By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 23, 2005
8:51 AM
Here I've been thinking about Durbin, Bolton, Gitmo, the anti-Hillary book, the Downing Street memo and other weighty matters while the biggest story of all has been right under my nose.
How, I wonder, could I have failed to turn my attention to one of the great episodes of media manipulation, especially since it has drawn the attention of some of our finest critics?
Have I been out to lunch on Tom and Katie?
Okay, don't answer that.
Forgive me for thinking that the Cruise-Holmes "romance," which culminated in an Eiffel Tower engagement so heartfelt and private it was followed by a news conference, was just another bit of Hollywood myth-making. Forgive me also for thinking that if the twice-married Cruise goes through with it and Katie Holmes doesn't pull a Jennifer Wilbanks, it won't last long. I'm so jaded from reading about whether Brad is breaking up with Jennifer but pursuing Angelina -- and wasn't it just yesterday that Tom Cruise was cruising with Penelope Cruz? -- that I assumed the latest gossip was just an attempt to hype Tom & Katie's respective films.
But no, it's a major cultural moment that tells us a great deal about the symbiotic relationship between celebrities and the press. Or so I'm hearing.
Jack Shafer says in Slate that the two-month courtship has caused "editorial turmoil" for celeb chroniclers. "The blitzkrieg relationship of the A-list star and his C-list TV-star fiancée, which peaked last Friday with a proposal of marriage atop the Eiffel Tower and a press conference afterward, has caused the celebrity magazine formula to warp and buckle.
"The aggressiveness of the TomKat timetable completely violates the industry formula. If the magazines are going to invest pages in a star-on-star romance, they want the thing to unfold like two seasons of Desperate Housewives so they can string along their readers -- and reap the longer-term economic benefits. After the first rumors of on-set canoodling, paparazzi shots of a disheveled lover leaving a romantic sleepover should appear. Then they should be photographed on vacation or walking their recently adopted pup before aerial shots of their jointly purchased love nest are published. Finally, the editorial interruptus also known as 'wedding watch' begins. The buildup should usually last six months to a year or so before breaking into something big, like a distant-yet-opulent ceremony that's canceled once or twice. The magazines want a preview of the wedding dress and engagement ring, and they want the couple to sell the wedding pics and the honeymoon pics, to pose for at-home photos in the Xanadu they build in the Hollywood Hills, to share the marital troubles they overcome, and then finally, to feed their newborns to the publicity machine."
Hey, somebody has to do the tough work of journalism.
"Hence the editorial crisis: Even though the convenience relationship/marriage is a time-honored Hollywood tradition, the rapid pacing of TomKat: A Love Story has fractured not only reader expectations but the magazines' faith in the enterprise from almost the beginning. Instead of swooning over the couple, the magazines were asking polite variations on the question, 'What's up with this and why is Cruise acting like such a freak?' "
Frank Rich provides the theater review, saying that "in repeated public appearances, most famously on 'Oprah,' the Spielberg movie's star, the 42-year-old Tom Cruise, has fallen to his knees and jumped on couches to declare his undying love for the 26-year-old Katie Holmes, the co-star of another summer spectacular, 'Batman Begins.' Forget about those bygone Hollywood studio schemes to concoct publicity-generating off-screen romances for its stars-in-training. Here is a lavishly produced freak show, designed to play out in real time, enthusiastically enacted by the biggest star in the business. On Friday, after popping the big question to Ms. Holmes at the Eiffel Tower, Mr. Cruise promptly dragged his intended to a news conference.
"But though the audience for this drama is as large as, if not larger than, that for Orson Welles's [long-ago hoax], there's one big difference. The Cruise-Holmes romance is proving less credible to Americans in 2005 than a Martian invasion did to those of 1938. A People magazine poll found that 62 percent deem the story a stunt. To tabloid devotees, the reasons for Mr. Cruise's credibility gap are the perennial unsubstantiated questions about his sexuality and his very public affiliation with a church, Scientology, literally founded by a science-fiction writer. But something bigger is going on here. The subversion of reality that Welles slyly introduced into modern American media in 1938 has reached its culmination and a jaded public is at last in open revolt.
"The boundary between reality and fiction has now been blurred to such an extent by show business, the news business and government alike that almost no shows produced by any of them are instantly accepted as truth. The market for fake news has become so oversaturated that a skeptical public is finally dismissing most of it as hooey until proven otherwise."
Fellow NYT columnist David Carr in a meditation on celebrity coverage, says: "Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, having decided to spend their lives together, felt compelled to share the good news immediately last week in a full-on news conference before cheering journalists.
"Add in Jessica-and-Nick and B-list names too numerous to count, and its apparent that in a mediated age, nothing quite says 'I love you' like a well-managed and potentially lucrative rollout. And while stars have always used the sizzle of romance to add to their own allure, they are no longer dependent on the fickle attentions of the press."
Speaking of celebrities, National Review's Myrna Blyth says that Ed Klein's new book "is a lot more like a juicy celebrity's biography than an analysis of a politician. And the Clintons -- Hill as well as Bill -- can be treated that way by a writer because they have always behaved more like celebrities than your standard-issue politician. Klein previously wrote three books about Jackie Kennedy and also one called The Kennedy Curse. And Jackie as well as members of the Kennedy Clan understood how, occasionally, politics and superstardom can converge.
"The Clintons have always believed in a non-stop public-relations campaign, and have always tried to manipulate the press in order to manipulate the public. I have long thought they secretly relished that their lives were such colorful stories, even when the story was a scandal not exactly to their liking. Bill always knew and Hillary learned that appealing emotionally to the public was the key. And the media today much prefers telling stories than contemplating policy or discussing issues . . .
" 'The Truth About Hillary' will make Hillary even more of a celebrity. It is the perfect beach read. And in the current culture, when the public is buying three million copies a week of magazines with cover lines like 'Angelina Jolie: Her Bedroom Secrets,' that is really the problem."
Maura Moynihan rips the book in the New York Observer:
"Ed Klein, author of the book in question, 'The Truth About Hillary', alleges that New York's late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan 'despised' Mrs. Clinton, that he once hid in a cloakroom to terminate a conversation with her. Nonsense. I think I know Senator Moynihan better than Mr. Klein, because he was my father. Mr. Klein also claims firsthand knowledge of a meeting between my parents and Mrs. Clinton that took place in their apartment in Washington. It was during this meeting that Mrs. Clinton, then the nation's First Lady, discussed the idea of running for the seat my father was about to vacate.
"Mr. Klein puts quotes around statements that were never uttered. I can confirm this because the only other persons present during this meeting were myself and our Tibetan cook, who speaks about 10 words of English. Mr. Klein has now gone on the record to say that he spent 'several hours interviewing Mrs. Moynihan.' Puzzling indeed, in that Mrs. Moynihan--my mother--hasn't seen Mr. Klein in over 20 years. I'd like to see the transcripts or hear the tapes of his on-the-record talks with Mrs. Moynihan. And it would have been difficult for him to interview Senator Moynihan, because he's dead."
How inconvenient.
A number of conservatives are trashing the book, such as the New York Post's John Podhoretz:
"This is one of the most sordid volumes I've ever waded through. Thirty pages into it, I wanted to take a shower. Sixty pages into it, I wanted to be decontaminated. And 200 pages into it, I wanted someone to drive stakes through my eyes so I wouldn't have to suffer through another word.
"Though Klein suggests in his subtitle that he has written a study of a power-hungry politician -- 'What She Knew, When She Knew It, And How Far She'll Go to Become President' -- he's produced something quite different. An unduly celebratory biography is called a 'hagiography.' Klein's book is a 'hate-eography.'
"Despite a distinguished journalistic pedigree including stints as the editor of both Newsweek and The New York Times Magazine, Klein has chosen to emulate the works of the highly dubious bio-defamer Charles Higham, who with the slimmest of evidence wrote books claiming that Errol Flynn was a gay Nazi spy and Howard Hughes was a bisexual.
"Klein may offer a few words here or there about Whitewater or Travelgate, but what really floats his boat is the Higham-like notion that Sen. Clinton is secretly a lesbian.
"He has no proof whatever for this claim save that she has had some lesbian friends. (So do I. Does that make me a lesbian?)"
Slate provides the book's juicy bits.
Now here's one of the, ah, burning issues facing America:
"The House on Wednesday approved, for the sixth time since 1995, a constitutional amendment that would allow Congress to prohibit the physical desecration of the American flag," the Los Angeles Times reports. "The measure now goes to the Senate, which has consistently rejected similar proposals."
Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum tries to move beyond the fixing-the-intelligence flap by examining the British memos for "what they say about the Bush administration's postwar plans:
"David Manning Memo: 'From what [Condoleezza Rice] said, Bush has yet to find the answers to the big questions . . . what happens on the morning after? . . . I think there is a real risk that the Administration underestimates the difficulties. They may agree that failure isn't an option, but this does not mean that they will avoid it.'
"Straw Memo: 'We have also to answer the big question -- what will this action achieve? There seems to be a larger hole in this than on anything.'
"Downing Street Memo: 'There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.'
"The message from these memos is is pretty clear: the administration didn't have any postwar plans. They figured they'd invade, mop up, and then leave.
"Of course, the memos were written in 2002, so normally we would simply assume that serious planning was done at a later date. However, the evidence says otherwise, and the tone of the memos provides yet another data point to indicate that this lack of planning was consistent throughout the entire prewar and postwar period.
"After all, in March 2002 no one had thought about the aftermath. Four months later, in July, postwar planning was still nonexistent. In August, General Tommy Franks 'essentially shrugged his shoulders at what to do once Baghdad fell' -- and Donald Rumsfeld shrugged along with him."
Durbin may be trying to put the whole Nazi-analogy thing behind him, but by saying he's sorry he has ticked off people like Cenk Uygur who writes at the Huffington Post:
"Dick Durbin's apology on the Senate floor today almost made me want to cry . . . when are the Democrats ever going to learn?!
"I think Dick Durbin is a decent man and very good legislator. So, in a lot of ways, I am sorry to take part in what is bound to be a lot of Durbin bashing for his pathetic apology. Now that I've got that out of the way, it was inexcusable.
"Just when we should be getting on the war path to fight back against the administration, he caves and caves huge. To not only apologize, but to have tears in your eyes. Come on, you can't do that. It makes an already weak party look even more miserably weak.
"If you don't stand up for yourselves, you'll never convince the American people that you can stand up for them!
"Instead of apologizing themselves, Democrats should have demanded apologies from Senator Santorum, Senator Sessions and Senator Inhofe for their own Nazi references. Senator Santorum -- just last month -- compared Democrats to Adolf Hitler. There are millions of Democratic veterans who fought for this country, who died for this country, some of them while fighting against Adolf Hitler. How dare Senator Santorum say that?!
"Howard Dean says Republicans are white Christians and the roof falls in on him. Santorum says Democrats are like Adolf Hitler and not one peep from the media. Durbin says we shouldn't be like the Nazis and there's an avalanche of faux media outrage. The administration condones torture hellip and not a damn thing!"
Daily Kos is also disappointed:
"Torture isn't a partisan issue. And by apologizing, Durbin caved to those who worked their best to turn it into one. And the right-wing partisans rejoice -- content in their ability to trivialize what is one of the most serious issues facing us morally, as a nation, and practically, on the battleground.
"As for Mayor Daley, who cut off Durbin at the knees -- a pox on his house. His time is coming to an end. I hope Jesse Jackson Jr. takes him on."
Ann Althouse simply says: "Crying??!!!
"Durbin apologizing. I saw this on TV and found it . . . icky. What are you really crying about, Dick? Your own miserable little career?"
Hmm . . . Can he apologize for the apology?