You`ve probably never given much thought to the awesome responsibilities borne by the media, have you?
Sure, you might be impressed that a TV weatherman can make more money in a fiscal year than a trio of eye doctors. You might be stunned that someone in a position of editorial power would turn over a great swatch of newsprint and a silly portrait without a forehead to a guy with more opinion than sense.
But when you think of responsibility, you think about heart surgeons and airline pilots and the guy at WBBM-TV who had to find the Ford City Shopping Mall last week so Walter Jacobson could do his news show from out that way.
What you don`t understand is that every day those of us laboring in the media wake up with the gnawing fear that we might be Missing Something.
It could be a Trend, or maybe a Personality, or maybe a Happening. There might be a budding Madonna out there, or a gust of mesquite cooking, or a hot new illness that all the right people are contracting. And if the press isn`t paying attention, well, it might go right on by us, straight into the maw of
”Entertainment Tonight.”
Now that you`ve heard the background, you should have a better understanding of the journalistic importance of the Limelight.
In case you`ve been waiting in line for Bruce Springsteen tickets for 10 days or so, the Limelight is a spiffy new nightclub on the North Side. The owners threw open the doors one evening last week and hundreds of people who should have known better showed up, some of them clutching invitations, most of them groveling in the rain.
The press covered the story with a gravity normally reserved for trips on the space shuttle, complete with follow-up reports and pithy quotes gleaned from important Chicago socialites and hairdressers. Television was there, of course, bringing us moving pictures of women with boa constrictors for dates and men cornering the local market in eye makeup.
The adolescent desire to be a movie star is an acceptable fantasy for adolescents. Among adults, even adults with leather pants and hair colors not known in nature, it`s a trifle pathetic and hardly newsworthy. With few exceptions, the gaggle of thrill seekers at Dearborn and Ontario were vivid personifications of author Gore Vidal`s thoughts on celebrity. ”Having no talent,” Vidal wrote, ”may no longer be enough.”
The tidal wave of media attention given to the Limelight begged a couple of questions. For example, who is Sugar Rautbord and why is she ever quoted anywhere about anything?
The success of the Limelight`s entrepreneurs in treeing the self-important and then luring the press in to cover their soggy humiliation begs another question about Chicago: Is this simply the world`s largest prairie community?
Certainly the chaps who put the Limelight together must think so. Who but a collection of rubes and apple-knockers would tumble for so transparent a public-relations stunt? Phony sophistication trumped by artificial demand, complete with snooty doorpersons. It hardly works in New York City anymore, where they`ll fall for anything from $300 a month to park your car to seafood enchiladas to the New York Post.
It`s the cafe society equivalent of the scene in the funny pages where Lucy offers to hold the football for Charlie Brown to kick, then yanks it away from him at the last moment. Charlie Brown falls for it every time, and so does the element in Chicago that believes it glitters when it walks. And so does the media.
Movie stars limo into town to shoot their witless cinematic looks at the Midwest and there we are, asking them how they like Chicago-style pizza and the Cubs. The producers of TV shows with the shelf life of broccoli show up to take pictures of the Wrigley Building or the elevated, and the local media run amok, chronicling their movements and collecting their great thoughts.
Until last week, Chicago had successfully avoided the blandishments of the Studio 54 scene. Until last week, the media didn`t treat the unveiling of saloons as news. Then again, the boys at the Limelight had the good sense to ship a passel of those hard-to-get invitations over to the newspaper offices and the radio and TV stations, where pockets of public notoriety can be mined. (Here in fairness, I must confess that I wasn`t invited, nor did I attend. Apparently, those two states of social being were not mutually exclusive.)
We do our best to Keep Up here in media-land, and that`s why you had to be so well-informed about the latest in night spots. The media didn`t want to miss a thing with regards to the Limelight. From all reports, it didn`t. Miss a thing, that is.
