The election of Culifornia’s Gropenfuhrer has spawned many articles about the
meet-cute of fame and power, most recently Anthony Lane’s Talk of the Town piece, “Poll Stars,” in this week’s New Yorker, and Todd
Purdom’s Week in Review piece, “Government by Celebrity …,” in Sunday’s New
York Times. As Der Gropenfuhrer settles into Sacramento, we’re bound to
see many more like them. But the ur-text of that meet-cute is a very funny 1992 British
television series, “Fame in the 20th century,” later rebroadcast by PBS, which is unlikely to be
improved upon for the wisdom it offers.
One thing you learn from it, besides such pregnant details as
Hitler’s theatrically clever idea “to enter a rally always from the rear of the
auditorium, so that he appeared to emerge from among the people as the expression of their
desires, the embodiment of their dreams about a better fate,” is how far Uncle Sam has come since
the days when:
Power was in Washington and fame was in Hollywood. The only fully
equipped American superman was in the movies: Tarzan of the Apes, [whose] ape-call was based
on a Tyrolean yodel. If Johnny Weissmuller, like his parents, had been born in Germany, he would
have provided Hitler with a stunning example of what the master race looked like with its
clothes off. But Weissmuller was raised in America and got the job of Tarzan instead. …
Weissmuller had a face off the front porch of the Parthenon. He was a natural to
play king of the jungle. In one low-budget movie after another he fought to gain the upper hand
over Tarzan’s deadly enemy — the dialogue. … This was where dreams of omnipotence belonged:
in dreamland. The king of the jungle was a sportsman turned actor and the jungle he was king of
was a hundred yards across at its widest point. Everybody was enchanted and nobody was fooled
…
In Europe, the eyebrows of the highbrows were raised in derision at America’s culture of
daydreams. But there was one big advantage in confining daydreams to culture. It kept them out
of politics.
The advantage has long since disappeared. If there were any question of
that, Der Gropenfuhrer will doubtless try his mighty best to make sure it has
vanished forever. But to wish us back to the dreamland days of Johnny Weissmuller and the
Tarzan era, as though they were a model of sanity, is too ridiculous to contemplate. Has anybody
got a better idea?
