Spectator

By Kurt Anderson

Hucksterism is a deeply American trait. P.T. Barnum was a truer man of his time and place than Henry James, and sharpies' 19th century land-promoting broadsides sucked more settlers west than any high-minded exhortations to manifest destiny. If England is a nation of shopkeepers, the U.S. is a land of pitchmen; it is part of the national charm.

Modern advertising and modern celebrity arose simultaneously in America. The symbiosis was automatic, and Sarah Bernhardt leased her name and reputation to merchandisers decades before Cher was born, let alone starring in infomercials for personal-grooming products. At first endorsements were simply that: straightforward firsthand testimonials about the virtues of a product. William McKinley appeared in Waterman pen ads even while he was in the White House ("An invaluable pocket companion").

Those sorts of literal endorsements tend to make us cringe nowadays, whether at the primitivism, or the low state to which some public person has been reduced (George McGovern for Pritikin Longevity Centers), or the intimacy of real-life typecasting (manic-depressive Patty Duke touting a chain of for- profit psychiatric hospitals). Because consumers are too skeptical to put much stock in guarantees delivered by hired celebrities, and because major stars find it demeaning to recommend any product explicitly, mainstream celebritocentric advertising has become a subtle, weirdly stylized genre. Michael Jackson and Madonna don't do much more than appear in the vicinity of the Pepsi logo; Michael Douglas and Gene Hackman hire out for commercial voice-over work but -- We're major artists! -- decline to appear in ads or be identified by name. This is the age of virtual endorsement.

Celebrity spokespeople are held only to a loose, don't-ask-don't-tell standard of credibility. Bill Cosby doesn't really serve Jell-O chocolate pudding at dinner parties? Duhhh. Almost nobody is naive enough anymore to believe the tacit advertising shams, but neither are celebrity endorsements registered as falsehoods -- at least as long as the untruths aren't thrown in our faces. Only when vegetarian Cybill Shepherd served as a spokesperson for the beef industry did the commercial lie become insuperable.

Since the late '80s, we have been asked to believe that Elizabeth Taylor, Julio Iglesias, Herb Alpert, Gabriela Sabatini, Joan Collins, Princess Stephanie, Dionne Warwick, Liza Minnelli, Sophia Loren and, of course, Cher are people whose eponymous perfumes are better than fragrances to which the names of show people have not been appended. Certainly Julio, Liz and Joan are people whom we instinctively believe to be intensely scented, but do even the buyers of White Diamonds imagine that Taylor concocted the stuff?

Publishers have barreled down the same cynical, slippery slope. Not so long ago, readers of autobiographies were meant to understand that Sammy Davis or William Paley actually produced his memoir. About a decade ago, the pretense was dropped and ghostwriters' names went onto book jackets; nobody minded. Now comes an extraordinary new stage in this postmodern devolution: works of fiction that the nominal celebrity authors not only didn't write but that publishers and celebrities admit they didn't write.

Following the success last year of Ivana Trump's ghostwritten dirt-dishing roman a clef about herself, Pocket Books is publishing another one -- Free to Love, out next month -- and openly discussing Ivana's role as a promotional figurehead. For the buyers of the Trump novels and the forthcoming mystery novels "by" Martina Navratilova, actual authorship is "a non-issue," says William Grose, a Pocket Books executive. The only problem, Grose says, is that people "are less willing to accept celebrity-fronted fiction when the celebrity is absent. The closer a buyer is able to brush against the + individual, the more satisfied she is." The novels are pretexts; what audiences want is Ivana and Martina themselves, like Catholic pilgrims more interested in ogling the shard of a saint's bone than contemplating some boring sermon about St. Augustine.

Is it any wonder? When television's cutting edge, MTV, consists of record ads passing as entertainment, where millions of people hoot and holler at pro "wrestling" matches they know to be utterly fake, of course women want to wear a pair of Joan Rivers' QVC earrings, splash on Elizabeth Taylor's White Diamonds and curl up with a copy of Ivana Trump's Free to Love. They aren't bothered by the artifice; they buy the lie.