There’s a particular school of cultural critic — you know the kind — who are forever seeking signs that the world is going to hell in a bucket. One phenomenon that they decry with tiresome regularity is that of celebrity-in-itself — that is, the idea of someone who is “famous for being famous.” The assumption, when the phrase is used, is that such a state of fame is a new anomaly in the order of things, and so a symptom of our civilizational decline.
Reader, ‘tain’t so. Literary biographies and cultural encyclopedias are full of figures of questionable accomplishments whose names we still sort of remember: Mrs. Astor, Diamond Jim Brady, Lilly Langtry, Beau Brummel. They didn’t call them “celebutantes” then; instead, they come down to us with such non-professional titles as famed beauty, noted dandy, or celebrated wit. Some of them made a living as writers or performers in between stints as professional dinner guests, but then, just as now, many came from inherited wealth. They were famous in their day for their parties, their clothes, their lovers. Even figures of genuine ability aren’t immune to this sort of celebrity-in-itself. Lord Byron, for instance, was a hell of a poet — but not even grad students actually read him any more. He belongs to posterity as a lifestyle, as a mood, as an adjective.
You can’t control how history will remember you — only whether it will or not. The wealthy layabouts of centuries past might court fame by patronage of the arts, or by hosting literary salons; they shone by surrounding themselves with men of genius and reflecting their brilliance. The major innovation of today’s celebutantes lies in cutting out the middleman. Instead of surrounding themselves with talent, they’ve simply surrounded themselves with cameras and taken their case directly to the viewing public.
So it is with the kin of the late multimillionaire scumbag businessman and lawyer Robert Kardashian. How much of a scumbag was Robert Kardashian? Enough to sign on for O.J. Simpson’s “dream team” of defense attorneys — even though his own then-wife Kris had been a close friend of Nicole Brown Simpson. Robert and Kris subsequently divorced, and Robert died a few years later, leaving his quasi-widow and their brood of kids (Kim, Khloe, Kourtney, and a couple of others with names slightly less ridiculous) to fend for themselves, shielded from the vicissitudes of the world only by their bottomless sense of entitlement, their trust funds, and the loving (if befuddled) presence of stepfather-figure Bruce Jenner. (Yeah, the guy from the Wheaties box, once the world’s greatest all-around athlete, playing straightman to a house full of drama queens. No wonder he looks so exhausted all the time.) In their E! Network reality series Keeping Up with the Kardashians (Sundays, 10 PM), we see them cope as anyone would, by endless parties and shopping among their moneyed peers, and by abusive drinking. The girls intermittently play at being members of the productive class, taking occasionally shifts at the till of a vanity boutique set up for just that purpose; I thought of Marie Antoinette’s little dairy at Rambouillet. Their real full-time job, though, is to read their own press and then complain about it.
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