Word: celebrityhood
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...flown 78 combat missions--became the first to step on the moon. He had returned to civilian life, and the Nixon Administration, mired in the Vietnam War, did not want a commissioned officer "militarizing" space. Second, his reticent manner was considered ideal for coping with the demands of celebrityhood. Third, and most practical, as mission commander he was physically closer to the hatch of the Eagle and had to be the first out. Since Armstrong was assigned to handle the camera, most of the pictures from that famous mission are of Aldrin, with Armstrong seen only as a reflection...
Marilyn Monroe and the rest of those icons cemented in American celebrityhood on the world-famous Hollywood Walk of Fame are sinking, tilting or cracking. The cause: boring beneath the surface, in order to build a subway extension in car-dependent L.A. Transit officials called the mess "reparable and not unusual for tunnel construction of this nature...
Nowadays what lurks beyond the sunset is the floodlit plain of American celebrityhood. Where do -- where can -- Ollie and wife go from here? The movies end with a fade because to show what follows is to demystify what precedes. Imagine Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly raising chickens and changing diapers in a High Noon sequel (Quarter to Four ?). You can't. "How dull it is to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnished," laments Tennyson's Ulysses after his return home from heroism to sit "by this still hearth, among these barren crags...
There used to be no cure for the ennui of the returned hero. Now there is and it is worse than the disease. It is celebrityhood. Last winter a Washington radio station began a news roundup with this: "Joe DiMaggio, baseball hall of famer, former husband of Marilyn Monroe, and also Mr. Coffee, had surgery today." Hero status, unless arrested by artistic device (the fade-out) or tragedy (an early death), decays. There is a trajectory to fame, and it points downward...
First- magnitude fame comes to Ollie North during the Iran- contra hearings, but its demystifying decay to celebrityhood is inevitable...