One more thing from the recent email exchange between Bill Simmons and Malcolm Gladwell. (I posted here about my agreement with Gladwell’s remarks about PEDs.) The host and guest discuss celebrity early in the conversation and make some good points. There is one thing, however, I disagree with. In discussing an anecdote from Johnny Carson, the new book by Henry “Bombastic” Bushkin, the late talk show host’s longtime lawyer, Gladwell asserts that celebrity behavior must have been far worse 50 years ago because there wasn’t so much press attention. This is conventional, but I think incorrect, wisdom. 

Celebrity behavior was horrible decades ago, and it was covered up. That’s true. Every now and then something would explode into public view, like the cases with Errol Flynn and Fatty Arbuckle. But I believe the same thing happens now, even with the tabloid culture. Paparazzi aren’t muckrakers duty-bound to serve the public good but entrepreneurs who sell salacious details, even uncovered information about criminality, to the highest bidder. Plenty gets covered up. It’s a marketplace in which silence is bought with money or favors. Let’s assume that tween performers don’r grow up to be so dysfunctional without cause and that action stars don’t always behave well while filming abroad. Every now and then something will explode into the public view, like the cases of O.J. Simpson and Michael Jackson. But despite the surfeit of information everywhere, most misbehavior is still kept quiet.

From Simmons and Gladwell:

“Bill Simmons:

It’s weird to think of Johnny Carson involved in a conspiracy, though.

Malcolm Gladwell:

And it just not plausible today, is it? There are 4 million Americans with top secret security clearances. How can you make a legitimate cultural argument for the presence of some shadowy secret government when 4 million people are in on the shadowy secret government? But in 1970, the Mafia throws the biggest star on television down the stairs and then puts a contract on him, causing him to lock himself in his apartment for three days and for millions of Americans to be forced to watch live coverage of the Italian American unity rally, and none of that became public. This is tabloid malpractice.

Bill Simmons:

Wait, it seems like you were inordinately mesmerized by this Carson book. Was it because you didn’t realize that he was such a flawed human being? Or were you blown away by how different celebrity culture was in the 1960s and 1970s compared to now?

Malcolm Gladwell:

Well, it made me think that the average level of celebrity behavior must have been much worse 50 years ago than today.”