• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 270 0

a time when every reputation would be so mutable that going to jail would actually add a layer of authenticity and charm to a lawbreaking famous person. I had no way of knowing that we had said goodbye forever to the kind of public ruin that had in the 1920s capsized the career of Fatty Arbuckle, a celebrity whose cautionary tale was always cited when I was a kid. I didn’t understand that we had begun an era of melding criminals and celebrities into one big celebriminal culture. Which is not a very fun word to say. (But “crimebrity” is worse.) So I’ll just call them Celebrities 2.0: voracious, fame-seeking creatures ruthlessly pursuing personal ambitions who feel very strongly that “the rules don’t apply to me.” Both live for attention and will do whatever it takes to capitalize on it, knowing that if they do it right, fame will be the result. And now, both categories are working with the same exact media tools.

ACT 1: CELEBRITY 2.0

Celebrities have long been the embodiment of middle-class ideals, the more perfect stand-ins for the rest of us. The big difference between twentieth-century celebrities and twenty-first-century celebrities is that the old model required the celebrity to have some kind of connection, however tenuous, to specific talents or abilities to really thrive. Therefore, a celebrity was usually an artist, or a public servant, a scientist, or a religious leader. Once the rise from struggling average person to prominent luminary was accomplished, society offered these newly designated superpeople a little more latitude than they did the average Joe. Everyone knew that talented people were often kind of weird and out of control. Thomas Edison reportedly slept under his desk still wearing his shoes and socks. James Joyce and F. Scott Fitzgerald drank too much. So did Jackson Pollock, who was, after all, a bastion of sanity compared to Vincent van Gogh. Creative geniuses were allowed to bend the rules a little as long as some talent—or unusual beauty or extreme wealth or interesting vision—was also part of the package.

Not anymore. Now a morphing of crime with pop culture seems to have created a new strata of showbiz that probably isn’t going to go away, ever.

Maybe it got its start back in the twentieth century with Frank Sinatra, a celebrity who wore his friendly connection to crime proudly, like a contrasting-color pocket square. Over the course of his career, everyone learned that Frank Sinatra could be kind of an asshole. He was always mouthing off and getting into fights. He had an arrest record and hung out with Sam Giancana. But since it was his fluid artistry that made him famous, the asshole/thug stuff was noted, then shrugged off. Small price to pay for all the fantastic music.

After Sinatra came the beginning of rock and roll and a whole new roster of sexy bad boys, many of whom had their own brushes with the law. But since it was the fifties, everyone still preferred to keep the worst of their behavior under wraps. Elvis and Chuck Berry and the rest were still concerned that polite society regard them as gentlemen.

It wasn’t until somewhere in the late sixties that the concepts of outlaw and entertainer became laminated to each other like a big backstage all-access pass. During that period of cultural upheaval, as various Rolling Stones and Beatles were jailed for assorted excesses, at first the public reacted with shock. Careers had been ruined by less. Would this be their swan song?

As it turned out, no.

Mick and Keith were released back into the stream of pop culture, where they went from merely successful to enormously, astoundingly successful. And in the years that followed, too many other musicians to bother naming—as well as the actors, actresses, and models who admired them and wanted in on this kind of street cred—began to get into trouble with the law for various reasons: drug abuse, civil disobedience, assault. But now, instead of being excommunicated from public life and forever tainted like Fatty Arbuckle, they found their reputations enhanced.

By the time guys like Axl Rose