Pendergast T., Pendergast S. St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture. Volume 1: A-D
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
CATHERENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
459
response to the obscene hypocrisies of the profane adult world. The
irony, of course, is that Holden himself has already been contaminat-
ed by the world he despises. The child of affluent parents, he clearly
enjoys the benefits their ‘‘phony’’ world affords him. He spends
money on taxi rides and nightclub visits, and even as he condemns lies
and fakery, he himself lies and participates in the fakery. He is
acquiring the survival skills that will allow him to operate in the fallen
adult world, a fact he himself acknowledges: ‘‘If you want to stay
alive, you have to say that stuff.’’
Critics often classify The Catcher in the Rye as a quest story, but
Holden’s quest, if such it be, is aimless and incomplete. Holden’s
New York misadventures occur during the Christmas season, a time
when Christendom celebrates the birth of a child who became a
savior. But the Holy Child has no place in this world where the cross
that symbolizes his sacrifice has become merely a prop carried by
actors on a Radio City stage. A self-proclaimed atheist, Holden
inhabits a world where true transcendence can never be achieved. Yet
longing for a heroic role, he dreams of being the ‘‘catcher in the rye,’’
of saving ‘‘thousands of little kids’’ from plunging over the cliff into
the abyss of adulthood. Ultimately, however, as he comes to realize
while watching his little sister Phoebe circling on the carousel in
Central Park, children cannot be saved from adulthood. Only the dead
like his younger brother Allie are safe. Heroes belong in coherent
worlds of shared values and meaningful connections; Holden’s world
is the waste land, all fragments and dead ends. Would-be heroes like
Holden are ‘‘crazy mixed-up kids’’ who end up in California institutions.
The Catcher in the Rye is most frequently compared to Mark
Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, another account of an
adolescent male’s escape from the confinement of education and
civilization. The similarities between the two novels are obvious. The
narrator/protagonist in each is a teenage boy who repudiates adult
hypocrisies and runs away in search of a less flawed world; both
youthful protagonists speak in richly idiomatic language, and both are
comic figures whose humor sometimes offers grim truths. But Huck’s
longing for freedom is undiluted by dreams of saving others, and
Huck’s world has a duality that Holden’s slick society lacks. For
Huck, the corruptions on land are balanced by the ‘‘free and easy’’
life on the raft. Huck has the Mississippi; Holden has a duck pond.
Huck’s abusive father is balanced by the tenderness and concern of
Jim; Holden’s father is irrelevant, a disembodied payer of bills. Other
adult figures who have the potential to nurture Holden through his
crisis are mere passing images like the nuns to whom he gives money
or phony betrayers like Mr. Antolini who seems to offer Holden
compassion and understanding only to make sexual advances to him
later. His peers offer Holden no more than do the adults. They too are
phonies, like the pseudo-sophisticated Carl Luce and Sally Hayes, or
absent, idealized objects like Jane Gallagher.
Nowhere is Holden more clearly a creature of his time than in his
inability to connect, to communicate. The Catcher in the Rye is filled
with aborted acts of communication—truncated conversations, failed
telephone calls, an unconsummated sexual encounter. Most of the
things which awaken a sense of connection in Holden are no longer
part of the actual world. The precocious Allie who copies Emily
Dickinson poems on his baseball glove, the museum mummy, even
Ring Lardner and Thomas Hardy, the writers Holden admires and
imagines that he would like to call up and talk to—all are dead. In a
particularly revealing moment Holden fantasizes life as a deaf-mute,
a life that would free him from ‘‘useless conversation with any body’’
and force everyone to leave him alone. Yet this fantasy indicates
Holden’s lack of self-knowledge, for his isolation would be an act, his
deaf-muteness a pretense. He defines alienation as a job in a service
station and a beautiful, deaf-mute wife to share his life. Therein lies
the pathos of Holden Caulfield. He can neither commit to the inner
world and its truths nor celebrate the genuine that exists amid the
phoniness of the public world. The Catcher in the Rye, for all its
strength, fails as a coming of age story precisely because its protago-
nist, who is terrified of change, never changes. Mark Twain’s Huck
Finn sets out for the territory and freedom, James Joyce’s Stephen
Dedalus experiences his epiphany, T. S. Eliot’s Fisher King hears the
message of the thunder. J. D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield can only, as
he himself says at the novel’s end, ‘‘miss everybody.’’
—Wylene Rholetter
F
URTHER READING:
Bloom, Harold, ed. Holden Caulfield. New York, Chelsea House, 1990.
Engel, Stephen, ed. Readings on the Catcher in the Rye. San Diego,
Greenhaven, 1998.
Pinsker, Sanford. The Catcher in the Rye: Innocence Under Pressure.
New York, Twayne, 1993.
Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye. Little Brown, 1951.
———. Franny and Zooey. Little Brown, 1961.
———. Nine Stories. Little Brown, 1953.
———. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenter and Seymour: An
Introduction. Little Brown, 1963.
Salzberg, Joel, ed. Critical Essays on Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye.
New York, Macmillan, 1989.
Salzman, Jack, ed. New Essays on the Catcher in the Rye. Cambridge
and New York, Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Cather, Willa (1873-1947)
Willa Cather, variously perceived by critics as realistic, regionalist,
or sentimental, as well as an unusual literary stylist of unhurried
elegance, memorably exploited themes long regarded as part of the
American mythos. She wrote 12 novels and over 60 short stories,
contrasting nature’s wilderness with the social veneer of her charac-
ters, and achieved critical and popular acclaim for works such as O
Pioneers! (1913) and My Antonia (1918), which depict the Nebraska
frontier, and, most famously and enduringly perhaps, her ‘‘Santa Fe’’
novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), which treats the
history of the Southwest after the Mexican War. According to Susan
Rosowski, Cather ‘‘saw herself as the first of a new literary tradition,
yet one which evolved out of the past and from native traditions rather
than in revolt against them.’’ Novels like O Pioneers!, The Song of the
Lark (1915), and My Antonia favor cultural diversity as embodied in
the experiences of immigrant settlers, and showcase the strength of
their heroic female characters Alexandra Bergson, Antonia Shimerda,
CATHY ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
460
and Thea Kronborg, respectively. Cather’s work also affirms appre-
ciation for a simpler era when America espoused spiritual ideals. In
the 1920s, in novels such as One of Ours (1922), A Lost Lady (1923),
and The Professor’s House (1925), she indicted a society that had
rejected revered traditional values to embrace materialism. Her last
novels—Shadows on the Rock (1931) and Sapphira and the Slave
Girl (1940)—reflect the writer’s retreat to a past further removed
from her own time, when order, stability, and noble principles
governed human life. Born in Virginia and educated at the University
of Nebraska, Cather wrote poetry, and spent six years as a journalist
with McClure’s magazine before devoting her life full-time to fiction.
She spent 40 years until her death living in New York with her
devoted companion Edith Lewis.
—Ed Piacentino
F
URTHER READING:
O’Brien, Sharon. Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice. New York,
Oxford University Press, 1987.
Rosowki, Susan J. The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather’s Romanti-
cism. Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1986.
Woodress, James. Willa Cather: A Literary Life. Lincoln, University
of Nebraska Press, 1987.
Cathy
The comic strip Cathy, by American artist and writer Cathy
Guisewite, addresses the insecurities and desires of a new generation
of women trying to balance traditional pressures with the responsibili-
ty of careers and other personal freedoms. Premiering in November of
1976, Cathy introduced a character struggling with a mother urging
marriage and children, a demanding boss, a noncommittal boyfriend,
and a loathing for her figure. Although Guisewite was instrumental in
bringing women’s issues to the daily comics, Cathy also has its
detractors who long for a less scattered, more self-confident female
character. Nevertheless, Cathy has grown to syndication in more than
1,400 newspapers and has spawned books, television specials, and a
line of merchandise.
—Geri Speace
F
URTHER READING:
Friendly, Jonathan. ‘‘Women’s New Roles in Comics.’’ New York
Times. February 28, 1983, p. B5.
Moritz, Charles, editor. Current Biography. New York, H.W.
Wilson, 1989.
Sjoerdsma, Ann G. ‘‘Guisewite Could Be a Stronger, More Profound
Voice for Single Women.’’ Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service.
August 15, 1997.
Cats
By the end of the twentieth century, Cats had lived up to its
billing of ‘‘Now and Forever,’’ as it became the longest-running
Andrew Lloyd Webber musical in both London and New York. The
tuneful score, inspired by T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical
Cats, includes songs in a wide variety of styles. John Napier’s
elaborate set transforms the entire theater into a garbage dump upon
which the feline cast learn which one of them will gain an extra life at
the Jellicle Ball. Various cats tell their tales through song, but the
winner is Grizabella, the glamour cat who became an outcast.
Grizabella’s number, ‘‘Memory,’’ is one of Lloyd Webber’s most
famous songs; by 1992, it had been recorded in no fewer than 150
different versions. Cats opened in London in 1981 and in New York
the following year. The innovative costumes and choreography
coupled with the eclectic musical score which culminates in ‘‘Memo-
ry’’ account for its continued popularity. A video version of Cats,
filmed during a London performance, was released in 1998.
—William A. Everett
F
URTHER READING:
Lloyd Webber, Andrew. Cats: The Book of the Musical. Lon-
don, Faber & Faber, 1981; San Diego, Harcourt, Brace, and
Jovanovich, 1983.
Richmond, Keith. The Musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber. London,
Virgin, 1995.
Cavett, Dick (1936—)
‘‘Sophisticated,’’ ‘‘witty,’’ ‘‘urbane,’’ ‘‘intelligent,’’ and ‘‘lit-
erate’’ are among the adjectives commonly used to describe Dick
Cavett, the Nebraska-born talk show host who experienced fame
during a relatively brief period of his early career and professional
struggle thereafter. The Dick Cavett Show was seen five nights a week
for seven years on ABC-TV from 1968 until 1975 and then once
weekly on Public Television until 1982. Cavett won three Emmy
awards during these years. His interviews with such individuals as
Lawrence Olivier, Katharine Hepburn, Noel Coward, Orson Welles,
Groucho Marx, and Alfred Hitchcock are classics in the field, as
Cavett’s lively mind allowed a degree of candor and spontaneity
generally lacking in the attempts of less gifted colleagues. For many
viewers, his show was the saving grace of commercial television and
a good reason to stay up late.
A Yale graduate, Cavett began his career as an actor and standup
comic without great success. While working as a copy boy for Time
magazine in 1960, he decided to try his hand at comedy writing. Since
Jack Paar was one of his early idols as a performer, he wrote a series of
jokes designed for Paar’s opening monologue on the Tonight Show
and finagled a plan to deliver the jokes directly to Paar. The plan
succeeded, Paar liked the jokes, and Cavett landed a job writing for
the show. From the Paar show, he got his first chance as a talk-show
host on morning television and soon moved on to his spot opposite
Johnny Carson (Paar’s successor) on ABC.
After the Cavett show’s demise, its host found various other
venues but never again reached the same level of visibility. An
attempted variety show series predictably fell flat, as scripted sketch-
es were not Cavett’s metier. Through the years since 1982, he has
CAVETTENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
461
The cast of Cats.
hosted numerous talk shows on cable stations including Showtime
and CNBC, taken cameo roles in the theater, and narrated a PBS series
on Japan. His gift for conversation keeps him popular on the lecture
circuit, and his clear, uninflected Midwestern diction makes him an
ideal candidate for commercial voice-overs. In short, Cavett has kept
relatively busy, but his varied activities go mostly unnoticed by the
general public.
Cavett’s name came into the news in 1997 when he was sued for
breach of contract over a syndicated radio talk show he was scheduled
to host. He left the show after two weeks, and word went out through
his lawyer that Cavett’s premature departure was due to a manic-
depressive episode. The civil suit was eventually dismissed.
Prior to this turn of events, Cavett had been relatively open about
his chronic suffering with depression, even going on record about his
successful treatment with controversial electroconvulsive (otherwise
known as ‘‘shock’’)therapy. As a spokesperson on psychiatric illness,
Cavett, like William Styron, Art Buchwald, and others, has put his
verbal skills to use in articulating his experiences with the disease that
has plagued him intermittently throughout his career. He recalls, for
instance, in an interview for People magazine, a time before his ‘‘big
break’’ when he was living alone in New York City, and ‘‘I did
nothing but watch Jack Paar on The Tonight Show. I lived for the Paar
show. I watched it from my bed on my little black-and-white set on
my dresser, and I’d think, ‘I’ll brush my teeth in a minute,’ and then
I’d go to sleep and wake up at three the following afternoon.’’ It is
ironic that this brilliant conversationalist, the life of a sophisticated
nightly party, would once again enter the public eye by virtue of
his melancholia.
—Sue Russell
F
URTHER READING:
Cavett, Dick, and Christopher Porterfield. Cavett. New York, Harcourt
Brace, 1974.
———. Eye on Cavett. New York, Arbor House, 1983.
Cavett, Dick, and Veronica Burns. ‘‘Goodbye, Darkness.’’ People,
August 3, 1992, p. 88.
CB RADIO ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
462
Dick Cavett (center) with Muhammad Ali and Juergen Blin on The Dick Cavett Show.
CB Radio
The Citizens Band Radio, familiarly known as the CB, was a
device that enabled free mobile communication up to a ten mile radius
for those who owned the requisite microphone, speaker, and control
box. Although the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) first
introduced it in 1947, the CB did not experience its heyday until 30
years later, when hundreds of thousands of automobile and tractor
trailer drivers installed them in their vehicles.
In order to popularize the device among individuals for their
personal use, the FCC, in 1958, opened up part of the broadcasting
spectrum originally reserved for ham radio operators. This Class D
band enabled the manufacture of higher quality, less expensive CB
sets that were useful and affordable to ordinary people. By 1959 the
average set cost between $150 and $200, but there were only 49,000
users licensed with the FCC. From 1967 to 1973, the FCC registered
about 800,000 licensees. Although one did not need to obtain a license
to operate a CB radio, the number of licensees shot up dramatically
from 1973 to the end of the decade, when more than 500,000 people
were applying for licenses each month in direct response to cultural
shifts at the time. The Vietnam War had ended with America less than
victorious; the Watergate scandal rocked the Nixon White House; and
the oil crisis from 1973 to 1974 led to a capping of national speed
limits at 55 miles per hour. The CB afforded people—many of whom
were distressed by recent governmental decisions—an opportunity to
create their own communities over the airwaves.
The CB, as a ‘‘voice of the people’’ and the fastest growing
communications medium since the telephone, rekindled a sense of
camaraderie during an era when people felt oppressed by a seemingly
monolithic federal government and looming corporate control. Al-
though manufacturers encouraged people to use CBs for emergency
purposes (broadcasting on channel 9) or to relieve the stress and
boredom of long automobile trips, the CB transcended these practical
functions and became a tool of empowerment, enabling each person
to be his or her own broadcaster on the 40 channels of airwaves.
Like all small communities, CB culture developed its own
language and sensibility. People liked these devices because they
could use them to evade the law by communicating with drivers up
ahead to find out the location of speed traps and police. They also
liked the CB because it allowed for mobility, anonymity, and a chance
to invent oneself. For example, instead of using proper names, CBers
(or ‘‘ratchet-jaws,’’ as users called themselves) had ‘‘handles’’—
nicknames they would use while on air. They also utilized a very
colorful vocabulary, which included words like ‘‘Smokey’’ for police
(so named because of their Smokey Bear-type hats), ‘‘Kodiaks with
CELEBRITYENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
463
Kodaks’’ for police using radar, ‘‘negatory’’ for ‘‘no,’’ ‘‘10-4’’ for
message received, and ‘‘let the hammer down’’ for speeding. Broad-
cast sign-offs were equally baroque: people would not just say good-
bye, but rather phrases such as, ‘‘Keep your nose between the ditches
and the Smokeys off your britches.’’
An essential component of the growing CB popularity was the
acknowledgment and celebration of a ‘‘trucker culture,’’ summed up
by the ubiquitous phrase of the time, ‘‘Keep on Truckin’.’’ Tractor
trailer drivers had been using these radios to communicate among
themselves over the long haul for decades, and in 1973, the CB was an
integral device that enabled truckers to organize strike activities.
Soon after, ordinary people began to identify with the trucker, who
represented a freedom, heroism, and rugged individualism on the
open road. But this trucker culture was not just confined to the
roadways and airwaves. It also appeared as a recurring theme in the
popular media. ‘‘Convoy,’’ by C.W. McCall, was a novelty song
about a trucker named ‘‘Rubber Duck’’ who leads a speeding pack of
trucks across the country, avoiding police along the way; it hit number
one on the Billboard chart in 1976. ‘‘Six Days on the Road’’ was
another trucker-inspired song. The film industry also became enam-
ored of truckers and their CBs: Smokey and the Bandit, a film directed
by Hal Needham and starring Burt Reynolds and Sally Field, came
out in 1977, and in that same year Jonathan Demme directed Handle
with Care, another trucker film. In 1978 the song ‘‘Convoy’’ was
made into a film with the same title, directed by Sam Peckinpah and
starring Kris Kristofferson and Ali McGraw. And television enjoyed
BJ and the Bear during this same period.
While the American public’s love affair with the CB radio and
truckers did not last long—the glamour and glitz of the 1980s made
truckers seem backward and unhip—it did have lasting repercussions
that made people more accepting of new communications technolo-
gy. Cellular phones and the Internet were just two examples of the
continuation of the CB sensibility. Cellular phones offered a portable
means of communication that people could use in their cars for
ordinary needs and for emergencies. Internet chatrooms, while not
offering mobility, did offer a sense of anonymity and group camara-
derie and membership. The CB was the first technology that truly
offered Americans their contradictory wishes of being part of a
solidified group while their personae remained wholly anonymous if
not entirely fabricated.
—Wendy Woloson
F
URTHER READING:
Hershey, Cary, et.al. ‘‘Personal Uses of Mobile Communications:
Citizens Band Radio and the Local Community.’’ Communica-
tions for a Mobile Society: An Assessment of New Technology. Ed.
Raymond Bowers. Beverly Hills, Sage, 1978, 233-255.
Stern, Jane, and Michael Stern. Jane and Michael Stern’s Encyclope-
dia of Popular Culture. New York, HarperPerennial, 1992.
The CBS Radio Mystery Theater
Premiering on January 6, 1974, the CBS Radio Mystery Theater
was a notable attempt to revive the tradition of radio thrillers like
Suspense (1942-1962) and Inner Sanctum Mysteries (1941-52). Cre-
ated by Inner Sanctum producer Himan Brown, the CBS Radio
Mystery Theater featured many voices from the golden age of radio,
including Agnes Moorehead, Les Tremayne, Santos Ortega, Bret
Morrison, and Mercedes McCambridge. E. G. Marshall was its first
host. The series ended on December 31, 1982.
—Christian L. Pyle
Celebrity
Celebrity is the defining issue of late twentieth-century America.
In recent years, much has been made and written of the rise of
contemporary celebrity culture in the United States. Writers, thinkers,
and pundits alike warn us of the danger of our societal obsession with
celebrity, even as more and more Americans tune into Hard Copy and
buy People magazine. Andy Warhol’s cynical prediction that every-
one will be famous for fifteen minutes has virtually become a national
rallying cry as television airwaves overflow with venues for every-
one’s opportunity to appear in the spotlight. The more that is written
about fame, the less shocked we become. That’s the way things are,
we seem to say, so why not grab our moment in the sun?
Fame, of course, is nothing new. In his comprehensive volume
The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History, Leo Braudy has traced
man’s desire for recognition and need for immortality back to
Alexander the Great, noting: ‘‘In great part the history of fame is the
history of the changing ways by which individuals have sought to
bring themselves to the attention of others and, not incidentally, have
thereby gained power over them.’’ The desire to achieve recognition
is both timeless and universal. What is particular to late twentieth-
century America, however, is the democratization of fame and the
resultant ubiquity of the celebrity—a person, as Daniel Boorstin so
famously noted, ‘‘who is known for his well-knownness.’’
The origin of the unique phenomenon of twentieth-century
celebrity may be found in the words of one of America’s Founding
Fathers, John Adams, who wrote, ‘‘The rewards . . . in this life are
esteem and admiration of others—the punishments are neglect and
contempt.... The desire of the esteem of others is as real a want of
nature as hunger—and the neglect and contempt of the world as
severe as a pain.... It is the principal end of the government to
regulate this passion, which in its turn becomes the principal means of
order and subordination in society, and alone commands effectual
obedience to laws, since without it neither human reason, nor standing
armies, would ever produce that great effect.’’ Indeed, the evolution
of celebrity as the Zeitgeist of the twentieth century is a direct result
of democracy.
As Alexis De Tocqueville noted in the early 1830s, the equality
implied by a democracy creates the need for new kinds of distinction.
But there are problems inherent in this new social order, as Tocqueville
wrote: ‘‘I confess that I believe democratic society to have much less
to fear from boldness than from paltriness of aim. What frightens me
most is the danger that . . . ambition may lose both its force and its
greatness, that human passions may grow gentler and at the same time
baser, with the result that the progress of the body social may become
daily quieter and less aspiring.’’ A prescription, it would seem, for
twentieth-century celebrity. Indeed, some 150 years later, Daniel
Boorstin would describe a celebrity thus: ‘‘His qualities—or rather
his lack of qualities—illustrate our peculiar problems. He is neither
good nor bad, great nor petty.... He has been fabricated on purpose
to satisfy our exaggerated expectations of human greatness. He is
CELEBRITY ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
464
morally neutral. The product of no conspiracy, of no group promoting
vice or emptiness, he is made by honest, industrious men of high
professional ethics doing their job, ‘informing’ us and educating us.
He is made by all of us who willingly read about him, who like to see
him on television, who buy recordings of his voice, and talk about him
to our friends. His relation to morality and even to reality is
highly ambiguous.’’
What Tocqueville foresaw and Boorstin confirmed in his empty
definition of celebrity seems, however, to belie the fact that, as a
nation, we have come to define success by celebrity. It is the singular
goal to which our country aspires. But how and why has this hollow
incarnation of fame become our benchmark of achievement?
The great experiment inaugurated by the signing of the Declara-
tion of Independence proposed a classless society in which the only
prerequisite for success was the desire and the will to succeed. In fact,
however, though founded on a noble premise, America was and is a
stratified society. Yet the myth of classlessness, of limitless opportu-
nity open to anyone with ambition and desire, has been so pervasive
that it has remained the unifying philosophy that drives society as a
whole. In a world where dream and reality do not always mesh, a third
entity must necessarily evolve, one which somehow links the two.
That link—the nexus between a deeply stratified society and the myth
of classlessness—is celebrity.
According to Braudy: ‘‘From the beginning, fame has required
publicity.’’ The evolution (or perhaps devolution) of fame into
celebrity in the twentieth century was the direct result of inventions
such as photography and telegraphy, which made it possible for
words and images to be conveyed across a vast nation. Abraham
Lincoln went so far as to credit his election to a photograph taken by
Matthew Brady and widely dispersed throughout his campaign.
Before the invention of photography, most Americans could have
passed a president on the street and not known it. A mania for
photography ensued and, during the nineteenth century, photograph
galleries sprang up throughout the country to satisfy the public’s
increasing hunger for and fascination with these images. The ideal
vehicle for the promulgation of democracy, photography was accessi-
ble to anyone, and thus it soon contributed to the erosion of visible
boundaries of class, even as it proclaimed a new ideal for success—
visual fame.
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed an
avalanche of inventions that would transform America from a rural
country of provincial enclaves to a more unified nation of urban
centers. The rapid growth of mass media technologies spawned
increasing numbers of national publications eager to make news. And
make it they did—searching out stories that might not have been
recognized as newsworthy a decade before. As Richard Schickel
writes in Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity: ‘‘The pace of
life was quickening, the flow of information beginning to speed up
while mobility both geographic and social was stepping up as well.
People began to need familiar figures they could carry about as they
moved out and moved up, a sort of portable community as it were,
containing representations of good values, interesting traits, a certain
amount of within-bounds attractiveness, glamour, even deviltry.’’
Thus the stage was set for the invention of the motion picture.
The birth of celebrity is, of course, most closely tied to the
motion picture industry, and its embrace by a public eager to be
entertained. Paying a penny, or later a nickel, audiences from cities to
small towns could gather in a darkened movie theatre, an intimate
setting in which they could escape the reality of their daily lives and
become part of a fantasy. But how was this different from live theatre?
In part, movie houses existed all over America, and so hundreds of
thousands of people had the opportunity to see the same actor or
actress perform. Furthermore, films were churned out at a phenome-
nal rate, thus moviegoers could enjoy a particular performer in a
dozen or more pictures a year. This engendered a new kind of
identification with performers—a sense of knowing them. Addition-
ally, Schickel cites the influence of a cinematic innovation by director
D. W. Griffith: the close-up, which had ‘‘the effect of isolating the
actor in the sequence, separating him or her from the rest of the
ensemble for close individual scrutiny by the audience. To some
immeasurable degree, attention is directed away from the role being
played, the overall story being told. It is focused instead on the reality
of the individual playing the part.’’ The intimacy, immediacy, and
constancy of movies all fostered an environment ripe for celebrity.
Audiences clamored to know more about their favorite actors
and actresses, and a new kind of public personality was born—one
whose success was not measured by birth, wealth, heroism, intelli-
gence, or achievement. The fledgling movie studios quickly grasped
the power of these audiences to make or break them, and they
responded by putting together a publicity machine that would keep
the public inundated with information about their favorite performers.
From studio publicists to gossip columnists, the movie industry was
unafraid to promote itself and its product, even if it meant making
private lives totally public. But the effect was electrifying. Almost
overnight, fame had ceased to be sole property of the moneyed elite.
Movie stars, America believed, might be young, beautiful, even rich,
but otherwise they were no different from you or me. In Hollywood,
where most of the movie studios were run by Jewish immigrants,
where new stars were discovered at soda fountains, where it didn’t
matter where you came from or what your father did, anyone could
become rich or famous. This new fame carried with it the most basic
American promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It
proved the system worked. Whatever the reality might be of the daily
lives of Americans, Hollywood celebrities proved that, with a lit-
tle luck, good timing, and a modicum of talent, anyone could
become somebody.
The Hollywood celebrity factory churned out stars from the very
beginning. In silent pictures, Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino,
and Greta Garbo captured America’s imagination. But when sound
came to pictures, many silent stars faded into obscurity, betrayed by
squeaky voices, stutters, or Brooklyn accents. In their place were new
stars, and more of them, now that they could talk. During the Golden
Age of Hollywood, the most famous were the handsome leading men
such as Robert Taylor, Gary Cooper, and Cary Grant, and beautiful
leading ladies such as Vivien Leigh, Ava Gardner, and Elizabeth
Taylor. But Hollywood had room for more than beauty—there were
dancers such as Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, singers such as Judy
Garland and Bing Crosby, funny men such as Bob Hope and Danny
Kaye, villains such as Edward G. Robinson, horror stars such as Boris
Karloff, starlets such as Betty Grable, cowboys such as Gene Autry.
The beauty of celebrity was that it seemed to have no boundaries. You
could create your own niche. As Braudy wrote: ‘‘Fame had ceased to
be the possession of particular individuals or classes and had become
instead a potential attribute of every human being that needed only to
be brought out in the open for all to applaud its presence.’’
With the invention of television, the pervasiveness and power of
celebrity grew. By bringing billions of images into America’s homes,
thousands of new faces to be ‘‘known,’’ celebrity achieved a new
intimacy. And with the decline of the studio system, movie stars
began to seem more and more like ‘‘regular people.’’ If the stars of the
CELEBRITY CARICATUREENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
465
Golden Age of Hollywood had been America’s ‘‘royalty,’’ now no
such pretensions existed. From the mumbling Marlon Brando to the
toothy Tom Cruise, the stars of the new Hollywood seemed to expand
the promise of celebrity to include everyone.
Celebrity, of course, did not remain the sole property of Holly-
wood. During the Roaring Twenties, Americans experienced a period
of prosperity unlike any that had existed in the nation’s 150-year
history. With new wealth and new leisure time, Americans not only
flocked to the movies, they went to baseball games and boxing
matches, and there they found new heroes. Babe Ruth became an icon
whose extraordinary popularity would pave the way for such future
superstars as Joe DiMaggio and Michael Jordan. During the 1920s,
however, Ruth’s popularity would be rivaled by only one other man, a
hero from a new field—aviation. When Charles Lindbergh became
the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, he was hailed as
a national savior. America’s hunger for celebrity seemed unquenchable
as each new star seemed a new fulfillment of a country’s promise, of
the American Dream.
The history of the twentieth century is the history of the growing
influence of celebrity. No area of American society has remained
untouched. The entertainment industry is no longer confined to
Hollywood. Sports, music, art, literature, and even politics have
embraced the celebrity ethos in order to succeed. It has been said that
if Franklin Delano Roosevelt—a man in a wheelchair—were to run
for president today, he would not be elected. We live in a society
bounded and defined by the power of images, by the rules of celebrity.
Dwight D. Eisenhower hired former matinee idol Robert Montgom-
ery to be his consultant on television and media presentations. John F.
Kennedy, an Irish Catholic, won the presidency because he looked
like a movie star and he knew how to use the media, unlike Richard
Nixon, who dripped with sweat and seemed uncomfortable on cam-
era. Ronald Reagan, a former actor with little political ability, used his
extensive media savvy to become a two-term president. Today, a
politician cannot even be considered a presidential hopeful unless he
has what it takes to be a celebrity. Visual appearance and the ability to
manipulate the press are essential to becoming our chief of state,
political knowledge and leadership come second.
Yet the more pervasive celebrity has become, the more it is
decried, particularly by celebrities themselves, who claim that they
have been stripped of their privacy. As Braudy describes this paradox:
‘‘Fame is desired because it is the ultimate justification, yet it is hated
because it brings with it unwanted focus as well, depersonalizing as
much as individualizing.’’ The greater the need for audience approv-
al, the more powerful the audience—and thus the media—has be-
come. With the death of Princess Diana, an outcry for privacy was
heard from the celebrity community and blame was cast on the media,
even as hundreds of thousands of people poured into London to pay
tribute to the ‘‘People’s Princess’’ and millions mourned her death on
television around the globe. Celebrity’s snare is subtle—even as the
public itself vilifies the press, it craves more. And even as celebrities
seek to put limits on their responsibilities to their audience, they are,
in fact, public servants.
By the late twentieth century, celebrity has become so ubiqui-
tous that visibility has become a goal in itself. Tocqueville’s predic-
tion has come true. Americans no longer seem to aspire to greatness.
They aspire to be seen. John Lahr wrote: ‘‘The famous, who make a
myth of accomplishment, become pseudo-events, turning the public
gaze from the real to the ideal.... Fame is America’s Faustian
bargain: a passport to the good life which trivializes human endeav-
or.’’ But despite the deleterious effects of celebrity, it continues to
define the American social order. After all, as Mae West once said,
‘‘It is better to be looked over than overlooked.’’
—Victoria Price
F
URTHER READING:
Boorstin, Daniel. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America.
New York, Vantage Books, 1987.
Braudy, Leo. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History. New
York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986.
Brownstein, Ronald. The Power and the Glitter: The Hollywood-
Washington Connection. New York, Pantheon Books, 1990.
De Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. J. P. Mayer, editor.
New York, Harper Perennial, 1988.
Gabler, Neal. Walter Winchell: Gossip, Power, and the Culture of
Celebrity. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.
Gamson, Joshua. Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary Ameri-
ca. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1994.
Lahr, John. ‘‘Notes on Fame.’’ Harper’s. January 1978, 77-80.
Schickel, Richard. Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity.
Garden City, Doubleday, 1985.
Celebrity Caricature
Celebrity caricature in America has become a popular twentieth-
century permutation of the longstanding art of caricature—the distor-
tion of the face or figure for satiric purposes—which claims an
extensive tradition in Western art. For centuries, comically exaggerat-
ed portrayals have served the purpose of ridicule and protest, probing
beneath outward appearances to expose hidden, disreputable charac-
ter traits. In the early twentieth century, however, American caricaturists
based in New York City deployed a fresh approach, inventing a new
form of popular portraiture. They chose for their subjects the colorful
rather than the corrupt personalities of the day, reflecting the preoccu-
pation with mass media-generated fame. During the height of its
vogue between the two World Wars, celebrity caricature permeated
the press, leaving the confines of the editorial cartoon to flourish on
the newspaper’s entertainment pages, at the head of a syndicated
column, on a magazine cover, or color frontispiece. Distorted faces
appeared on café walls, silk dresses, and cigarette cases; Ralph
Barton’s caricature theater curtain depicting a first-night audience
caused a sensation in 1922. Caricaturists did not attempt to editorial-
ize or criticize in such images. ‘‘It is not the caricaturist’s business to
be penetrating,’’ Barton insisted, ‘‘it is his job to put down the figure a
man cuts before his fellows in his attempt to conceal the writhings of
his soul.’’ These artists highlighted the public persona rather than
probing beneath it, reconstructing its exaggerated components with a
heightened sense of style and wit. Mocking the celebrity system,
caricature provided a counterbalance to unrestrained publicity.
American caricaturists sought a modern look, derived from
European art, to express a contemporary urbanity. They departed
from comic conventions, selectively borrowing from the radical art
movements of the day. Like advertisers, they began to simplify,
elongate, geometricize, and fragment their figural forms. Eventually,
CELEBRITY CARICATURE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
466
Alfred Hitchcock in profile.
their stylish mockery would be fueled by the abstractions, collage
techniques, color dissonances, and unexpected conflations of Cub-
ism, Fauvism, and Surrealism. Humor and a recognizable face made
modernist stylization palatable. Artist and critic Carlo de Fornaro,
arriving in New York around 1898, was the first to advocate a Parisian
style of caricature that was closely related to French poster art. His
india ink newspaper caricatures combined an art nouveau elongation
of the figure with a bold simplification of form. Caricaturist Al Frueh
abbreviated images of theatrical figures into quintessential summa-
ries of their characteristics. Critics marveled at Frueh’s ability to
evoke a personality with a minimum of lines, and Alfred Stieglitz, the
acknowledged ringleader of the New York avant-garde before World
War I, exhibited his drawings in 1912.
Mexican-born artist Marius de Zayas’s approach to caricature
especially intrigued Stieglitz, who mounted three exhibitions of his
work. De Zayas drew dark, atmospheric charcoal portraits suggestive
of pictorialist photographs and enigmatic symbolist drawings. Influ-
enced by Picasso, he even experimented with ‘‘abstract caricature,’’ a
radical departure from visual realism. Many critics admired the
aesthetic sophistication of this updated art form. ‘‘Between mod-
ern caricature and modern ‘straight’ portraiture,’’ the New York
A caricature of Alfred Hitchcock in profile.
World’s Henry Tyrrell wrote, ‘‘there is only a thin and vague line
of demarcation.’’
Ties to the avant-garde raised the prestige of caricature and
encouraged its use in such ‘‘smart’’ magazines of the post war era as
Life, Judge, Vanity Fair, and the New Yorker. Caricature reflected a
new strain of light, irreverent parody that pervaded the Broadway
stage, the vaudeville circuit, Tin Pan Alley, magazine verses, newspa-
per columns, and the writings of the Algonquin Round Table wits. In
the early 1920s, Vanity Fair, a leading proponent of this art, recruited
the young Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias to draw portraits of café
society luminaries. His powerful ink line lent an iconic, monumental
quality to his figures. ‘‘They are bald and crude and devoid of
nonsense,’’ Ralph Barton wrote, ‘‘like a mountain or a baby.’’
Advances in color printing gave caricature an additional appeal in the
1930s. Will Cotton provided portraits in bright pastels, employing
color as a comic weapon. Artist Paolo Garretto used collage, airbrushed
gouache, and a crisp Art Deco stylization to create vivid visual effects.
The best artists in the increasingly crowded field honed their
clever deformations with a distinctive style. William Auerbach-Levy
eliminated details and distilled shapes into logo-like faces that were
printed on stationery and book jackets. Covarrubias, working in
CEMETERIESENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
467
watercolor, lampooned the leveling nature of celebrity. Visual con-
trasts of such opposite personalities as Martha Graham and fan dancer
Sally Rand, in his famous ‘‘Impossible Interviews’’ series, were
undermined by the commonality of fame. Few could evoke the
dynamic movement of performance as well as Al Hirschfeld, whose
swooping curves and sharp angles captured in mid-step the familiar
look of a dancer or actor.
Caricature exploited the appetite for modern celebrity whetted
by the developing mass media. The nature of fame had changed, and
notability was no longer tied to traditional areas of accomplishment.
As Vanity Fair explained, caricature subjects were selected ‘‘because
of their great interest as personalities.’’ Information about the famous
became increasingly standardized: publicity photographs, syndicated
stories, records, films, and news clips consolidated the celebrity
image. Caricature consistently reflected the narrow, shallow exag-
gerations that the mass media dispensed. The famous learned to
appreciate the compliment. H.L. Mencken wrote to one artist that he
liked his caricature: ‘‘It is grotesque and yet it does justice to my
underlying beauty.’’ Emily Post, unflatteringly portrayed in a maga-
zine, thanked the editor for the ‘‘delicious publicity.’’
The celebrity caricature fad peaked in the 1920s and 1930s. The
trend even inspired star-studded animated cartoons, and collectible
dolls, masks, and puppets of film idols. By mid-century, it was on the
wane. The Depression years and advent of World War II demanded
sharper satiric voices. And, although magazines of the 1940s still
published caricature, editors turned increasingly to photography.
Influenced by changes in art, humor, literature, and fame in an age of
television, caricature evolved into new forms and specialized niches.
In its heyday, caricature helped people adapt to change, alleviating the
shock of modern art, leveling high and low cultural disparities, and
mocking the new celebrity industry. Furthermore, in the celebrity-
crazed press of the late twentieth century, witty, personality-based
celebrity caricature seemed to be making a come-back.
—Wendy Wick Reaves
F
URTHER READING:
Auerbach-Levy, William. Is That Me? A Book about Caricature.
New York, Watson-Guptill, 1947.
Barton, Ralph. ‘‘It Is to Laugh.’’ New York Herald Tribune. October
25, 1925.
Bruhn, Thomas P. The Art of Al Frueh. Storrs, Connecticut, William
Benton Museum of Art, 1983.
Hirschfeld, Al. The World of Hirschfeld. New York, Harry
Abrams, 1970.
Hyland, Douglas. Marius de Zayas: Conjuror of Souls. Lawrence,
Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, 1981.
Kellner, Bruce. The Last Dandy: Ralph Barton, American Artist,
1891-1931. Columbia, University of Missouri Press, 1991.
Reaves, Wendy Wick. Celebrity Caricature in America. New Haven,
Yale University Press, 1998.
Reilly, Bernard F., Jr. ‘‘Miguel Covarrubias: An Introduction to His
Caricatures.’’ In Miguel Covarrubias Caricatures. Washington,
D.C., Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985, 23-38.
Updike, John. ‘‘A Critic at Large: A Case of Melancholia.’’ New
Yorker. February 20, 1989, 112-120.
Williams, Adriana. Covarrubias. Austin, University of Texas
Press, 1994.
Wright, Willard Huntington. ‘‘America and Caricature.’’ Vanity
Fair. July 1922, 54-55.
Cemeteries
Cemeteries reflect society’s interpretation of the continuing
personhood of the dead. Colonial America’s small rural family
graveyards and churchyard burial grounds were an integral part of the
community of the living, crowded with tombstones bearing the
picturesque iconography of winged skulls, hourglasses, and soul-
effigies, and inscriptions ranging from the taciturn to the talkative—
some with scant facts of name, age, and date of death, others offering
thumbnail biographies, unusual circumstances of decease (‘‘They
froze to death returning from a visit’’), homilies in verse (‘‘As I am
now, so you shall be, / Remember death and follow me’’), and even
the occasional dry one-liner (‘‘I expected this, but not so soon’’).
In the nineteenth century, alarmed by public health problems
associated with increasing industrial urbanization, the rising medical
profession pressed for new cemeteries on the outskirts of towns,
where the buried bodies could not pollute nearby wells and where any
‘‘noxious exhalations’’ thought to cause disease would be dissipated
in the fresh suburban air. These new ‘‘garden cemeteries’’ would also
function as places to which the inhabitants of the teeming cities could
go for recreation and the inspiration of the beauty of nature.
First of the new genre was Mount Auburn Cemetery, picturesquely
sited on a bend in the Charles River between the cities of Boston and
Cambridge. Three years in the making, with carriage paths and artful
landscaping (thanks to the collaboration of the Massachusetts Horti-
cultural Society), it opened in 1831 to enthusiastic reviews and was
soon followed by Mount Hope in Bangor, Maine; Laurel Hill in
Philadelphia; Spring Grove in Cincinnati; Graceland in Chicago;
Allegheny County Cemetery in Pittsburgh; and the battlefield burial
ground at Gettysburg. By the end of the 1800s there were nearly two
hundred garden cemeteries in America.
The boom in street-railway construction in the 1870s made the
outlying cemeteries readily accessible to the public for day-trips and
picnics. In several cities the departed could ride the rails to the
cemetery, too. (The United Railways and Electric Company of
Baltimore owned the ‘‘Dolores,’’ a funeral car with seats for thirty-
two plus a compartment for the casket. Philadelphia had a streetcar
hearse as well, the ‘‘Hillside.’’) But the streetcar revolution also
fueled suburban development of the open spaces surrounding the
cities of the dead, even as parks for the living began to compete for the
shrinking acreage of undeveloped land. (Frederick Law Olmsted,
while designing New York’s Central Park, completed just after the
Civil War, is reported to have said: ‘‘They’re not going to bury
anyone in this one.’’)
With the passing of the Victorian age and the splitting off of
parks from cemeteries, cemetery management began to stress effi-
ciency and profitability. A pioneer of this new approach was Dr.
Hubert Eaton, a former mine owner who bought a down-at-heels
graveyard called Forest Lawn in Glendale, California, in 1917, and
over the next four decades metamorphosed it into a flagship of
twentieth-century cemetery design and culture with hundreds of miles
of underground piping for sprinklers and flat bronze markers in place
of headstones (allowing the trimming of vast areas by rotary-blade
CENTRAL PARK ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
468
machines and of maintenance costs by as much as 75 percent). Area
themes included ‘‘Babyland’’ and ‘‘Wee Kirk o’ the Heather,’’
accented by sculptures such as Duck Frog and the occasional
classical reproduction.
While not every memorial park could aspire to be a Forest Lawn,
by the end of World War II, private cemetery management had
become a thriving industry with its own trade journals—such as
American Cemetery, Cemeterian, and Concept: The Journal of Crea-
tive Ideas for Cemeteries—and a ready target for both the biting satire
of Evelyn Waugh’s 1948 novel The Loved One and the merciless
investigative reporting of Jessica Mitford’s 1963 exposé, The Ameri-
can Way of Death.
Attitudes toward death itself were changing as well. The
medicalization of dying, with its removal from home to hospital,
helped to transform the awe-inspiring last event of the human life
cycle into a brutal, even trivial fact. Whether from denial or mere
pragmatism, two-thirds of the students polled at three universities
said they would favor cremation, while a rise in the number of
anatomical donors prompted medical schools in the greater Boston
area to begin sharing excess cadavers with one another whenever one
school had a surplus.
Public policy also took an increasingly utilitarian tack. In 1972,
ninety years after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the nonprofit status
of cemeteries owing to their ‘‘pious and public purpose,’’ the Depart-
ment of Housing and Urban Development declared that burial was a
marginal land use and proposed establishing cemeteries under elevat-
ed highways, in former city-dump landfills, or on acreage subject to
airport runway noise.
‘‘After thirty years a grave gets cold,’’ one mausoleum builder
ruefully told cemetery historian Kenneth T. Jackson, who noted the
high mobility of Americans near the end of the twentieth century and
the fact that older cemeteries ‘‘run out of space, and few people still
alive remember anyone buried there.’’ As individual markers and
statuary fell into disrepair or were vandalized, indifferently main-
tained graveyards became less and less attractive places—ironically
turning again into recreational areas, but now for persons and activi-
ties unwelcome in the public parks.
Notable exceptions to this trend are sites where the famous are
buried, such as the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and of President
Kennedy in Arlington National Cemetery, or Elvis Presley’s grave
site at his Graceland mansion in Memphis, which continue to draw
thousands of pilgrims every year.
—Nick Humez
F
URTHER READING:
Allen, Francis D., compiler. Documents and Facts, Showing the Fatal
Effects of Interment in Populous Cities. New York, F. D. Al-
len, 1822.
Drewes, Donald W. Cemetery Land Planning. Pittsburgh, Matthews
Memorial Bronze, 1964.
Jackson, Kenneth T. Silent Cities: The Evolution of the American
Cemetery. New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 1989.
Klupar, G. J. Modern Cemetery Management. Hillside, Catholic
Cemeteries of the Archdiocese of Chicago, 1962.
Linden-Ward, Blanche. Silent City on a Hill: Landscapes of Memory
and Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery. Columbus, Ohio State
University Press, 1989.
Miller, John Anderson. Fares, Please! A Popular History of Trolleys,
Horsecars, Streetcars, Buses, Elevateds, and Subways. New York,
Dover, 1960.
Mitford, Jessica. The American Way of Death. New York, Simon and
Schuster, 1963.
Shomon, Joseph James. Crosses in the Wind. New York, Stratford
House, 1947.
Waugh, Evelyn. The Loved One. Boston, Little, Brown and Compa-
ny, 1948.
Weed, Howard Evarts. Modern Park Cemeteries. Chicago, R. J.
Haight, 1912.
Central Park
The first major public example of landscape architecture, Man-
hattan’s Central Park remains the greatest illustration of the American
park, a tradition that would become part of nearly every community
following the 1860s. This grand park offers a facility for recreation
and peaceful contemplation, a solution to the enduring American
search for a ‘‘happy medium’’ between the natural environment and
human civilization.
Initially, the construction of parks responded to utilitarian im-
pulses: feelings began to develop in the early 1800s that some urban
areas were becoming difficult places in which to reside. Disease and
grime were common attributes attached to large towns and cities. Of
particular concern, many population centers possessed insufficient
interment facilities within churchyards. The first drive for parks
began with this need for new cemeteries. The ‘‘rural cemetery’’
movement began in 1831 with the construction of Mount Auburn
outside of Boston. Soon, many communities possessed their own
sprawling, green burial areas on the outskirts of town.
From this point, a new breed of American landscape architect
beat the path toward Central Park. Andrew Jackson Downing de-
signed many rural cemeteries, but more importantly, he popularized
and disseminated a new American ‘‘taste’’ that placed manicured
landscapes around the finest homes. Based out of the Hudson River
region and operating among its affluent landowners, Downing de-
signed landscapes that brought the aesthetic of the rural cemetery to
the wealthy home. His designs inspired the suburban revolution in
American living. Downing became a public figure prior to his
untimely death in 1852 through the publication of Horticulturalist
magazine as well as various books, the initial designs for the Mall in
Washington, D.C., and, finally, his call for a central area of repose in
the growing city on Manhattan Island.
Wealthy New Yorkers soon seized Downing’s call for a ‘‘central
park.’’ This landscaped, public park would offer their own families an
attractive setting for carriage rides and provide working-class New
Yorkers with a healthy alternative to the saloon. After three years of
debate over the park site and cost, the state legislature authorized the
city to acquire land for a park in 1853. Swamps and bluffs punctuated
by rocky outcroppings made the land between 5th and 8th avenues
and 59th and 106th streets undesirable for private development. The
extension of the boundaries to 110th Street in 1863 brought the park to
its current 843 acres. However, the selected area was not empty: 1,600
poor residents, including Irish pig farmers and German gardeners,
lived in shanties on the site; Seneca Village, at 8th Avenue and 82nd