The modern phrase for a moment of realisation that a lifestyle is out of control is ”wake-up call”. So linguists as well as counsellors will be interested in the fact that the actor Russell Crowe has experienced a behavioural watershed that actually involves a telephone in a hotel room.
It seems likely that Crowe was surprised to find that both his liberty (a potential seven-year jail term) and his career could be on the line over a thrown phone; he was charged with assaulting a hotel clerk who, after the star failed to connect to Australia on the equipment provided in the suite, allegedly received the receiver in his face.
It’s true that the charges are superficially far less serious than those faced by Michael Jackson — awaiting his fate on denied allegations of corrupting minors — or Hugh Grant, whose Hollywood bankability survived an incident with a prostitute. But, while taking a handset off the hook in anger does not by most standards compare with a hand job from a hooker, Crowe’s wake-up call is highly revealing of the new limits on celebrity behaviour.
For a start, the story is intriguing for what it tells us about the lifestyles of the rich and famous. On what lawyers call the night in question, Crowe, promoting a film in New York, had reportedly just flown briefly by private jet to Manchester to watch a title fight. This may be psychologically significant. A man able to cross the Atlantic at a whim may feel that he has conquered money and time — two of the traditional constraints on humans — and may therefore be shocked to find himself defeated by a piece of technology as widely available as a telephone.
Crowe’s apparent lack of access to a cellphone is one of the oddities of the incident: we would imagine film stars to carry some kind of tri-band satellite phone thinner than a matchstick. My guess would be that the actor is phobic about either the potential radiation from cellphones or the greater possibility of journalistic eavesdropping. Another possibility is that a film company was picking up the hotel tab and he was determined to make full use of free facilities. But, for whatever reason, he chose to try a transpacific landline and, unable to raise the missus in Oz, ended up complaining to hotel clerk Nestor Estrada.
Having been defeated by a machine, Crowe now seriously failed in human interaction. In the not very far Hollywood past, stars could treat others and especially underlings exactly as they wished. Violence, rape and even murder could usually be covered up by the studio or your backroom flacks. Crowe, though, had failed to see that the star-staff relationship has starkly changed.
The problem is that a period in which celebrity has risen to previously unprecedented levels of intensity has coincided with an absolute rejection of deference by the public. We live in a time when a monarch who suffered a coronary would be expected by most people to wait their turn for treatment.
Crowe, however, has always seemed drawn to a different definition of celebrity: The star apart. On the front of his T-shirt was the invisible slogan: Do You Know Who I Am? But this won’t do; the slogan of the smart set now is: I Know Who You Are.
Crowe’s attempted redemption has followed an established path: appeal to the court of late-night TV. The US legal system’s looser rules on legal contempt mean that celebrities in trouble there, unlike in Britain, can give image-improving interviews even with the cuff marks still raw on their wrists. So, where Hugh Grant fessed up to Jay Leno that he’d been bloody stupid, Crowe was inserted as an emergency guest on David Letterman’s show, big-heartedly laughing as the host made an elaborate show of moving the phone on his desk beyond hurling distance. Crowe insisted he was determined to apologise to Estrada ”but he’s not answering his phone”.
But the likelihood must be that Crowe’s lawyers will achieve some deal — involving apology, compensation and participation in community-improving projects — that prevents him ever having to queue up to use the jailhouse payphone.
Eventually his notoriety may even be spun into ads for telecommunications equipment, with the actor grinning sheepishly beneath the slogan: ”If you’d bought one of ours it would never have happened.”
The biggest problem for Crowe is that, whatever the outcome of this case, the accusation that he chucked the dog and bone seems to fit a pattern of thunderous rage against underlings: he previously apologised to a TV producer after a threatening rant at an awards ceremony. A contemporary star can survive allegations of prostitute use or even perhaps paedophilia, but any suggestion that a big star holds the little people in contempt risks the public saying to the phone thrower: don’t call us. – Guardian Unlimited Â