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For some, the celebrity is a mirror, a reflection in which the public studies and adjusts its own image of itself (Durgnat 137-38). For others, the celebrity is a direct or indirect projection of the needs, drives, and dreams of American society (Walker xi). As Richard Dyer point out, "stars have a privileged position in the definition of social roles and types, and this must have real consequences in terms of how people believe they can and should behave" (8). This privileged position is maintained in a variety of different ways. Primarily, it's maintained by the public relations industry that grows [End Page 160] up alongside any successful celebrity. This industry allows us to amass, without any conscious effort on our part, a tremendous wealth of details concerning every aspect of the star's life and lifestyle--from biographical accounts of childhood by close friends or family members, to photographic archives recording various hair styles and the history of outfits worn on various occasions, to graphic accounts of emotional intimacies and sexual preferences. It's also maintained by techniques like the close-up, a device that Bela Balazs describes as appearing to reveal "the hidden mainsprings of a life which we thought we already knew so well" (185), and by such mechanisms as the cinema or television celebrity "biopic."
Critics have often observed how celebrity personalities are "constructed" by the entertainment industry. This "personality construction" is so intrinsic to the "star system," so taken for granted by film and television audiences, that it's sometimes very difficult to understand how far it goes, where it begins, and when--if ever--it ends. These constructions, which include notions about what "makes" a star, and how people "become" stars, are so deeply entrenched in the ideology of western culture that they may perhaps be better described as myths.
One of these myths is the belief that stars become stars because they are "touched with magic" in the form of "great talent," "a rare personality," "an instantaneous connection with the public," "an overabundance of charismatic on-screen charm," or "the ability to make you care" (Wilkerson and Borie 181). Another myth is the idea that stars get "discovered," as in the old story of the accidentally-spotted soda-fountain girl who was quickly elevated to stardom--a myth that, according to Daniel Boorstin, "soon took its place alongside the log-cabin-to-White-House legend as a leitmotif of American democratic folklore" (162). 1 Other celebrity myths include the "star plucked out of nowhere who becomes difficult and uncooperative," the "big star who's declined into obscurity," the "star who sacrificed everything on the altar of ambition," and the overarching myth of "Hollywood as destroyer."
These myths, of course, all change and develop over time. It was once widely believed, for example, that the role and the performance in a film revealed something about the star's personality, which was then "corroborated" by stories in fan magazines and similar "reliable" sources. In other words, the plot of a film was often regarded at some level as the working out of the actor/character's inherent nature. A good example of this is the [End Page 161] "character" of Greta Garbo, whose line "I want to be alone" in Grand Hotel in 1933 was attributed again and again to the "real" Garbo (who requested only that the press stop hounding her), and interpreted as the expression of an innate, fundamental, and even "metaphysical" personal desire (Dyer 176, 181n).
Today, this myth has been replaced by the new myth of "contradictions-in-the-image" when viewed retroactively. For example, as Richard Dyer points out, today's Bogart cult tends to see him at odds with his contemporary image--more full of worldly wisdom perhaps--just as today's Marilyn Monroe cult sees her as full of tragic consciousness--a quality so at odds with her movie roles that to the modern viewer, the contradictions threaten to fragment the image altogether (71).
This current wave of celebrity myths was ushered in by a cluster of scandalous "true-life" Hollywood chronicles published in the 1970s. Heralded by Kenneth Anger's infamous Hollywood Babylon series, other outrageous publications included Haywire (1977), Brooke Hayward's chronicle of her life as the daughter of prima donna mother Margaret Sullavan, and Mommie Dearest (1981), Christina Crawford's inglorious depiction of her movie-star parent. Since the 1970s, no celebrity biography or biopic has been complete without its sordid accounts of the "seamy side" of stardom--the myths of destruction, of celebrity scandals, of Hollywood's "dark side." The glamor and the tinsel, the beautiful people and their daring love affairs, are now equally famous for their sordid underbelly--the realm of greed, lust, jealousy, and shame. As long as there is a celebrity elite living in an illusory world of sparkle and style, as long as Hollywood fuels dreams of a glamorous, sexually charged, thrill-packed universe, there will continue to be stories told of intolerable pressures, violence, and catastrophe.
Myths of Hollywood's dark side generally tend to revolve around the legendary "pressures" that every star must face: the criticism, the hypocrisy, the backstabbing, the extravagance, the dramas and scandals, the searching inquisitions into private lives, and the fabled rejection that follows the legendary adulation. Looking at the stars now involves looking underneath their skirts, inspecting their pants, sniffing their bedsheets, and spying through their bedroom keyholes. Today, the celebrity biopic is expected to chronicle not just the lavish homes and priceless jewelry, but the personal anxieties and emotional tensions, the drunken collapses and nervous breakdowns that lead to frenetic and distasteful contests of luridity between the tabloids, gleeful at the misfortunes of the rich and famous. [End Page 162]
Since its inception in 1984, the A&E Biographies® series has become extremely successful. Currently airing six nights a week on the A&E Channel, it covers a diverse three hundred subjects a year, and attracts more than two million viewers each evening. Each episode is marketed separately on video. Biography Magazine gives more celebrity gossip; an A&E Biography® Web Site went online in July 1996; and an A&E Biography® Book Series was launched by Crown Publishing in July 1997. And January 1999 witnessed the inauguration, with much hoopla, of the A&E Biography® Channel. 2 The entire A&E Biography® "system" is in fact a subtly coordinated marketing process, most apparent on the A&E Biography® web site, with its online cyberstore offering home video versions of almost every A&E Biography® ever shown, plus all the customary books, t-shirts, baseball caps, and embroidered sweatshirts.
"More and more," Kevin Macdonald and Mark Cousins have remarked in Imagining Reality, "screens and images are places where we access aspects of the real world, but also escape and ignore it" (311). What is particularly fascinating about the A&E Biography® is the way in which it deliberately eschews the contemporary model of the celebrity narrative, consciously rejecting appeals to voyeurism, and instead attempting to present a mass fantasy of the happiness of mythical pasts. In doing so, the A&E Biography® returns to a much earlier style of celebrity-watching, one whose standard formulaic features are a veneration and magnification so extreme as to rewrite history, even at the cost of refusing to acknowledge sometimes fairly well-known facts.
In its supposedly purest form, the "documentary-biography" seeks to represent reality, including the inner reality of the subject, through the precise selection of objects surveyed by the camera and sounds recorded by the microphone--objectively produced subjective truths. What is so fascinating and compelling about the A&E Biographies® are the ways in which they consciously reject any attempts to reproduce objective reality, instead employing a deliberate policy of reducing complex lives to simple formulae, enacting fantasies of reassurance through the presentation of stereotyped characters, predictable "ironic twists," moral reductions, and melodramatic narratives of good and evil. Though presented as "biographies," the programs are in fact disturbingly reductive rewritings of history-- "official portraits," glossily sliding over the surface of events, which vastly magnify the significance of some rather ordinary people, without ever probing into the motives or psychologies of these purported "subjects." In fact, [End Page 163] since it seems to have no power to recontain any historical transgressions, the A&E Biography® often serves simply to reestablish the conventions that produce the usual gender, sexual, class, and racial hierarchies in American culture.
To illustrate this general tendency, I will look closely at a cluster of biographies screened in mid-January 1999, which focused on Frank Sinatra and his friends, the "Rat Pack." Two general Rat Pack documentaries were broadcast on January 3rd and 4th, 1999. A Dean Martin biography aired January 5th, followed by a show on Sammy Davis Jr. on the 6th. Ava Gardner was featured on January 7th, and the subject on the 8th was Mafia boss Sam Giancana. Finally, the two initial documentaries were rebroadcast on January 9th and January 10th. Now available for purchase as individual videotapes, these programs can also be bought at a discount as the "Rat Pack Set." This short series of documentaries closely approaches the classic narrative form. A sense of closure and assumptions of individual agency brings each "life story" within the folds of the larger narrative history--that of the Rat Pack. The timely screening of this series soon after the death of Frank Sinatra in late 1998 offered viewers the opportunity to probe into the myths of this fascinating group of characters while the memories of its leader were still fresh.
Though narrated by Danny Aiello, these shows are introduced and brought to a close by A&E Biography® host Peter Graves. For these shows, Graves sits on a black couch in a tuxedo, his bowtie loosened rakishly, a decanter of whisky and a highball glass on the cocktail table beside him. As he speaks, smoke rises through the air, as if from a cigarette smoldering in an ashtray somewhere, although no cigarette is actually ever shown. The impression is calculatedly that of a "swinger"--perhaps in the back room of some Vegas nightclub, or back in his hotel room after a party--waiting for his playboy friends to join him.
Each biography is fifty minutes long, except for the two "double feature" Rat Pack biographies, which are broadcast over two nights. Commercial breaks separate the shows into five sections of about ten minutes each. Interviews and reminiscences are complemented by clips from Rat Pack movies and the friends' legendary show at the Sands Casino. Stock historical footage, loosely assembled, completes the picture.
It appears that after being selected as a candidate for an episode of "A&E Biography," the subject is subsequently placed in one of the two simple [End Page 164] categories of hero or villain. The villains are mass murderers (David Berkowitz, Ted Bundy), "gurus of evil" (Charles Manson, Marshall Applewhite), or Mafia dons (Sam Giancana). Everybody else is a hero. The hero does not have to be clearly heroic to deserve biographical treatment--recent shows have focused, for example, on Ann Landers, Anthony Robbins, and Regis Philbin--but the biography itself ensures they are elevated to a heroic position. Minor figures from the world of cinema and television are often made the subjects of popular celebration and veneration, their life stories restructured as melodramatic narratives which, to maintain the mass fantasy, often take some obvious liberties with the historical truth. As a result, these "heroic" figures often appear to be more symbolic and representational than real.
The Rat Pack, of course, are all heroes, and the only "villain" associated with them is Mafia don Sam Giancana. Although very little mention is made of the Rat Pack's involvement with Giancana, it is significant that his biography is shown as part of the Rat Pack "cluster," along with a show about the kidnapping of Frank Sinatra's son, and the biography of Ava Gardner. As the only non-venerational biography in the series, the Giancana documentary deserves closer scrutiny. Presented by Jack Perkins, and written and directed by Christopher Olgiati, this is in fact a vastly condensed and simplified version of a much longer and more complicated documentary made by the BBC. More graphic in its details of murder and torture, that documentary spends a lot more time explaining and analyzing the rather complicated series of relationships between Giancana, the Mafia, the Rat Pack, the Kennedys, and the C.I.A.
In contrast, the "BBC/A&E co-production" is a hugely simplified, one-dimensional portrait of "a man who in later life would stick ice-picks into the brains of his victims." While Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, and Sammy Davis Jr. are venerated as virtual saints, the "brutal" Giancana becomes "an animal force, unleashed on the underworld," "a gun for hire, a freelance enforcer who killed for order"--"Barely out of his teens, legend has it, he'd killed twenty men." Giancana "told his brother that he enjoyed killing." Distinctions between fact and fiction become increasingly hazy, as the voice-over backs stills of bodies gunned down in the St. Valentine's Day massacre and other famous murders, followed by interviews with Giancana's daughter and others who knew him.
Little mention is made of Giancana's class and ethnic background, and no evidence contradicts his depiction as a "constitutional psychopath." Even the description of his romantic relationship with singer Phyllis McGuire of the clean-cut McGuire Sisters indulges in the usual binary [End Page 165] platitudes ("She--pure as the driven snow. He--evil incarnate. Wherever the sisters went, the gangster followed.") More anecdotes of his "terrifying legend" follow, accompanied by more stills of dead bodies, until all at once, "Giancana seemed suddenly old, even vulnerable," and he's gunned down at home by one of his many enemies. "He was cooking sausages," the voice-over informs us, as we gaze at Giancana's body on a slab in the morgue: "A few minutes later, he was dead."
The Ava Gardner biography is equally simplistic. Since her stormy marriage to Frank Sinatra is the only reason for Gardner's inclusion in the Rat Pack "cluster," the show devotes the most attention to that part of her life. There is plenty of information about Frank and Ava's "tempestuous relationship"--fiery temperaments, primitive passions, acrimony, jealousy, accusations and counteraccusations--but very little about Ava's films, or her talents as an actress and singer. This biography seems determined to recreate the "spirit" of Gardner's life, rather than its details, exploiting for dramatic effect the major facets of how that life was publicly perceived. Consequently, and in line with audience expectations, she becomes primarily an elemental comeuppance to Sinatra's inflated ego. The mythic structure of the Rat Pack "cluster" has no room for her own talents as a performer.
After relating details of her divorce from Sinatra, the Gardner biography rapidly segues into the "ruined by success" paradigm, emphasizing the emotional price Ava was forced to pay for being a matchless beauty and sought-after celebrity. The operant myth is rise-and-fall. Plenty of time is devoted to Ava's final years in London, where she is depicted as an eccentric, Garboesque recluse, victim of the destructive undertow of the glamorous world of show business. Unable to "handle" the "loss of her beauty," she escapes from the "unbearable pressures" of Hollywood by moving to Europe, where she lives alone, with her beloved dogs. Suffused with sympathy and convenient omissions, this Ava Gardner biography is nostalgia-based, tragic-hued, and wholly in keeping with the A&E mythic construction of the show-business narrative paradigm.
Like network news, the A&E Biography® makes heavy use of melodramatic codings in its representations of reality. Subjects are on the side of good or evil--"one of us" or "one of them." Life histories are narratives of conflict, rivalry, sacrifice, and betrayal. The "subjects" become as saintly or wicked as the heroes or villains of biblical parables, with the mundane events of their lives becoming tales of pressure, deception, and heartbreak. Personalities have no nuance; gender, class, or racial hierarchies do not exist. Unpredictable or transgressive material (marriages that end in [End Page 166] divorce, for example) is either suppressed, or treated as ammunition for later "surprising" plot twists, although early, unsuccessful marriages are included when their details are too well known to ignore.
The function of this kind of biopic is actually to "keep reality at bay," as Bill Nichols says of reality television (54). Viewer opinions are not changed; no consciousnesses are raised. Stock phrases, such as "one of the century's most popular performers," or "evil incarnate," slide past in unexamined innocence. Little more than promotional videos, these "documentaries" adopt the most superficial and "showbusiness-like" style of television "reporting." They are biographies that center, essentially, around absences.
In his analysis of the historical life on television, James Combs explains how the biographical formula "satisfies the schizophrenia in democratic societies about Great Men." The Great Man "must be the 'best of us' but also 'one of us,' a leader of great ability on the one hand but who is also clearly a 'man of the people' on the other." A&E Biography® lives certainly follow this pattern. Dean Martin's story, for example, begins by emphasizing his "ordinary" roots--"Dean's neighborhood was a tough one" (though little mention is made of any specific class or ethnic background). But the Great Man's "specialness" was also a Martin trait. "Dean was a leader, the man was a leader," says his friend Alan King. Martin's biography thus presents a stereotypical instance of how sociopolitical control of the masses often takes place at least in part through giving the public officially designated heroes. For, as Combs put it, "the notion of greatness implicit in democratic man still moves us."
By avoiding analysis of social or economic context, any "investigation" into a subject's "private life" necessarily turns into a discussion focused almost exclusively on "roots," "ordinariness," humanity, devotion to family, hobbies, children, great love for friends, and so on. Such narratives emphasize and perhaps even exaggerate the unpromising surroundings these "great men" spring from. Focusing on their struggles, their suffering, and their triumphs over adversity, their stories thus reconfirm the American democratic mythology about "great men" arising from the masses.
According to Bill Nichols, one of the primary characteristics that distinguishes documentary representation from fiction is an "adherence to the principles of rhetoric that govern the discourses of sobriety"--that is, discourses such as economics and medicine which attempt to represent the state of affairs in the historical or natural world (47). From this perspective, [End Page 167] the A&E Biography® is far closer to fiction than to documentary, because it avoids the "discourses of sobriety" and embraces narrative structures which offer an openly imaginative representation of the world.
Renewed interest in the Rat Pack after Sinatra's death also resulted in The Rat Pack, a recent HBO made-for-TV movie, starring Ray Liotta as Frank Sinatra. 3 This version did include some fairly explicit--though equally mythologized--references to Sinatra's involvement with Judy Campbell, John Kennedy, and Sam Giancana. Not so, however, the two longer A&E Rat Pack biographies, where the "boys" are never depicted as crossing the line between charming, good-natured chicanery and criminal behavior.
In its explicit effort to find a balance between the "public" and the "personal" life of its subject, the A&E Biography® exploits popular interest in the "private lives" of celebrities by purporting to allow us glimpses into their "personal secrets." In the telling, however, not only are no such secrets revealed, but widely known truths are glossed over, distorted, or denied. Alleged extramarital sexual activities, for example, which might compromise the subject's implicit "heroism" and "purity" are either brushed off or ignored, as part of an impulse to present the subjects as sexually--and by extension, domestically--"normal." [End Page 168]
In the case of Dean Martin, for instance, this well-known womanizer is presented as being blessed with a happy marriage to ex-beauty queen Jeannie, whose implicitly irrational jealousy is made into something of a joke. Greg Garrison, producer of the Dean Martin Show, explains how part of the show's structure was to surround Dean with a "bevy of beauties" called "the gold-diggers." "As a matter of fact, it caused a few problems, sometimes," laughs Garrison: "Jeannie would say, at dinner, 'who was that blonde who was paying you so much attention tonight?'"
In other biographies, however, Martin's friends and lovers suggest that the situation often wasn't all that funny. "Dean used to fuck every human he could," claims one source. "He was a bastard: all wine and candlelight, then a pat on the ass in the morning," claims another (Levy 199). In keeping with its own logic, however, the A&E Biography® fabricates and falsifies the truth by presenting Dino as a faithful, home-loving husband--sometimes with inadvertently comical consequences. "By 1964, Dean Martin was one of the biggest players in Hollywood," claims the voice-over, as a drunk-looking Martin works the stage, and "In private life, Dean was busy too. By then, Dean and Jeannie had seven children. Dean the swinger was a dedicated family man. He was always home for dinner." Cut to a rather irritated looking Jeannie sitting beside a swimming pool. "He was always home for dinner," she confirms, "He never reneged on that." [End Page 169]
Similarly the A&E Biography® implies that Martin consciously chose to present himself as a playboy and a swinger. "He knew he looked like a guy who liked to lead the good life," claims the voice-over, "and he decided to make the most of it. Dean got paid for having fun. He was America's favorite swinger." However, the biography neglects to mention the well-documented fact that Martin's boozing evolved from a stage joke into the real thing, and was eventually supplemented by a Percodan addiction (Levy 304).
Like Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. is made into a home-loving family man. When he first saw his future wife, May Britt, a white actress, he fell in love at first sight, and "he pursued her the way he pursued stardom--he never gave up." They marry, and have three children, giving Sammy "his chance finally to be a family." What is not mentioned are Davis's many marital infidelities, with such women as Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, or his membership in Anton LaVey's Church of Satan, or his friendship with Mafia boss Sam Giancana, or his heavy gambling habit--at one stage, apparently, he had to make $17,000 a week just to break even (Levy 277). Even when mentioned, the breakup of his marriage to Britt comes as a light-hearted and affectionate afterthought ("if he couldn't be the best husband and father, he was determined to be the best Sammy Davis, Jr."). Nor do we hear almost anything of his well-testified drug and alcohol addictions--the joke was that Davis seemed to be the only person in America who couldn't remember where he was the day Kennedy was shot (Levy 260). What the viewer is left with is only that Davis had a "terror of growing old, but his fears were unfounded."
In the world that is the A&E Biography®, even very minor stars in the celebrity galaxy suddenly become dynamic characters, blessed with a "personal power." People are drawn to them, defer to them, respect them, love them. The subject's past is essentially constructed through internal narrative corroborations to provoke a conventional response, and to anticipate later developments in the life. Tropes and conventions from fiction and films, including voice-over narration, mood music, reconstructed events, and manipulated time sequences, create cohesive, engaging drama, but in the process often cover over the important issues that their very use should raise, including whether or not the gaps and revelations in the narrative result from agreements made with their subjects or their subjects' surviving families. Neither documentary nor fiction, this process is in essence a resculpting [End Page 170] of reality. In addition to making heroes out of ordinary and sometimes quite inadequate men and women, and to creating some rather obvious omissions in a life story, this resculpting can also create some profound disjunctions and juxtapositions between explicit structure, themes, and attitudes, and implicit, perhaps even inadvertent, strategies, images, and dialogues.
Much is made, for example, of Dean Martin's legendary "dignity" and "aplomb." Yet the only interview footage used is of a seedy-looking Martin in his seventies, greasy and bloated-looking in a black-leather jacket, slurring his words drunkenly. "We didn't care about the audience," he says of his stage performances with Jerry Lewis, "We didn't look at the audience. We looked at each other." Here the fabled "dignity" and "aplomb" seem more like casual indifference. Other biographical sources testify how, in his later years, Dean lost respect for his audience altogether, swearing in Italian on network television, singing only three songs all the way through during a show in Las Vegas, or walking off movie sets because he felt like an ass playing a cowboy at his age (Levy 290). The A&E Biography® response is simple denial. "There were stories," claims the voice-over, "that Dean worked only one day a week so he could play golf the rest of the time. Truth is, he was busier than ever." And of course, no mention is made of Martin's notorious association with known Mafia criminals like Skinny D'Amato, the inevitable Sam Giancana, and Mack "Killer" Gray--Dean's procurer, bodyguard, and drug peddler.
As for Sammy Davis Jr., his biographical treatment seems to suffer from a strange kind of schizophrenia whenever it comes to the issue of race. On the one hand, the show tells the story of showbusiness hypocrisy--of Davis being denied a dressing room at the Sands Casino in Las Vegas, of having to enter through the back door and take lodgings on the black side of town, away from his friends. "For all his success," we're told, "Sammy still hadn't escaped prejudice." On the other hand, the program also blurs politics and showbusiness by telling a second story of the victory of talent and friendship over narrow-minded racism and bigotry, as Davis "broke down racial barriers at every stop along the way." "In Vegas," we learn, Davis "broke the long-standing color ban," apparently because "showfolk don't care about color" and "the best way to break down barriers" for Sammy was "through his talent."
A great deal is also made of his relationship with Frank Sinatra, who apparently referred to Davis as "my brother." In a late interview, Davis, sitting on a sofa smoking a cigarette, tells the interviewer that Frank was "one of the nicest human beings I've ever met in my life." Davis explains his [End Page 171] affection by telling the interviewer that "Frank's always finding little games to play, like, let's punch someone out, something like that." According to a producer, Sinatra "was the barometer for which Sammy shone." And according to the A&E Biography®, "Sammy was so loyal to Frank that he even postponed his wedding [to May Britt] until after the Kennedy election." (Not only were the Kennedy's "heroes to him," claims the voice-over, "they were friends.") What is not mentioned is that the Britt-Davis wedding was postponed only reluctantly, and in response to Davis's terror of Sinatra. Nor does the documentary mention that many of Sinatra's jokes were made at Davis's expense, and often with a racist undertone. In fact, Britt refused to visit her husband on the set of Robin and the Seven Hoods because she was so tired of seeing him mocked and belittled by Sinatra, who always referred to him as "the kid" (Levy 167-70, 274).
Nor apparently was Davis always so fond of Sinatra. In his recent book Rat Pack Confidential, Shawn Levy recounts an anecdote about Ed Olsen, who as chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission had had the courage to revoke Sinatra's license to invest in Nevada hotels, casinos, or gaming interests, because of his behavior and his connection with Giancana and his cohorts. According to Levy, Davis took Olsen quietly aside to tell him, in many of the same four-letter words that Sinatra had used, what a great thing Olsen had done:
Olsen thought Sammy must have been drunk, then, realizing that the singer had just finished his show and was stone sober, he relaxed and let him continue: "That little son of a bitch," Sammy told the commissioner, who was not beaming. "He's needed this for years. I've been working with him for sixteen years and nobody's ever had the guts to stand up to him!" (253) [End Page 172]
Though presenting themselves as narratives of coherence and resolution, the A&E Biographies® are therefore in fact full of incommensurate juxtapositions, local gaps, distortions, incompatibilities, and pieces of contradictory "information." Indeed, some of the most inadvertently interesting scenes in the series are those which unconsciously question the elusive border between fact and fiction. Paula Rabinowitz explains how documentary films "speak about themselves as contradictory texts." Full of self-doubt about their status as organs of truth and reality, "the films and their criticism unravel like so much celluloid on the cutting room floor, revealing both productive and problematic sites for historical inquiry" (23). According to Rabinowitz, the implicit meaning of documentary is not simply to record but to change the world--"to evince material effects through representation"--and to do so through highly personal interventions into public life (102). A&E Biography® operates differently. Here audience attention is invariably diverted away from the realities of gender, racial, and economic struggles in favor of the formulaic, mythic structures and familiar narrative paradigms of the lives of celebrity entertainers.
Instead of telling the truth about the Rat Pack, this fascinating and complicated group of men, the A&E Biography® series employs a kind of detached duplicity to make them into a group of one-dimensional heroes--a team of venerated "great men" about whom only great things can be said, men for whom we ought to feel nothing but profound respect. Greg Garrison calls Dean Martin "the sweetest, kindest, most gentle human being I ever met in all my life." A miserable looking Jerry Lewis adds that "we had a genius in our midst, unrecognized, unfulfilled." In his A&E Biography® Sammy Davis Jr., becomes "the world's greatest entertainer. He was showbusiness." "There was only place where Sammy Davis, Jr., felt comfortable--on stage, entertaining people as only he could," the voice-over informs us: "He could do everything. Showbusiness was his life." "Sammy was one of a kind," claims Jesse Jackson at the funeral of "Mr. Entertainment." And yet the A&E depiction makes Sammy Davis Jr. seem remarkably similar to every one of their heroic subjects.
So what does all this mean, and how is it symptomatic of the way contemporary society seems to be reconstructing its position on celebrity? These "biographies" are, in essence, simply more examples of self-congratulatory media-packaged entertainment--thoughtless, depoliticized and simplified treatments which fail to interrogate their own narrational position in the mechanisms of commodification. They speak to a widely and [End Page 173] deeply held fascination with celebrity, but offer precious little new understanding of this fascination.
William Cohn has noted that "historical surprises are not part of the audience expectations which influence the shape and character of historical documentary presentations" (283). Yet the A&E Biography® series is full of historical surprises--surprising omissions, a surprising indulgence in mass fantasy, and some surprising liberties with historical truths. This series remakes the past in the light of our more conservative, present cultural climate, which seems to have a need for unsullied heroes, possibly even saints. It seems unclear whether these glossy over-simplifications are motivated by assumptions about what audiences really want to see, or by a nostalgia for an earlier, far less cynical style of celebrity watching. Either way, it seems obvious that this series of popular biographies has far more to tell us about the present, which produces and consumes them, than about the celebrity subjects they purport to expose and explore.
Mikita Brottman ("Everybody Loves Somebody") gained her Ph.D. from Oxford University, and is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Com-parative Literature at Indiana University. She is the author, most recently, of Hollywood Hex: Death and Destiny in the Dream Factory (London: Creation, 1999).
1. Rock Hudson apparently began his career by hanging around outside studio gates for hours at a time, waiting to be "noticed" by some movie producer. "Believe it or not," he said, years later, "I was so naive I really did think that those stories about people being discovered were true. It may sound foolish, but that's what I did, and nothing happened" (Parker 13).
2. See Tedesco "A&E Writes" and "A&E Family" for information on the web site, and Stephens for the book series.
3. Apparently a full-length feature film about the Rat Pack is also currently in the works, starring, in a monumentally uninspired piece of casting, Tom Hanks as Frank Sinatra.
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Balazs, Bela. Theory of the Film. New York: Ayer, 1972.
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Cohn, William H. "History for the Masses: Television Portrays the Past." Journal of Popular Culture 10 (Fall 1976): 280-89.
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_____. "A&E Writes 'Biography' Page." Broadcasting and Cable 126.29 (July 8, 1996): 40.
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