Protocol for Close Encounters of Celebrity Kind
My speculations on how to conduct oneself in a chance encounter with a celebrity have provoked various accounts of such experiences from readers.
Such sightings are not as common as they were in the 1920s or 1930s, when one might bump into Clara Bow or Warner Baxter on Hollywood Boulevard, but the odds are still more in our favor here in Southern California than they would be, say, in Scott City, Kan.
My correspondents are divided on whether one ought to speak up--perhaps even ask for an autograph--or simply leave the celebrity alone in his or her privacy.
Paul V. Newman writes that he has never tried to engage a celebrity in conversation, but he rather regrets those occasions when he might have as missed opportunities. Just recently, he says, he saw Diane Keaton at the Rose Bowl Swap Meet. “Now isn’t that somebody you would enjoy chatting with?”
I wouldn’t have the slightest idea what to say that might interest Ms. Keaton.
Diane Davis says that she and a schoolteacher friend, Bubbles, were in a Sherman Oaks restaurant when Marlon Brando and two friends came in and sat three tables away. After much indecision, Bubbles walked up to Brando and said, “Hi. My name is Bubbles and I’d like your autograph.” Brando said, “I don’t give autographs. It’s against my religion.” Bubbles said, “Well, I can certainly understand that. I’m Jewish.” Whereupon Brando said, “Well, Bubbles, I’d like to shake your hand.” And he did.
That dialogue seems to me a bit of a non sequitur, but it probably makes more sense than the dialogue in most such encounters.
Joan C. Bertolet of Rancho Palos Verdes recalls that in 1960 she saw Ray Milland in a Santa Maria drugstore. She first heard him asking the clerk for a cold remedy in his “splendid voice.” She rounded a counter and recognized him instantly. “He was shorter than I had envisioned, and was causing the clerk to hyperventilate.” Finally the clerk rang up his purchase and asked for his autograph. He replied, “Oh, my dear, I’m afraid I would give you my germs.” Of course he couldn’t have offered to shake her hand, for the same reason.
Nearly 30 years ago, Midori Ohno of Glendora says, she found herself at the airport standing by an extraordinarily beautiful woman in a white dress with a white fur on her arm. She had just escaped a cluster of admirers and flashing cameras. She turned to Ohno. “Pardon me, did you happen to see a big, black car come by?” Ohno said she hadn’t, but she hadn’t been there long. “Oh, well,” the woman said, “then they may not be here yet.”
It wasn’t until she saw the woman’s picture the next day that she realized she had talked with Sophia Loren.
Ivan Schreiber recalls the time in a Biloxi mess hall when Laraine Day served him a pork chop (he doesn’t say why), and when Gen. George C. Marshall, with Anthony Eden at his side, asked his cadet formation if the chow was satisfactory.
He also recalls brief encounters with Van Cliburn, Peter Ustinov and Tony Randall. “It is possible that Tony Randall was mildly baffled when I decorously ignored him in the small Manhattan gallery where only the two of us scrutinized the collages.
“Wordsworth called such events ‘spots of time,’ ” Schreiber says. “Joyce might have accepted them as ‘epiphanies.’ Small as they are, perhaps they make the world just a little more our own.”
One of my encounters-that-might-have-been also took place at LAX. I was walking with a photographer down the sidewalk in front of a terminal when I recognized a woman walking toward us, alone. She was Katharine Hepburn.
We had been there to interview some second-rate celebrity whose name I have forgotten. My heart skipped as I saw Ms. Hepburn. Without breaking stride she recognized us for what we were.
I thought of ambushing her. She had no baggage. Evidently she had come to pick up a friend. Who? Spencer Tracy? I sensed a story. Hepburn was a very private person. Catching her off guard might make good copy. “Come on,” I said to my photographer. “Let’s leave her alone.”
Alas. It might have been an epiphany to remember.