Celebrities face the ‘pinata syndrome’

First it was a nasty flu bug or walking pneumonia or writer’s block that reportedly delayed the much anticipated new season of Dave Chappelle’s Comedy Central show. Then he was seeking treatment for “personal issues.” After the network announced May 4 that the show was on indefinite hold, gossip blogs were claiming the comic was “off his rocker,” disappearing from the set for days and then returning delusional and under the influence. A week later, Entertainment Weekly reported Chappelle had checked into a mental hospital in South Africa, a story picked up by dozens of other media.

Four days after that, Chappelle turned up on a beach in Durban, South Africa, apparently lucid, blaming his disappearance on stress, not drug addiction or mental illness. He’d been visiting a friend on a “spiritual retreat,” he told Time magazine, “doing a lot of thinking.” Chappelle’s publicist Matt Labov, who lost contact with the comic when he disappeared, had no comment this week on the crisis -- and no news as to when Chappelle might return to work.

In just two weeks, Chappelle’s ordeal went from celebrity train wreck to run-of-the-mill exhaustion, a sure sign that today’s entertainment news cycle moves faster than the news itself. The hunger for celebrity gossip, particularly scandal, has become more insatiable than ever with the viral proliferation of media covering it, from “60 Minutes” to Internet bloggers to every cellphone camera owner on the street.

Just before the Chappelle story hit, the media had been doggedly covering two lukewarm scandals: Pat O’Brien’s rehab for alcoholism and Paula Abdul’s alleged affair with an “American Idol” contestant. And as Chappelle’s scandal dissipates, the media is poised to move on to more fertile ground, such as Britney Spears’ pregnancy and the latest rumored indiscretions of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.

“Nowadays, there is no privacy,” says Allan Mayer, managing director of the crisis communication firm Sitrick and Co. “Everything is played out in public view ... the more you feed it, the bigger it gets.”

As a result, every story has an abbreviated life span, accelerating the demand for more news. Ultimately, this adds up to exaggerated expectations of celebrities. If they can’t maintain their public persona, they’re devoured for our entertainment instead.

“I call it the pinata syndrome,” says publicist Howard Bragman, founder of the Hollywood PR firm Bragman Nyman Cafarelli. “It’s really about the media. They’re only lifting you up so that they can take sticks and beat you and see what comes out.”

The celebrity breakdown has become so common a phenomenon that an industry has emerged to support and exploit it. High-paid crisis management teams that carefully script a star’s downfall and subsequent redemption have replaced the “fix-it men” of decades past, who bribed and strong-armed sources into stifling any hint of scandal. Publicists, agents and managers often drive the gossip, feeding information to reporters to sculpt a client’s image or magnify their own role in it.

Mark Ebner, a staffer at tabloid publisher American Media Inc. and coauthor of “Hollywood Interrupted: Insanity Chic in Babylon -- The Case Against Celebrity,” which dissects dozens of recent celebrity scandals, says it’s not uncommon for publicists to negotiate a magazine cover for one client by offering dirt on another. “It’s all part of the back scratching that goes on,” he says.

For example, after the address book from Paris Hilton’s T-Mobile Sidekick ended up on the Internet, Us Weekly got the first interview with the socialite on the scandal. Ebner credits that scoop with the cuddly relationship Hilton had with Us Weekly editor Ken Baker, whose friendly messages were among those revealed.

As Chappelle’s story unfolded, Internet gossip blogs Defamer.com and Loosie.com attributed their dish to unnamed cast and crew from “Chappelle’s Show.”

“The tabloids are being courted by the very people that these creative souls put around themselves,” Ebner says. “It’s a very, very, very sick cycle.”

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Media stayed clear

Until relatively recently -- in the pre E! Entertainment Television world, let’s say -- the mainstream media rarely stooped to celebrity news because that was the stuff of tabloids. Today, TV careers are built on the airing of that dirty laundry while national magazines and newspapers (including this one) are as likely as Us Weekly or People magazine to follow the whims of Lindsay Lohan or Mary-Kate Olsen.

Of course, the pleasures and pressures of stardom are now so well documented that they’ve become cliche. Entire economies survive by helping celebrities enjoy their fame. They’re lavished with gifts and pampering, whisked from one glamorous locale to another and saved from the mundane nature of day-to-day life. To the layman, the perks most certainly outweigh the demands.

But entertainers aren’t like most people, as any celebrity handler will attest. With great talent and recognition often come great ego, a giant, quivering mass that demands constant maintenance. They often possess an equally fragile sense of self-esteem. And yet they’re expected (albeit for outlandish sums) to perform brilliantly on demand and preserve their money-making persona at all costs. The incessant chronicling of every drunken one-night stand, every bad hair day and every messy breakup only fractures their already delicate state of being.

Stress expert Charles Figley, director of the Traumatology Institute at Florida State University, conducted a study 10 years ago on celebrity stress, interviewing 51 A-listers, and found that stars consider the media their No. 1 stressor. And that was before reality TV and the overwhelming popularity of blogs.

Famous entertainers constantly struggle to maintain a private sense of identity, Figley says. “There is this inconsistency that emerges along the way between who you know you are and what people think you are,” he says. “I use the concept of schizophrenia in a metaphoric sense.... There is this constant pressure to go in and out of the persona that people expect you to be.”

Chappelle alluded to this crisis in his Time magazine interview. (His publicist says the interview wasn’t intended to target rumors. It had been scheduled months before to promote the show’s DVD release and the debut of season three.)

“If you don’t have the right people around you and you’re moving at a million miles an hour, you can lose yourself,” he said. “Everyone around me says, ‘You’re a genius! You’re great! That’s your voice!’ But I’m not sure that they’re right.”

After years of false starts, he was at the top of his game. The first season of “Chappelle’s Show” had such phenomenal DVD sales -- the best for any TV show -- that the network reportedly paid him as much as $50 million for two more. Soon after, “60 Minutes” reporter Ed Bradley told Chappelle during an interview that Richard Pryor considered him his heir.

By late April, however, the premiere of Chappelle’s third season had been postponed twice, Chappelle was AWOL, and the gossip blogs Loosie.com and Defamer.com were reporting rumors of drug abuse and emotional imbalance.

Overwhelmed, Chappelle told Time he retreated to his friend’s home. “People got to take inventory from time to time,” he said.

When a celebrity’s travails spin out of control, the real challenge is wrangling them back in again.

Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey have toured Iraq together and appeared on talk shows in an attempt to stem persistent rumors of their impending divorce. Mariah Carey still references her calamitous 2001 breakdown as if her image hasn’t quite recovered from it. Britney Spears’ new reality TV show, meanwhile, is being viewed as an attempt to repair the pop star’s weathered appeal. And while Chappelle’s interview with Time has cooled the chatter on his ordeal for now, the situation remains unresolved.

Still, celebrity publicists, spin doctors, stress experts and American Media’s Ebner all credit Chappelle for escaping the industry to get perspective.

“He’s my hero,” Ebner says. “He extracted himself from the problem and went as far away from Hollywood as possible.... If he stays as far away from people like us, he’ll be fine.”