TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/042092/04209933.000

Text File | 1992-09-10 | 5.7 KB | 121 lines

                                                                                SOCIETY, Page 74

Fair Game?


Forced to go public with his most private and painful truth,
Arthur Ashe plays out his future in a spotlight

By LANCE MORROW


    Here is the Lives of the Saints gone tabloid. Here is the
American Church of Celebrity Trauma and Redemption. Joseph
Campbell should be alive to explore its mysteries.

    The dramas are curiously ritualistic and similar to one
another. A celebrity wanders in the shadow world of Dysfunction:
amid drugs or booze or binge eating. Or else in Denial of
something, of incest, say, or child abuse, or another shameful
secret. This is the Exemplary Ordeal. Celebrity Hits Bottom
(descent into underworld). Then stumbles halfway up, to Betty
Ford or some equivalent purgatorial rehab. At last, fallen angel
reascends to the upper air, finds new life (often new mate as
well, or else peace with the truth that, hey, it's O.K. to be
alone). The rebirth is celebrated on the cover of PEOPLE: Drew
Barrymore, Richard Pryor, Kitty Dukakis, Roseanne Arnold, all
the newly clear-eyed. After the exorcism of devils, resurrection
and hugs. "I've got my life together now, Barbara. I'm more
centered."


    In a forlorn way, a sort of collective moral life of the
nation gets enacted through the ordeal stories. They dramatize
the problem. They dramatize the resolution. Here is a sample
Rashomon of rape -- Willie Smith's accuser pacing the lawn with
Archpriestess Diane. Here is Mike Tyson. Here is life and death
itself: poor Michael Landon slowly dying in full view of the
congregation of Johnny Carson and PEOPLE.

    Arthur Ashe is not Michael Landon. He did not wish to
appear in an Exemplary Ordeal. Ashe has AIDS -- a fact that the
public knows now because the Press (in this case a reporter and
an editor from USA Today) reached into the most private
precinct of his life (inside his body itself) and forced him to
reveal his disease to millions of strangers. Ashe and his wife
Jeanne have a five-year-old daughter. The girl was entitled to
privacy and to tenderness in how she would be told, and when.

    Was it necessary to force the story out? Was some
redeeming purpose served? Does Ashe's ordeal usefully warn
potential AIDS victims about the all-but-vanished danger of
blood transfusions, or promote collective human sympathy and
solidarity with those who already have AIDS?

    Irrelevant. There was no public need to know, or right to
know. Everyone is not fair game to be dragged onstage for
involuntary exposure. Does AIDS make Ashe, or anyone, public
property? As Ashe said, he is neither a political candidate nor
a businessman beholden to stockholders. That Arthur Ashe is a
"public figure" whom people recognize as he walks down the
street is precisely the best argument for any decent human
being's not informing the whole world that the man has AIDS.

    If Ashe had had leukemia, would reporter and editor have
published the story? Maybe, in one paragraph. But not if Ashe
had asked them not to. AIDS made it different. Irresistible.
Juicy gossip. Red meat. When reporters pick up that scent, they
are off the leash and baying through the woods. The Ashe affair
makes a strong case for media loathing.

    Ashe acquiesced to the inevitable. He made the TV rounds
in the days after his AIDS announcement, and he kept his
dignity -- not easy in an exercise in which the line between
richly cartooned gossip and basic responsible journalism
(who-what-when-where-how) all but dissolves. Television has a
genius for the intimacies of personal-redemption chat. It
formalizes the primitive newspaper gossip column into a ceremony
and a sacrament. The Archpriestess Barbara Walters comes with
producer and camera crew to hear confession. She is empowered
to grant absolution on behalf of the American people, playing
first Inquisitor, then Fairy Godmother in the space of a
segment. There are other clergy: the Archpriestess Diane Sawyer,
the Archpriestess Oprah Winfrey. Credible Cardinal of High
Policy and Emergency Confessions (" . . . better come clean,
call Nightline") is Ted Koppel. Then there is His Grace Phil
Donahue, the barking, mike-ready Bishop of Prurience, whose
vestment for one of his shows was actually a dress.

    The premise holds that getting at the truth (a candidate's
sex life, an actor's drug addiction, Elizabeth Taylor's Hundred
Years' War against fat) is also riveting entertainment. The
pseudo-religious purgatorial ordeals of the rich and famous are
worth millions. In some ways, such spectacles are what
Americans have instead of tradition or moral community.

    Are these vivid messes harmless? Is it possible that these
agonistics serve a higher purpose? Maybe. One of the motifs of
American life in the late 20th century is a sad, destructive
disconnection. The fraying of family and community is visible
in homelessness and granny dumping and children shooting other
children without even attaching much importance to the act. It
is evident this year in Americans' disgusted alienation from the
presidential campaign.

    "Real life" ordeals are more interesting today, and more
bizarre, than anyone's fiction. But the phenomenon of ritual
celebrity ordeal seems to foul up the judgment of journalists.

    If a star volunteers, out of vanity or some other need, to
tell all, the story may be interesting, even helpful to others.
Arthur Ashe did not volunteer. He did not invite the world in.
A pattern of revelation that routinely puts the most intimate
details on public display has nearly obliterated an appreciation
of both the right of privacy and the obligations of kindness.