Fair Game?

HERE IS THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS gone tabloid. Here is the American Church of Celebrity Trauma and Redemption. Joseph Campbell should be alive to explore its mysteries.

The dramas are curiously ritualistic and similar to one another. A celebrity wanders in the shadow world of Dysfunction: amid drugs or booze or binge eating. Or else in Denial of something, of incest, say, or child abuse, or another shameful secret. This is the Exemplary Ordeal. Celebrity Hits Bottom (descent into underworld). Then stumbles halfway up, to Betty Ford or some equivalent purgatorial rehab. At last, fallen angel reascends to the upper air, finds new life (often new mate as well, or else peace with the truth that, hey, it’s O.K. to be alone). The rebirth is celebrated on the cover of PEOPLE: Drew Barrymore, Richard Pryor, Kitty Dukakis, Roseanne Arnold, all the newly clear-eyed. After the exorcism of devils, resurrection and hugs. “I’ve got my life together now, Barbara. I’m more centered.”

In a forlorn way, a sort of collective moral life of the nation gets enacted through the ordeal stories. They dramatize the problem. They dramatize the resolution. Here is a sample Rashomon of rape — Willie Smith’s accuser pacing the lawn with Archpriestess Diane. Here is Mike Tyson. Here is life and death itself: poor Michael Landon slowly dying in full view of the congregation of Johnny Carson and PEOPLE.

Arthur Ashe is not Michael Landon. He did not wish to appear in an Exemplary Ordeal. Ashe has AIDS — a fact that the public knows now because the Press (in this case a reporter and an editor from USA Today) reached into the most private precinct of his life (inside his body itself) and forced him to reveal his disease to millions of strangers. Ashe and his wife Jeanne have a five-year-old daughter. The girl was entitled to privacy and to tenderness in how she would be told, and when.

Was it necessary to force the story out? Was some redeeming purpose served? Does Ashe’s ordeal usefully warn potential AIDS victims about the all-but- vanished danger of blood transfusions, or promote collective human sympathy and solidarity with those who already have AIDS?

Irrelevant. There was no public need to know, or right to know. Everyone is not fair game to be dragged onstage for involuntary exposure. Does AIDS make | Ashe, or anyone, public property? As Ashe said, he is neither a political candidate nor a businessman beholden to stockholders. That Arthur Ashe is a “public figure” whom people recognize as he walks down the street is precisely the best argument for any decent human being’s not informing the whole world that the man has AIDS.

If Ashe had had leukemia, would reporter and editor have published the story? Maybe, in one paragraph. But not if Ashe had asked them not to. AIDS made it different. Irresistible. Juicy gossip. Red meat. When reporters pick up that scent, they are off the leash and baying through the woods. The Ashe affair makes a strong case for media loathing.

Ashe acquiesced to the inevitable. He made the TV rounds in the days after his AIDS announcement, and he kept his dignity — not easy in an exercise in which the line between richly cartooned gossip and basic responsible journalism (who-what-when-where-how) all but dissolves. Television has a genius for the intimacies of personal-redemption chat. It formalizes the primitive newspaper gossip column into a ceremony and a sacrament. The Archpriestess Barbara Walters comes with producer and camera crew to hear confession. She is empowered to grant absolution on behalf of the American people, playing first Inquisitor, then Fairy Godmother in the space of a segment. There are other clergy: the Archpriestess Diane Sawyer, the Archpriestess Oprah Winfrey. Credible Cardinal of High Policy and Emergency Confessions (” . . . better come clean, call Nightline”) is Ted Koppel. Then there is His Grace Phil Donahue, the barking, mike-ready Bishop of Prurience, whose vestment for one of his shows was actually a dress.

The premise holds that getting at the truth (a candidate’s sex life, an actor’s drug addiction, Elizabeth Taylor’s Hundred Years’ War against fat) is also riveting entertainment. The pseudo-religious purgatorial ordeals of the rich and famous are worth millions. In some ways, such spectacles are what Americans have instead of tradition or moral community.

Are these vivid messes harmless? Is it possible that these agonistics serve a higher purpose? Maybe. One of the motifs of American life in the late 20th century is a sad, destructive disconnection. The fraying of family and community is visible in homelessness and granny dumping and children shooting other children without even attaching much importance to the act. It is evident this year in Americans’ disgusted alienation from the presidential campaign.

“Real life” ordeals are more interesting today, and more bizarre, than anyone’s fiction. But the phenomenon of ritual celebrity ordeal seems to foul up the judgment of journalists.

If a star volunteers, out of vanity or some other need, to tell all, the story may be interesting, even helpful to others. Arthur Ashe did not volunteer. He did not invite the world in. A pattern of revelation that routinely puts the most intimate details on public display has nearly obliterated an appreciation of both the right of privacy and the obligations of kindness.