Going Starry-Eyed in the Presence of Luminaries

People never seem to forget their chance encounters with celebrities.

As a journalist, I have met more celebrities than chance would have put in my path. I know the feeling one has of being in the presence of someone who seems bigger than life.

Most celebrities today are celebrities because we see their images on the screen, large or small. Before TV, they were indeed larger than life, and when we saw them reduced to life size, and three-dimensional, they suddenly seemed magical.

Actually we know very little about celebrities as real people. Unless they take their politics public, as have Jane Fonda, Ed Asner and Martin Sheen, we know nothing of them beyond the characters they play.

The supposedly true stories about them in celebrity magazines do little to make them real.

Only when their posthumous biographies appear do we learn that they abused their children, or were promiscuous, or were tightwads, or neurotics or monsters on the set.

But when we meet them we are tongue-tied. We can only stammer out how much we love their work, which may or may not be true. I have never heard anyone boast that he has told a celebrity, “You’re a lousy actor and a worse person.”

Perhaps we miss our gods. The Greeks and other ancient peoples had gods who were indeed bigger than life. Because they intervened in human affairs, people were obliged to placate them.

Some people have failed to exploit their chance meetings with celebrities and forever regret their lost opportunities.

Charles T. Fisch of Redondo Beach regrets that he passed up a chance to shake hands with John F. Kennedy at Anchorage Airport in the summer of 1960.

Fisch thinks he might have been inhibited by a story he had heard about a grocery clerk’s chance encounter with Woodrow Wilson.

While traveling through a small Midwestern town, Wilson dropped into a shop to buy some fruit. The clerk did not let on that he had recognized the President, explaining later that the President had not introduced himself.

“Now that’s class,” Fisch says.

Today, of course, if the President expresses an urge to drop into a shop, the Secret Service goes apoplectic. Standard procedure would be clear the shop of shoppers, sweep it for infernal devices, subject the clerk to a security clearance and depopulate the sidewalk outside.

Gladwin Hill, who must have met many celebrities as a correspondent for the New York Times, recalls that he not only encountered Katharine Hepburn in a hotel elevator in Washington, but she may have saved his life, or at least kept him from being bruised.

Hill says he tried to get into the elevator when the door was closing. A passenger inside grabbed the door and forced it back.

“Only then did I discern that my rescuer was Miss H.” Hill breathed his thanks. “Anything more seemed presumptuous. However, I have reflected on that old Chinese maxim that if you save a man’s life, you are forever indebted to him . I’ve never tried to collect.”

Lynne Spear Merles of Costa Mesa recalls that she was painting a landscape in the Hidden Hills when a man rode up on horseback. She knew he was Ronald Reagan, but she didn’t let on.

The man told her they were going to turn Mulholland into a four-lane highway.

“This from the man who later said that if you saw one redwood you had seen them all!”

Novelist Dan Brennan says that during World War II he met the cynical British novelist Evelyn Waugh in a London GI club and asked him why he always treated the lower classes as a subspecies. Waugh walked away (treating Brennan as what he evidently thought he was).

Gerry Furth says her encounter with Cary Grant will last her a lifetime. It was in the Magic Castle in 1976.

There were not enough seats and Grant suggested she sit on his lap. She did. She does not say how old she was at the time.

“It seems to me,” she reflects, “that true ‘stars’ like Cary Grant have a higher energy, a faster vibration, and are able to cast a glow at no expense while still maintaining their distance in the galaxy.”

I might feel that way, too, if I’d ever sat in Katharine Hepburn’s lap.