Walking in the University District of Seattle one evening during the period when I was engaged in a doctoral program at the University of Washington, my wife and I noted a billboard photo of Marilyn Monroe, a visual image that violated our perception of social propriety. My wife asked me what would be my prediction about the future of Marilyn Monroe. I blurted out that I believed she would sicken and die before her time. I surprise myself and those who know about my off hand prognostications about some celebrities, celebrities who violate social balances and offer unsatisfactory models to society. I am not comfortable with my feelings about these persons, and try to keep my dark views about the flaunting of life’s high values to myself, except in serious discussions related to search for truth about virtue. I favor positive views. This writing is the first I have broached the matter to anyone, to write to discover if my off-hand thoughts might unravel on these multiple tragedies of well-known personalities, especially from entertainment.
Even as a child, I was impressed by the early deaths of persons who were celebrities, especially out of Hollywood, persons like Rudolph Valentino, Lupe Velez and Jean Harlow. At death, Harlow was in her mid-twenties. The list of sorrows could be made long including Fatty Arbuckle, Errol Flynn, Rock Hudson, Liberace, Janice Joplin, and many others. I was discussing the life and work of Ernest Hemingway, and incurred a strong negative response of a student who had elevated Hemingway to literary deity, when I said that the writer seemed to possess seeds of a death factor in him. Several days later the news was front page with the story of the grisly suicide of Hemingway. Today I am prompted to write about the death of Anna Nicole Smith in February, 2007, at the age of 39 years. She was a school drop-out, a teen aged mother, and a drug addict early on. Her mother attributed her demise to drugs. At least two men claimed paternity for her newborn child. Neither claimant was her husband. She earned her first extensive celebrity by becoming a Playboy Bunny and marriage to a gentleman, old enough to be her great-grandfather. He died weeks after the marriage and the rights to his enormous wealth were reviewed in the courts. She became the center of an ill-advised television series that made her into an airhead. During this last she was getting over the over-dosed drug death of her twenty-years-old son.
It is well known that persons with even lesser moral and social values have lived long lives, and were attended with grief at their funerals. We do not seek a scientific poll. Even so, if a similar story were told for any level of social and personal life, the story becomes unattractive. The point is made that sowing to the wind reaps the whirlwind whether persons are known or unknown. The celebrity tragedy may underline the situation in all our lives. One ought to go into the sunset with the confidence that there is a legacy of good, a proper character, a grace that honors the humble, and awareness that the celebrity world offers little to immortality. The world needs awareness that celebrity is no recommendation of mankind to God. Celebrity serves purpose if celebrity has achievement generating it. Celebrity is offered by the public, so may say more about the person celebrating than the person celebrated. The public makes celebrities, even if some celebrities seek that recognition. Humility would serve them better as persons, so that celebrity becomes an influence for something useful to society. Every person is a model of something for good or ill and that fact ought to have something to do in the way each lives, and finds satisfaction with life. It is in the model of one’s life that legacy of value and virtue is found. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020