Are they the equivalent of the modern day morality plays that allow us 'normal mortals' to experience glamour, notoriety, success and wealth in a vacarious fashion?
It would seem so. And, within that context, it is a harmless diversion that allows us to strike up a conversation with colleagues at work - "Poor Sadie Frost, isn't Jude Law a cad?"
But this is where the waters become deeper and murkier. These are not characters in a soap opera - "How could Brooke have had her daughter's husband's baby?" - they are real people with real children with real lives to screw up.
Like Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily (if the name alone isn't enough), for instance.
The daughter of self-absorbed Michael Hutchence and the self-deluded Paula Yates, now orphaned, has handicaps against having a normal, happy fulfilled life:
1. She was the child of 'celebrity'
2. Drug-fuelled and sex obsessed parents no less
Doubt me? Look at the hellish childhood of sometime lesbian and recovering druggie Drew Barrymore.
Though guilty of reading the piece about Yates' vulture-like friends tearing another mouthful from the corpse of 'celebrity' in a new book on the tragic life and death of Yates, I will draw the line at buying the tome.
Oh poor Paula, doing so well almost three years after the accidental autoerotic-asphixated death of Hutchence, has one last bender on heroin and expires.
Or as Belina Brewin (Paula Yates' best friend) puts it in her book (Trouble Brewin - clever, ain't it):
The coroner concluded that had Paula been a habitual drug user, the amount of heroin found in her system would not have been fatal. She had been drug-free for two years; but that night she foolishly took what she thought to be a normal dose, and it killed her.
Hello? Would Yates have been less foolish if she'd taken a smaller than normal hit?
Anyway...
We are all guilty to paying too much attention to these clowns, jesters, these fools and the minutae of their private lives.
We simply can't help it. It is gossip that comes without price.
We can shun Jude Law and Hugh Grant, whisper about Anjelina Jolie and Brad Pitt and not have to worry about having to face them at work the next day or bump into them at the next family gathering.
The danger comes when we give them status beyond that of individuals who entertain us and look to them as role models.
Very few of them can sustain normal relationships or lifelong marriages (Elizabeth Taylor and J'Lo), most raise screwed kids (Joan Crawford, Henry Fonda), can't stay off drugs or drinking (Robert Downie jr, Eminem) and can't stay out of trouble with the law.
Hell, you wouldn't want people like that as neighbours.
Yet we're supposed to take them seriously when they want to talk about foreign affairs, domestic politics, social policy and farming practices?
Puhhleeze.
The best advice came from an audience member at one of the Dixie Chicks' gigs - "Shut Up And Sing".
-- Nora
UPDATE: Exceptionally talented writer LaShawn Barber has little sympathy for Jude Law's fiancee and gives us another reason why Hollywood is not the best inspiration for marital bliss.
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