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Mama Mia: Christina Crawford wrote her best-selling tell-all 'Mommie Dearest' in 1978, soon after celeberty children began telling all.
Photograph courtesy of Cookie Curci-Wright
Remember When
Celebrity Confessions: Joining Urge to Purge
By Cookie Curci-Wright
Aided by advancing technology, global media extends its news coverage to include every part of the world and some parts of the universe.
Tabloid television encroaches on the private lives and loves of the world's most illustrious people. Through exposés and stalking public figures, modern media has managed to entrap celebrities and extract public confessions.
The tell-all journalism of the 1980s was mortifyingly personal. Celebrities, with the urge to purge, were writing tell-all autobiographies faster than publishers could print them. Did readers really need to know that Kitty Dukakis, who was almost our first lady, was once so desperate for a buzz that she downed nail polish remover and hair spray? The list goes on: Drew Barrymore's boozing binges, ballerina Gelsye Kirkland's addiction to cocaine, Liz Taylor's gluttony, Roseanne's childhood abuse and Tina Turner's life with abusive husband Ike.
The public was fast becoming blasé to these public confessions. A decade earlier, we heard first lady Betty Ford's shocking confession of her drug dependency and alcohol abuse. Betty decided to bare her soul to the media. She told the world of her addictions and showed us she was as human as the next person. However, the following year, her husband, Gerald Ford, lost his bid for reelection. The American voter wasn't as forgiving as the movie fan, and Betty told us more than we really wanted to know.
According to Marty Posner, an agent at William Morris, the tell-all autobiography is the quickest way to turn misfortune into fortune.
In 1981, through satellite technology, America was able to attend the storybook wedding of England's Prince Charles to Diana at St. Paul's Cathedral. A decade later, after years of being stalked by the tabloids and the failure of her marriage, Diana appeared on worldwide television and disclosed intimate details of her marriage and her private life. She publicly dredged up everything, from her battle with bulimia, her bouts with anorexia to her cheating husband's sordid affair.
We squirmed uncomfortably in our chairs as Diana revealed all: her deep depressions, her attempted suicide and her own marital infidelities. This all fed tabloid rumors about young Prince Harry's lineage. Diana had popped the romantic royal bubble.
Tricky Dick Nixon and his Watergate cohorts initiated the boon of political confessions in the 1970s. After disclosures of taped conversations in the White House about the Watergate break-in, it was every man for himself. Confessions were a commodity to be sold to the highest bidder.
This genre of literary confessions isn't new; it harks back centuries. St. Augustine's work, Confessions, chronicled a spell of dissolute pagan living.
Stars such as Bing Crosby, Joan Crawford , Bette Davis, Ronald and Nancy Reagan have had their names and memories besmirched by tattletale offspring.
There's a limit to what we need to know, a point where it ceases to be knowledge and becomes sensationalism. Instant familiarity doesn't win my regard; it loses my respect.
History writes kindly of President John F. Kennedy. He is revered as one of our greatest presidents. I shudder to think how he, his administration and his "friendship" with Marilyn Monroe would fare today.
For the price of a tabloid story the lives of celebrities can be ruined in the time it takes to set up a video recorder.
In 1997, football great Frank Gifford was set up, entrapped and recorded on videotape in an illicit liaison. His wife, Kathie Lee, the darling of daytime television, expounded at length on the virtues of her perfect marriage until the shocking pictures of her husband's infidelities hit the tabloids and the media frenzy began.
We don't need the media to tell us our idols have feet of clay, do we? Isn't this something we all learn around the time we discover there ain't no Santa Claus, no Easter Bunny and no tooth fairy?
These days we read and hear about the private lives of entertainers, politicians and our neighbors. We know who is sleeping with whom and who is hooked on what. Unsolicited confidences abound throughout our social life.
For instance, a new acquaintance I met at a party told me she had a great time on her vacation. "It would have been better," she added, "if my husband hadn't caught me cheating with his best friend." I was no more interested in her extramarital affairs than I was in reading about Ronald Reagan, the lousy father, or Joan Crawford, the rotten mother.
Just as sex means more when it follows courtship, secret swapping has more value when it follows friendship. In the name of open communication, we have become a kiss-and-tell society.
I guess I'm just one of those old-fashioned souls, born and raised into a generation that believed in keeping private things private. To kiss and tell is very well, but I'd rather kiss and shut up!
Who knows, maybe even St. Augustine, if he were around today, would rush to plead his cause on tabloid television with the likes of Larry King, Sally Jesse and Geraldo to spur him on.
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
