THE BURDEN OF CELEBRITY

posted by James Reel

    Last night my wife and I attended a benefit dinner involving Stephanie Zimbalist and Efrem Zimbalist Jr., following their appearance in Chamber Music Plus Southwest’s Mesmeric Mozart. We’d met Stephanie last year at a much more intimate dinner and got to know her as well as you can know anyone after two or three hours. Both she and her father are remarkably unpretentious, patient, “normal” people in every positive sense of that word. I’ve met several actors and interviewed a great many musicians, and I must say that most of them have been much like the Zimbalists: gracious, easygoing people who happen to have parleyed their talent into solid careers. In fact, I’ve taken an instant dislike to only three world-famous musicians. The late guitarist Narciso Yepes struck me as, yes, narcissistic and arrogant, yet that hasn’t diminished my admiration of his recordingds. The other two are pianists who are still alive and whom I may encounter again, so they shall remain unnamed here. Otherwise, self-regard is a character flaw I find among very few performers anymore, save for a few opera singers who are just a bit too full of themselves but otherwise inoffensive. (Youngish movie stars like Tom Cruise are another matter.)
    What I find remarkable is how these people maintain their equanimity under difficult public circumstances. The Zimbalists, for example, were exhausted last night. Even though they’d had the luxury of reading from scripts, as is customary at Chamber Music Plus events, they’d put a lot into their performances, far more than some more celebrated thespians have. On top of that, Efrem, who still cuts an elegant figure, is well into his 80s and suffers from a bad knee that really should be replaced. Yet he and his daughter remained gracious throughout the long meet-and-greet dinner. Eventually my wife took pity on them, wrested them away from their fans and steered them to a table where they could finally sit down, eat and relax a bit. “I’d forgotten how hard these things can be,” Stephanie said.
    I imagine the work of shmoozing doesn’t stop at these organized gatherings. Just walking down the street or going to a private restaurant is surely a trial if you’re a celebrity with a recognizable face. Perfectly nice people come up to say hello and chat about how much they enjoyed the celebrity’s work in something that happened decades before. (Last night, people were chatting up Efrem Zimbalist about 77 Sunset Strip, which was canceled 40 years ago.) They want only a minute of the celebrity’s time, but when one fan leaves another comes up, then another. No wonder so many movie actors snub the public; they just can’t take the onslaught of well-meaning people. (Then there are the stalkers; Stephanie had one of her own, who was ultimately jailed for a couple of years.) Even I, a person who has just barely set one toe past the threshold of public recognition in a not very large market, can hardly make it across a theater lobby without being buttonholed by a series of very nice people who want to say something about KUAT or some review I wrote for the Weekly or a magazine article that was just published but I can’t recall clearly because I wrote it a couple of months before. Making nice with the public is part of being a public figure, but I can imagine how fatiguing it must be for celebrities, and I admire people like the Zimbalists for their pleasance and fortitude even more than for their actual work.