Look out, friends. I find myself suddenly forced to defend Farrah Fawcett – supermodel, actress, mother, and fallen warrior in the cancer battles.
Blame Associated Press reporter Polly Anderson. My newspaper’s feature section today printed Anderson’s story looking back at the year’s celebrity deaths under the headline “They Won’t Be Forgotten.”
Perhaps there should’ve been a subhead reading, “…and they won’t get the last word, either.”
Anderson’s article is really just a “roll call,” as she herself writes. It’s a nod to those we knew through stage, screen, letters and music. The piece is decidedly not a column or analysis of the individuals’ value to the arts.
So when I got to this sentence, I stopped: “TV mourned ‘Prisoner’ star Patrick McGoohan, delightfully sharp-tongued Bea Arthur, ‘Kung Fu’ star David Carradine and the decorative Farrah Fawcett.”
OK, let’s get this out of the way. I’d never heard of Patrick McGoohan. And what comes to mind when I hear Carradine’s name is, sadly, not “Kung Fu” but the circumstances of his death.
Neither of those things bothered me, though. What I resented was Anderson’s self-indulgent choice of adjectives for the women in that sentence.
Arthur, she of “Maude” and “Golden Girls” fame, is lauded not just as “sharp-tongued,” which she undeniably was, but as “delightfully” so. I myself loved Arthur, but my own departed mother would’ve strenuously argued the "delightful," and she was not alone.
Fawcett, meanwhile, is dispatched with the single pejorative, “decorative.” In case you’re interested, the fine-art world uses “decorative” as shorthand for work that’s pretty but without substance.
So does Anderson -- who, of course, is entitled to her opinion. But why do I want it?
Taking an opinionated swipe at dead people – even mere entertainers – is bad form. In this case, it also appears to be mildly sexist, or maybe looksist.
Fawcett got famous off that red-bathing-suit poster for sure, and milked her looks for what they were worth. But she also earned critical acclaim for acting in her decidedly less “decorative” role as an abused wife in The Burning Bed.
Moreover, she was no more to blame for her beauty than Arthur was for her husky voice and mannish stature. Anderson’s single word seems like a weird, after-the-fact lob from the world of the resentful (and possibly less decorative?) living.
In the scheme of things, the writer’s decision to award neutral adjectives to the men in one sentence and loaded ones to the women doesn’t amount to much. Such micro editorializing is a common print-media misdemeanor, especially in feature sections. I know I committed it myself, perhaps dozens of times over a 26-year newspaper career. It often passes for "color," or "attitude," both of which were once sorely missing from newspapers and both of which are now over-valued by them.
Yes, micro editorializing is common practice, but it's bad practice. It’s one of the accepted almost imperceptible ways that journalists set themselves apart from the interests of their readers. More often than not, what readers want is reportage, information, maybe analysis and the occasional wise voice.
What they don’t want is to think they’re picking up a nice look back at the lives of celebrities only to trip over a snarky comment that might just piss them off and never needed to be there.
I suspect I’ll hear from people who are all too ready to say, “Yes! That’s why I don’t read newspapers.”
To which I say, that’s too bad for you, and it's shortsighted.
I loved my newspaper career. I love my newspaper. I love its indispensible place in our city and our culture.
And I’m really sad at the way newspapers are hurting now. So it seems all the more important for them to run a tight ship – from the biggest of the big-budget talks all the way down to the smallest adjective.
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