The other day on a local radio show — when I thought I would just be talking about the new plays and movies I had seen — the host threw me with a question about the Tiger Woods affair.
Then in a sort of radio stream of consciousness segment we somehow got into the tangled romantic/sexual lives of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy.
Suddenly, I felt like I was on that TMZ TV show where the “editor” (above) with the oversized soda cup is grilling his “reporters” about the latest Hollywood scandal.
I tried to explain on the radio program that I’ve always thought movie stars and sports celebrities exist in an entirely separate realm from the rest of us.
Christopher Walken put it well once when he told an interviewer that he believes he has spent most of his life on “planet show business” and that things are done differently there.
The show biz lifestyle and its excesses don’t change much as time passes, just the names of the players.
Every two or three years, I like to re-read Richard Condon’s brilliant Hollywood satire “The Ecstasy Business” because it is so funny and because so little that is essential about celebrities has changed since the book was published in 1967.
Condon is best known for the 1959 novel that launched his career — “The Manchurian Candidate” — but before he became a popular novelist he spent more than 20 years working as a publicist for a number of different Hollywood studios, including Disney.
Condon drew on his PR experience to craft a portrait of an out-of-control movie star named Tynan Bryson who could easily exist in today’s celebrity culture.
Bryson is so popular that he wants 100 percent of the gross of his pictures and the star is so sexually insatiable that he has never been able “to remain faithful for more than seventeen hours.”
Condon writes: “Despite his former wife’s celebrated allegation, ‘Scratch an actor and you’ll find an actress’…Bryson had slept with all but one of his leading ladies, the discard having turned out to be a female impersonator, the best-kept secret in worldwide show biz.”
“Bryson sometimes tried to seize reality, but he had to grasp upward beyond his reach through the quicksand of his existence,” Condon says of his fictional movie star. “(Bryson) wanted to be what he played, not for his art, for he was not a Method actor, but because according to the laws of being a hero in an American motion picture, he must always win.”
“The Ecstasy Business” has been out of print for many years, but Condon’s vision of celebrity madness remains as fresh as today’s TMZ or Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Daily.
