Public Image, Private Lives -- When Celebrities Seem A Part Of US, How Do We Handle Their Failings?

Though I have often enjoyed his movies, I've never taken in a New York Knicks game with Woody Allen. Nor have I hung out with Mia Farrow, or her adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn, or the 10 other children in the Farrow household.

But last month it was as if all these strangers moved into my living room, or married into my family. Suddenly their dirty laundry became mine.

Like millions of other bystanders, I got swept up in the lurid romantic melodrama involving Allen, one of America's best-known cinema auteurs; Farrow, his 11-year paramour and frequent leading lady; and college sophomore Soon-Yi, Allen's new love.

I could have avoided this ugly family feud only by going on a drastic media fast. Newsweek alone devoted an eight-page spread - more ink than the Republican convention got - to the unproven child-molestation allegations against Allen, the chronicling of his romantic liaisons with Mia and Soon-Yi, comments by Mia's other children about the mess, an interview with the usually press-shy Woody himself, and Soon-Yi's own protestations that she is "not a retarded little underage flower."

Add to all that the radio bulletins, newspaper accounts, televised press conferences, outraged editorials, and conservative congressman Newt Gingrich's political-spin comments. Plus the hurry-up teasers at multiplexes everywhere for Woody's new film a clef, "Husbands and Wives," which opened this weekend.

Yes, child-molestation allegations are shocking. But celebrity scandals are like buses at rush hour: After one clatters by, another will be coming along in 10 minutes.

Moreover, the galvanic public reaction to Woody Allen's personal life, and the great surprise and dismay expressed over his private actions, is a vivid reminder of just how tenuous distinctions between private and public behavior, artifice and reality, glorification and demonization have become in our whirligig culture. And how profoundly confusing too.

In his 1985 book "Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity," film critic Richard Schickel wrote about a pervasive "illusion of intimacy" that exists now between the American public and its huge pantheon of media celebrities.

Because he appeared to look, act and talk like the same character he usually played in his movies, and because his leading ladies were often his real-life lovers, Woody Allen didn't seem like a stranger to us.

Neither did President John F. Kennedy, the first politician to exploit the intimacy potential of television, or Ronald Reagan, who went on to even greater mastery of that cozy medium. Nor did Jackie Gleason, who came into living rooms as the irascible but endearing Ralph Kramden, and like many entertainers, seemed a spiritual twin of the characters he invented.

But the fact is, such people are total strangers to us. No matter how well we think we know them, all we really know is their artistic output, or political deeds. And somehow we have a hard time accepting that.

"In the particular case of Woody Allen," Schickel said in a telephone interview, "people thought of him as this kind of austere man who had resisted big budgets and the blandishments of big celebrity, and was somehow still like the nice, schleppy little guys he portrayed.

"But Woody as an individual has never been that schleppy little character. He's a confident and successful artist."

"The Great One," William Henry III's new biography of Jackie Gleason, shows that Gleason was no folksy Ralph Kramden either, but a complicated man with a wide nasty streak.

And while he appeared to be the ultimate family man, JFK apparently was a hearty, even reckless, womanizer. And ex-president Reagan may or may not be the aw-shucks nice guy he seemed. What's chilling is how that seamless image became a Teflon-coated political shield.

"Reagan ran on his niceness, and people believed him," observes Neil Postman, Columbia University communications professor and author of the book "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business." "Surveys showed more or less consistently over his eight years in office that Americans didn't agree with his policies but voted for him because they liked him."

Our public images of famous artists and politicians are now volatile, complex compounds derived not only from the work and public utterances of these people, but also from press photos, from speculative character analyses in academic journals, tabloids and every kind of publication in-between, and (last but surely not least) from our own fantasies and psychic projections.

We have somehow gotten tangled up in our imaginings about these peoples' lives until they've become an oddly forceful part of own. As Schickel wrote, "None of these lives is of great moment to us. But taken together (they) create a sort of psychic energy field that surrounds us and penetrates us, binding our universe together."

There's no turning back the clock to when the famous could easily avoid the media glare, or we could avoid hyper-awareness of them.

As film critic Neal Gabler has written, "When life is a movie, image and life conflate.

The stars aren't projecting anymore. They seem to be living for us, opening their lives to public inspection, letting us in on their secrets, entertaining us."

But as private affairs are probed and revealed to us at an ever-accelerating pace and in ever-more-generous detail, how do we absorb and process it all? How do we relate to, and what should we expect from, these icons who hog so much space in the Zeitgeist, whose misadventures entertain us and whose triumphs swell us with envy?

Here are some approaches:

Saints and Sinners. By this process we relegate celebrities to two camps: the naughty people who can get away with just about anything because we expect them to be bad (Madonna, Fergie), and the neutral or "good" guys we hold to a stricter moral standard.

It's easy, it's fun, it's hypocritical. And once the image is set, it's tough to crack.

An example from Schickel: "When Rita Hayworth was married but ran off with another man, it was no big deal because she was considered sort of trashy anyway. When Ingrid Bergman did it, it was a huge scandal."

We also, says Postman, may let whole groups off easier than others. Rock stars have the most free license, followed by iconoclastic painters and writers, then come actors and sports figures, and finally, politicians.

The Bigger They Are, the Harder They Fall. A clicheed but popular notion: When the mega-famous get trounced by the media for doing something socially unacceptable, it's just the price they pay for their great wealth and fame. If they don't like "being swallowed by men's eyes," as Shakespeare put it, then tough tuna.

"There is a kind of arrogance that can develop in these cultural icons, so they begin to believe that their personal lives are nobody's business," suggests Postman.

"That's nonsense, because the entertainment world has always invested a lot in personal images, even if they're manufactured by public-relations people. It's part of our world to know who these people marry, what food they like. That's one of the things that makes them worth millions of dollars."

Celebrity Equals Responsibility. An extension of the above. That is, if you attain riches and notoriety you owe the public some decorum, even a payback.

Magic Johnson carries the HIV virus, which in the eyes of many makes him a pariah. Yet he braves rebuke by speaking out on the AIDS epidemic, by using his celebrity to inform and encourage young people.

Others use their cachet to push political causes, to raise funds for charities, to draw attention to environmental concerns or animal rights. Should this be mandatory service for the extremely privileged? In our heart of hearts, many of us believe so - especially if the celebs are embracing causes we too endorse.

None of Our Damned Business. The flip-side position is that whatever someone does outside his or her chosen arena (politics, the arts, sports) should be off-limits and of little interest.

Did presidential candidate Bill Clinton have an affair with Gennifer Flowers? And if so, should it matter? Franklin Delano Roosevelt's extramarital relationship with Lucy Mercer, and JFK's dalliances, don't seem to have hindered two of the most dynamic presidencies in our history. Or did they?

Do the sexual proclivities of the skilled actor Paul Rubens, whose screen alter ego was children's-show host Pee-wee Herman, need to be our concern? (Rubens, you'll recall, was busted on a minor sex charge in a Florida adult cinema.)

"We have this desire for famous artists to have lives as exemplary as their work," Schickel comments. "But there's no actual moral correlation between the life and the work.

"Who are we to pass judgment on Woody Allen's behavior anyway? We don't know the situation, we don't what human needs and tragedies are involved, and we may never know."

Artist as Misfit, Artist as Mirror. More than allowing them privacy, should we also be expecting artists to break the social rules that need breaking, shatter the taboos that need shattering, reveal to us the dark things we can't reveal to ourselves?

It's an idea inherited from 19th-century romanticism, but it still carries weight.

As Oscar Wilde put it, "Art is the most intense individualism that the world has known." Guerrilla intellectual Camille Paglia, whose latest book is titled "Sex, Art and American Culture," concurs.

In a recent essay published in Newsday, Paglia asserted that controversial artists such as Allen, Picasso, Madonna, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, presumably, Wilde himself, have been unfairly "denounced by holier-than-thou groups, from feminists to the Moral Majority, for their unsettling themes or bohemian lifestyles.

"This provincial American abuse of artists must end," Paglia went on. "Neither art nor the artist will ever conform to bourgeois decorum or tidy moral codes. Originality is by definition rule-breaking."

Perhaps the flamboyance of certain artists and public figures intrigues us because they are vicariously acting out our own thwarted desires.

Just Say No. What would happen if for one week, one day, one hour even, we stopped thinking, talking, writing and reading about the personal lives of the glitterati? And what if they made themselves inaccessible to the press, as candidate Clinton has tried to do, for all but questions related to their work at hand?

Is it possible? Would Oprah, Arsenio, Phil and Sally Jessy cooperate? Can you even imagine what it would be like? Think it over.

Learning to Differentiate. In the end, it may not be possible, or even noble, to resist the lure of gossip writ large. Gossip is, after all, an eternal human pastime. And much of the time it's as harmless as it is mindless.

But there must be a way to keep this record-weight barrage of celebrity information and speculation in better perspective. There must be a way to slow down the carnival, to avoid living so much in illusions about others that we lose interest in (and fail to come to grips with) our own lives, communities and world.

I modestly suggest two grass-roots strategies. First, we keep our hype-detectors turned on at all times, staying aware that the information we consume about celebrities - in the press, on TV, extrapolated from their work - is only a fraction of a much larger, more entangled truth. And that much of what we know is packaged and fed to us as entertainment, not news.

Second, that we ask ourselves habitually: What's truly important here? That Bill Clinton be the kind of guy who'll tell me all about his personal failings? That Woody Allen conform to my notions about how he should live? Or that Clinton lay out political policies I can ponder, and Allen make movies I can enjoy?

Here's an acid test: Ask yourself how a celebrity became famous in the first place, back before his or her face became as familiar as your own. If you can't remember the answer, or the answer no longer seems relevant, maybe you don't need that intimate stranger in your life anymore.