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On the Arts: Do not ask for whom the wedding bells toll
Sunday, October 08, 2000 By Barry Paris
First in a two-part essay on the moral/social impact of the entertainment industry on American youth and culture.
Next Sunday: "Duels and Dualities: Zappa & Tipper, Hinckley & Jodie, Barbra & Charlton, Diablo & Columbine."
Barry Paris is the author of several books and is a Post-Gazette film critic.
I don't care too much for money,
In or out of Hollywood, the greed of your loved ones is an ugly thing, which is why my heart goes out to Michael Douglas -- a not-quite-self-made man, like George W. Bush -- whose hard-earned professional fame and fortune have been achieved despite the genealogical burden of being the son of a famous father.
Ever since Hollywood values have come under fire at both the GOP and Democratic conventions, no one has stopped for a minute to realize that multimillionaires are people, too, with the same domestic and emotional stress as little folks like you and me.
There could be no more wrenching illustration than the impending marriage of Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, now rescheduled for Nov. 18. I have followed that romance religiously, ever since reading in the Post-Gazette that the first time Douglas met Zeta-Jones, he said, "I want to father your children." (The one time I tried that line on a woman, she said, "Thanks, but I don't want to mother yours." It was deeply wounding.)
Plans for the wedding have long been stalled over plans for the divorce. At issue was how big a slice of Douglas' $224 million assets the Welsh actress would carve out of his pie when -- I mean, if -- their marriage hit the rocks. In June, 54-year-old Son of Kirk rejected 30-year-old Z-J's request: $4.4 million for each year they stayed married. He countered with a low-ball $1.4 million per annum of marital bliss and a house (he's got 'em all over the place) to be named in the future -- for all she knows, some duplex in Newark.
Zeta-Jones had already caved on the wedding loot, agreeing to let Douglas keep all presents worth more than $18,000. Keep that in mind when shopping for a wedding gift more extravagant than a place setting of their china pattern on file at Kaufmann's: If you want Catherine to end up with it, spend no more than $17,999.
Back in June, friends described her as "distraught" about the "financial cloud" hanging over both the wedding and the imminent birth of her first child. Imagine those breathing exercises in the Lamaze class, where the father's job is counting slowly to 10 for the mother, when Daddy-to-be -- still Hubby-to-be! -- Freudian-slips during his count: "One million, two million, three million ..."
It's "tearing her apart," said the anonymous friend. "She isn't money-grubbing, she just doesn't want to feel like she's getting a raw deal." Nor does she want Junior -- Dylan Michael, born Aug. 8 -- to end up in rags. Who can blame her?
On the other hand, who can blame him? Douglas is eager to hold on to the pathetic remnant of his $224 million left after his divorce from first wife Diandra, in which he's being cruelly forced to cough up a whopping $40 million -- inspiring current- and post-traumatic fiscal shock and his vow, like that of many great men after many great tragedies down through history: "Never again." To get as much as Diandra got, at Mike's proposed $1.4 mill rate, Cate would have to stay married to him 28 years -- slightly less likely than the return of Elvis and Jimmy Hoffa in the same spaceship.
I sense (if not actually feel) his pain, even as I thank God that my own first and hopefully last wife, bless her foolish heart, was too naive to think of saddling me with a prenup in 1975. If she had done so and if the name "Wyoming Paris" had the same nepotistic currency as "Kirk Douglas," I'd owe her $75 million.
Not to rub it in, but she also missed the prenuptial chance to get her hands on my unique pieces of real-estate: a two-room Kansas farmhouse with outdoor plumbing and a summer home in Wilkinsburg (bought for $28,500 in '78, recently sold for $23,000). Nor did she think to attach my other assets -- the '69 Maverick ($1,995 new, blue book value $280 in '75) or my campaign-button collection (then valued at upwards of $800, now nearly twice that).
I empathize with both parties in the Douglas dilemma: Zeta-Jones is no Barrett-Browning, and Michael no Robert. How does she love him, and he her? When these people count the ways, they do it less romantically -- computing quarterly, with compound interest, substantial penalty for early withdrawal. In the unlikely event of a breakup or water landing, this tightwad expects her to survive on $1.4 mill a year? In Beverly Hills, that won't keep you in swimwear. The gardener gets more. We will never know all the private recriminations, but I like to think they were bitter.
Such are Hollywood standards in the millennial year 2000 -- and our own. That bridge to the 21st century? It was a toll bridge, kids -- no bucks, no entry! As always, our film nobility reflects the new values, marital and beyond: "I now pronounce thee man and wife for 10 minutes. What God hath joined, let no man put asunder for less than $4.4 mill annually."
The American Dream? A Prenuptial Nightmare.
But our true-life parable has a happy ending, of sorts: Just as the calligraphy was drying and the invitation envelopes being stuffed with those little pieces of tissue paper, the crisis was resolved in a compromise by which the price of Zeta-Jones' wifely services was fixed -- not unlike a barrel of oil or bushel of soybeans -- at $3 million annually. Prorated, it's $8,219 a day -- for which even I could stand Michael Douglas for a year or two.
No report on who gets the kid. The Motion Picture Country Home? The Humane Society? It reminds me, somehow, of the New Yorker cartoon with a nasty-looking little boy in court and one lawyer whispering to another: "It's a particularly bitter custody fight -- neither side wants him."
But for the moment, until the divorce, we can rest more easily in the knowledge that wee Douglas III will have full economic backup for his a priori nepotistic advantages. Just like Douglas II. And George Bush II -- and (to a lesser extent) Gore II, too. The closer equivalent of Douglas II in politics is not Bush II but the late John Heinz II, whose family bought him the Senate seat that would have been won by Bill Green in 1976 and should have been won by Cyril Wecht in 1982, had they not been outspent 7-to-1 -- drowned in a fathomless, 57-variety vat of family food money.
The political provides the social connection: Little Dougie III is gonna do just fine in life, no matter which Hollywood-bashing party wins the election. The two things on which Gore and Bush see eye to eye are: 1) "let no child be left behind"; and 2) the debilitating moral influence of the pop culture. What neither sees, in the ignorance of affluence, is the real source of our corruption: not sex, drugs or music but money.
In Pat Buchanan's Culture War, I straddle a paradoxical fence. Radically liberal-permissive on one hand, I don't care a bit what movies my kids see. Ultra-conservative on the other, I forbid them to read celebrity-marriage coverage without my ethical supervision.
The cultural corruption of America stems not from its vice but its most cherished motivational virtue: money. A galling thing, money. Galling, personally, because no one has bothered to corrupt me with it. I'm now forced to face the awful truth in humiliating Gore-Bushian terms:
I have been left behind -- me, of all cutting-edge people! -- plus a hundred million or so other middle-to-lower-class culture warriors with varying degrees of alienation, whose big gripe is not the immorality but the inequity of the cultural corruption.
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