gabbard, a psychiatrist at Baylor College of Medicine and editor of The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, “because he created an environment with unremitting narcissistic mirroring so that he wouldn’t be sufficiently motivated to explore his inner world in a therapeutic process.”

  In other words, welcome to Neverland. Given enough immunization in the form of wealth and celebrity, a person is free to relieve the tormenting pressures of his or her fantasy world in the sorts of floridly eccentric, boundary-violating ways that would never be tolerated from people in more ordinary circumstances, who are subject to more stringent societal constrictions (or, as may be the case, safeguards). Jackson’s decades of freaky behavior with the gloves and the pet chimp and he dangled the baby over a balcony—not to mention the transformation of his face from that of a black man to a grotesque parody of a white woman’s—speak to the near-absolute convergence of an individual symptomatology and a cultural pathology in which age and maturity are the enemy.

  Would Michael Jackson be where he is today—would he be Wacko Jacko, as the Brit tabloids have nicknamed him—if someone had read aloud from Goodnight Moon or The Runaway Bunny as he drifted off to sleep instead of “training” him (Jackson has referred to his steelworker father, seemingly unironically, as a great trainer) to perform on command? Whether his father abused him or merely subjected him to harsh discipline, it is clear that Jackson was yanked out of his childhood well before he had finished growing up. Shades of the prison house—to borrow a phrase from one of the great poets of childhood, William Wordsworth—closed too early upon this particular growing boy from Gary, Indiana. If nostalgia is often bittersweet, nostalgia for what you didn’t have must create enormous pain. And for people who have never had a childhood, being a grown-up isn’t where the glamour is.

  Now it appears that all Michael Jackson wants to do, at the age of forty-five, is to stop time and refind that vanished childhood, replay the trauma and make it turn out differently. I can’t say I’ve ever believed he’s much interested in anything other than having affectionate sleepover dates with these twelve-year-old boys, if only because he seems to be too confused on a core level of gender identity to be recognizably erotic in his functioning. “This is about pregenital longing,” says Gabbard. “You can definitely have regressive longing without violating boundaries.” On the documentary about him that was watched by twenty-seven million people when it appeared ten months ago, Jackson explained his feelings on the issue in his strangled, wispy voice, which made perfect sense from a nine-year-old’s perspective: “Why can’t you share your bed? The most loving thing to do is to share your bed with someone.” Still, I’m not sure how much room our culture allows for a forty-five-year-old man to snuggle up with a twelve-year-old boy. Does our imagination of what love can consist of stretch far enough to include an admittedly exaggerated romance with the concept of childhood itself?

  Meanwhile, what we have before us is a drama of damage, handed on down the generations, as it always is. Depending on whether you see Jackson as unjustly hounded or as a nutjob who’s gotten away with pedophilia, he is either a little boy lost, preyed on by scheming and foul-minded adults—or a scheming, foul-minded adult preying on little boys lost. The truth is undoubtedly more ambiguous than either of those scenarios, as it usually is. For to the extent that we all live on primal as well as socialized levels, being an artist requires that one live on a more primal level than other people. That Jackson has greater access to the outlandish desires of his unconscious—and in the process to ours—can hardly be in doubt. That he has far greater license to flamboyantly act out these desires than we do—whether it be a wish to have alabaster skin, or to be feminine, or an eternal boy-child in a world of boy-children, or, again, some impossible mix-and-match incarnation of everything on the verge of becoming everything else—is what endangers him and, paradoxically, saves us.

  “Mama, mama see me, I’m a pop star,” Cat Stevens used to wail like a hyped-up kid back in the 1970s, when Michael still had his old nose and shade of skin, before Neverland clanged its gates shut around him. Not long after, Stevens saw the light, in a manner of speaking, and renounced the permanently juvenile pop-star life for one that adhered to Muslim traditions. Jackson, meanwhile, is still trapped in his lonely playground, unable (or unwilling) to put his childish ways behind him.

  GIDGET DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE

  (SANDRA DEE)

  2005

  At the height of her spectacularly short-lived fame, coverage of everything from her dietary habits to her taste in men was enormous, with approximately fifteen magazine articles appearing every month. The thing is, it all happened so fast, was over practically before it began, that we can almost be forgiven for misconstruing her as a cultural simulacrum: a blip on the monitor, a media invention, an adorable incarnation of a feminine ideal of the reluctant or unwitting nymphet, rather than a flesh-and-blood creature with needs and wishes (not to mention raging demons) of her own.

  The lightning speed with which Sandra Dee was first heralded and then discarded may have been just another example of the “now you see her, now you don’t” phenomenon endemic to the fever dream of Hollywood, bu
t it also suggests the dark Miss Lonelyhearts side of the American manufacture of celebrity—the ruthlessness that drives it and the despair it feeds off of. She went from being discovered in 1956, at twelve, to winning a Golden Globe Award in 1958, to being hailed by the Motion Picture Herald in 1959 as the “Number One Star of Tomorrow,” based on her promising pigtailed debut in the sterling weepie Until They Sail as well as her performance in The Reluctant Debutante. Less than a decade later, her career all but ended when she was dropped by Universal after her divorce, at age twenty-two, from the crooner Bobby Darin. “Sometimes I feel like a has-been who never was,” Dee told the Newark Evening News in 1967.

  In truth, she never entirely disappeared from the collective imagination, and therein lies one of many painful paradoxes (she was, for instance, among the last actors to be dropped as a contract player before the studio system expired) in what turns out to be a story too full of them. Her moment as “a junior Doris Day,” as she once put it, or “a Tinkertoy,” as an underwhelmed journalist once put it—although she early on demonstrated a far greater range of acting talent than she would later be remembered for—may have been vastly abbreviated, but there’s no forgetting that fluffy neon concoction of a name, or what it stood for. Even if you never caught her in her glory days as Gidget or Tammy, Dee’s legacy as an eclipsed and parodied icon, a cinematic reference that signifies everything blond and unviolated about the 1950s, was assured by her immortalization in a catchy song from Grease. Its broadly winking lyrics are declaimed by Rizzo, the designated high-school Bad Girl, at a pajama party and are aimed at converting the goody-two-shoes newcomer Sandy to a life of carnal sin: “Look at me, I’m Sandra Dee / Lousy with virginity / Won’t go to bed till I’m legally wed, / I can’t, I’m Sandra Dee.”

  Precisely because of the mythic stature she’s been endowed with, it’s hard to believe that the wisp of a girl who cavorted decorously on-screen with John Saxon and Troy Donahue, in a time before teenagers of either sex thought to have their tongues pierced, lacked the grace to fade out, had the temerity to live on—and so unfetchingly, her life marred by chronic anorexia, alcoholism, and depression—after we were no longer paying her any mind. Dee’s death last February at age sixty, or, as is more likely, sixty-two (her official age was obscured from early childhood, when her mother added two years to it; many obituaries listed her age at the time of her death as sixty-two), of complications from kidney disease, impels us to retrieve her from her vacuum-packed, nostalgia-inducing state as an idealized adolescent prototype. This in turn raises a possibility almost too disturbing to contemplate: how to envision Sandra Dee as middle-aged—as anything other than a bubbling and bikinied beach babe, the candied yin to Annette Funicello’s sultry yang, the sweet and genteelly chaperoned box-office ingenue whose popularity once rivaled Elizabeth Taylor’s and whose elopement at sixteen with the scrappy Bronx-bred Darin, after a one-month courtship on the set of a forgettable movie (Come September), spoke to a girlishly starry-eyed fantasy of romance.

  Then again, the “darling, pink world,” as she herself characterized it, that Sandra Dee was thought to inhabit by her fans had always been a grotesque mockery, plagued not by an overripened case of virginity but by childhood molestation. The girl with brimming brown eyes and a fizzy lilt to her voice was born Alexandra Zuck in Bayonne, New Jersey. Her parents divorced when she was five; her father, a bus driver, disappeared from her life shortly thereafter, and her mother, Mary, married a much older real estate entrepreneur named Eugene Douvan within a few years. According to Dee’s own account, as relayed by her son, Dodd Darin, in his touching and unglamorized memoir of his parents, Dream Lovers, her lifelong battle with anorexia—which would lead to three hospitalizations in her mid-teens, cardiac distress, and multiple miscarriages—began with Mary’s bizarre approach to her daughter’s meals: “My mother fed me with a spoon until I was six years old. She would make me a bowl of oatmeal … She’d crack an egg into it, raw, and … cold and lumps and streaks, I had to eat it all.” Worse yet, Dee’s devoted but manipulative mother turned a conveniently blind eye to the defiled sexual appetites of her new husband. Douvan, who liked to tease his wife that he married her “just to get Sandy,” started having sex with his beautiful stepdaughter when she was eight and continued doing so almost until his death when she was twelve.

  After her divorce from Darin, Dee never remarried. The former teenage sweetheart who had once received more fan mail than Rock Hudson became an anxious recluse whose primary connections were with her mother and her son. A cover profile in People magazine in 1991 depicted her as a damaged and isolated survivor—Dee poignantly expressed a wish to do a TV series, “because I want a family. I can have that if I’m part of a show”—and her son’s portrait of her in his book only deepened the shadows. Dee had plans to write an autobiography and in 1996 did a brief stint as an infomercial spokeswoman for an antiaging cream. Last year she was played by Kate Bosworth in Kevin Spacey’s movie about Bobby Darin, Beyond the Sea.

  Sandra Dee’s dazzling wreck of a life—the implausibly meteoric ascent followed by the long fall—would, I suppose, make for a perfect Lifetime special. Or, better yet, a searing biopic all its own, underscoring the gap between the glossy image and the nightmarish reality. It would, that is, if the truth weren’t so unbearably sad, revealing a tale of ravaged innocence under cover of familial enmeshment, which led, in turn, to a wasteland of self-destruction. The problem with a story like this one, at least from a filmmaker’s point of view, is that it isn’t even a cathartic tearjerker. There is no fortifying moral to be drawn from it, no redemptive Oprah ending hovering in the wings. Look at her, she’s Sandra Dee, lousy with debility. Tickets, anyone?

  THE MYSTERY OF DR. B.

  (BRUNO BETTELHEIM)

  1997

  What becomes a legend most? Was Bruno Bettelheim a mountebank swathed in a thick Austrian accent and false credentials? Or was he a compassionate teacher and therapist who had penetrating insight into the unconscious processes of emotionally traumatized children, and whose time in Dachau and Buchenwald shaped an iconoclastic but humane vision?

  Bettelheim’s legend is eerily bifurcated—as though a snapshot of the man, round-faced and benign looking behind thick glasses, had been torn down the middle. In the 1960s and ’70s Bettelheim was an intellectual celebrity, with multitudes of believers reading his books and flocking to his lectures; in 1983, at what was perhaps the height of his incarnation as a wise paterfamilias, he appeared as a psychoanalyst in Woody Allen’s Zelig. But in the seven years that have passed since his suicide, a figure who was once revered for his commitment to healing psychological wounds in the young has come to be reviled for his single-minded dedication to the nurturing of his own myth and for his apparent brutalization of a number of the children under his care. As two recent biographies of Bettelheim demonstrate—The Creation of Dr. B, by Richard Pollak, and Bettelheim: A Life and a Legacy, by Nina Sutton—his life sets before us a fascinating study of the politics of reputation and the curious mixture of pathology and renown that contributes to it. Although Sutton’s book takes a more sympathetic view than Pollak’s zealously debunking account, there is some agreement on the basic facts, as well as on the notion of a troubling fault line in Bettelheim’s character.

  Bettelheim sailed into New York on May 11, 1939, on the SS Gerolstein—along with more than a hundred other refugees from the Third Reich—with three dollars in his pocket, a doctoral dissertation on the aesthetics of nature, and some experience running his family’s lumber company. In Vienna, Bettelheim had attended the opera, collected the lithographs of Käthe Kollwitz and Egon Schiele, frequented the coffeehouses, and even undergone analysis for a brief period. This cultivated upper-middle-class life came to an abrupt end when he was arrested by the Austrians on orders from Berlin in 1938. He was incarcerated in concentration camps for nearly a year before he managed to bribe his way out and escape to America.

  Bettelheim had hoped to be reunited with Gin
a, his wife of nine years, who had fled Vienna for America immediately after the Anschluss, but these hopes were dashed at their first meeting in New York. Although he had ardently courted her, the marriage had never been a happy one. (Even on their honeymoon, the bridegroom, who was twenty-six, preferred to sit in a beach chair and read a biography of Frederick II, while his bride rode up into the Sicilian hills on a donkey.) After his wife’s blunt rejection, Bettelheim turned to an old flame—Trude Weinfeld, a nature-loving, Montessori-trained teacher whom he had known in Vienna and who had since left for Australia. He had sent her a cable informing her that he was free, and she joined him in America some months later. (The two were married in May 1941 and eventually had three children.)

  Helped by some official letters from a relief committee, Bettelheim set out to find work, but none materialized. Then, in the fall of 1939, on a tip from a fellow émigré, Bettelheim arrived in Hyde Park—a gemütlich academic community in Chicago’s South Side—to take an unpaid position on an ambitious secondary-school-reform project under the leadership of Ralph Tyler, the chairman of the University of Chicago’s Department of Education. In spite of his tentative English and bouts of depression punctuated by nightmares about the camps, Bettelheim proved to be a quick study, and Tyler offered him a salaried post before the year was out. He also recommended Bettelheim for a job at Rockford, a small college for women near Chicago, where he taught a panoply of courses (including art history, philosophy, psychology, and German) and became something of a campus celebrity—“an intellectual Pied Piper”—known for a brilliant but scorching teaching style and for mercurial behavior with his young students: half “kindly Viennese uncle” and half “Erich von Stroheim.”