{"id":28837,"date":"2016-04-17T13:07:32","date_gmt":"2016-04-17T13:07:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/?page_id=28837"},"modified":"2016-04-17T22:51:39","modified_gmt":"2016-04-17T22:51:39","slug":"no-pain-no-fame","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/king-family\/columns-king-uit-entertainment-weekly\/no-pain-no-fame\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pop of King: No Pain, no Fame"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n
\"kingcolumn\"<\/a>In 1988\u2014I think it was \u201888\u2014my older son asked if I\u2019d take him to the Tyson-Spinks fight. You may re-member it; this is the one that lasted roughly five punches and 38 seconds. When we got to the Trump venue where the fight was being held, a functionary whose job it was to collar \u201ccelebs\u201d steered my son and me toward a room where, he said, we could relax, eat canap\u00e9s, and meet others of our ilk. Other celebs, in other words.
\nI don\u2019t recall if the guy mentioned privacy as well as canap\u00e9s, but if he did, the son of a gun lied. The room\u2014which my son remembers as being the size of a banquet hall\u2014was full of photographers and those soft-news people who are always more interested in who showed up than they are in what happened. Each time a new celeb made his or her entrance, the paparazzi would school like tuna to-ward a new feeding ground, yelling \u201cOprah!\u201d or \u201cJack!\u201d (The first thing celebs lose is their last names.) At some point\u2014around the time I was thinking I ought to get my son out of there, the atmosphere was that lynch-party feverish\u2014Sean Penn walked in, holding hands with Madonna.
\nThe reporters and paparazzi went nuts. \u201cSean!\u201d they shouted. \u201cOver here! Madonna! Hey, give us a smile, honey!\u201d The room seemed to shrink in that flashgun glare, a light that\u2019s both brilliant and somehow thin; it\u2019s the way you see things when you\u2019re suffering a high fever.
\nMadonna fed on it\u2014this, at least, is my son\u2019s memory. We are both in agreement, however, that Mr. Penn was caught flat-footed. Like me, maybe he had foolishly assumed that \u201ca place to relax and get away from the crowds\u201d meant a place of relative privacy.
\nThey made one seemingly endless circuit of the room with the press in full pursuit, Mr. Penn tugging his sweetie by the hand. They passed close to my location, and I got a good look at the expres-sion of horror on Penn\u2019s face. It was the face of a young man who\u2019s finally beginning to understand what he\u2019s gotten himself into.
\nThis memory comes back to me whenever I hear that a soft-news press pool has hired an air-craft to get pictures of a \u201cceleb wedding,\u201d or when I see front-page tabloid photographs of some celeb who has either put on a lot of weight (indicating heartbreak) or lost a lot (indicating cancer, and ne-cessitating use of the word \u201cbrave,\u201d as in BRAVE [INSERT CELEB\u2019S FIRST NAME] FACES CANCER WITH HELP OF EX-WIFE… AND GOD!). I think of Mr. Penn and his one stunned How-do-I-get-outta-here? cir-cuit of the \u201cceleb room\u201d every time I read a bit of tattle about who bought what (and for how much; that\u2019s always important), then stiffed the waiter at lunch. I thought of him recently when I noted that at least one immensely popular magazine\u2014not this one, I\u2019m happy to say\u2014had invented the one-word moniker Bennifer for Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez… as if their romance summed up everything we\u2019d ever care to know about them. Are they talented? Can they sing, dance, and act? Doesn\u2019t matter. When dealing with celebs, talent\u2019s a side issue.
\nI know that some actors and singers relish the limelight, but for others the hysterical quality of the coverage first becomes disturbing, then rather terrible as they discover that there\u2019s no way out, that a normal life is now denied them. Can you imagine Mr. Affleck and Ms. Lopez (that\u2019s J. Lo to you, buster) ever dining quietly \u00e0 deux in a neighborhood restaurant? For that matter, can you imagine them having a neighborhood?
\nMany people have no patience with this point of view. Celebs like \u201cBennifer,\u201d they argue, live in a way \u201cthe rest of us\u201d can only dream about, eating caviar in private jets while the rest of us stand in airport lines for hours, waiting to be groped at the security checkpoint. Unless their financial wallahs screw up, celebs never have to look at a price tag or calculate the cost of a restaurant meal. Want a vacation home in Aruba? It\u2019s yours. How \u2018bout a brand-new Porsche? Drive it away. Life\u2019s a freebie for celebs, this argument goes, so how dare they complain?
\nRight. And everyone laughs at you if you\u2019re off-kilter and go out in public wearing a veil; they call you WACKO JACKO. And you\u2019ll never get to look at a price tag because you\u2019ll never be able to shop in a store\u2014unless the management shuts it down, that is. When you drive your new Porsche away, you\u2019ll see the \u201cfotogs\u201d trailing along behind in your rearview mirror, snapping and snapping. To most of the world, you\u2019re just a freak with a pretty face.
\nLife\u2019s a banquet for celebs; your waiter will gladly settle for an autograph instead of a tip. (Es-pecially since he can sell it on eBay for big bucks, if he\u2019s ever really hard up.) But there is a price to be paid. I think Sean Penn\u2019s sad face sticks in my mind because I saw him on the night when he was realiz-ing it was too high. Eat all you want, sure. But all too often you get to the end of the meal and dis-cover that you\u2019re for dessert.<\/p>\n

As promised, here\u2019s the answer to EW\u2019s First Annual Hollywood Babble-On Competition: Candlestick Park<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1988\u2014I think it was \u201888\u2014my older son asked if I\u2019d take him to the Tyson-Spinks fight. You may re-member it; this is the one that lasted roughly five punches and 38 seconds. When we got to the Trump venue<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":4585,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-28837","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28837"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28837\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28890,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28837\/revisions\/28890"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}