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Monday, September 01, 2008
Perempuan dan Politik - selebriti
The Celebrity Solution
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By JAMES TRAUB
Published: March 9, 2008
In 2004, Natalie Portman, then a 22-year-old fresh from college, went to Capitol Hill to talk to Congress on behalf of the Foundation for International Community Assistance, or Finca, a microfinance organization for which she served as “ambassador.” She found herself wondering what she was doing there, but her colleagues assured her: “We got the meetings because of you.” For lawmakers, Natalie Portman was not simply a young woman — she was the beautiful Padmé from “Star Wars.” “And I was like, ‘That seems totally nuts to me,’ ” Portman told me recently. It’s the way it works, I guess. I’m not particularly proud that in our country I can get a meeting with a representative more easily than the head of a nonprofit can.”
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Letters: The Money Issue (March 23, 2008)
Letters: The Celebrity Solution (April 6, 2008)
Well, who is? But it is the way it works. Stars — movie stars, rock stars, sports stars — exercise a ludicrous influence over the public consciousness. Many are happy to exploit that power; others are wrecked by it. In recent years, stars have learned that their intense presentness in people’s daily lives and their access to the uppermost realms of politics, business and the media offer them a peculiar kind of moral position, should they care to use it. And many of those with the most leverage — Bono and Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt and George Clooney and, yes, Natalie Portman — have increasingly chosen to mount that pedestal. Hollywood celebrities have become central players on deeply political issues like development aid, refugees and government-sponsored violence in Darfur.
Activists on these and other issues talk about the political power of stars with a mixture of bewilderment and delight. But a weapon that powerful is bound to do collateral damage. Some stars, like George Clooney, regard the authority thrust upon them with wariness; others, like Sean Penn or Mia Farrow, an activist on Darfur, seize the bully pulpit with both hands. “There is a tendency,” says Donald Steinberg, deputy president of the International Crisis Group, which seeks to prevent conflict around the world, “to treat these issues as if it’s all good and evil.” Sometimes you need the rallying cry, but sometimes you need to accept a complex truth.
Celebrities, and especially Hollywood celebrities, have always engaged in public philanthropy. In “An Empire of Their Own,” Neal Gabler describes charity dinners of the 1930s where movie-industry moguls would gather at the Hillcrest Country Club and outbid one another with gifts to the United Jewish Welfare Fund and other Jewish causes. In later years, movie stars and politicians treated Marvin Davis’s Carousel Ball, to benefit diabetes research, as a command performance. But the “grip ’n’ grin celebrity stuff,” as the publicist Howard Bragman calls it, has largely passed into history. Nowadays, says Bragman (whose coming book is to be titled “Where’s My Fifteen Minutes?”), “you’ve got to have something for People magazine to shoot you at. You can’t just get $20 million a picture; you’ve got to serve turkey to the poor too.” The old Hollywood philanthropy was passive and dutiful. In those days stars were shaped by the studio system before being delivered to the public. Now, in the era of People and the E! channel and the global swarm of paparazzi, stars shape themselves, and their brands, through their own public acts. And their audience is not just fans but everyone; a star’s life is a kind of public movie. You have to do something with all that attention. As Portman says, “If they’re going to follow me around and take pictures, I’d rather talk about Finca than what dress I’m wearing or who I’m dating or whatever nonsense people care about.”
Most celebrities no longer have charities; they have causes. Eve Ensler has enlisted Jane Fonda, Salma Hayek, Jessica Alba and others to perform her play “The Vagina Monologues” to raise money to combat sexual abuse against women. Next month, Ensler’s organization, V-Day, will celebrate its 10th anniversary with a weekend of “Superlove” in the New Orleans Superdome, where Ensler’s team of stars will celebrate the resilience of “Katrina warriors” — women in the region who have suffered physical or emotional abuse. Ricki Lake campaigns for natural childbirth; she understands, she says, that “doing something pro-mom and pro-baby and pro-midwife” is her “life’s work.” Paris Hilton was supposedly planning to go to Rwanda soon after she finished her jail stint, and Playing for Good — an organization that staged a three-day “international philanthropic summit” on the resort island of Mallorca, with “the acclaimed actress and philanthropist Eva Longoria” as the host — had hoped to use Hilton’s redemptive escapade as an episode in a reality show to be titled “The Philanthropist.” The show appears to be in turnaround.
An entire industry has sprung up around the recruitment of celebrities to good works. Even an old-line philanthropy like the Red Cross employs a “director of celebrity outreach.” Oxfam has a celebrity wrangler in Los Angeles, Lyndsay Cruz, on the lookout for stars who can raise the charity’s profile with younger people. In addition to established figures like Colin Firth and Helen Mirren, Oxfam is affiliated with Scarlett Johansson, who has visited South Asia (where the organization promotes girls’ education) and is scheduled to go to Mali. Cruz notes that while “trendy young people” are attracted to the star of “Match Point” and “Lost in Translation,” Johansson had “great credibility with an older audience because she’s such a great actress.”
The stars themselves have their own retainers to fend off the celebrity recruiters and to screen and sift charitable opportunities; publicists say their major clients get dozens of requests every week. The more deeply committed figures, like Angelina Jolie, retain firms like the Global Philanthropy Group, which, according to a representative, offers “comprehensive philanthropic management.” This includes establishing and staffing foundations, bringing in subject-area experts or even helping the novice philanthropist figure out what he or she actually wants to do. A similar organization, the Giving Back Fund, works with athletes like the quarterback Ben Roethlisberger and the basketball players Jalen Rose and Shane Battier.
Both the stars and the causes, in turn, depend on corporate sponsorship. It is the sponsors who pay for the galas at which the stars raise money for their causes; sponsors normally pay for the stars’ first-class air tickets and hotel suites. Corporations need causes as much as stars do. Like the stars, they understand that they must shape and protect their brand identities; and they understand that those identities will be judged by the broad public, through public acts. As Howard Bragman puts it, “Celebrities, sponsors and a cause: it’s the golden troika of branding.”
The costs are small compared to the good will. Thus Alicia Keys’s Keep a Child Alive, which provides antiretrovirals to victims of AIDS in Africa, has 78 “corporate partners,” including CBS, Continental Airlines, Condé Nast and Chanel, to pick a few from the C’s. And just as stars have philanthropic managers to help them with causes, corporations with a cause can turn to celebrity recruiters to find just the right star. Thus Rita Tateel, who describes her occupation as recruiting and coordinating celebrities for “cause-related marketing and public relations,” recently hooked up Purina, which wanted to support “small animal-rescue organizations,” with Emily Procter, a star of “CSI Miami,” who, Tateel says, “lives and breathes animal rescue.”
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James Traub, a contributing writer, is working on a book about democracy promotion.
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