Same Old Scandals

It is rare to open a newspaper or magazine without being confronted by the latest Hollywood scandal. From marriages lasting days and drink driving to indecency, from the latest Lindsay Lohan tantrum or Russell Crowe fight to Bennifer and Brangelina, we devour the details while expressing shock at how celebrities seem to think that fame is a license to behave above the law or decency. Often we point to the glittering icons of seeming perfection that decorated Hollywood in the first half of the last century, claiming that the early stars knew how to behave.

Yet the popular notion of Hollywood as a den of iniquity isn’t new; it is as old as Hollywood itself. Hollywood was a community founded by filmmakers running from New York in order to escape paying patent rights on filmmaking equipment – so it was, perhaps quite rightly, immediately awarded an image of a haven for the wanton and wicked. By the mid 1920s, Hollywood had been rocked by scandal after scandal. Imagine for a moment that George Clooney had impregnated, married and shortly thereafter divorced a succession of teenage girls, Jim Carey had been arrested and tried, three times, for the vicious rape and murder of an aspiring actress, Julia Roberts was the last person to see Steven Soderbergh alive and the ensuing investigation exposed her cocaine addiction, Brad Pitt had died from the ravages of heroin addiction, and Harvey Weinstein was mysteriously shot aboard a yacht belonging to Rupert Murdoch.

Speculation was rife as to the reasons that such goings on were so prevalent in the so-called ‘movie colony:’
Unfortunate though it be, the assembling in more or less forced intimacy of considerable numbers of persons of both sexes whose code of personal behavior is not the rigid sort that pervades the general walk of life, is likely to produce results that shock the world by their nature.
Suggested the Omaha Bee on February 4, 1922. However on February 6, the INDIANAPOLIS NEWS maintained that:
The trouble seems to come from a combination of a low order of mentality and big salaries... Few things are more dangerous than money in the hands of those who have no idea of its value, and not the slightest sense of the responsibility which its possession imposes.
And on February 7, 1922, the New York Evening Mail pointed out that:
Those who are in the public eye owe public morality a greater debt than those who are not, because their example can do so much harm.
It is interesting to note that these very same opinions could be, indeed have been, applied to celebrity scandals ever since… perhaps ninety-odd years don’t make as much difference as one would think.

Entertainment that appeals to the basest inclinations of human nature hardly began with Hollywood. Whenever I read social commentators bemoaning the extreme violence of Se7en or Saw, I wonder if they know anything of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Or to those who complain of the toilet humour of the latest Farrelly Brothers’ offering I would suggest they read Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (especially The Miller’s Tale – I had to endure the burning indignity at 14 years old of being the one to have to read aloud the immortal line: “let flee a farte” to my high school English class and am not sure I have ever recovered.)

Sex, violence, and lives of charmed and shallow excess have existed since the dawn of the human race; and have been discussed and represented in art forms for almost as long. Was the greedy consumption and flamboyant wealth of the court of Henry VIII any ‘worse’ than the ostentatious bling lifestyle exposed in The Fabulous Life of…? Indeed, was he any more deserving or worthy of such riches than Paris Hilton or Jordan? The difference seems to be that today, we are aware. Thanks to the high visibility and accessibility of entertainment and the personal lives of those that make it, we all know what they are up to. We question and dissect and judge, and thanks to a combination of the social revolutions of the 19th century and the launch of talking pictures which humanized the stars of the silver screen, we are more aware that there is little fundamental difference between “us” and “them.” They say that we are hardest on that which we recognize within ourselves: could the horror-stricken scrutiny with which we greet the latest Hollywood scandal be nothing but reaction to the self knowledge that we would behave just as badly given half a chance?