Getting By With a Lot of Hype, and Their Friends

It’s a bit of a stretch to equate several period art exhibits in Los Angeles with the adventures of fame and celebrityhood in today’s 24-hour high-tech media. Yet the connection is too close to ignore.

At the J. Paul Getty Museum is “Nadar/Warhol: Paris/New York,” which finds parallel trends in the portrait photography of the Frenchman Nadar (1820-1910) and American painter Andy Warhol (1928-1987).

Much like media stars of today, Nadar and Warhol used their cameras at once to promote their own reputations and those of their celebrity subjects in a coalescing of interests in which each participant gains from the other.

Also at the Getty is “A Passion for Performance: Sarah Siddons and Her Portraitists,” its subject a famous 18th century actress who was known as the “queen of tragedy.”

And less publicly, was the empress of hype. Although reputedly so gifted at stagecraft that audiences wept aloud at her performances, Siddons earned her superstardom also with a little help from her friends, the artists who painted her.

In the kind of symbiosis that’s become routine in the shadow of a new millennium, moreover, some of these guys got more famous themselves just by depicting and glorifying Siddons on canvas. One of them, William Hamilton, painted her as about 9 feet tall in hopes of elevating his own stature as an artist, Robyn Asleson, who curated the Getty exhibit, said in a talk there Thursday. And another, Thomas Lawrence, “rode her coattails to fame,” Asleson said.

The centerpiece painting here, “Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse” by Sir Joshua Reynolds, is on loan from the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens. Its own exhibit is titled “Cultivating Celebrity: Portraiture as Publicity in the Career of Sarah Siddons.”

That about says it, for when it comes to self promotion, she appears to have been the Madonna of her day. The self-serving devices employed by Siddons--whose death in 1831 predated the arrival of the modern camera by eight years--were a precursor to the intense hype and spin control that today’s TV seems at times almost to welcome, if not worship.

Siddons “was constantly manipulating her public image and refining it with the portrait artists of the day,” Asleson said. In addition, she handed out engravings of herself, said Asleson, the way contemporary stars do 8-by-10 glossies.

Today, Siddons would have her publicists plant flattering items about her in the media and would get herself booked on TV with fellow celebrities the likes of Barbara Walters, Katie Couric and Larry King to advertise her Lady MacBeth. Just as Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo spent last week visiting every talk show on the planet to promote “The Thomas Crown Affair.” No, scratch that. Siddons wouldn’t have to call them. They’d be calling her.

All these years later, in other words, only the method of brushwork has changed, not the agenda. And art and celebrity intersect in some of these Siddons paintings much as media and celebrity do today.

What a buzz in some circles last month, for example, when ABC News star Diane Sawyer did not participate in early coverage of the demise of John F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife and her sister. Of all the nerve.

In case you don’t recall the Kennedy story, by the way, it was the one we were obsessed about before Hillary Clinton gave Talk magazine the skinny about why her husband fooled around. Hillary Blabs to Talk About Bill is an obsession du jour that will linger until something juicier arrives.

On Friday, for example, the 24-hour news network, MSNBC, welcomed a handwriting expert who examined the penmanship of the famous and controversial, beginning with that of President Clinton and the first lady. His analysis revealed her to be someone a guy would be comfortable with “everywhere but in the bedroom.”

That sizzling scoop came about 10 minutes before the 24-hour Fox News Channel exhumed “Who Killed JonBenet?” You know, the unsolved murder of JonBenet Ramsey, the Colorado pit stop we were obsessed about en route to our obsession with the killings a few miles up the road at Columbine High School.

Traveling back to Sawyer, though.

The “Good Morning America” co-anchor was absent for two days after Kennedy’s small plane went down last month, killing all aboard. As the rumors went initially, Sawyer had begged off taking part in ABC’s early coverage, saying she was too distraught because she and her husband, director Mike Nichols, were friends of the Kennedys. She later denied that was the reason, telling a gathering of TV critics in Los Angeles that she went missing, with permission, because of “personal obligations.”

Well, whatever. Although a few competitors sniped at her anonymously over this, Sawyer’s decision to initially stay out of it was ABC’s problem, not America’s.

A wider issue, of course, is the incestuous linkage between star journalists and those whom they cover, just as the interests of Sarah Siddons’ portraitists were intricately intertwined with those of their subject.

The stakes are higher now. And the more vast the media reach, the greater the potential for conflicts of interest, such as Christiane Amanpour, who led CNN’s foreign coverage of the conflict between Serbs and ethnic Albanians over Kosovo, being married to James Rubin, spokesman for a State Department whose policy clearly favored the Albanians.

That’s dangerous. As is the increasing tendency of celebrity journalists to socialize and hang out with newsmakers whose stories they may be called on to report. Not that ABC News seems to care.

It was Walters, after all, who accompanied inaugural committee chairman Sen. John Warner (R-Va.) in his limo to the White House prior to Clinton’s 1997 swearing in. And was the inaugural committee chairman’s guest in the VIP area of the podium. And joined him in the official greeting line for the post-inaugural luncheon. And sat at the head table with him near President Clinton and Vice President Gore.

Fame at the top: A crushing burden, but somebody’s got to wield it.