Show Where have you gone Joe DiMaggioand Charles Lindbergh and Eleanor Roosevelt? In our troubled times do we really want and need heroes? Or does our intense scrutiny make them as disposable as k containers? soft-drin- thing commensurate with our own excitement: a charisma not normally found in embassy hands or even test pilots You’d do as well sticking pins in the phone book Within a year the names of the hostages will be a trivia question If they’re lucky Because prolonged exposure to our goofy attentions can cause terrible limelight bums Perhaps the first and still most instructive victim of the modem press turned on full ¥T ¥ f f force was Charles Lindbergh This stunt pilot was transformed in the 1920s by one flight into a morbidly private sealed-of- f man who expected to find his bed — for the very under reporters good reason that you might find them there in those days if they weren’t hanging from drainpipes washing happy-go-luck- y trans-Atlant- yt mm m y By Wilfrid Sheed it y T rri y y TTf had to happen When the hostages returned from Iran we smothered them with kisses and almost with the same breath accused ourselves of taking them too seriously “What did they do anyway? Anyone can sit around an embassy” Etc When John Lennon died we mourned and demanded statues all over the place — and almost at once some of us1 began to say “He wasn’t so hot he was a junkie a bad influence” And what-no- t We are an excitable people But is that all we are? Do Americans just crave an excuse any excuse to get excited? Or do we really want heroes? If we do want them we seem to have worked out a dandy way not to get them Because the first requisite of a hero is that we not know too much about him — the ideal hero being one of those early Christian saints who may not have existed at all Failing that Davy Crockett will do But as the old French saying goes Sheed is a novelist and essayist who has just completed a book about Clare Boothe Luce Wilfrid 4 FAMILY WEEKLY Jun 28 1881 “no man is a hero to his valet” and we are all valets now Through an elabo- rate keyhole known as the media we get to watch our man sitting perhaps with his humdrum family (Achilles didn’t have a family) or we listen to his second-han- d opinions until the fact that he just climbed Everest seems an odd coincidence Nobody can be a hero all day long: It is a part one plays from time to time But we have dedicated ourselves at excruciating expense to a microscopic study of the — the undull stretches heroic hours Half the American soul loves a king and the other half wants to flatten him out So we crown the creatures and go howling after new ones: astronauts hockey players — our interests are as broad as they’re shallow The astronauts like the hostages were actually that growing species the accidental hero chosen as if by lot or a spin of the wheel Any one of a number of people could have done what they did (though a larger number couldn’t of course) but we scrutinized them anyway for signs of genius of transcendence We wanted something more than their achievement some ic your windows or pretending to read your gas meter It was the heyday of the scoop and the scoop sometimes came right out of the victim’s innards “Lucky” Lindbergh’s press problems did not end there of course His overblown fame made him a natural target And when his son was kidnapped the press came galumphing back more obnoxious than ever and Lindy began to think of them as a symbol of democracy itself standing proxy for the greedy eyes and grabbing paws of the mob He found things just as bad in England and France but in Nazi Germany Lindbergh’s hosts had the wit to turn down the heat and he became overnight to be the just sufficiently single-moeffective opponent of our entry into World War II And all because he beat a couple of other guys into flying the Atlantic first pro-Germ- an st n extreme example no doubt f I but such drastic changes of per- are not uncommon the spotlight Take Ernest Hemingway whose recently published letters reveal a similar mutation from regular if difficult guy to paranoid in what seems like a matter of months Hemingway was not the s first author to suffer: Dickens Mark Twain and others had battled the crowds and survived Which suggests either that the Victorian psyche was sturdier and could take fame or leave it alone or that public attention has grown harsher since then with a larger proportion of malice in it For every idolator of nsonality world-famou- (continued) The expbits of war hero Audie Murphy (right) seemed pale compared to the cinematic heroics of Errol Flynn (left): “Audie s whole war would have been barely a mornings work for the wheezing ” Flynn out-of-sha- On the cover clockwise from upper left: the returning hostages Charles Lindbergh Joan Crawford John Wayne and Mother Teresa |