If Hollywood's Always Behaved Badly, Why Do We Dislike It So Much More Today?

I’ve been wanting to comment on Kyle Smith’s excellent New York Post column since Sunday, a column that reminds us of a truism too easy to forget. It’s just a fact that since the creation of celebrity there’s always been a dark, trashy, immoral side to it all — always been Hollywood debauchery, scandal and bad behavior. What we’re seeing today from Lindsay Lohan, Charlie Sheen, and Britney Spears, unfortunately, isn’t anything new. Which begs a question I’ll ask below.

The New York Post:

A common gripe about Lindsay Lohan, Chris Brown, Kanye West, Charlie Sheen and the rest of our celebrity monster posse is that they’re immature brats whom genetic fortuity gave riches but not brains, morals or character. They are.

But so were the stars of the ’50s. If their serene glamour persists, it’s in part because the movies are still on TV but the scandal sheets that chronicled their misadventures have crumbled to atoms. …

Taylor’s adulterous, drink-fueled hookup with Richard Burton on the set of “Cleopatra” inspired a letter published in a Vatican newspaper that condemned her for “erotic vagrancy.” When the lovers were out of the country, Rep. Iris Faircloth Blitch of Georgia called for them to be denied re-entry into the US “on the grounds of undesirability.”

Katharine Hepburn, the Camilla Parker-Bowles of La La Land, carried on with a married (and Catholic) Spencer Tracy for decades. Errol Flynn probably had sex with two underage girls, yet avoided conviction when his lawyers smeared the victims by bringing up their past sexual histories in a statutory rape trial that gave us the phrase “in like Flynn.” Flynn was also an anti-Semite who wrote to a friend, “A slimy Jew is trying to cheat me . . . I do wish we could bring Hitler over here to teach these Isaacs a thing or two. The bastards have absolutely no business probity or honor whatsoever.”

You can go back even further to the 1920s and just start with Fatty Arbuckle. There’s also the sleazy murder of film director William Desmond Taylor and all the sexual scandal surrounding the death of Olive Thomas — who some believe might have been poisoned by her philandering, syphilis-suffering husband Jack Pickford — brother of screen legend Mary. Hollywood has always been a small community packed with too many young, good-looking narcissists loaded with ambition and willing to do most anything to get ahead. That doesn’t mean there are and haven’t been a number of truly decent and moral people working at high levels of the entertainment industry, but Smith is dead on with his overall point.

The American people are pretty forgiving of this kind of stuff, though. We know none of us is perfect and normally don’t concern ourselves too much with what happens between consenting adults.

So what changed? Because something sure did.

How did an industry that was once almost universally beloved despite being as badly behaved then as it is today, suddenly become a polarizing punchline with an approval rating lower lower than that of President Bush when he left office?

I have my own ideas but would like to hear yours first.