By J.B. Nicholas
As deathly plumes of raw crude oil were slowly suffocating life out of the Gulf of Mexico, the celebrity-driven world we live in went on spinning as if nothing was happening.
A small squadron of standard-issue, gas-guzzling S.U.V.’s sailed to a stop on the side of the Ed Sullivan Theater where David Letterman tapes his TV show. The pop starlet stepped from one of them and promptly turned her couture-covered back on the 40 or so paparazzi stacked three deep on the sidewalk by the theater. She then stepped into the street behind the S.U.V. and, while tailored-suit-wearing former N.Y.P.D. brass blocked traffic for her, crossed to where a crowd of fans had gathered on the opposite side behind metal barricades. Then, with her back to the paparazzi, she went down the line signing autographs and posing for pictures. When she had reached one end of the line, she turned and retreated back across the street behind her S.U.V. As she headed for a theater side door, her outstretched hand led the way as she sought the grip of her older lover. Not once did she look at us, much less stop and pose for us. Then she disappeared, and an angry chorus of boos rained upon her swiftly disappearing shape from the bank of spurned photographers, mixing in with the fumes spewing from her ravenous steel beasts.
Such was the scene last week as Miley Cyrus arrived with her beau, Liam Hemsworth, for the Letterman show to promote her new album, “Can’t Be Tamed.”
While the paparazzi’s frustration was certainly real, real enough that the roar of the rejected rang in my ears, the entire event smacked to me of smart stage management, with all of us playing the role of dumb dupe. Earlier in the week a well-known celebrity blogger, Perez Hilton, posted either a true photo of Cyrus sans underwear exiting a car, or an image digitally manipulated to make it appear as if she did not have panties on. Voilà! Instant controversy, and publicity, featuring an out-of-the-closet gay digital journalist, puritanical anti-pornography laws with suitable draconian punishments, a public relations firm, self-righteous parents attempting to mount the “high road,” and a young girl who truly shamelessly promotes her sexuality for personal and professional gain, who, for example, posed topless, as a 15-year-old, for Vanity Fair. So, of course she expressed her contempt for “the media” by refusing to pose for pictures, no doubt hoping to spawn a story with precisely that headline.
It’s enough to make an honest man sick to his stomach, à la Sartre, even without a devil unleashing hell a mile beneath the deep, blackened sea.
