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Dear Camille:
I know that you're as intrigued as I am by dynasties and legends, but honestly aren't you as fed up
with America's royal family as I am? I'm speaking, of course, of the "star-crossed Kennedys," as the media always describes them. Their latest tragedy, the stupid ski accident of baby sitter lover boy Michael Kennedy, is just one more sign of how far this family has declined into bird-brained mediocrity. So I say enough! I'm no longer reading any stories about hunky John or any of his randy cousins. Isn't there another wealthy family in America we can all look up to and obsess about without feeling soiled?
Sick of Camelot Dear Sick:
I sympathize with your irritation. But dynasties by definition slide into
decadence, so in view of the current, puzzling creative slump of my favorite
TV show, "The Young and the Restless," I am quite content to tune into the
80-year-long Kennedy soap opera instead.
Most people outside Massachusetts had no idea who 39-year-old Michael Kennedy
was (the ever-multiplying Kennedy clan seems like one big blur of
undifferentiated teeth and hair) until last year's scandal over his affair
with the family baby sitter, which ended up derailing the gubernatorial
campaign of his brother, U.S. Rep. Joseph Kennedy II.
What interests me about Michael's demise is the extraordinarily efficient way
he managed to kill himself, virtually instantaneously, in front of his
children (notably his 14-year-old son, Michael), in the very last hours of his
year of public shaming. How about that for brutalizing your kinfolk and
passing on traumas? In the Freudian view, there are no accidents, only the
self-punishing working out of psychodramas. In the Greek view, delusion and
delirium inevitably destroy.
There was "blood all over the snow," it has been reported, and family members
kneeled around the prone Michael in the twilight to recite the Lord's Prayer.
It's like an eerie fusion of the blood-drenched sand of the pagan Colosseum
with a public-square Christmas crèche. The casual Christmas card that Michael
(separated last year from his wife) chose to send is also striking: a simple
color photograph, taken by him from below, with his three children looking
down at him, as if he were lying on the ground. It seems strangely prophetic
of his death -- and of something that, with his fractured skull and severed
spinal cord, he would not literally see.
We all heard decades ago about the Kennedy passion for touch football, which the
arts-oriented young Jacqueline Kennedy hated (she broke her ankle in her first
attempt to join in). But most of us are learning for the first time about the
arrogant transplantation of that game, over a 30-year period, to public ski
slopes, where other people were clearly endangered. This behavior, as much as
reckless, in-and-out speeding on a superhighway, is utterly
contemptible. I recommend Joseph Losey's brilliant film "Accident" (1967) for
an analogous scene of frivolous aristocrats at play, using a bolster for a
traditional family game of violent indoor rugby.
The weirdly competitive, familial show-offiness of Michael's last moments, as
he snared the Nerf ball at high speed from his son, makes me look at the
baby sitter episode with fresh eyes. Just as Woody Allen initially found Soon-Yi irresistible precisely because of her filial
tie to his official love, Mega-Mama Mia Farrow, so did the homey baby sitter
become Michael's cushy bridge to the incestuous constellation of superheated
but repressed-through-athletics emotions of Kennedy family dynamics.
Michael may have been in great physical shape (much more so than the 62-year-old Sonny Bono, who was killed on Monday in a
ski accident near Lake Tahoe, Nev.), but he was a runt in stature
who never grew out of his "Our Gang" prepubescent chipmunk persona. Perhaps
the once-underaged baby sitter never pressed charges because she felt her
dalliance with Michael was just another way to sit on babies.
There's a lot of promising talent in the Kennedy clan: For example, Kathleen
Kennedy Townsend, lieutenant governor of Maryland, is a
sober, disciplined analyst of public policy, though she's clearly gone out of
her way to keep her personality as colorless as possible. And there's likely
to be an unending series of political aspirants among the rising generation
too.
What you rightly call the "decline" of the Kennedys began to be obvious
decades ago. For example, John Kennedy was assassinated in a limousine, while
Robert Kennedy was assassinated in a kitchen. And while I adored JFK -- as a
13-year-old, I campaigned for him in 1960 -- I think Robert's character and
talents have been wildly exaggerated. In my opinion, he was a weasel cloaking
himself in the banner of the poor.
There are interlocking connections with another 1997 sex scandal. Michael's
wife, Victoria, who reportedly found him in bed with the baby sitter, is the
daughter of famed athlete-turned-sportscaster Frank Gifford, whom a tabloid
video camera caught in a hotel tryst with a mature blond. Ironically, Gifford had
just had a fancy Manhattan lunch with his wife, Kathie Lee, the goody-goody TV
host and insistently Christian songstress.
Frank Gifford is therefore the grandfather of the three children who watched
their father Michael die. Not only that: According to Kathie Lee, in her long
recitative about her weekend-from-hell when she returned to "Live With Regis &
Kathie Lee" on Monday, Frank had held the
10-year-old Michael on his lap on the long funeral-train ride bearing his
murdered father's body to burial in 1968. Gifford guilt is
also a theme here.
When the emergency call came about Michael's fatal accident on New Year's Eve,
the Giffords were staying with the estranged Victoria in Vail, the other fashionable Colorado ski
spot. As they all sped to Aspen by car, actor Kevin Costner got a call routed
to them to offer his private jet to transport the battalion of vacationers to
the funeral in Massachusetts. Upon their arrival at Aspen Hospital, Kathie
Lee says she decided to stay discreetly in the car but then had to use the
ladies room -- where she ran smack into the distraught Ethel Kennedy, Robert's
widow and the matriarch of this brood, who evidently did little over the years to control
or stop the dangerous game.
Why read novels? Hollywood begets Hollywood, which begets more Hollywood.
Simply from the point of view of toilet encounters -- there's a fabulous one
between Helen Lawson and Neely O'Hara in "Valley of the Dolls" -- I find all of
this quite absorbing. What strikes me is that the Kennedys haven't produced
any dykes or fairies yet (I'm quoting a great Ten Years After song by Alvin
Lee), though JFK's sisters had mannish jaws that could stop a truck. Kathie
Lee may edge the Kennedys out, if radio king Howard Stern's bold predictions
about her little smothered son, Cody, come to pass.
It's surprising there hasn't been a Kennedy board game yet. (OK, OK,
don't get your knickers in a twist: For the lack of Italian bourgeois piety
about death, see my Salon article, "The Italian Way of Death.") It would have to combine Monopoly with Careers, Sorry and, for
the driving-cars-off-bridges segment, Go Fish.
There would be an X-rated edition, with nude Marilyns straddling presidents in
bathtubs, and then a Vatican-approved version, with boisterous family ski
vacations. All, however, would end in death, jail, Congress or the funny
farm. At the end of the game, you'd have to start the whole bloody thing over
again. In India, it's called Karma.
Hi Camille:
I just saw "Titanic," which I think you might very well enjoy. It got me
thinking: If the same
situation were to occur today, would the "Women and Children First" rule
still apply?
If you were ship's captain and had the responsibility, how would you fill the
lifeboats, knowing
you had room for only half of the passengers.
Thanks. Love you.
Chris Botello Dear Chris Botello:
While I haven't gotten to "Titanic" yet, I have seen the prior movie versions
of the story, as well as the various television documentaries on the famous
1912 shipwreck, which eloquently expresses a leading idea of my work -- the
overwhelming power of nature.
I'm very fond of disaster movies of every kind and watch them over and over
again on TV: "The Poseidon Adventure" (1972), where Shelley Winters swims
like a zestful Yiddish manatee; "The Towering Inferno" (1974), oddly
prophetic of the World Trade Center bombing; "Earthquake" (1974), where Ava
Gardner is swept away in a storm sewer; and of course the series launched by
"Airport" (1970), where Jacqueline Bisset, as a scrumptious stewardess
illicitly impregnated by pilot Dean Martin, is slammed unconscious to the
aisle before completing the food service.
Your question is about triage, the coldly logical division of war or accident
victims into groups: those who cannot be saved and those for whom limited
treatment or equipment must be reserved. Triage is a fundamental feature of
medical education. In crisis, no sentimentality is allowed.
If I were captain of a sinking ocean liner with limited lifeboats, I would
assign two well-trained crew members to each boat and fill them, without
respect to gender, with able-bodied younger people first, from children on up.
If this meant that no passengers over 35 or 40 would be saved, so be it: They
have had a normal life span, by nature's law of early fertility.
Dear Camille:
The recent national spotlight on race relations has once again raised my
ire: How annoying and misleading are the names for our so-called "races."
While genetic science has disproved the 19th century notion of race as
distinct subclasses of our identity as homo sapiens, the old labels
persist, though they're packaged for our PC society as "African-American"
and "Asian-American" these days instead of the "racist" epithets "black"
and "Oriental." I find these PC labels equally offensive, and the people
who ply them usually practicing a (so far) accepted form of racism
themselves. (You've even used the term "Italian-American" in describing
Gloria Allred in a recent column, though she grew up in Philadelphia,
not Italy. "Philadelphian American" would be more precise, though taking
this notion to its logical end seems ludicrous. I'm American, not a
Washingtonian American.)
But the rest of us lacking these supposed cultural influences are simply
called "white." (Actually, I'm a nice shade of ivory! My ancestors were
Scots, English and French, though it sounds silly to call myself "Scots-American" or any other made-up combination, à la Tiger Woods.)
I think it's high time we Americans accepted the melting pot premise as
part of our genetic heritage, as well as our cultural heritage, and dropped
the pseudo-tribalistic "them, not me" marketing-like branding of our very
identities. We seem unable to accept the obvious mixed genetic heritage of
such celebrities as Woods without commenting at length on just who
procreated with whom to produce such a blend of physical characteristics.
(I'm grateful to Tiger for his courage in insisting that he transcends easy
categorization of a person.)
From my experiences abroad, we Americans are recognized mostly for our
shared cultural characteristics, such as our bent toward individualism,
which transcend simple racial identity. Yet within the country, we persist
in identifying all the "others" as just that, other. As long as this mass
delusion continues, I fear that race relations will be mired down in
teliology. Please share your thoughts!
Julie Murdock Painley Dear Julie Murdock Painley:
Your splendid letter will surely be of great interest to Salon readers. Your
presentation is most persuasive. I too am sick to death of "identity
politics," as it has been promulgated by guilty, white, middle-class liberals
in the United States.
However, I believe in cultural identity that confers a sense of history,
something sorely lacking among young people today, with their disorganized,
diluted, feel-good primary and secondary education. Perhaps you don't see the
need for ethnic consciousness because your Scots-English ancestors created the
mainstream culture that is all around us. No wonder you feel quite at home!
As the product of an immigrant family (my mother and all four grandparents were
born in Italy), I am acutely aware of how different I have always been, in
manner and assumptions, from the masters of the WASP establishment -- whose
speech, manners and style are still required for anyone who wants to rise to
the top of the corporate or academic ladder.
For all the talk of "diversity" in America, homogenization is the rule, so
that everyone who succeeds, no matter what the color of his or her face, ends
up whitebread bland. To stay different, you have to renounce the material
benefits of the system. Mavericks must accept ostracism.
In "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders" (in "Sex, Art, and American Culture"), I
called for "creative duality" as the only solution to our current problems.
As we move into the global 21st century, we must be true to our ethnic roots
but also participate responsibly in the wider, vigorously capitalistic
society, that fertile invention of the British industrial revolution.
N E X T_P A G E | Gore Vidal, the ethics of human cloning and Camille's New Year's wish list
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KENNEDY PHOTOGRAPH: AP/WIDE WORLD
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