Truth or Dare

NATIONAL REVIEW December 18, 2000 Issue

Just Like Ozzie and Harriet

When Hollywood liberals ‘settle down.’

By Jonah Goldberg, NRO Talk about picture-book weddings. The stunningly beautiful actress Catherine Zeta-Jones recently married movie star Michael Douglas at the Plaza hotel in New York. From the beginning, this May-December romance had been fawned over by the likes of Barbara Walters and other "journalists" committed to the idea that attractive people are profoundly interesting. When the actual wedding day arrived, it was for many countries a media event outshining even America's electoral turmoil. The event cost millions; the dress alone reportedly cost $250,000. The 350-person guest list included Walters, of course, as well as a Who's Who of Hollywood liberalism: Steven Spielberg, Anthony Hopkins, Tom Hanks, Whoopi Goldberg, Oliver Stone, Goldie Hawn, Jack Nicholson, et al. After the Perrier-Jouet champagne reception, the guests dined on lobster and lamb prepared by Donald Trump's personal chef. The five-tiered wedding cake caused no less than Martha Stewart to exclaim, "Wow! Look at that cake!" According to People magazine, everyone went home with a "silver Welsh love spoon engraved with the bride and groom's initials."

Naturally, there's nothing wrong with spending money or enjoying the finer things. But it does seem worth pointing out that many of those in attendance are famously committed to the plight of the common man and to opposing the influence of greedy corporations. Of course, nothing says "solidarity with the proletariat" like a lobster-and-champagne fκte cordoned off by a ring of guard dogs, armed "ushers," and metal detectors. But the display of wealth is not the most sociologically interesting aspect of the Douglas marriage. For that, we must look to their prenuptial agreement. Assuming — as pretty much everyone does — that this will end in divorce, Zeta-Jones will get $1.5 million for every year she has stayed married to Douglas. She had originally asked for closer to $5 million for every year of her tour of duty, but felt that holding out would get in the way of romance. So, in return for Zeta-Jones's acceptance of a lower figure, Douglas agreed to pay an undisclosed sum of cash up front and to fork over a $5 million "straying fee" if he — a self-confessed "recovering sex-addict" — cheats on her. In return, the love-struck Zeta-Jones agreed to a confidentiality clause barring her from revealing any personal details from their marriage — forever.

Jones, who had Douglas's baby, Dylan, in August, is reportedly "totally" in love with him. But she was nonetheless "concerned," according to friends, that her betrothed had cheated on his first wife repeatedly, including with his wife's best friend. Now, is it any wonder that Hollywood liberals are eager to make discussion of "family values" totally unacceptable in public debates? Indeed, it's fairly shocking that conservatives ever have any trouble at all in the culture war. But we do. In fact, conservatives generally lose arguments about traditional values. In today's cultural climate it is almost impossible to discuss, say, marital fidelity, without seeming like a church-lady prude or some Grand Inquisitor just itching to apply a hot poker to sinners' anatomical zones not usually graced by sunlight. Hollywood consistently mocks those advocating more traditional arrangements and distorts their arguments; in The American President, for example, Douglas plays a Clintonesque figure who is attacked by mean-spirited Republican zealots, not for behaving like Fredo Corleone at the Tropicana, bedding cocktail waitresses two at a time, but for being a widower who goes on a date with a mature, single woman. Of course, there's also the real inconvenience that conservatives tend — like all human beings — to be sinners too, making hypocrisy an unavoidable issue.

But the existence of Republican peccadilloes doesn't change the fact that standards serve a useful purpose. Marriage serves myriad social functions, one of them being economic. Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher argue in The Case for Marriage that marriage works because of the economies of scale it affords. Two people can live together for the cost of 1.6 people. Now, it goes without saying that most men can't afford to buy out their first wives for $60 million, as Michael Douglas did. And while many women may be able to come up with a reasonable number for what their "straying fee" would be, few husbands would be able to pay it.

The central message of today's popular culture is that personal liberation is the highest, if not the sole, good. In films and TV, people are heroic when they dump their wives, admit their homosexuality, or quit their jobs. Of course, personal freedom forms the core of the inalienable right to pursue happiness that America was established to protect. But Hollywood attempts to persuade average Americans to pursue a definition of happiness that is unattainable even for people of great wealth, never mind those of limited means. Madonna is a case in point. Within days of the Douglas/Zeta-Jones wedding, Madonna announced that she was finally engaged to the father of her second child. This was hailed by the fawning entertainment press as further evidence that Madonna is settling down. She has, in fact, matured: She used to wear a belt buckle with "Boy Toy" emblazoned across it. Now she doesn't. Throughout her earlier phases, conservatives objected to her as a bad role model, one who convinced millions of young fans that being a sexually callous tramp was liberating, virtuous, and cool.

Last March, when she announced she was having her second baby, People magazine put Madonna on the cover. "With the sexcapades, scandals and wild times behind her, pop's former boy toy tackles the roles of adoring mother and mature woman in love," gushed the gold standard in waiting-room literature. In an interview for another publication, she said of her early days: "My God, how petulant was I? … I've grown up a lot since then."

Madonna is moving to Britain, where she is buying an $11 million town house and putting her kids in British schools. "It grounds you when you're a parent. I look at my children and the person I love and realize this is reality," she told a British paper. One of the things she likes most about living overseas is that she feels she can live a more normal life there. In America, she has told various papers, people don't understand her. In Britain, by contrast, her past doesn't dog her.

"I've gone through all my sexual rebellion and don't need to do it anymore. I worked it out of my system, it's pretty safe to say," Madonna told People. Gosh, that's great for her. But the 14-year-old daughter of a construction worker, and millions like her, who during the 1980s took her exhortations to group sex and anonymous fellatio as gospel may not now be in a position to start over in a posh London flat or demand a $5 million straying fee.

Whenever conservatives denounced Madonna in her rutting period as a bad role model, the chattering classes and the pop media simply dismissed such concerns as prudishness or creeping Comstockery. And, generally speaking, conservatives were cowed. But very few reasonable people would have disagreed that Madonna herself would eventually grow tired — and tiresome — in her public sexual adventures. To say so before she completed her trajectory was "too judgmental." But today, liberal commentators want to give her a medal for adopting precisely the bourgeois values that her "judgmental" critics charged her with trampling.

But it's not judgmentalism to point to conduct like Madonna's, and to values like those celebrated in the Douglas/Zeta-Jones match, and say: "Kids, don't try this at home." Nobody should emulate those values. And just as important, most people can't — except at a cost that can't be measured in dollars.

-- (Paracelsus@Pb.Au), December 02, 2000

Answers

Of course, there's also the real inconvenience that conservatives tend — like all human beings — to be sinners too, making hypocrisy an unavoidable issue.

Yet the writer avoided it quite nicely.

-- Uncle Deedah (unkeed@yahoo.com), December 02, 2000.

Unk:

That's not my reading. Hey, I have a goal of writing totally bug-free code. I never expect to reach this goal, but that doesn't make it unworthy. He writes "standards serve a useful purpose" and this is true, even if those standards cannot always be met. They're something both to shoot for and to guide your life by.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), December 02, 2000.