A Dearth of Heroes
Sift through any source of
celebrity drinking quotes and you’ll find nearly every one was
uttered before 1970. From then on our cultural icons
have been strangely silent about the subject of
alcohol, except when they’re looking for something
to blame.
There was a time when all the movers and shakers
in the entertainment industry not only drank, but
also didn’t mind saying so. Their exploits
were revealed and reveled with a wink in the gossip
columns. They were the best at what they did, their
artistic reputations were unimpeachable, and media
dared not attack them.
Somewhere along the line,
however, all that changed. The media stopped reporting
and started judging. If they hinted a celebrity
was drinking, they said in the tone of a prosecutor
accusing a criminal, or worse — in my opinion — consoling
a victim. And it wasn’t long before the celebrities
picked up on the new system. Today’s entertainers
undoubtedly still drink, and probably a lot, but
you’d have to hold a gun to their publicist’s
head before they’d admit to it in print. And
if they are caught with their had in the whiskey
jar, they assume the guise of the victimized knave,
using booze as a universal scapegoat for their glaring
personality flaws and run-ins with the law. Modern
celebrities don’t fuck up anymore, the booze
fucks them up.
The handful of celebrities
willing to admit they actually enjoy tipping a few
back, such as Hank Williams III, Shane McGowan and
Kid Rock, are generally relegated to pseudo working-class
outlaw personas doomed to dwell on the fringes of
celebrity. Those that don’t fit the outcast mold are
not the sort you’d look to for drinking cues.
Half-weights like Leonardo DiCaprio who, yes, likes
his vodka neat, but gets his kicks by having his
limo driver park on an overpass so Leo can drop
garbage on the working stiffs rushing to meet their
horrible 6 a.m. shifts. Ewan MacGregor likes to
pour them down, but even this self-styled enfant
terrible carefully shepherds talk about his drinking
bouts with carefully worded qualifications. Where
Gleason said, “I drink to get bagged,” and
Bogart proclaimed, “Scotch is a very important
part of my life,” Ewan will admit to getting
drunk then backtrack with: "It really doesn't make
you feel clever. Your acting is absolutely for shit.
So I haven’t done it since.”
All our heroes are dead,
to paraphrase the vigilante cop in Magnum Force.
And what’s
more, Without heroes we're all plain people and
don't know how far we can go. Bernard Malamud said
that and Bernie puts our dilemma in a nutshell:
somewhere along the line our drunkard kings and
queens were bumped off and replaced by a bunch of
creepy con artists. Me, I’m going to pour
a glass of Jack, put on a Sinatra CD and read some
Hemingway. To paraphrase Billy Shakespeare, “Better
to serve a dead king who was just, than a living
one who really sucks.”
Frank Kelly Rich
